present and simultaneously ancient, unreachable: Canton, Elyria, Lorain, Medina. Even as I walked and sat, ate and drank in those towns, I was a feature of their passing. Even then, another’s body was both landmark and landscape, steep climb and descent, breath exchanged, passing current, wave, pulse, there, going and gone. And, too, my own body—mine and not mine, offered, recollected, offered again, until I could see its shape as my own, unequivocally.
I anticipate this pin, its sprung tension, and my own, as I step over. I am, every morning and every afternoon, with each going-out and coming-back, startled by its shine, by the light so surely illuminating its sharp tip, its faint rust, the disquieting thoughts that come. A terrible tenderness comes: the dry scratch of the failing Viceroy on my wrist, on my son’s wrist, slow now, dusty and fraying midautumn; my neighbor, who practices writing her name because she is forgetting how the sounds go, what the letters mean. And from further away: at Point Lookout, on Long Island’s south shore, the pale pink of a clam, its stomach in shreds, its inner shell a purple iridescence pooling water; the periwinkle, washed up at high tide, its milky scrim of muscle and row of blue jeweled eyes, drying.
And from further off still, this comes: the cloudy hexagonal window I peeked through on a class trip, and then unscrewed for myself to reach into the cow’s first stomach, the rumen, I repeated. We were on a science outing and were meant to put our hands in and explore. We were given cheap, plastic gloves with long, scratchy seams that ran from shoulder to fingertips. “Won’t this hurt?” I remember thinking.
The pin continues as a sliver of glass or jagged piece of shell on the beach continues. The sky here, now, is as low and vast as some other sky, elsewhere and past, and I step over: I, whose hand in a plastic glove swept through a cow’s stomach. I, who was told the window in the cow’s side, the cannula, still-awful word, didn’t hurt at all. Imagine the child pairing the word “window” with “stomach”, squaring the phrase “won’t hurt at all” with “the cow’s side is open for us all to touch.” Imagine the child on a high, wobbly stool, sweating, itchy—it was early June—watching, beginning to narrate her own hesitation:
She pulled out a handful of cud and it was sweet-smelling. She was not the least bit afraid to press her face against the warm hide, to plunge her arm down and feel the stringy, matted stuff.
It wasn’t fear, but the adults’ insistence that skewed the scene. “The cow never even notices the hands inside her stomach,” and “go on, go ahead” they urged.
And though I did go ahead (I was a brave child), I could not make the moment grow, and I knew this resistance to be right. I could not make the cow a thing. That story would not unfold.
I keep in front of me always, on a sill or shelf, in every place I’ve ever lived since college, the jaw of a calf I found in a field. It was January in the Badlands of South Dakota. The cold was shattering; it left one literally breathless and coughing. One night the Sioux rancher I was staying with for the term got a call that part of his herd wandered out of the barn and their faces were iced to the ground. In the blackness, he and his sons dressed and went out with blow torches to free them and bring them back in. I did not live for long on the Reservation; I was only working there for a while. But I have the jawbone with its planes and curves, and I can see, anytime I look up, the darkened patches, the curtains of teeth, their folds and pleats, the porous, roughened bone with grays and creams, and where the light finds a translucent patch, a delicate near-pink.
I keep it because, as forms go, it’s shapely, beautiful. I might say, more accurately, it speaks to me. There’s a crescent-shaped hole where a cord once went through, a few teeth are broken and the joint’s only
I anticipate this pin, its sprung tension, and my own, as I step over. I am, every morning and every afternoon, with each going-out and coming-back, startled by its shine, by the light so surely illuminating its sharp tip, its faint rust, the disquieting thoughts that come. A terrible tenderness comes: the dry scratch of the failing Viceroy on my wrist, on my son’s wrist, slow now, dusty and fraying midautumn; my neighbor, who practices writing her name because she is forgetting how the sounds go, what the letters mean. And from further away: at Point Lookout, on Long Island’s south shore, the pale pink of a clam, its stomach in shreds, its inner shell a purple iridescence pooling water; the periwinkle, washed up at high tide, its milky scrim of muscle and row of blue jeweled eyes, drying.
And from further off still, this comes: the cloudy hexagonal window I peeked through on a class trip, and then unscrewed for myself to reach into the cow’s first stomach, the rumen, I repeated. We were on a science outing and were meant to put our hands in and explore. We were given cheap, plastic gloves with long, scratchy seams that ran from shoulder to fingertips. “Won’t this hurt?” I remember thinking.
The pin continues as a sliver of glass or jagged piece of shell on the beach continues. The sky here, now, is as low and vast as some other sky, elsewhere and past, and I step over: I, whose hand in a plastic glove swept through a cow’s stomach. I, who was told the window in the cow’s side, the cannula, still-awful word, didn’t hurt at all. Imagine the child pairing the word “window” with “stomach”, squaring the phrase “won’t hurt at all” with “the cow’s side is open for us all to touch.” Imagine the child on a high, wobbly stool, sweating, itchy—it was early June—watching, beginning to narrate her own hesitation:
She pulled out a handful of cud and it was sweet-smelling. She was not the least bit afraid to press her face against the warm hide, to plunge her arm down and feel the stringy, matted stuff.
It wasn’t fear, but the adults’ insistence that skewed the scene. “The cow never even notices the hands inside her stomach,” and “go on, go ahead” they urged.
And though I did go ahead (I was a brave child), I could not make the moment grow, and I knew this resistance to be right. I could not make the cow a thing. That story would not unfold.
I keep in front of me always, on a sill or shelf, in every place I’ve ever lived since college, the jaw of a calf I found in a field. It was January in the Badlands of South Dakota. The cold was shattering; it left one literally breathless and coughing. One night the Sioux rancher I was staying with for the term got a call that part of his herd wandered out of the barn and their faces were iced to the ground. In the blackness, he and his sons dressed and went out with blow torches to free them and bring them back in. I did not live for long on the Reservation; I was only working there for a while. But I have the jawbone with its planes and curves, and I can see, anytime I look up, the darkened patches, the curtains of teeth, their folds and pleats, the porous, roughened bone with grays and creams, and where the light finds a translucent patch, a delicate near-pink.
I keep it because, as forms go, it’s shapely, beautiful. I might say, more accurately, it speaks to me. There’s a crescent-shaped hole where a cord once went through, a few teeth are broken and the joint’s only
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