Free Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura Page B

repertoire of arguments, and the tone never changed, nor did the duration or pitch. Because their yelling and meanness became merely annoying as I settled in to make dinner, listening to the radio, with a glass of wine, stilled at the center of my life where light lavished its golds on spilled salt, drops of oil, papery garlic skins, and I was given to see such lavishing before dusk came on fully and it was time to clear the scraps away and call everyone to eat. The yelling so contradicted their rowhouse’s pastelly façade and cascading flowerboxes, that whenever I passed it, my eye had to work to reject the bright prettiness, and that wasn’t sad, just tiring.
    But in National Geographic , a series of photos of vast rooms full of jewel-colored birds, tagged and ordered by size and kind, that had crashed into buildings, thrown off course by excessive lights at night: yes. The imposition of light as sadness, and the dark as defenseless—whoever thought darkness would need defending, assumed realm of the scary, haven of self-sufficient night creatures, shy, tender-skinned, but flying and crawling, diving and burrowing, rec- and procreating like crazy in private by way of their special radar.
    And briefly now (the illustrations are coming in very fast): hard candies. In a cut-glass bowl. The bowl positioned just-so, near the door. Always a-brim which might look like many guests are expected. I hate hard candies, but I take one, and then a few more, just to keep hope’s economy moving.
    “Hand Picked With Care” on the blue Chiquita banana sticker. That I hadn’t considered care was involved, that someone might gently, might delicately pick, that maybe care’s real , not a value enhancer.
    And “Rhinestone Cowboy”: the song. (Yes, really.) It came out in 1975, but today on the radio, I heard for the first time the actual words—“and offers coming over the phone” which of course the singing cowboy wants , he hit the big time, but which also mean (super-obvious modulation to minor) a lonely life on the road . The sudden clarity right there in the supermarket, because back then, in fifth grade, I heard it as “And old-folks going over the foam.” Which I thought was a metaphor for the end of life , and at the time the suggestion of such an easeful ending, the notion of being carried so frothily away made me very wordlessly sad.
    And yet, how strangely good to know this sadness maintains itself over decades.
    That it concentrates moments. That it refines them.
    How generous sadness is. How capacious.
    Mostly, though, how startling—so that just when one’s settled into a moment, say on a train to visit one’s parents, book out, orange peeled, coffee balanced and cooling, there it is, a swift visitation: coal trains in the station offering the sundered, ruined hearts of mountains. Brief five o’clock light. A frayed cuff on a seatmate. Snowy egrets in a marsh the train passes. Some birds stilled in rushes, others fishing in mud. The mud rainbowed with oil.
    One spends the ride containing it all.

Augury
     
    That hanging bird in the maple tree: someone might come and cut it down. Or it might stay and dissolve to bone, blowing through seasons, snared in a mess of fishing line. It must have happened just days ago, the bright body’s still heavy and pulls the line tight. If taken down, the absence would mean another’s discomfort. And the space where it swings, once open again, a measure of someone’s breaking point— a thing too awful to see. Which is very close to what I feel, rounding the bend down by the lake, finding the goldfinch invisibly strung. Caught plunging up , as goldfinches will, bobbing and looping in jittery arcs when alive. How a very wrong thing inverts the world’s laws, stills flight and proposes air can hold weight. How weirdly suggestive is hanging and swaying: this should be fruit, the form’s ends are tapered, the center’s a swell of vesicles, ripening. Wind should make of it