The Abundance (6 page)

The room where I live is plain as a skull, a firm setting for windows. A nun lives in the fires of the spirit, a thinker lives in the bright wick of the mind, an artist lives jammed in the pool of materials. But this room is a skull, a fire tower, wooden, and empty. Of itself it is nothing, but the view, as they say, is good.

Since I live in one room, one long wall of which is glass, I am myself, at everything I do, a backdrop to all the landscape's occasions, all its weathers, colors, and lights. From the kitchen sink, and from my bed, and from the table, couch, hearth, and desk, I see land and water, islands, sky.

The land is complex and shifting; the eye leaves it.
There is a white Congregationalist church among Douglas firs; there is a green pasture between two yellow fallow fields; there are sheep bent over below some alders, and beside them a yard of brown hens. But everything in the landscape points to sea. The land's progress of colors leads the eye up a far hill, a sweeping big farm of a hill whose pale pastures bounce light all day from a billion stems and blades. Down the hill's rim drops a dark slope of forest, a slant your eye rides down to the point, the dark sliver of land that holds the bay. From this angle you see the bay cut a crescent; your eye flies up the black beach to the point, or slides down the green firs to the point, and the point is an arrow pointing over and over, with its log-strewn beach, its gray singleness, and its recurved white edging of foam, to sea: to bright Haro Strait, the bluing of water with distance at the world's edge, and on it the far blue islands, and over these lights the light clouds.

You can't picture it, can you? Neither can I. Oh, the desk is yellow, the oak table round, the ferns alive, the mirror cold, and I never cared. I read. In the Middle Ages, I read, “the idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more real to him than the actual thing itself.” Of course. I am in my own Middle Ages; the
world at my feet, the world through the window, is an illuminated manuscript whose leaves the wind takes, one by one, whose painted illuminations and halting words draw me, one by one, and I am dazzled in day and lost.

There is, in short, one country, one room, one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person: but I am myself hollow. And, for now, there are the many gods of mornings and the many things to give them for their work—lungs and heart, muscle, nerve, and bone—and there is a no-man's-land of many things wherein they dwell, and from which I seek to call them, in work that's mine.

So I read. Armenians, I read, salt their newborn babies. I check somewhere else: so did the Jews at the time of the prophets. They washed a baby in water, salted him, and wrapped him in cloths. When God promised to Aaron and all the Levites all the offerings Israel made to God, the firstfruits and the firstling livestock, “all the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine,” he said of this promise, “It is a covenant of salt forever.” In the Roman church baptism, the priest once placed salt in the infant's mouth.

I salt my breakfast eggs. All day long I feel created. I can see the blown dust on the skin on the back of my hand, the tiny trapezoids of chipped clay, moistened
and breathed alive. There are some created sheep in the pasture below me, sheep set down here precisely, just touching their blue shadows hoof to hoof on the grass. Created gulls pock the air, rip great curved seams in the settled air. I greet my created meal, amazed.

I have been drawing a key to the islands I see from my window. Everyone told me a different set of names for them, until one day a sailor came and named them all with such authority that I believed him. So I penciled an outline of the horizon on a sheet of paper and began labeling the lobes: Skipjack, Sucia, Saturna, Salt Spring, Bare Island . . .

Today, November 18 and no wind; today a veil of air has lifted I didn't know was there. Behind the blue translucence of Salt Spring Island I see a new island, a new wrinkle, the deepening of wonder. I have no way of learning this new island's name. Still, I bring the labeled map to the table and pencil in a new line. Call that: Unknown Island North; Water-Statue; Sky-Ruck; Newborn and Salted; Waiting for Sailor.

Henry Miller relates that Knut Hamsun once said, in response to a questionnaire, that he wrote to kill time.
This is funny in a number of ways. In a number of ways I kill myself laughing, looking out at islands. Startled, the yellow cat on the floor stares over her shoulder. She has carried in a wren, I suddenly see, a wren she has killed, whose dead wings point askew on the circular rug. It is time. Out with you both. I'm busy laughing, to kill time. I shoo the cat from the door, turn the wren over in my palm, and drop it from the porch, down to the winter-killed hair grass and sedge, where the cat may find it if she will, or crows, or beetles, or rain.

When I next look up from my coffee, there is a ruckus on the porch. The cat has dragged in a god, scorched. He is alive. I run outside. Save for his wings, he is a perfect, very small man. He is fair, thin-skinned in the cat's mouth, and kicking. His hair is on fire and stinks; his wingtips are blacked and seared. From the two soft flaps of the cat's tiger muzzle his body jerks, naked. One of his miniature hands pushes hard at her nose. He waves his thigh; he beats her face and the air with his smoking wings. I cannot breathe. I run at the cat to scare her; she drops him, casting me an evil look, and runs from the porch.

The god lies gasping and perfect. He is no longer than my face. Quickly I snuff the smoldering fire in his yellow hair with a finger and thumb. In so doing I accidentally touch his skull, brush again his hot skull, which is the
size of a hazelnut, as the saying goes, warm-skinned and alive.

He rolls his colorless eyes toward mine; his long wings catch strength from the sun, and heave.

Later I am walking in the day's last light. The god rides barefoot on my shoulder, astride it, tugging on loops of my hair. He is whistling at my ear; he is blowing a huge tune in my ear, a myth about November. He is heaping a hot hurricane into my ear, into my hair, an ignorant ditty calling things real, calling islands out of the sea, calling solid moss from curling rock, and ducks down the sky for the winter.

I see it! I see it all! Two islands, twelve islands, worlds, gather substance, gather the blue contours of time, and array themselves down distance, mute and hard.

I seem to see a road; I seem to be on a road, walking. I seem to walk on a blacktop road that runs over a hill. The hill creates itself, a powerful suggestion. It creates itself, thickening with apparently solid earth and waving plants, with houses and browsing cattle, unrolling wherever my eyes go, as though my focus were a brush painting in a world. I cannot escape the illusion. The colorful thought persists, this world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of blood. If I throw my eyes past the rim of the hill to see the real stars, were they? Something with wings? I elaborate
the illusion instead; I rough in a middle ground. I stitch the transparent curtain solid with phantom mountains, with thick clouds gliding just so over their shadows on green water, with blank impenetrable sky. The dream fills in, like wind widening over a bay. Quickly I look to the fat dream's rim for a glimpse of that old deep . . . and, just as quickly, the blue slaps shut, the colors wrap everything out. There is not a chink. The sky is gagging on trees. I seem to be on a road, walking, greeting the hedgerows, the rose hips, apples, and thorn. I seem to be on a road walking, familiar with neighbors, high-handed with cattle, smelling the sea, and alone. Already, I know the names of things. I can kick a stone.

Time is enough, more than enough, and matter multiple and given. The god of today is a child, a baby new and filling the house, remarkable here in the flesh. He is day. He thrives in a cup of wind, landlocked and thrashing. He unrolls, revealing his shape an edge at a time, a smatter of content, foot first: a word, a friend for coffee, a windshift, the shingling or coincidence of ideas. Today, November 18 and no wind, is clear. Terry Wean—who fishes, and takes my poetry course—could see Mount Rainier. He hauls his reef net gear from the bay; we talk on its deck while he hammers shrunken knots. The
Moores for dinner. In bed, I call to me my sad cat, and read on. Like a rug or wrap rolling unformed up a loom, the day discovers itself, like the poem.

The god of today is rampant and drenched. His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time's live skin; he burgeons up from day like any tree. His legs spread crossing the heavens, flicking hugely, and flashing and arcing around the earth toward night.

This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves. This is the one air, bitten by grackles; time is alone and in and out of mind. The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot. His power is enthusiasm; his innocence is mystery. He sockets into everything that is, and that right holy. Loud as music, filling the grasses and skies, his day spreads rising at home in the hundred senses. He rises, new and surrounding. He
is
everything that is, wholly here and emptied—flung, and flowing, sowing, unseen, and flown.