...leaves poised. Each wisp of darkness
held out the cool palm of its hand,
its hollow of safety, a silk suit...
From
—Peter Rabbit
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...leaves poised. Each wisp of darkness |
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When I chewed bubble gum to get new baseball cards the B-52 was everywhere you looked. In my high school year book the B-52 was voted “Most Popular” and “Most Likely to Succeed.”
The B-52 would give you the finger from hot cars. It laid rubber, it spit, it went around in gangs, it got its finger wet and sneered about it. It beat the shit out of fairies.
I remember it used to chase Derek Ramsen around at recess every day. Caught, he’d scream like a girl. Then the rest of us pitched in and hit.
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By then, whatever that difficult name was, making itself at home in her nervous system, had disconnected it, had all but assumed her name, had stripped her of her right to communicate with her own tongue, her right to swallow food, her right to eat, of the dignity to even hold her spit, twisted her into this small, curiously wrought practical joke whose eyes would squirt this way and that, yet which contained, still, some last seed of Agnes, whose wheezing, the doctor said, was laughter at the crack I’d made about our friend Dot’s henpecking poor Pete, part of my loud pep talk as I sat there like some young attorney encouraging a client, mouthing the pat articles of law, swallowing for the luxury of it.
The sunlight was dull, it might have been morning or evening before the word Don’t was said. The grass, if there were grass, might have been gray, it didn’t make any difference. The temperature of the air outside the burrow was normal. Don’t. It cast all the shadows. The sun shrank back into focus. He could see. Under that harsh brilliant judgment each whetted blade of grass had a black shadow. And a gate was rearing against the sky, a rebuke, a giant affront. He squeezed under it, his heart twittering. Scritch. Scratch. He could hear—a rake, a bee fizz as it rose from a daisy, the wind’s restless crowds in the high reaches of the oak trees behind him, wind encompassing fields for miles, birds swinging on it, sparrow trapezes, wind, enough sound to cover his tracks, don’t don’t, to make sly twitches, faint substitutions of grass that could be other stealthy creatures, decoys to draw the fire of Mr. McGregor, as Peter, now sick with hunger, crept, toward the clenched hearts of the lettuce, thinking, don’t touch the hidden parts you’ve heard about, don’t finger the wet leaves, don’t spit them out. “Stop! Thief!” It sharpened the shadows. Don’t. Don’t. The leaves poised. Each wisp of darkness held out the cool palm of its hand, its hollow of safety, a silk suit to slip into, try on, cast off. He’d never noticed such terrain. How its curves console, its hills reveal. Without Mr. McGregor he might never have seen a pot before. “Stop! Thief!” The light was a nuisance. Each row was a boot step. A scramble. A heartbeat. Each second a question. Each door a new answer. The gate was a daydream, and he was alive.
For Alan Nordby Holden (1904 – 1985)
Scared, I watched my son, eleven, his first time on the mound, stare in at the tiny lead-off man. So tense, he’s poker-faced, Zack’s practicing the politician’s trick of looking confident, as if a man could be substantial just by looking it. But pitching, I learned young, isn’t politics. In the center of the dusty ring where, as if under unremitting examination by the lights, your squirmy shadow’s multiplied by five, faking doesn’t work. The one thing not to do, I told him earlier, is issue walks. We were playing catch. I whipped one back. I was talking as casually as I could, worried about tonight, but trying to hide it, to talk seductively. I was talking in teasy little parables, embroidering them— about the time I walked eight batters in a row, about the time I got mad at the umpire and started to cry—anything to make sure what help I gave the boy would register before he’d be there alone on the mound, out of range. His low fastball stung my hand. I whipped it back. I told him how sometimes in the middle of a game if you get wild you can think about your stride or where your shoulders face, you can experiment, correct yourself. As I talked and threw and talked, we never broke the easy to-and-fro of pitch and catch, The more I talked the better I remembered how. I understood My own shock when my father used to pause from his obsessive work to talk to me, to offer— always shrewdly, at a slight oblique— what help he could. Zack throws. The batter takes. Ball one. Ball two. Ball three. And I prepare myself for the first of many walks. Zack pauses, on the next pitch eases up. It’s nicked foul. Impassive, Zack waits for the ball. He delivers easy, call strike two. If the advice is right and handed out with style, we never forget the things our fathers say. They talk directly to our sons, and our sons can deliver us our own boyhood back a second time. The batter whiffs. We live redundantly, and the second time is better than the first.
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