Carpentrix

Twins in their final days of being five made drawings on my living room floor. One drew as though dancing, swoops and leaps, fast stops and flourishes, more sophisticated than scribbles, a choreographed abstraction. The other curled over his sketchpad and worked in silence until he came to the couch to show me what he'd done.

"This is the tower of the ghost rats," he said. "This is the kitchen where they make fried scrambled fox."

"That's what they eat?"

"Yes."

He pointed to a chamber at the lower half of the tower with bands of light color, pale yellow, pale green, pale pink.

"The ghost rats don't pee. Instead they release different colored mist and this is where that happens."

"I see it," I said. We both continued to look at his drawing.

"I don't think I'd want to eat a fox," I said. He didn't care. He knew what he could disregard. He considered his tower in silence. "They're like moving flames, like living animal flames," I continued. And he looked up fast and his eyes were lit and it is one of the best feelings to light up a kid's eyes this way. To find the thing that translates through the dull dust of adulthood and to see it land in the wild imagination, the fire behind the eyes. To light anyone up this way, to be lit up.

Earlier, his nine-year-old brother told me facts about a lizard I'd never heard of.

"What does it look like?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "picture a lizard."

Some descents invite. Down here, here below, come. To drop into a place of strange welcome, eyes adjusting to the dim, foreign syllables whispered in the hush, smell of black tea, warm candle wax, dust, a sense that the plants are listening in, unmistakable charge of potential, and water out the windows. A bookstore on a boat parked in a canal in Paris, L'Eau et Les Rêves it's called, Water and Dreams, the title of a book by Gaston Bachelard. "The stream doesn't have to be ours," he writes, "the water doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets."  

Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo. Sparkles. Bongo. A cat slips off, joins up with the raccoons and coyotes, makes a wild way of things. It happens. Then yesterday, in front of a grand brick apartment building across from the river on Memorial Drive, a little laminated sign hung from a low bush. "LOST: Have you seen me?" read the sign with a photograph below of a bonsai tree, delicate and elegant, gnarling out of a grey ceramic pot with what looked like tiny bay leaves spiking from the branches. Below the photo, an explanation: On December 27th, someone walked off with two small bonsai trees that had been left briefly on the sidewalk. "Those trees were not free," the poster reads. "I think it was a big misunderstanding," with a smiley face emoji. They're a fragile species, wrote the owner, he wants them back, and leaves his cell and email. "No questions asked, no worries!" The first floor bay window on the corner is a forest of bonsai trees. I see the tiny trees on night walks when the window glows. Maybe these two slipped off to join the mighty sycamores that they've seen from their perch in the window. Maybe they fled further, running on their roots, to grow in a deeper set of woods, with the raccoons and the coyotes and all the missing cats.

[Image: from Views of Instructions for Bonsai along the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Utagawa Yoshishige, 1848.]

Sun comes up on a fresh year and everything is new and everything is the same. Sun moves through a glass of water and a shadow like an x-ray of the wingtip of ghost falls on someone else's counter. Sun warms the bowl of a spoon made of apple wood, carved from a log got at an orchard in the western part of the state, made as a gift for someone who gives me kindness, kindness for this fresh year, an apple wood spoon in the hand. Sun shows time's wing, moving always, same and new.

At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. "I walk around the neighborhood this time of year and I look in the windows and I feel homesick," a man in his seventies said to me recently. With his home --- its kitchen counter and its checkered dishtowels, soft blankets on the bed he shares with his wife, old dog dreaming and atwitch on a pillow in the livingroom --- just a few blocks away. Homesick for what, then? For a long-gone childhood sense of home? For a long-gone childhood? For some only-imagined sense of comfort and safety? (May we all, all of us, find it and have it.) The nights are long. Late afternoon brings the deep and aching blue. The original hearth burns somewhere.

[Print: Uncle Henry's (Monhegan Island) by Mary Teichman, 2013]

Drop a word into the well of the brain, it sinks in deep and the ripples move out to the skull and ripple back from there, and somewhere between the bottom of the well and the ripples, meaning is made. An image enters differently, a color, a shape, a pulsing shaft of light on the bedroom floor. It's thrown into the well like a handful of pebbles that sizzle across the surface. The ripples ring out against each other, and out against the wall of the skull. What do you see? Lucien Freud painted the eye of a teenager, her vessels, bolting and looped, the milky weight of her lid, the light reflecting off her glisten. Count the colors — midnight, cinnamon, moss, pond. Orange, light brown, pink, wheat. The delicate penetrability. You, unseen, see what she sees with.

Now is the season when the corpses of the Christmas trees line the sidewalks of the city. Needled and not without dignity, they've been laid to rest on their sides by the trash bins, by the curbs, stripped of lights, tinsel, strands of cranberries or popcorn, all the ornaments in their yearly dangle. It is the new season now. The sky is low today, no stars tonight, the moon's fullness felt behind a woolly blanket of cloud. We move into winter. A friend on the phone spoke of thinking gone was the only good option. Two days ago, another friend made me a mug of warmed milk with honey, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger. The color of pale egg yolk, it tasted like kindness and my whole nervous system responded, melting and soothed. I haven't taken down my small tree. Its final days are here, but I do love its glow.

[Painting: Skating by Linden Frederick.]

It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year.

What now on this longest night? What now as Holly King surrenders and Oak King takes charge? What now as the wheel of the year tips to its lightening side? What now in this season of sorrow? What now as the solstice fire opens a doorway to our secret souls? The soul is thicker in winter.

We stand in the dark with strands of light between us. Feel the warmth, the heat, the glow, it’s yours to know. I want to give it name and say it to you, but I don’t know the words. The soul doesn’t let us know, not all the way. We flail and give name to simpler needs. Here, sit. Get warm.

Winter Solstice at the Paris Review.

[Print: Mood Indigo, by Mary Teichman, 2014.]

The dragonflies hover and dip at the edge of the pond at the cemetery. Light catches in the net of their wings as they rush and pause, rush and pause above the mud and turtles and hungry ducks. Flotillas of lilypads make a thin ground on the water. This is in the summer when it's warm. Now, ice has come to the pond. We stood at the edge and threw small stones to test it. They landed with an otherwordly whang, skiddled across the ice, and brought beautiful action below the surface, a slow-motion rolling of dark cold water. Strange music, small stones on ice, like the sound of stars across darkness frozen over, like a licked thumb around the lip of a glass, ringing in the all-ears of those below the cold and silent stones. It's almost winter. The dead don't know the cold. Sleeping are the turtles. Sleeping are the bugs.

[Watercolor Drawings of Japanese Dragonflies, collected by Lafcadio Hearn, artist unknown, 1900.]

Quality in craftwork depends on three things, according to furniture designer David Pye. Care, judgement, and dexterity. He repeats the words over and over in The Nature and Art of Workmanship. With care, I take it to mean attention, a focused tuning in, the ultimate form of care. With judgement, I take it to mean honest discernment, an ability to look, openly, and assess, to see not what you want to see but to see what is, and in doing so, thereby see the possible routes to what you want. And with dexterity, I take it to mean, be it in carving a spoon, or in love, how intention is translated to touch.

November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way. “The space of nothingness is where one struggles to reach a deeper layer of self,” writes Tadao Ando. November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It’s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads.

It’s the last day of November, and in honor of the month, an essay I wrote for the Paris Review, “The Dark Looks Different in November.”

Today the persimmons were ripe. Fingertips, a squeeze, and the flesh below the skin allowed. I sliced one into eighths and ate the slices slowly. Inside, the sunset honeyed fruit, its subtle sweetness, the tongue-smooth flesh, and cupping it all round the waxy resistance of the skin. I was deep into adulthood before I had one and felt lucky for the introduction, and feel lucky when I walk into the kitchen and see them on the counter in a bowl. They arrive in November with the pomegranates. One fruit has the sun inside it, the other, shadow rubies from the underworld. I eat them while I can.

Rain in the morning. Drear all day and colder than it's been. At the end of the afternoon, I walked west along the river and at the bottom of the pale low sky, a blaze of fucshia burned, and then, for seven minutes, maybe less, the low fast clouds moved with pink fire over the river. The clouds went grey again, from fire back to smoke, and the dark came quick. The dark comes quick these days, quicker than you think.

The blues are getting deeper and the oranges on the either side of day. A child on the street is counting down from ten. I can hear him because the windows are open because it's already almost seventy degrees, here on a Sunday morning in November. I walked outside after I woke up and the air was soft and balmy, but it did not feel like spring. The quality and slant of light, the sycamore leaves rattling against the curbs, the ghosts around. Earlier dusks, starting today. Six, five, four, this charged atmosphere of countdown.

[Photograph: Trustee Room with Fireplace by Shellburne Thurber, 2002.]

What is the moon?

The moon is the lantern in the abdomen of an insect who wants to fuck. The moon is a hill of sheep. The moon is a rock roughed by a surface of barnacles. The moon is the filed tusk of a night mastodon. The moon is a furred spider-egg sac spilling spider stars. The moon is the haunch of a white cow, the haunch of a kneeling horse. The moon is the pouch of a pelican beak flashing full of silver fish. The moon is a crumb of pollen carried on the back leg of a bee. The moon is hydrangean. The moon is aware of the original chaos and the subsequent chaos. The moon is honey, is lemon, is marmalade, is lavender. The moon is garnet, dried blood, stained in the crotch of your underwear. The moon is a tooth whose roots tangle through the great jaw of space. The moon is camouflaging behind the clouds. The moon is never trespassing.

Tonight’s Full Worm Moon brings the finale of my moon series for The Paris Review.

I imagined the men, hungry, gaunt, shadows deepening in the craters of their eyes, getting thinner, getting weaker, and one night lying down together, maybe holding hands in their big moon suit gloves, their lives leaving them. And I imagined the abrasive moondust chewing through their big moon suits, then the flesh of them, so they were bones on the surface of the moon, and I imagined the moon swallowing the bones into itself, as the desert sand absorbs a snakeskin. Their helmets left as headstones. Their bones absorbed into the bone of the moon, until they were made moon themselves.

The Hunger Moon has come and gone, but “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.

A QUESTIONNAIRE FOR THE MOON

In general, are you glad to be tethered by gravity to planet Earth? Please circle one:   Yes   No

Is the light you appear to shed made of ghosts? Please circle one:   Yes   No

If you were to describe the smell on your surface, you would use the word(s) (please circle all that apply):

  -Snow     -Black tea     -Dust char on heater when heat is first turned on     -Marshmallow     -Wet nickel     -Lily of the valley     -Basement (damp)     -Bone marrow     -Normal rock     -None of the above

Do you dream? Please circle one:   Yes   No (If yes, please fill out the following)

Do you dream about:   -Contours?     -Falling?     -The horror of arrival?     -Attraction and its many forms?     -Swimming in the laval fields before they were solidified?     -Stairways, elevators, ladders, other means of ascent/descent?     -Icarus, his feathers, his avoidable death, an alternative night flight in which you would’ve seen him soar, would’ve seen him safely to new land?     -Tidal waves, rogue waves, walls of water, flood, rhythm, swell, retreat?     -Mirrors?     -Shoes?     -Blood? 

The Wolf Moon is bright and high, and “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.