Colleen Iverson

WRI 725

Fall 2009

no angels in the bushes

Start with a small thing.  A snowflake.  Scissors and paper.  Sit in the corner.  Concentrate very hard.

            It's late November and there are people over. 

            Grown ups, Mom's friends, talking in groups, laughing.  Someone pushes open the door to scoop up some snow. 

            “First snow!” They call out. 

            Someone else leans a little out the door to light a cigarette.  Cold cuts across the room, and I wish they would close it.  I bend in closer to my snowflake.  I'm trying to figure how Mom makes them come out like stars.

            I remember the room.  The people, their bright winter sweaters and long hair and old jeans.  The friendly shouts and laughter.  Beer bottles clinking.  Cigarettes stubbed out in ashtrays.  I remember this party very particularly.  Blushing when someone said “cigarette butt,” confused at the multiple uses.  I remember that time looked too long, just then, life a little too big.  Something about it heavy and difficult to breathe through, like wet air.  Looking up seemed overwhelming.  I remember, I sat very still.  I remember hunching over my work, the sharp wind, the big, clumsy scissors, the voices, the worn wood floor, the way the boat swayed, precarious with all those people, the icy late November, the worry about driving, the talk of being frozen in, the tiny boat, the rocking waters, my mother somewhere across the room, I remember leaning in and concentrating very hard.

           

            Later I will say, “how can I miss him?  I never knew him.”  And toss my head and grind my cigarette out with my heel.  I will have very blonde hair.  Red lips.  A predilection for hooker hoops and cocaine. 

            The inability to shut up or stand still or be alone. 

           

            It was May. 

            He was laid out on the bed.  Red plain wool blanket still over his knees.  They were dressing him in his favorite shirt.  They were crying.  I don't remember feeling anything.  Someone was holding me.  Walking outside and down the dock a ways.  I remember that the water seemed sad.  That the sky was both too big and too close.  That the sun made me nauseous.

            [when I think of you]

            Oh, Daddy.

I wish I could say I called out in the night, or that

I recognized your voice on the recording,

I wish you ever were mine.

Not somewhere in back of the stories.  “Your father,” they all begin

with the slow shake of a head,

a remembering smile.  “A great man,”

Not just the knobbed cane leaning

in the corner, not the ring: three people and a fish

in what position?  Or every pack of Lucky Strikes I ever saw.

Not the photograph hanging

at the top of the stairs.  Caught, once, in a flash of light.  Laughing at something

I will never know what  

I will never know you.  I set my jaw hard. 

You're not mine to cry for.

“a Benefit for

STAN IVERSON

To look at him you would not know that he is dying.  Yet crab-cancer gnaws at his life. He is Stan Iverson lumpen-bohemian, dirty old man-dirty young man, womanizer, lover ('I regret only missed opportunities'), drinker ('My revels are now almost ended'), dreamer, outside agitator, visionary, Fifth Amendment Communist, Anarchist (always), subversive, and rolling stone (gathering, of course, no moss).  Now he is flat broke, dying a slow death on board the old river tug on Lake Union that he has called home these last eighteen years.  As the waves of the lake splash and roll against the boat cancer permeates ever more of his body.

SUNDAY MARCH 3rd ―POTLUCK GATHERING―FROM 2p.m. On

BLUE MOON TAVERN―MARCH 3^rd”

            [the Ora Elwell]

           

The whole time he is dying, the boat is sinking.  He loves her and it is breaking his heart.  They put Styrofoam in the bottom and pump the water out every day.  But it's more than that.  There may be rust.  She may be rotting.  Nothing anyone can do.  By the bed, on the floor, there's a hatch you can lift, and look straight down into the lake.  Lay your face a foot or two from the murky waters.  It's a precarious feeling.  I'm scared I'll fall in, or jump.  I pull the rug over it so there's just the bump of a handle sticking up.  

            [objects]

a photograph

two sketches

and the calendar you used in 1984: chemo, chemo, chemo, surgery, Jacob's birthday, chemo, final exam.

A love letter from 1966 (who wrote it?)

the Provo-White plans (what are they?)

a newspaper clipping

a canceled check

the tape of you reading to me.  On so many painkillers you can't keep track.

            [secretly, I believe you are God.  I'm sorry.]

I open and unfold them.  Listen.  I don't know what for.

Do I think I'll find you? 

It's just a stack of papers.  You held them once, but you're gone.  It's other peoples' memories.  I'll never know how your hands move when you talk or what makes you laugh.  Not how you smell.  Not the feeling of your hand on my shoulder.  Not the rhythm of your voice, how you bend your head to light a cigarette, the way that you walk.  Not what it's like to lean against you when I'm tired or sad.

            [consequences]

My sister, who isn't really my sister,

has lost her mother

who is still alive.

My sister imagines that everyone she loves is swaying on the edge of death

at all times.

She holds on tight.

Won't let us go.

This summer

my love wants to marry me. 

“What do you see, for us.  For a future?”  he asks, late at night.

I look at the place where night slips through

the corner of the window where the curtain's folded back,

caught on something, and

no light comes in because the sky is starless now.

“I'm scared,” I say.

“You don't eat right.  You drink.  You smoke.” I turn my cheek to the cool pillow.

“I don't want my mother's life,” I say to the wall.

Brandy is seventeen when her mom drives herself into the side of a tunnel.

Four or five days a month, I want a baby.

I want a house with a vegetable garden and to read bedtime stories, bake cookies, make hot apple cider in the middle of snowy winter,

but:  “I never wanted to love anything so much,” my mother

has told me

about me

and I believe her.

She was drunk,

but that was common.

Extensive reconstructive surgery

for the collapsed left half of her face.

She drags an oxygen tank behind her and

calls Brandy to confess:  mouthwash again.  To ask:

Can you get me some weed?

Brandy checks the contraindications of Holy Basil and Aspirin. Of milky oats and caffeine.  She says Hold your breath near gas stations, Wash your hands before you touch your face, Drink this tea.  She makes me walk with my keys between my fingers like claws

at night when I walk alone.

She worries that she's dying.  She worries that she's dying of worry.

My father, with cancer, was trying to learn to meditate.

“It's like someone holding a gun to your head and saying, 'relax, or I'll shoot.'” he's said to have growled

in that beautiful baritone.

Her father (who wasn't really her father)

died of painkillers and liquor

in Rawlins, Wyoming.  Just never woke up.

He loved that town.

In August we drive through to look at what he left for.

We picture him whistling through the mountains on the night train:

one huge light, unstoppable speed, faceless cliffs.

There's a grocery store and a church and Drive-Thru Liquor.  A lot of dust.  A couple bars.  Some houses.

            More highway.

Afterward my mother cuts her hair off.  He had loved it.  It had hung down to her waist.

            “Too pretty for me,” she says. 

I never had the chance to know if she was crazy before he died

or only consequentially.  If it's grief makes it impossible for her to be here.

Heart ripped out again.  His death was one of a long, long line. 

In a rare moment of quiet, she bends her head and

says to her lap: “am I cursed?”

I have no faith in the ground:

“Just because it's always held does not mean it always will.”

Brandy decorates a room perfectly and buys the right appliances and is marrying the steadiest guy

a really good guy, reasonable and generous and funny, smart and kind.

She can't get out of bed, though, this month. 

She calls me:

“I don't know what to do, I can't get out of bed.  Do you think I need iron?”

I get half way through hanging curtains, and give up.  Sit down.  What's the point?

I eat rice straight from the pot

and the only relationships I like are the ones wrong from the start

because at least I know where I am.

Parting.  At the airport we hold each other and cry like the world's ending.  Oh God, we say, It's like my soul is being torn. 

If this sounds dramatic

that's only because that's how it feels.

 

We are each of us sure that one or the other of us will die; a plane crash, or the masked man with the chainsaw on the bus; a sudden, anomalous lack of oxygen; aneurism or broken heart.