On Looking: Essays Page 3

Sketching, I consider the line: “These fragments I shore against my ruin”—from a time when so much was felt to be coming apart. But no. My fragments I shore to reveal my ruin. And all the similarities my eye is drawn to: flaw. Torque. Skew. I make a little pile by the shore: cracked horseshoe crab, ripped clam, wet ragged wing with feathers. I look because a thing is off, to locate the unlocatable in its features, forged as they are, or blunted, or blown. I look because the counter flashes its surprising grin.

  My own deformities, of course, abound, but they are on the inside. I do not mean the flaws of reason, the insufficiencies of heart. I mean my spine fused and fixed in place with metal rods—all inside, except for the eleven months I wore a body cast. And then I was the walking ruin for all to see, the shore to keep in sight while sailing free.

  The woman with the half-arm, no, a bit more than half an arm (it stopped below her elbow) stands chatting with her friends waiting for the bus. In a gesture she must have developed long ago, she rolls a magazine into a tube and slips her half-arm into it. How well and how long must the gesture have served, because, really, who hides an arm, a perfectly good arm, in a magazine? Whose but a child’s arm could be covered by a magazine, its length or its circumference?

  One sees what one expects to see: “a magazine laid over the arm.” But because I saw the arm slip in, I see instead her quiet strategy. And what does looking at her, what does knowing that teach me—since all along in here I’ve been practicing, letting the sight-of work on me. And recording, recording, recording. I am not her parent and so do not feel guilt. I am not her sister and so do not feel that dual reprieve/protectiveness. I call up the warmth of such an arm in my hand (I don’t know if she says “stump”), the curve, the balance, its abrupt end, and the ghost of its missing length. I feel, like a child, neither moral nor immoral saying this. I feel many things.

  When the eye sees something beautiful the hand wants to draw it.

  Or here’s another way to say it: a poem should not mean, but be.

  There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass—and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating. And yet one scientist says, “When thinking of jellies we have to suspend our bias towards hard skeletons with thick muscles and dense tissues.” He means in order to see their particular beauty, to see them, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.

  Of course, we peer into houses at night not because they’re beautiful, but because we want to see what’s going on in there—illuminated, partial, and beckoning.

  I’ve carried this image for a long time now: the port-wine birthmark on the girl’s pale face. All that summer at the beach, the mark was like a harbor, or what I knew of the shore, growing up near the ocean as I did. Tidal, it crept up near her eye and stayed like a dampness. I felt I was supposed to separate that color—velvety, royal, berrylike—from its place: her face, where it shouldn’t be. But I could not get the color to be unlovely. And I could not remove the mark from her face.

  Magda, who worked at my favorite lunch counter in Warsaw, had the lovely, plain face of a farm girl. When she laughed, her white teeth shone and the scar in the middle of her chin puckered. And when she looked past me, into the distance, one eye rolled to the side. Her left eye was fixed in place during our conversations as she ladled out the borscht with beans I ordered every day. And every day, I’d wait to see it slip away—the whiteness, the angle, the variation: the hand wants to draw it. If that which is beautiful is balanced and symmetrical, a “pleasing unity,” then the unbeautiful’s more a form of interruption—like a gasp. A catch in breath. The unbeautiful’s a form made of interruptions—a rough hand passed over wool’s nap, snagging. And passed over again and again for the snag. It’s a moment that catches your attention. It’s a moment into which you fall, as when on a crowded bus, hot crowded subway, you forget yourself and enter some other, less populated world by an unexpected door: a woman’s earlobe, deeply notched; the close back of a man’s neck, oily and creased; a girl’s cracked lip; a freckle; a boil; a split thumbnail with its crescent of dirt, next to which your own nail rests on the cool, aluminum pole.

  Recurrences/Concurrences

  Conditions are present.

  Frost on the bathroom window this morning burgeons and twines in winged fleurs-de-lis. Astonishing frost on this, the same morning I discover my mother’s old cigarette case: the same, precise blooms but in silver-etched motion. How the mind of frost, the form reaches out, draws its heirs close: from anywhere, cracked riverbeds and leaf-veins in sun. From a few blocks away, wrought-iron fish on the Roland Park schoolyard fence. From childhood, Dead Man’s Fingers, Codium fragile, common seaweed, washed up on any Long Island beach.

  And this afternoon, sitting down to work, a plastic bag catches in a bare tree and stays. I can see it from up here, from my second floor window. Up here, it’s Baltimore. The middle of winter. But I know this thing, puffed full of air, the four corners taut, is a swollen egg case, a skate’s or a ray’s: Mermaid’s Purse we’d find at low tide, shining and black and tangled on shore.

  Forms everywhere watch and align.

  I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he’d seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we’re no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel conveyor beneath their feet, when all along they’d assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.

  As he was for me.

  What do you see? What aligns? he’s still asking.

  Fronds of frost. Crystallized leaves. Ironwork, sterling, the form recurring. In Belgian lace, threaded with light. In Russian tea glasses, the filigree heated by steaming, sweet amber. In coral arms. In branching veins.

  In this way I begin to speak to him. Slant and sidelong.

  A path through this thinking is clearing. Stay with me. Events will fit themselves to themselves. Stitch along and proceed.

  Without the site of this essay, these moments are nowhere. And Reader, without you, this reflection on things remaking themselves—fern into ice, ice into sea plant, faces and lives over time—is unseen.

  Stay with me.

  What about this: these moments of recurrence/concurrence are not messages fluttering toward, bearing secrets, but stories in which we are part of the telling. We are, for a spell, of the path where shape forms, where flux assembles, briefly, a center.

  And there are so many centers.

  What does this sound like:

  Where I held my finger to the window and warmed a small circle in frost this morning, a new flower has grown. The new flower began in the shape of a star. Codium fragile. Silver-leaved. I am only writing what is true—true to form—when I say the flower, whose fronds are in motion, grew from a star. To say every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal, to say that the star’s disappearanc
e, ongoing, is what we see looking up at night—sounds unbelievable.

  This sounds unbelievable.

  But sitting down to this work, this work, too, seems unlikely: that particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble. That what I didn’t know I knew was somewhere . . . waters be gathered, waters bring forth . . . and how, what seems in the end like intention, arrives only piecemeal. How what seems in the end inevitable, is a trail of particulars finding each other.

  Of course, I could say I won’t write about my old friend. And, to be honest, I’d rather not, since I still feel regret and sadness about that loss. But things about him assert here as subject. The obituaries (you’ll see). The dizziness. His belief in the uneasy matter of chaos. It’s all, here, important. All-of-a-piece. These lightest of strands, moments, memories unbury. Forms align in each others’ presence.

  It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.

  Shows we’re in use.

  Uses us.

  Right now. Right this minute.

  So often these days my son—who is busy getting the basics down—asks “why?” and “is that the rule?” Here’s what I think to myself (though I sometimes impatiently say “Yes, it’s the rule”): I make the rule up, moment to moment. I mean, the moment conjures the rule.

  Like this:

  the surface temperature must drop below freezing, must drop below dew point; the dew point must hover, and then frost will form.

  By reaching into the nothing there.

  The emptiness waits to crystallize, to filigree.

  It’s the same emptiness the clam steps into, stretches its single, pink, muscular foot toward. The clam stirs the water. Hits something hard: retracts/waits/proceeds. Foot out and in, it stitches along.

  A few days after surgery, as I write this, recovering, I am thinking about stitches. Behind bare trees is the hard blue sky. The snow-glare reflects and it’s very bright. Three planes mark white, discrete lines in the sky. I look away for what seems just a moment and when I turn back, the jet trails are gone. Wholly dissolved and the blue is all healed. Just like that.

  Just like.

  I saw once a reenactment of an old British parlor game, Similes. The host goes around the circle asking “Slippery as a _____ ,” “Sharp as a _____,” and the players fill in the correct word—that is, the known, the agreed-upon. As a fish. As a tack. It’s a game for those who like playing by rules, slipping into, not standing back from. Those wanting a clean end. As a fish! As a tack! No watching for forms, no rogue search here, but much good citizenry all around. Bright as a ______? Star-bright, of course. Not bright as frost. Fern-bright. Fern-dark. Sea-fern green. Fern-frosted. In the fern-frosted silence. The dead man’s fingers frosted over. Ice-sharp. The stitched sky. A filigree purse.

  I just came upon this, in a book I’m reading: “When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.”

  The frost. The crystals. A Dead Man with secrets moving like fingers: it’s all here. All there. Here and there, piling up. What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? “Nothing in particular,” he’d answer, meaning “I have no plan.” No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble—in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us.

  Daily Seismics

  A few days ago, six o’clock at night: I am cutting strawberries and thinking of my father. I call him up. His hand is on the phone, ready to call me. It is six o’clock. He is cutting strawberries.

  A few days ago, at dinner, I suggest that my friend read The Gift by Lewis Hyde. I try my best to say why, and why now in her life she should read it, try to sum it all up as an antidote to troubling times. Hope I’ve done a convincing job. I feel very strongly about this, though I wonder if I’ve been prescriptive, annoying. When we finish our meal, I drive home and park on the street. I pull up behind a car whose license plate reads “HYDE.”

  And yesterday morning, settling in with the dictionary to find some new words, I land first on hagioscope: a small opening in the interior wall of a church designed so those in the transept can see the altar. I write the word down and its definition. Later in the day, at the dentist’s office, I open a magazine and there, right there, is a review of a book called Hagioscope.

  Each time, the sensation of being slapped on the back, of some joke in the air: don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

  Something’s near coughing from laughing so hard.

  The jet trail’s white stitches. The white haze of recovery. After my first surgery, years ago, those stitches, in black, the whole length of my spine. And now, lying here, I’m remembering that recovery room and in the bed next to me, the ballet star, also thirteen, who would never again dance, the scoliosis twisting her spine, and the surgery, a fusion like mine, inevitable. How, clutching her parents, she sobbed for days, “What will I do? What will I do?” In bed, today, thinking of her, I pick up the paper, flip to the obituaries: Tanaquil Le Clercq, 71, the ballerina who dazzled the world in the 1940s and ’50s before her career was cut short by paralytic polio . . . and how she went on, as another person. Choreographer. Teacher. Author.

  In the portrait by John Singer Sargent, “Lady Agnew, 1892,” the subject looks so startlingly like me that others over the years have sent postcards and reproductions noting this. Lady Agnew sits languidly in a wing chair, in a light purple dress, worn as easily as a breath. I wear nothing that easily. And though there is much unlike me here—her slightly skewed gaze, one eye looking up, the other off to her right, the longer, narrower waist, and gold worn at the wrist—more stubbornly, potently, I am there: in the widow’s peak, and dark, arched eyebrows, one steeper than the other, the body held firmly against the chair’s frame, face intent, its jumpiness contained. The long sleeves pushed up past the elbows: I do that, assuming the day will take work. I see in her how I try, and fail, to hide my impatience. An art historian calls her “elegantly assured,” her expression “tantalizingly ambivalent,” notes that her face “seems all possibility.” In her lap she holds the tight bud of a white rose, which could be crumpled paper or a handkerchief at first—something beautiful and useful, or used. She seems both resistant and engaging at once. The sash at her waist is tied tightly, and yet an armful of purple silk falls in a bright sheen over her thigh and down in a broad heap of soft folds, like a bouquet of lilies, upended. Its studied drape is made to look casual. Her hair is pulled back but rises above her forehead and gathers in a shadow at the back of her neck. I look hard at the painting, as if at a mirror, waiting for it to reveal me more fully to myself. Where her hair and the background darken together, her left ear is obscured, so the viewer’s eye slides easily down, over the flushed ridge of collarbone along a gold chain to a pendant. And there, reduced and contained, the icy blues and plums collect.

  At the pendant’s center is a stirring of light, a reflection shaped like a heart, or a keyhole. A reflection shaped like a snowy owl, its tiny wings folded and head tucked in.

  A snowy owl that is also a heart, if you squint a bit. That is also a keyhole, if you look at it sidelong. If you believe that, off to the side, so many things hover, and wait to come in.

  Brown

  In this body of brown, in this pile of sticks come upon on my walk, are two black, stripped-bare ones, and a snarl of red vines mingling in, crawling up, or of a mind to. And there’s some yellow gone past its bearings, all underside and protected curl. There’s a yellow sanctified. An escharotic. Hints and tangles. Yes, brown’s a combustion, moving and reckless. Brown’s a lobster of moss and bark. (Remember these tender antennae in air, probing for signals and knowing don’t touch
rock, anemone, star, but sift for a radiant depth, bent and scattered.)

  And, too, with a stick in its mouth of sticks, joy in its face as it comes from the tangle, brown’s a dog, straight-on, (mid-run, it must be) eyes shadowed and nose, that brightness, a wetness. Its tail a live coil diving back in. A dog decohering. Fascicle. Fascia. Driving toward fascis: a bundle.

  Then it all pares away.

  Brown junks and darkens upon itself.

  Starts over again the next day.

  I’ve always disliked, in the name of precision, and for their resolve, landmarks.

  Brown meanders.

  There’s that lobster again, right here, the size of, oh ten or twelve dog heads—one of which is all I can make of this form emerging from its tender surround, the scrawl of it, the matter crisscrossing, those buckled, stray, wiry shoots shooting out. Over grainy, bright eskers. Honeycomb rotars. Rump curves and cochlear swirls pricked up. Black eyes on stems. Haunches ruffled in wind.

  A lobster-dog.

  Which if I had to look for, en route, means I’d find a pile of sticks, and turn left, and keep going, since such an attraction cannot be arranged.

  Sugar Eggs: A Reverie

  For years I have collected the occasions for this space—perhaps, in part, for just this occasion, which I do not expect will finalize the subject in any way. The space I’m speaking of has its perfections—though you’ll see how I’ll have to name it, and name it again to try to get at it. (A list, after all, is an incantation. In a list of likenesses, each element, each peculiarity gathers, leans into and flicks on the light in the room of the next one. The elements loop and knot forth like a net, band as a colony of frost or coral reaching, suggesting not so much a progression as a collective tendency toward. And taken together, the elements offer the assurance of a stance: here is a way to speak of this lightest, barely perceptible—in this case—space. From here I can count and collect that which stirs, and has always stirred me.)