On Looking: Essays Read online

  Consider their find: cross-sectioned rings interrupted by bullets, all the loops of years pierced.

  The loops of years pierced and containing the point.

  This time of year, when the sky darkens early and clouds stack up in thick, western swells, I see therein a mountain range I once knew. (The sniper, we will come to learn, had a mount for his gun in the trunk of his car: the trunk of his car a small terrain of roughened upholstery, the gun at rest there, those beveled edges along the muzzle, the boredom of waiting, his fingernails scraping up curls of grime, flicking them off. Sun in a beam through the punched-out lock reaching a summit, casting its curves.)

  Let me come back, though, to the matter at hand.

  When the sky darkens and clouds rise like a near mountain range, my neighborhood plunges into a valley, makes of itself one of the small, snug towns I loved as a child in New England. I’d like you to believe, as I wanted to believe, that I actually “lived as a child in New England,” for I felt such familiarity when visiting, as if I’d found a home I hadn’t known I’d lost—in Great Barrington, East Hardwick, at our friends’ small farm in Clarkesville, New Hampshire, way up near the Canadian border.

  What it is—is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.

  What it is—is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street—not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid—but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind—and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.

  I mean to say, too, that it’s not all jittery, these exchanges. I remember seeing, at my uncle’s house, a cat’s brain, preserved, and how the brain’s topography slid into more: a crush of continents ribboning up, river-valleys gone to inclines, post-glacial, scoured and jarred. And how standing in front of the pen-and-ink drawings of neurons, those cells were stretching, wavering blooms, tributaries, sidewalk cracks.

  Things pair up to go forth.

  When I am clear enough to catch it, it’s the motion of Bach’s Prelude XIV, the sense of it-all-going-on-at-once, one voice seeding always the next swell, unending, the swell out-spinning, the strands of sound buoyant, a weave tightened and cinched like the lip of a purse until the last tilt, and the pucker of folds lets the gold go.

  And my husband’s sure fingers are cresting sound as they have moved over all that I am, and all I am overrun by.

  I came across this a while ago: “In music the distance and the nearness of space, the limitless and the limited are all together in one gentle unity that is a comfort and a benefaction to the soul.”

  The space a comfort.

  A benefaction:

  And what in the soft air, the chalk-blue of the blue spruce, the sky orange and pink just the other morning as I took the garbage out—what ferried me past my fear? What brought me instead to my old summer job as a coffee vendor, lower Manhattan, awake before dawn on Avenue C, the junkies cooled off, the Bowery wide and dank and mine to share with the bakery trucks, the newspaper trucks, just a few of us going out, a few coming home. Here’s the blue dawn air settling over the cart I readied at my corner in front of Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway—here now, in October, at six a.m., and fifteen years later.

  What is it that took this morning over, washed it with a morning past and by that breath, kept from it the fear—who next will be shot?—also going on, right now. Right here.

  Above this scene? Beyond it?

  Where?

  What about this, from Emerson’s journal: “The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.”

  Strange, yes, this sympathy, clearing a space, preparing a ground for meetings to occur—but fragile, too. Terribly fragile. So why, why, I have been wondering, did my friend, standing at the shore one night this summer, watching the white breakers arc, curl and fall—why did she say, even as the chill spray hit our faces and we shivered in relief from the day’s heat, how could she say “it’s just like a movie”? And pull us from the evening damp, the woody, splintered boardwalk, sweet ache of leaning on the chest-high railing, rumble of the arcade fading, folding in and out of wind. Why break the hum and echo of the moment we were in? Why leave the moment just then forming, moment that would, some morning, some evening, return to her a quality of light or air or scent and displace the sadness she might be feeling?

  I’ve never been able to conjure, in winter, summer’s heat. I cannot, by will, regard the snow into a fringe of green. So while I believe the sniper will be caught, I cannot summon that peace, nor compose a time without this pulse of fear. I only know fear comes to me. And also peace.

  On October 24th, hours before dawn, the sniper is caught, with an accomplice, sleeping at a rest-stop near Myersville, MD. It’s been twenty-five days now since the rampage began. Eleven people are dead. And though the snipers are locked far from us now, a world away—three miles away, just downtown, in hyperbolized space (Supermax, the sine qua non of desolation)—here they still are, large in their absence, and circling. Fall, like an axis, collected them in, spooled all the fear up.

  Fall also spun around itself translucing yellows and flaming red stems. Last flocks lifting whole into trees for a rest, leafing back the empty spots, and late afternoons, a neighbor’s carrier pigeons let out for a spin, angling like a single wing, an arm crooked up to block the glare. Thick pumpkins. White mums. Fall gathered these in.

  And fall gathered, too, on this afternoon, my husband working up Prelude XIV; my son and his friends dropping split, rotting walnuts, thunk, in tin pails; the blade of air sharpening as the temperature falls; box elder bugs swarming the shed’s southern wall—and everything, everything else uncountable, unaccountably part of, that constitutes now. And all this I call fall, I call late afternoon, will come back, will come hauling its wedge of cold fear, its unbidden relief, oh who can know which, some long summer hour when lines of road tar loosen in heat, a boy sits idly peeling a stick, and wood wasps drill slow, perfect circles in eaves.

  Coming to See

  Windows: Now and Then

  I’m sitting in front of a clean, paned window. It looks out on a field but, floor to ceiling, the scene is filled by honeysuckle, its sweetness and low buzz crowding in. Above, two oaks lean in from either side and touch. Through the chinks in the bush I can see the field lead, in scraps, to a far stand of pines.

  Yesterday I wanted to cut back the green tangle, so close to the house and obscuring the field, but I am just a visitor here.

  I’m sitting in front of a clean, paned window, facing the mess of yellow-white-green. Here is my chance to see how bright the partial can be, the particular now. Last year when I stayed in a house nearby, my window framed a different field. But the window was screened and blurred my gaze so I had to focus on the sprawl of b
ig forms—silver silo, far white fence—to keep my sight from slipping into the gray crosshatch of wire. I blinked and blinked to adjust my gaze.

  I remember I wished for a clear pane then. A small, simple view. The distance contained.

  Parts and Wholes

  The sun, angled low in the early morning, makes the window gauzy in streaks. Branch-shadows switch darkly across my face and slowly, from the wash of green, things step forth: the seedling ash as thin as a finger, but plush with leaves, notched and saw-toothed, as big as those on the full-sized tree; the milk-blue moths and the buttery ones. Two branches of honeysuckle stand straight up, lean into the place the bush will go next.

  I missed the deer but saw in parts, through the bush, small bits of brown, a flicking of cream. A dipping of white as it stepped along. A brief drought pulling across the field as the deer moved into the woods beyond.

  And now, because I missed the deer whole, I want to cut back the honeysuckle—just enough to see I think. See through.

  To more?

  To beyond and not here?

  I am thinking that cutting can shift a thing—release a space, be a new pattern laid.

  That clearing a space is like crafting a question.

  First Cutting: Opening

  I asked my host if the honeysuckle is ever pruned in front of this house. I thought it might be rude to ask, but he said No, if you want you can. Here—he went to his car—I just bought these clippers yesterday. He squeezed the red handles, demonstrating. Do what you like.

  Dew weights the new growth and wets my hands.

  And now there is thistle. Now a sight line. Already a goldfinch looping up. Already I am not satisfied, the field a bright glimpse and I want only more.

  Had he said No, we just let it all go, I would have settled in with the tangle, learning it, diagnosing its moment-to-moment gestures. I would have studied the overleafed patches by which the distance was parceled and cut. Come to leaf ribs and spines in motion, the sound of rain sifting. Would have gone in and down, where, in the thick, matter intercedes for matter and leads to still more—recombinant, shapely.

  But I wanted distance to unscroll my sight, for the grasses’ bright tips to draw my eye out, far, to that jittery open.

  I have not yet said that all this is occurring while my friend back home is dying. And that her dying is a hand upon it, a breath upon it and a frame.

  Into the Open

  This morning, early, I cut back more so the honeysuckle would tip like a cup and the field pour forth rye, milkweed, and chicory. If I knew better the kind of work I was doing, this work with distance, proximity, and sight, I could give it a name—for example, I’m painting. And purple the trunks, make of the blue-through-far-pines an odd spurt, a shot brightened, as if a spring were caught rising. Looking out, I could think so this is a bower, stand at the easel and feel the solidity of the room behind me. Feel the dark filling, like a theater, lending purpose to my gaze.

  But I could go further: clear-cut the brush to the edge of the field. Topple the trees that arc into this scene.

  Yank the white curtains at the window’s edges.

  Then where would I go?

  Shave the panes down and when the glass loosens, push the glass out. Climb over the sill. Turn to the house.

  Burn the house.

  Now in the entirely open field. As my friend is.

  Is made to be.

  What do you do in an open field—if it one day occurs, is come upon? Sun and shade striping, the green lapping, tidal, the tide its own thinking. The laps and relapse, all the internal shifting. If there, in the field, is a threat circling, a fin in the green, in the too-green field. Swimming so fast. Relentlessly swimming.

  Interruption

  If I went out to the apple and cut the black branch that hangs in my view, I could see, past the tree, a white spray of phlox, the flowers like sun spots, sudden in the field. The hanging black branch is swinging, distracting: it’s the slip of a pen, or a brush stroke misplaced. A flaw in the scene, too precisely there.

  Field as Body

  Where the glass warps, the far trees ripple with weird internal banners. I look through the glass refracting the field, making it fold and slip and blur. Out there is a bird drilling into rich hollows, breaking them down, taking the field, part by soft part, into its body.

  Dissembling

  The end of the day swells like a breaker, holds itself curled against the green field. Keeps itself brief above the grasses. Keeps itself sheer before it falls.

  Now in the half-light above the field, the day is something vanished-but-present, or present-but-going. A crest then a wobble, hovering.

  I remember the game move-dusk-to-dawn: at the end of the day how we reeled back our bodies, making-believe.

  How we made, for long moments, the rising and sinking alike.

  Second Cutting: Belief

  I push myself up from the chair after sitting and reading, and because I have been lifting heavy things in the last few days, moving furniture in this small house, and pruning, I feel a mild, affirming ache. Then I hear it.

  At first I think wind is swelling-receding, filling the trees so they’ll lift and sigh flat. But then the exhalation keeps on, elongates, and looking up, it’s rain, that long, rolling boil, boiling over. Crushed honeysuckle is scenting the air. In the field beyond, timothy jackknifes.

  More distance clears.

  I think I can make that happen again, so in the damp after-mist, I go out to work on the big dripping branch that interrupts the whole field. And once it is gone I can see further still. I relax my gaze. It feels like driving, the field stretching out. Like I am moving. Moving toward.

  Mist and Force

  By morning, a fine, light sifting comes down, a wetness that isn’t exactly rain: a roiling mist like motes of dust; a prickling damp; pinpoints beading up the field.

  As out-and-out rain the wetness fails.

  For silent, inexorable growth it is perfect.

  All night the damp gathers. By morning everything green is bent under its diligent weight.

  Decline

  The dark spot on the window was an ash leaf days ago. It curls like a lip. It draws the eye to it.

  Beyond, in the field, two purple finches meet above the thinnest grasses. They dip and hover—too heavy to land, but wanting the seed—then fly off to sturdier brush to rest. But my eye returns: the spot softens and browns. It worsens each day. In it, the gathered refusals of sun. In it, a thumbprint of heat and bruised air.

  Body as Tether

  In the three weeks that I’ve been here, the phlox has seeded itself in the field.

  I can hold my arm out and squint, and one of the new blooms is a fingernail away from the first. I can lie down in the field and, reaching in any direction, touch one. But then there’s another and another beyond that.

  Scattered and dotted, I cannot hold the flowers together in any bounded way. I cannot corral them, not with my arms flung wide, or my sight. They cluster and bend. They come up all over.

  The field is a tide the flowers ride out—far past the body I am using as measure.

  Song

  I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.

  Tally

  A web across the honeysuckle shifts light like beads on an abacus. Back and forth, doing its sums, it golden subtractions.

  Third Cutting: Rising

&nbs
p; It’s some kind of butterfly: orange and black but smaller than the Monarch, smaller, too, than the Viceroy, something crazier that dips and flies up, scallops the air, looks like a kite a child is coaxing. Across the field its path is all sharp peaks and perfect troughs. Across the field means the whole way is clear and uninterrupted.

  I look into the distance. The disheveled air above the green is a field itself, a haze of new heat where insects bob, slipknot, and careen.

  Now my eye finds the dark edge of the field with ease.

  Even after all my work, the low brush and honeysuckle were still too close—too close to the house, too close to sight, and so my host came with big clippers and chopped the rest back.

  And when he clamped the blades around the base of the bush and pulled the long wooden handles together, he made a little grunting sound. I heard it from inside the house, the intimacy of dismantling, and then a softer rustle as he pulled the branches free. His exhalation, that smallest breath came for the bush and marked its falling.

  Then: a confetti of moths in a freshet of air, rising because the way was clear. Scraps of distance seaming up, all the flecks caught in rays, the motes aloft.