Weiser River Pillow Book #8

[Here's the July installment of Eberle's Weiser River Pillow Book series. Enjoy!]

SHARP MOMENTS IN VERY HOT WEATHER

Finishing the storage box for the corral, we sit and watch a single ant carrying a wood chip around and around on the cracked earth.

In a nearby field, a neighbor loading hay for us into the truck. My darling steadies the load as the hooks pull out of the bale, cruel looking hooks so close to him, and my heart skips a beat in the beautiful field at the foot of Sage Hill.

Deciding that my distaste for leeches is less than my desire to cut down cattails, and finally wading into the pond with my fierce pink-handled knife.

INCURABLE

It doesn’t matter what the words are, when your beloved is tested, diagnosed. The cottonwoods with their terrible beauty went spinning out of reach, untouchable. As the hours passed, the presence of death made poetry everywhere—absolute perfection of line and form—it was appalling. How did I live through those two days? He said, please don’t cry any more, he said it very gently. I went to sit in the draw where the spring comes out of the earth and runs down. When I came out, I had stopped crying. I took his hand, loving him so much. And now we have begun.

WHAT WE DID IN THE FIRST DAYS

Drove to the city to have the belt sander fixed.

Pulled the pump out of the swamp cooler when it broke.

Put chicken wire around the young plum trees.

Went to a Historic Preservation Commission meeting.

The first time we were apart, he went to softball practice, I went to drumming practice.

Put a nest of guinea hen eggs under the broody bantam hen.

REFLECTIONS ON LIT CRIT

Taking things to their logical conclusion, all texts became of equal value—all criticism also becomes of equal value. Yet strangely the idea of a canon persists, of authority and hierarchy, it was not killed by the silver bullet manufactured for its heart. You can’t really kill the undead, or stop the living from offering themselves as food for the undead.

Still, it’s strange to think how they continue, the oddly dismal halls of academe—with the frosted door-windows of offices, the colored posters, the clicking of respectable shoes on tiles visited nightly by the other world of the maintenance staff. And the few insects who have found a niche, silent within the walls, where, secretively, they live and eat.

I DREAMED THE DITCH

I dreamed the ditch, although it was in another country, vaguely reminiscent of Bolivia, and the ditch was filled with fleshy-bony fish, so full that there was no water to step into. The horizon was distant, but flattened, the way it is in the land of death.

INCURABLE, REVISITED

Incurable hope.

Infectious laughter.

Untreatable irreverence.

PIGEON HOUSE

A man who plays on the softball team with my darling has a lung disease too.

Surprisingly, also, raises pigeons, which I have wanted for so long.

Inside his trailer, a helmet from the Vietnam war, a large TV, and a cat on the TV tray.

Inside the pigeon house made of plywood, truck windows, scraps, it is another world-- the beautiful colors and the muted light, the sound of wings, the unbreathable air.

SAND HOLLOW

A pocket in time, containing a diner and grocery store in one large room.

A large gumball machine, and in the bathroom a “Pandora’s Box” condom dispenser.

Salt and pepper shakers in the shape of pieces of toast in a toaster.

THE ROAD THROUGH EASTERN OREGON

Onions from the onion trucks lying on the roadside.

In one field, piles of different colored onions, reminiscent of crop circles, sand paintings, and other ancient mysteries.

A house in the shape of a lighthouse on the edge of a dry field rippling dust.

LAST CHERRIES OF THE SEASON

Coming home from the city, we stopped at a fruit stand. The cherries looked past their prime and the thought that there would be no more this summer overwhelmed me with the fear of death—his death. He saw, and began filling a bag by the handful, to assuage my sudden anguish. The woman behind the counter shook her head indulgently at him. “Look at you,” she said, and told him she’d get a damp towel for his hands. The sharp moment softened as they spoke over the damp towel, across the counter, and when I got back into the car, I was glad of the cherries again.

ABOUT MY BELOVED

When he moved in, he brought a colander with his kitchen things, so that we had two in the household. This upset me at first, giving me the sense of panic I get when there is too much stuff. How he persuaded me, gently, that it was all right to possess two colanders. Then the first night, making supper together, that we used both of them: one for salad, one for pasta, and I laughed at how useful, in fact, abundance could be.

THESE STRANGE STORMS

These strange storms have created moments of stillness unusual for July. Not the false stillness of numbing heat, buzzing at the edges with insects, the swamp-cooler—but the stillness that comes between storms—a lack of breath that makes me terrified of breathlessness—the stillness of stilled leaves.

AT FIRST

At first I thought that living with the shadow of death would somehow invalidate everything. But the opposite is more true: it is that shadow which completes things, which creates the thin bearable edge of unbearable beauty—which returns that beauty to the everyday, the immediate, the inalienable. I always forget this, and, always, remembering it again seems insurmountably difficult—at first.

Eberle Umbach
© Eberle Umbach 2001-2009