A Wild Surmise

After the Last Call Home

43 After the Last Call Home which of our visions will claim us which will we claim? —Adrienne Rich, “Nights & Days” I want to roll my life back and find the way I played with Tiny and Big Boy and Carol. I want to roll my knuckles down onto dirt packed hard by tamping, by marbles rolling, in some games a free hand leaning and pressing as I was playing with friends and we were playing “for keeps forever.” Then each day clicked against the others like marbles in a bag, each a favorite for its own reason and each as pretty as a pony’s eye. It was so simple then, writing with a stick on the ground, drawing circles for clean hard games that filled each moment with happy predictability and lasted until dark. It’s not so simple for me now. Lines I write draw back into me. Like furrows they break open my familiar ground to the awesome landscapes of a female future 44 rising up inside me with its fields that hold the horizon open to I know I don’t know what. I want to roll my feelings back to wandering the days against all warnings not to walk out in the corn where I might get lost and never found or be stolen by the gypsies or eaten by a tiger loose from a circus train. I want to remember the nights we stayed outside against all warnings and played in the dark, buoyant with a sureness taken in like air for a deep dive, the nights I stayed out in the darkness after the last call home playing what my life wants to speak over and over again: I’m not lost and I’m not leaving. I’m out here in the night with all the planets in their deep rings of darkness playing “for keeps forever” in the sky. I’m out here in the invisible gravity of my heartbeat practicing the distances in me. 45 I’m drawing gypsy circles for myself and leaping tigers through them as high as I can go. ...