September 14, 2022 • By Lisa Russ Spaar
Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens
Because I could not figure out anything else to do, I just kept returning to my desk, and to the rituals and practices of reading and writing that had structured my life and soothed my psyche and delighted my soul for as long as I could remember. Practice and repetition, practice and repetition, I muttered to myself in my head as if I was an athlete in training. If nothing else, it gave me something to do. It structured the days that had lost their shape, and acted as a guard rail against the mental and spiritual abyss that stretched before me. To some small extent, it temporarily derailed the obsessive grieving that sometimes kept me in bed for days. Just going through the traces, it seemed, prevented me from tipping over the edge. I can’t recall now if I had faith that poetry would come back to me, or not. But I was certain that if I did not keep the lights on, inviting it home, poetry would never come back.
The gods sat in the trees that evening, green and darkening, lingering over a last coffee, coffee with a shot of rum. The river was talking to them but they were gods and didn’t have to listen. Even in the trees it was hot that night. The leaves were not delightful as they knew how to be. The gods stirred in the trees, they looked away. The river was talking to them more urgently. “I don’t want this,” it said. “I don’t need it.” But the gods had worked enough that day. And the evening was so hot the little mortal flung himself into the water. Inside the house beside the river, someone talked on the telephone. Someone wrote in a notebook. The windows were just openings no one happened to look through. The hands on the clock lurched forward forever.
the speaker is protagonist — by turns child, adolescent, young adult — whose mother has attempted and ultimately commits suicide. The realm the narrator inhabits is a welter of emotional trip-wires and consequences that she senses but often does not yet have adequate experience to interpret or articulate.
I stand with the boy with the injured body while the smoke from his cigarette signs its slow signature. He leans on his cane and the cane shakes. It is late afternoon, almost dark. We are day patients and soon will go home. The boy says, I got into some trouble in Texas, which is so far away it doesn’t seem to exist, not with what’s going on now. All around us autumn is throwing gold and crimson leaves into the street while starlings are holding tight on a telephone wire, heads tucked in the cold. And the boy and the Vietnam vet, who has just joined us, and I are looking up with yearning, as though we could solve that string of bird and sky arithmetic and know the ages of our souls.
The summer rain takes one last sweep through the leaves. Sunlight shimmers on the stones below. In the parking lot, two girls smoke as they stroll, following the gray scrolls of their breath. Some of the doors are open to dim rectangular scenes as intricate as tarot cards — Lovers and Fools and High Priestesses. Above them the wind carries petals over dusk’s border. Sparrows hunt for their inheritance in the trampled grass. And my question endures another year, lit by tiny stars striking out across Arkansas. How will I live without her?
There are vision boards displayed along one wall. Glancing at them, I think that if the counselor brings in magazines, scissors, and glue, I’ll sit it out. Too cheesy, I tell myself, too juvenile. But that’s not it. I sip my water. Empty, the cup is so light it’s hard to hold. The vision boards are pinned edge to edge, a series of raw hope. I can barely look at them, knowing I too might choose the daisy, the word joy in royal blue, or the lighthouse, cutting shakily up the side of the tower and around the lantern room.
Physics loosened. Material things blurred. In class I saw the metal chair’s particles move. It was all so Newtonian. I taught the mechanics of meter to students nodding off at night the Old Poets’ syllables stair-stepped around my room. Why should the apple, asked Newton, always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should the chalk fall to the linoleum, the stack of papers fly across the floor? Inelegant movements of the sleepless. Long nights I would make my phone bright and watch the simulated stock ticker make senseless money for people I will never see. Across the country men make invisible machines in a room, I imagine, dark and whirring with the noises their monitors emit. In Minot, North Dakota, for instance, drone operations target men we will no longer, signed papers say, torture. We will not keep them from sleep or force-feed them rectally. We will not touch them. Once we mastered gravity wasn’t distance a thing of the past. That the earth draws it down, the fruit, the flight, as matter, Newton found, draws the earth back to it. In California nights are clear and frenzied. and in the morning my students explained why they dislike the spondee. For its excessive force.
[…] Once the body becomes a downloadable thing, is it true? I wake to a picture proving that if one rises early enough in Pennsylvania, one might see an employee wiping Hancock’s bronze Cheek. That the part represents the whole, in this space, after a night of no Communication. Hoe, mouth, man with hand in mouth: Egyptian hieroglyph for love.
[…] Before I left the city, post-certainty, post-cash, I posted pictures of my couch, my bookshelves, my ratty mattress that a stranger carried down three flights of stairs. I learned a postmodern side-eye, how to get by post-truth. I learned that the word disaster means bad star, that the planets might be positioned poorly but good god when we’re close enough Mars burns red hot in a corner of the western sky.
Up to infinity. Down to hell. Because air, in the days of tangible property was nothing. No foot had emerged from a lander onto the foreign terrain of the moon. No satellites passing over the hostas.
[…] So, before the space of utterance is duly regulated, before the 83 feet of air we own above our heads begins its collapse, this: I love you from the depth of the earth to the height of the sky. I love you upon land immovable, soil open to exploitation by all. I am for your unreasonable use alone. And, when the wingèd gods finally interfere with your possessor’s enjoyment, to an indefinite extent, I’ll remember a time when men were the ones doing harm with their own hands. I’ll remember the words I once had to give to you, on the porch, in private.
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