Recipes, Logistics
My grandmother’s penmanship lives on in recipes. She measured flour in a chipped teacup and pinched salt. My mother’s poignant scratches are preserved on cards or letters. She mainly wrote thank you notes or apologies. My father’s florid hand breaks the margins of letters he wrote to my mother and then had to censor himself, blacking out locations and logistics, because he was the chief communications officer on an aircraft carrier in WWII. I have several 3×5 notecards on which my father typed recipes for chemical compounds. Every now and then a letter goes silent.
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Divine Mushroom
I’m not sure about the dark orangey shells growing from the maple roots. They could be toxic or immortal (Ganoderma lucidum). Like sunshine or joy, reishi cannot exist without its shadow. Like the mushroom, I think I might be here to imagine what it must be like to be here forever. My roots are shallow or deep, I’m not sure which, but I am immortal, too. My uses are few and unmeasured by scientific means. My mind wanders more and more and lands on growing things that are true in their own rights, springing up after rains, and have no need of my understanding to complete them, nor have they any use for appraisals of their worth. This is hard on some but becoming less of a burden, just as a shot of cold truth goes down easier on the gullet than the bitter green worm medicine my father used to spoon out to us at the end of every barefoot summer.
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Saucer and Cup
I’m watching him from the kitchen window. Mother stands at the stove in her robe, holding a spatula above the bacon. I sit at the café table in the corner. My French poodle curls up at my feet, positioned for scraps. I’m hoping I can eat my eggs and bacon and go back down the hall to my room before he comes in from the garden. His folded newspaper is waiting. It takes up most of the space on the table.
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Giant Black Bear
You said the bear was of my making. Over me it loomed, or maybe it rose early in the evening as its own star deepening into its own sky. Stories above where I crouched, the giant bear occupied all of space, as I craned my neck to climb its height with my eyes then tucked my head to hide. I could hear it sniffing the air with a fee-fi-fo-fum. I pulled myself into myself to absorb all my own scent into my pores for fear the winds would betray me. I could smell my own fear, and I knew it would take only a few seconds more for it to waft. I couldn’t hold my fear inside forever; soon enough it would attract the bear to me in a roar, each tooth larger than one of my feet, a mouthful of them shining in planet light. Toward me the bear turned, keeping its head high, and stepped over me, and went on stomping into the distance.
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Encores
After “Rhapsody in Blue,” there’s little more to prove. The pianist rises from her bench to fetch some honest thunder, slips briefly into the wings and floats out again, Mozart awaiting. A large projection of her chubby, nimble hands looms over us as she doubles down in ivory. We applaud her again with every sincerity while inching toward the parking lot. But no, how could she cling like a wasp to its sting? We dive to reclaim our musical chairs as she attacks Ravel’s “Concerto for the Left Hand,” punctuating it with foot pedals, enlarging and enriching the sound. Oh, how her passion rips the air as we fidget! Paul Wittgenstein, elder brother to Ludwig, lost his right arm in World War I and commissioned Ravel (among others) to compose for him, so I know there are other such scores. After her third ending flourish, we rise and pound battle-weary hands, feet all but stomping. What? She doesn’t even leave center stage this time but slyly squats again. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. “I’m done,” mouths my companion, breaking the spell. I quickly trot after him. “They should have warned us,” he says, pointing to the program. “She should have stopped while the left hand was ahead.”