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Excerpts Dream of a Loquat Somewhere in the upper curl of the Italian coast, I am leaning over a rampart to pick a darker shade of orange gold loquat. It’s a long way down to the sea. I reach for a simple truth: Some fruit is worth a fall. This one, sweet and tart at the same time. This one, out on a high branch with a view of the harbor and the anchovy boats that have just returned. I tell myself I am so close, it should be mine to pick. I am old by now with my arms outstretched and my fingers grasping. It seems all I can do is hold this moment forever. Smoke After the tumor had been cut from his throat and the radiation had started to cheat his swallow, he told me how in the long middle of a winter night in Ward C, he got up craving a smoke even though he no longer smoked and he walked down a hall with his IV pole to a fire escape so he could stand outside and pretend he had gone there to draw on a cigarette and once there it started to snow and at first he didn’t see the other man who had come there for the same reason with his IV pole, but then through the expanding steam of breath, it became clear my friend was not alone. He was not startled but instead started talking with the other would-be smoker as if this sudden gathering was a normal outing for both of them. The other man said he was dying of lung cancer and my friend said he’d had his last rites read three times and maybe he was already dead but the fact had not yet sunk in. The two men stood on a fire escape in St. Paul, Minnesota and shared something in that unlit place and I picture them now wondering if they met again after they were gone for by the end of their winter talk during a snow fall, they swore they would talk soon and often. Can We Please Keep the World Out of Our Bed? I will leave this life without understanding the unobstructed reach of the army or the king’s command to kill the Holy Innocents or why I gave decades to the captains of industry in return for my little stack of chips. I will barely get anything right about the serpent or the dove or how we got this far with greed as our guide. If I have any honesty left, I will confess to my contributions to the landfill and how I could I have done more or a great deal less. Until then, I have one request: that we make of our bed a wilderness to keep the world out. No pings. No TV. No podcasts. No more dissections about our imminent collapse. Just us doing all we can not to be reached, and you without your blue dress on, the two of us navigating by ridge and valley and there a river to cross. Vultures Over the Immigrant As much as I complain about vultures circling the immigrant and the pecan trees failing on the hill, I don’t ever want our time to end. I can’t imagine entering the vast warehouse of the dirt and the thought of flame makes me dizzy. Even on summer days, I’m not especially keen on saying goodbye to anyone. I will never make a good Buddhist at my winter dojo traveling the long dark with that question, What is my death asking of me. When I’m asked to be a eulogist, I say I’m honored, then I hide in the basement. I have never once embraced the notion that death must sit down for dinner in order to make breakfast possible. Most days, my love, it’s hard for me to remember that everything bears fruit, everything I have loved and fought for, everything I have rejected, despised, turned away from, everything here sings for a time from the little shining of its birth no one saw coming. Seabooted I looked at my father in his last bed and saw him there seabooted in the cockpit, holding in his eyes how a hull slips under a wave without losing its push into weather. He didn’t hear my offerings from a book he didn’t believe in, so much as the flapping of cloth, the leaning into it, the splash kick of wake boiling off the transom. Like any ocean indifferent to suffering, he contained countless wrecks. On many other nights, I had gone down into his waters to survey the damage, salvage the proof, imagine some blood payment I might add to the patina, but on that night, I put aside my vanishing into the ink of some ancient faded ledger between us and stayed at the low, wet rail and we made the turn through the eye of the wind and together found the morning. One of us heard the ocean over the dune. Saint Francis, She Said She said death would alter her view of the olive trees, but the relationship would not end. Love means your flesh will be torn off yet you will not die. She made it sound romantic. Just another spill of language that nicks you at a precipice. I knew better. The surge of emptiness like a knife at the throat. The kicking of the ankle bones. All of it waiting you out. She said she had struck a truce with pain and beauty, The two faces of God. I had a need to know this agreement. Saint Francis, she said, would sometimes weep for days even after the Sultan of the Fifth Crusade let him return to Italy and Francis cut a deal with his wolf. Weeping all the time with the pain and beauty, with the ferocious and the small, never turning away from the boundaries that dissolve us. Talking like that about a saint, she could have been one of her olive trees set back on a turn of collapsed coast where the sea never sleeps.
