Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Not nothingness but too many meanings

as of a creature under siege.

First the basement floods the first day of the year

and instead of making love we make rage.

Then the kids lava down into the living room,

the dog vomits up something from the Pleistocene,

and in the brick wind the whole house tilts and lists like . . .

like an old house.

            “Any problem that can be solved with money

is not a problem,” bubbles up from somewhere,

as if that weren’t our honeymoon—eight days in a rainforest,

the howling darks and the vehement greens—floating in the murk,

as if that weren’t—in a Connecticut suburb, in winter—a snake

that just breached and vanished in the corner,

and as if this wisdom weren’t merely the echo of an uncle

whose only grace was goats, Liza and Little Bean,

Blue-Blue and Getchagone, all gone

to tuft and viscera, to an old man’s only ever tears,

at the teeth of wild dogs.

                        Look at them,

our girls, bent over their project now

and impervious to everything. And look at you,

bent over the sump pump’s guts

in your brand-new and barely-tethered Christmas robe,

smoothing sockets, exquisiting screws and lug nuts

like a lissome clockmaker.

                        I go down

into the flood again to find—among the floating bows

and ornaments, the party plates and drowned dolls—a Jesus lizard

leisurely eating thirteen three-inch caterpillars

from the side of a cocobolo tree.

Remember? Its placid appetency, its face full of hills,

the way time warped and distended like heat

as it looked right through the camera’s lens,

philosophically chomping each green glob.

“If you will accept it, if you will drink the cup to the bottom—

you will find it nourishing: but try to do anything else with it

and it scalds.” Remember? The Great Divorce.

Though our favorites were the dwarf and the tragedian,

who are one entity, actually, the latter the actor

of the former’s pain, or after-image of pain, rather,

the pleasure pain becomes when it becomes a thing to wield,

a means of extracting meaning from someone else’s heart

when your own has run dry.

                        “Let’s try it now,”

you say, clomping downstairs in bathrobe and rubber boots,

and it goes, of course it does, the motor and the water,

the anger and the hours, until we stand

in a dispensation we had not known we desired,

the purged clutter and the pristine concrete,

as if catastrophe were but occasion for a further order,

which can include, apparently, even a snake,

which even as we glimpse it again

grows legs, swivels its suddenly unsnakelike head

and is a newt—or an eft, rather—that trundles off

(“Scoot, newt! Scoot, newt!” the girls encourage)

behind the freezer.

                        “Hell is a state of mind—

ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind,

left to itself, every shutting up of the creature

within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell.

But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself.

All that is fully real is Heavenly.”

                        Too tired to make love,

we make love when the girls have gone to sleep,

and go to sleep holding each other like buoys

as the waters drip and descend

from every slope and bend in the waterlogged land

of Connecticut, and the pump kicks on like a sound

so inside it’s cellular, “for all that can be shaken will be shaken

and only the unshakeable remains.”

Christian Wiman’s most recent book is Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

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Published in the September 2019 issue: View Contents
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