Free On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura Page B

and mine.
    See how the moments go layering up?
    These days, late afternoons in our small living room, a form unfurls and spreads its weave—music building and cloaking, uncloaking and reaching. The fugue my husband is working on makes available to light, and with a light of its own brings forth a moment: amber with its captured specks, bubbles of breath and veering planes. And across the country, now, right now, in that other Washington, where it’s a still-bright two in the afternoon, there’s a search on for bullets a suspect once fired into a stand of trees. In a quiet neighborhood, ATF agents saw down stumps and haul them away in trucks as evidence.
    Consider their find: cross-sectioned rings interrupted by bullets, all the loops of years pierced.
    The loops of years pierced and containing the point.
     
    This time of year, when the sky darkens early and clouds stack up in thick, western swells, I see therein a mountain range I once knew. (The sniper, we will come to learn, had a mount for his gun in the trunk of his car: the trunk of his car a small terrain of roughened upholstery, the gun at rest there, those beveled edges along the muzzle, the boredom of waiting, his fingernails scraping up curls of grime, flicking them off. Sun in a beam through the punched-out lock reaching a summit, casting its curves.)
    Let me come back, though, to the matter at hand.
    When the sky darkens and clouds rise like a near mountain range, my neighborhood plunges into a valley, makes of itself one of the small, snug towns I loved as a child in New England. I’d like you to believe, as I wanted to believe, that I actually “lived as a child in New England,” for I felt such familiarity when visiting, as if I’d found a home I hadn’t known I’d lost—in Great Barrington, East Hardwick, at our friends’ small farm in Clarkesville, New Hampshire, way up near the Canadian border.
    What it is —is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.
    What it is—is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street—not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid—but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind—and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.
    I mean to say, too, that it’s not all jittery, these exchanges. I remember seeing, at my uncle’s house, a cat’s brain, preserved, and how the brain’s topography slid into more: a crush of continents ribboning up, river-valleys gone to inclines, post-glacial, scoured and jarred. And how standing in front of the pen-and-ink drawings of neurons, those cells were stretching, wavering blooms, tributaries, sidewalk cracks.
    Things pair up to go forth.
    When I am clear enough to catch it, it’s the motion of Bach’s Prelude XIV, the sense of it-all-going-on-at-once, one voice seeding always the next swell, unending, the swell out-spinning, the strands of sound buoyant, a weave tightened and cinched like the lip of a purse until the last tilt, and the pucker of folds lets the gold go.
    And my husband’s sure fingers are cresting sound as they have moved over all that I am,