May 29, 2010 Saturday

The house cat who can swallow the bird, softening the bones within its jaw, can live, can learn to live away from the house, can lose its master among the fields, stalking in its moonlit happy valley, scratching its claws on the bark of fallen tree-trunks and branches, testing its strength among the woodland debris, the expanse of hay and fallen leaves, his whole creation yawning before him.

Pine for October’s gothic enclosures already, valleys and overcast skies with bats swooping over the traveler’s head after sunset. Who can count how many bicycles in retrospect caromed down Academy Road during the fitful peak of day while I only watched them, a spectator at my improvised work-desk, also breakfast table. The woods were behind me. Far back a pioneer’s cabin burned down, a hermitage that could have doubled as a military barracks, so Spartan and scornful of modernity were its inhabitants, sending their sons to the foreign wars of each generation, their Protestant heritage refusing to soften before the spectacle of eastern caravans and oriental covertness and obsequies. About the deadly follies of the Asiatics, they can only sigh and hope for a swift and brutal Viking conversion, modified naturally by American-mandated tastes for consumer items, a volley of choices you are free to refuse as an individual but not to expel as a collective force. And the sons.

They ironed the kinks of bohemian inclinations from their sons at a very early date, although the inheritance was humble and the financial ties light. Any waywardness or sign of easy virtue among their daughters the mother stigmatized upon first hearing, swiftly and brutally. The women were pretty, severe and disapproving of the mores of the time, their opinions more inflexible than their spouses. They wore their hair au natural and never wore makeup, a trait that one might mistakenly associate with hippies. But now the house was gone and the remnants were in tents and storage sheds after the embers from the posts and beams had cooled in the meadow where the frost had settled.

I found a small plant, spongy with ridges as if the stem were trying to leaf but couldn’t, spread over a rock and growing in the lawn of the front yard where the grass had browned out. I brought a handful of these plants to the local nursery. “A succulent” judged the proprietor “in the same family as cactus.” But the species he could not identify, only that these plants suck water from the ground as the cactus does, although they lack the thorns that might keep them from desperately thirsty predators. No animal, bird or rodent, preyed on these succulents, no matter how vulnerable, how tender they were. As phallic as the field of mushrooms making the girls in Tess giggle, their skirts tied up. In swift propagation upon the lawn.

A green lawn says you’re home. A brown lawn says sweet home is imperiled. But a yellow, blanched-out one says here is the desolation that visits you sooner or later. Your yard labor only delays the obvious. The hermit kingdom that begins and ends as a legend in your own mind. As he looked at the dwarf pines in the back yard and beyond them the dirty chocolate lab that barked before the apartment block, the oparking lot littered with cars parked haphazardly, neither in parakllel nor in perpendicular fashion, the trucks of roofers and odd-job men he thought of the pines on the coast of Epirus, the rocky inhospitable inlets near the straits of Corfu, and the rock face above which the pines towered and barred the stranger from entering the hermit kingdom with its funny tongues, its insoluble customs and tribal divisions as mysterious to outsiders as Masonic or Eleusinian rituals, as the gold sheafs of grain decorating a lady’s throat in a jeweled sarcophagus on which the jewels have been pulled from their various sockets and clasps, he hoped his Bosnian pines would grow one day as high as those pines crowding out the quotidian accidents outside this precious border—it was the border, not the land within the vborder or the land without the border that was precious, thast indeed was what he paid for: the gate before the deserted village, nature’s gate, but it would eb years before the pines would grow beyond the size of bonsai, or the final efforts just on the treeline oif the mountainside he would shrink in their triumph against the orbits of the sun, and the disappearance of the barking of the chocolate dog and the dirty termination of the street in rubble and fieldstones—as he breathed his last, the tree-tops touched the sun that set beyond them.