Copia (4 page)

I
NCONSEQUENTIAL
A
LCHEMY

It's predictable summer again, the sun frosted and glaring like a cheap

Home Depot light fixture when it shines on the garden center

rife with landscaping plants that nobody loves but everyone buys as yard-filler:

pachysandra, rhododendron, euonymus, groundcover along with festive pansies

in black plastic six-packs that die by mid-July. There's no substitute for the figure

of a sunflower on a hill wilting past its stake, head drooped, body crucified.

The neighbor—the pastor's wife—tried to fill in the barren clay on the ridge

our houses share, but nothing thrives in this soil—not even the guaranteed

grass seed she bought that claims to grow on rock. But she's out watering anyway,

her chemo crew-cut glinting silver and ambiguous. Last season she offloaded

ziplocks of heirloom tulip bulbs from her freezer, told us to put them in our yard

since she was too weak to plant them. We buried them at the requisite depth

but they never came up; instead, a scourge of yellow trefoil entwined with the lawn.

This week she gives me three jars of home-preserved beets from their congregants.

Everyone must be praying for her, so that even those beets glow fuchsia on our counter,

countering the TV's ready-made alchemy. The local news is a strip-mall fire: remains

of an irreplaceable 1950s tricycle from the charred bike shop that had been in the family

for years. The form was recognizable, but the vehicle was literally a shadow

of itself, isometric charcoal, long and difficult. There are disruptions,

and there are disruptions. The news is always brought to us by Oakey's Funeral Home

& Crematory, and then on Sundays paid programming follows: Millennialist

news that trumpets the New World Order. Prophecies of the ages converging.

Specific details of the return, the eternal state of both the saved and the lost.

These exciting last days in which we live.

S
NOWPOCALYPSE

Allegheny Mission, Big Spring Baptist, Community Christian Fellowship:

Saturday night news scrolls every church name in seven counties, services

more than postponed. We don't need the meteorologist to whisper
inclement
,

to warn us to stay indoors. We have a window shaped like a television set.

Tree lights flicker through a scrim of curtain next door where the pastor

of Fieldstone Christian and his wife plot their empty Sunday, sermon abandoned.

No one will hear anything about I am the holiness we are holy we pray for you

and maybe praise his name. The plow blinks yellow, scrapes the darkness,

shivers the drifts on our roofs, the hanging icicle lights. Inside, silence

wafts through the heating ducts. My son is asleep while the heavens

smudge from black to red. Snow sky. Hydrology. In the cul-de-sac,

there's nothing on except a few panes of the neighbor's window-glass

and some tilting FOR SALE signs. There's nothing on except the wind

pulling at our siding, clouds bruising the sky. The news says it was a snow TKO,

one for the history books, and in the morning, between storms, the neighbors shovel,

go out to buy bread. I set my son upright again in the high drifts in our yard.

I'm ok
, he says each time I right him in his bib pants and boots. The pitch and yaw.

Convenience. We drive tenderly to the 7-Eleven. Milk. Maybe a newspaper.

Rock salt. He asks what convenience means. I don't have an answer.

I think holy. I think light. Later I tell him something about comfort. The news

drags in the evening, and with it, more snow. Our driveways retreat again

under the onslaught of white. We rest our weary feet on the ottoman, listen

to the neighbor's dog, who barks at the red sky then stops when she hears

the thin crescent moon wailing. There are truckers stuck on the interstate

who haven't eaten since yesterday. There are families sharing one thin blanket

on a high school floor. The news says stay in your vehicle, don't wander and get

frostbitten, don't spin your wheels—you'll only dig in deeper. We are glowing

with televised radiance so nothing can hurt us. The news says
this is an ongoing situation.

T
O
W
HOM
I
T
M
AY
C
ONCERN:

Please excuse me from the meeting.

I'm feeling small and non-combative.

It's below freezing, so we have no daycare.

The cable box is broken. The satellite

is misaligned. To Whom It May Concern:

The salt on the road crunches like teeth

so I can't make the meeting because

I am using my fingernail to rub

a critical note into the ice

on the neighbor's mailbox.

My tires are spinning in ellipses.

To Whom It May Concern:

My acupuncturist says my Qi

is puny, and the last time we met

someone told me to shut the fuck up.

I hate your monogrammed dress cuffs

so please conduct the meeting

without me as I'm suffering

from zipper failure. I'm hopped up

on caffeine and twitching. I'm battery

operated and recalcitrant. To Whom

It May Concern: I'd rather be reading

the story about the elephant crouching

in the corner trying not to be noticed

by the zookeeper's wife in her ruffled

sleep cap to my son. I'd rather be reading

the book to him where the snowman

actually dies in the end. To Whom

It May Concern: I understand

the task is important, but I do not

want to be part of this committee.

I've been buried by ribbons of snow

in a giant frozen dazzling. The universe

is changing to a white cereal bowl

with lots of rivets and I've been told

we live on the frost line. Please excuse me

from this meeting. Dark energy is shoving

the cosmos apart and it's best explored

in the pure environment of Antarctica.

To Whom It May Concern: I've moved

to the most difficult place on earth.

It's impossibly blue and blazing.

O
NE
V
ERSION OF
D
ECEMBER

There's something about the ice today that reminds me of the plastic kerchief my grandmother would wear over her wig and tied under her chin on days it rained, her synthetic hair the texture of spun sugar on a paper cone, a shade lighter than dirt under that translucent tarp. The ice skates across asphalt, deck-wood, slicks railings, shines sideways and crackles. It reaches its sharp hands into the dirt to root. The blank styrofoam head and neck where her wig rested sits empty on her dresser. A lifetime ago there were chickens in someone's front yard, and my grandmother watched over me.
You will be blessed
, she always implied, with her hands. It is winter and I return there. Sad girl with an unyielding triangle. Sad girl with a styrofoam head. Sad girl with nostalgia. We leave our attachments in a landscape (deeply felt, uneventful). The eternal city is not the hereafter but a cheap plastic copy with a crocheted ocean wrapped in blandness and littered with shiny cars. My grandmother's styrofoam head ripples with laughter and confusion, my grandmother in her white sun hat, her white turban, the ever more ancient man she hired annually in his white captain's hat to pick my sister and I up from the Fort Lauderdale airport in his Lincoln Continental. The one time I tried to drive myself in a rental I got so lost I had to stop at the Lucky Boy Motel for directions. It was night. There was bulletproof glass and the Vacancy signs lining US-1 shined pink, turquoise, the colors most opposite of ice. Her eyeless head, her head that would float on the Intracoastal, bob like a buoy then get swept out to sea, that won't nod anymore as if she were listening to us complain about the sun, the heat, “Feliz Navidad” playing on the slow drive from the airport each December, our faces tilted to the windshield.

W
AL
M
ART
S
UPERCENTER

God Bless America says the bumper sticker on the racer-red

Rascal scooter that accidentally cuts me off in the Walmart parking lot

after a guy in a tricked-out jeep with rims like chrome pinwheels tries

to pick me up by honking, all before I make it past the automatic doors

waiting to accept my unwashed hair, my flip-flops, my lounge pants.

The old man on the scooter waves, sports a straw boater banded in blue & white,

and may or may not be the official greeter, but everyone here sure is friendly—

even the faces of plastic bags, which wink yellow and crinkle with kindness,

sound like applause when they brush the legs of shoppers carrying them

to their cars. In Port Charlotte, a woman's body was found in a Jetta

in a Walmart parking lot. In a Walmart parking lot in Springfield,

a macaque monkey named Charlie attacked an eight-year-old girl.

I am a Walmart shopper, a tract-house dweller—the developments

you can see clearly from every highway in America that's not jammed up

on farmland or pinned in by mountains. I park my car at a slant in the lot,

hugged tight by my neighbors' pickups. I drive my enormous cart

through the aisles and fill it with Pampers, tube socks, juice boxes, fruit.

In the parking lot of the McAllen Walmart, a woman tried to sell six

Bengal tiger cubs to a group of Mexican day laborers. A man carjacked

a woman in the parking lot of the West Mifflin Walmart, then ran

under a bridge and disappeared. Which is to say that the world

we expect to see looks hewn from wood, is maybe two lanes wide,

has readily identifiable produce, and the one we've got has jackknifed itself

on the side of the interstate and keeps skidding. The one we've got has clouds

traveling so fast across the sky it's like they're tied to an electric current.

But electricity is the same for everybody. It comes in the top of your head

and goes out your shoes, which will walk through these automatic doors.

In the Corbin Walmart parking lot a woman with a small amount of cash

was arrested for getting in and out of trucks. A man stepped out of his car

in the Columbus Walmart parking lot, and shot himself. I get in the checkout line

behind a lighted number on a pole. The man in front of me jangles coins

in his pocket, rocks back and forth on his heels. The girl in front of him

carefully peels four moist dimes from her palm to pay for a small container

of honey-mustard dipping sauce. In the parking lot of the LaFayette Walmart,

grandparents left their disabled two-year-old grandson sitting in a shopping cart

and drove away. Employees in the parking lot at the La Grange Walmart

found a box containing seven abandoned kittens. I am not a Christian or

prone to idioms, but when the cashier says she is grateful for small mercies,

I nod in assent.
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.
The Latin root of mercy

means price paid, wages, merchandise, though now we use it as

compassion shown to a person in a position of powerlessness,

and sometimes forgiveness towards a person with no right

to claim it. God is merciful and gracious, but not just.

In the Walmart parking lot in Stockton, a man considered armed

and dangerous attacked his wife, beating her unconscious.

A couple tried to sell their six-month-old for twenty-five bucks

to buy meth in the Salinas Walmart parking lot. We who are in danger,

remember: mercy has a human heart. Mercy with her tender mitigations,

slow to anger and great in loving-kindness, with her blue employee's smock

emblazoned with
How may I help you?
Someone in this place have mercy on us.

Y
OU RETURN THE
T
ORAH TO THE ARK

and I think of the distant past

eins tsvey dray fir
now thirty years

since I was a child and used to count

men's hats in my grandparents'

synagogue the moment everyone

rose up but not the ladies—

they stood and I didn't count them

finf zeks zibn akht
as instead of hats

they wore latticed doilies

pinned to their wigs, scraps

of lace flat as an outstretched hand

conferring a webbed blessing

or folded like wings about

to take flight
nayn tsen elf tsvelf

before whom did we stand?

the male Rabbi, the male Cantor

and his
oyoyoys draytsn fertsn

fuftsn zekhtsn
the ark shuts

in a flash of white an arm

crossing the heart the chest

a house for the body is rending

of garments—a curtain's pull

zibetsn akhtsn nayntsn tsvantsik

Zichron Moshe, Adath Israel,

Ward Avenue Shul and who knows

what shteebles are demolished are

churches now this second post-war

shtetl of ladies and gentlemen the Bronx

is burning is burned the congregation

sighs into their seats and I think of

cousin Freddy's story about the Rabbi

(name long forgotten) who would call out

Yankees scores during high holiday

davening
ein un tsvantsik tsvey un tsvantsik

everyone could hear the ballpark crowd

cheering through the open doors