As For We Who ‘Love To Be Astonished’

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old
apothecary jar with what he called “sea glass,” bits of old bottles rounded
and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude.
It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one’s
tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down
the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she
fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little
money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than
anything
I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar.
She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree,
from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent
me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I
don't mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The pilot
of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that
when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens
went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of
water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching
the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the
hidden airport.
Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether
breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the
tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby
for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At
night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled
down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too
stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena,
ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order
to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would
anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy.
What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is
nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were
we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the
bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making
no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language.
To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of
surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still,
you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance.
A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward
the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early. A German goldsmith
covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first
button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of
one person, but nothing is isolated in history—certain humans are situations.
Are your fingers in the margin? Their random procedures make monuments
to fate. There is something still surprising when the green emerges. The blue
fox has ducked its head. The front rhyme of harmless with harmony. Where is
my honey running. You cannot linger “on the lamb.” You cannot determine the
nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives.