Still an impulse: wasn’t it as good most days, any old day, as intention?
The long grown list of intention, the hope of how to be.
Bird keeps grades on herself, the future school marm: a B day, a D day, details her insufficiencies: too late, too late, forgot. Nice try! The costume hung together with straight pins, the sneakers at the bottom of the pool.
She tries the PTP, the LEC, the LCC — tries service, attagirl—all the ad hoc this and that. Nurses a tree in the churchyard. Nothing pure about it. She is balancing deed with the failure to do, hoping for a wash. She brokers her little mercies, pre-pays against calamity, the F and D minus days — thinks in averages, bigger pictures, the solid and sustainable C.
Oiled rusty bike chain
+
played guitar at All School
-
boy sears chin on cookie sheet
-
pup breaks neck on stairs
Bird wants to be caught. Flung out.
Her husband moans in his sleep, he twitches — a dog chasing squirrels in a dream.
Bird resorts to a different tally, to the one she keeps against him. For dreaming, for instance, when she isn’t. For drinking the last drop of coffee. He never lets her use his toothbrush, or his 25-cent comb.
She wants all of it.
He tells her nothing. Tells her everything. Tells a good joke, his same good joke, and everybody laughs but her. Goofball, high school stories. Mellow man, man of good cheer. Easy to love, happy even asleep — but anything can be wielded. I was happy and look what you did.
“Did you see what I did? I washed the dishes. I fed the dog. This is me feeding the dog.”
Bird loves him best in pictures, but what does this mean?
And why will he not take pictures — with the baby, her boy growing up? The irretrievable life unrecorded.
“But I do,” he says. “I took a picture. Look there, there you are. There’s your pretty boy. I took that. That’s a nice little picture.”
She bought a camera for her husband and he lost it in a week with seven shot frames inside.
Bird tried holding out her camera her arm’s length away and aiming it down at the three of them, flat on their backs in bed. But she was pissy; she pouted, saw it each time: a woman giving grades out, a woman keeping score.
She’ll get over it, fine. No matter. She will survive and die and her babies will live without a record of who they have been. Just as Bird lives. Doesn’t matter. It is nothing but a life passing, a day smashed to golden shards.
Love, she thinks, and duration.
Sacred and narcotic.
You could fortify yourself against it. Hedge your bets; heed the signs.
A young man sleeps in a ragtop, for instance. Duct-tapes his sneakers together. His windshield is a patch of Lucite, stitched in, that whistles and thrums when he drives. There is a bullet in the defrost vent; a sack of bite-sized hamburgers deliquesces in the trunk. There are paw prints, handprints, smudge of a nose on each windowpane, the Naugahyde seat in shreds.
Think, girl. Read the signs.
She thinks of pictures they took — Bird of Mickey and Mickey of Bird. Bird slumped over the wheel of a roadster they found rolled into the weeds along the freeway. Her face wrecked, the windows webbed: Mickey’s favorite.
Bird’s: Mickey afloat above a trampoline, his hair staticked up, a dorsal horn, a boy in a cape, a man shrieking.
She hears her boy getting up down the hallway.
May he be a boy always like Mickey was.
May he wind a strand of hair around his bedpost.
May he sleep for months in a ragtop with the sumac high and survive it.
What an awful word—survive, Bird thinks. Sufficient, Bird thinks. Service.
Your porpoise is a service animal. Sufficiently intelligent to deactivate unwanted bombs.
This is before or after they are bleeding out their brains through their ears? Fucking Navy. Bird takes a short loop through her well-worn rant against the military-industrial complex — the terrors she scarcely thought of before she brought children into the world.
“You mean what’s left of the world,” Bird says out loud, and finds her boy at her shoulder saying, “Mama, don’t be mad, Mama. There is pee all over my bed.”
He bats at her face gently: that’s an apology. Bird kisses his sweaty head. She rises with the baby still at her breast and steps into the moving day.
Bird is washing her boy’s pissy sheets and stirring oatmeal on the stovetop when the telephone rings again.
Suzie again.
“Can’t talk,” Bird says. “I’m called.”
“You dope,” Suzie says. “I’m checking in on you. You okay? You won’t be able to reach me. I’ll be in the sack all week, sugar. My poet’s up from New Orleans. It’s all cocktails and crème brulee for us. I’m not budging to pick up the phone.”
“I’ve been warned,” Bird says. “That should do it.”
“I mean it, sugar. You need anything? You sounded like you hurt.”
“I hurt,” Bird says, “and I improve. Every day by day. The bone knits up quite nicely. You?”
“Bruised,” Suzie says. “Nothing broken. My ass is an unsightly yellow and my head is a little green.”
“Your timing’s bad.”
“I should say.”
“I’ll let you go.”
“I’m broke. I want a little dope for when he’s here.”
“That’d be nice,” Bird says.
“We make our choices, I guess.”
“And then we lie in them. I’m not floating you a loan.”
“I didn’t ask you to. I asked if you were okay,” Suzie says.
“Well I slept and then you called and then I slept a little more. And then the baby waked.”
“We make our choices.”
“We do.”
Bird thinks again of her husband sleeping, the warmth of his breath on his pillow.
It takes a funny sort of discipline to give yourself away.
Bird tries again to summon it and balks at the want for uncharted sleep while the sun swings under the world. But who sleeps anymore? Not even Suzie.
The phone rings in the dark. Suzie needs a ride from the bus stop. Suzie spent her last nickels on pizza. Suzie’s new pal she’s been sleeping with shoved her lightly on accident—on accident—down the stairs.
“But you should see him,” Suzie says, “sleeping. He sleeps with his eyes open. He sleeps with his arms tossed over his head like a falling god. The moon is on him. It draws the tides in him toward the air — like dew, opened up, like he’s blooming, like he is some succulent moon-white bloom dropped into my bed and lethal. I could tear him apart just to touch him.”
“And he is what,” Bird asks, “seventeen?”
“Newly carved. The boy glows like a skinned pear.”
Bird’s boy tugs at her robe. He needs her, it’s true. He needs his blue socks. He wants that yellow hat with that M.
Bird wants the heart to hang up, quit — but she can’t summon it quite, never has.
The morning is going. She finds the grooved spoon, favored. She ladles oatmeal over an army guy, a gluey mass, a joke he’ll get, go, “Unh?”
He wants toast. He wants a little toast with syrup. May she make him a dosht with seebup and butter and one little dust of the cinnamon, Mama, “Mama, please, if you don’t, will you please?”
“If I don’t?” she asks.
“I will never say good night to you again.”
“Are you talking to me?” Suzie wants to know. “I’m still here.”