But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen –and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen.
—Randall Jarrell, from The Animal Family
But I’m here, though, aren’t I? At least for now. Don’t count me out.
There is grandeur in this view of life.
Funny how we hunker down in our little canoes
in the middle of the scummy green swamp and wait and wait
for hope to appear, for ghosts to die and come back as bodies.
–Susan Wood, from “The Lord God Returns”
One night a few weeks back I got whacked with a shovel and shoved in the trunk of a beat-to-shit Nova. The tweaker who whacked me drove me out into the country and dumped my body in a corncrib.
It was a cold night, and as I rocked at the edge of consciousness my heart was removed from my chest by a tiny old man with strong hands. This little man, who was wearing a miner’s helmet, perched on my breastbone and opened my chest with a rusty saw. There was a stiff wind whipping across the fields, and to keep himself from blowing away, the man –he was from a long line of heart deliverers– had secured his body to the framework of the corncrib with strands of baling twine. He worked long and diligently, and the procedure was precise but bloody work.
When he had finished he wrapped my heart in burlap and loaded it into a waiting carriage pulled by two peacocks and driven by a fox wearing a red velvet top hat.
The carriage traveled many miles along dark roads. At some point during its journey it began to snow, and the snow grew heavier the further the carriage traveled.
Eventually the carriage entered heavily wooded country, where the sky was suddenly blown free of clouds and a bright moon illuminated mile after mile of evergreen trees heaped with snow and mottled with shadow.
The fox drove long into the night, all the while singing and whistling quietly to the drowsy and plodding peacocks. In the early hours of the morning they arrived at a lake deep in the woods.
The lake was a vast thing, dark and ceaselessly rolling shattered moonlight ashore. It stretched to the far horizon, and was so black in the distance that the constellations appeared to be complex geometrical diagrams drawn upon a chalkboard.
Out in the lake some distance was anchored a miniature sailing ship with a scurrying crew of mice. My heart was a very small thing by this time, and it was carefully unloaded from the carriage, unwrapped, and packed in a nest constructed of pine needles and birch bark. It was taken aboard the ship by a contingent of mice in a rowboat.
While the peacocks drowsed and pecked tentatively at the snow-covered earth, the fox watched these proceedings from his perch on the carriage. Though he had been trained to not eat the mice, he was distracted by their presence all the same.
Once my heart was safely secured in the ship and the crew members were back aboard, the captain, a fat old mouse with long whiskers and a jaunty cap, gave the order to set sail. The ship eased out into the darkness of the lake, rocking in the turbulent waves, its sails providentially bowed by the stiff breeze that carried my heart north at a steady clip.
(To be continued)
