And then there
was that time—he’s telling
someone, years
hence—he hopes to be—when we all
ran a raging fever, when we slewed
from the gas range to the icebox,
when nothing,
not even the
voice of our parents, could calm
us down. You
hated me, she says, and I
hated everything you said. We barely
remembered
the commons, the playground, the
vacant
lot, even as a concept.
Something was hiding
in a corner of the
basement, misshapen and
scary, and it got out, made
skittering hoof-clicks
in the dark across the polished hall
floor, left
a funny metallic
taste in the bottom of the water-
cups. It’s not
that something happened, but that
something had been
happening all
along, growing up beside
us
like an unnoticed
sibling or
a spectral husband.
Corner-
of-the-eye stuff, you
know?
The colder air braces you against
the fall, when it finally comes.
There’s a rabbit
in the backyard, nosing
around among the
leaves you haven’t
raked. Mail stacked in the hall, a
dozen
files cluttering the desktop. You
shift
and putter,
neaten up and put away.
This is no time
for pretending everything’s
changed or everything’s alright,
that the gears
have somehow slipped or the shiny
machinery’s
broken.This is
how it’s supposed to work, this
is where your
day-in-day-out has brought you.
The fever broke, he
tells the child
on his knee, just
nodding off
in sleepiness or
boredom, and the sky
was clear and pure and
clean.
We could count the fingers
before
us, put one foot in
front
of the other. We knew
our right
hand from our left, and our
neighbors
from our enemies. Who we were allowed
to love, and who
was off limits. The rabbit
is gone, and all
the little squabbling sparrows.
The brilliant yellow leaves are
mostly fallen,
crunch damply under our waffled
boot-heels, or
mutely let themselves
be gathered in.
And down the street, the engine
is still running, solid and
remorseless.
O David Kaufmann, sage and
bewildered
lodestar of
these marginal notes, pray for us now
and at the hour
of our waking, pray for us
before the Law and beyond the door
through which we passed unknowing.
