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I forgot to tell you my husband
died. He was in Spain and something
strange happened with alcohol or water. He loved them
both so much. Which reminds me, do you want
to be cremated or buried? The difference,
if you do not know, is the ghost
or the body; heaven or sex.
Also I am planning a trip. No place special
just somewhere God has been.
Do you have any ideas? From there I will bring back
vials of ambergris. Did I mention I am carrying
his baby. I am in the tenth month and still
he does not show. The house hates me
and breaks everything I touch.
I myself prefer to be left
face up in a ditch and for someone to go
to jail because of what he’s done to me.
That way I can watch the stars
as they move toward the end of the sky
and he can plan his last
meal or some other consolation.
Cuba took more than a little getting used to. There was the heat: one team we played had a stadium that sat in a kind of natural bowl that held in the sun and dust. The dust floated around you like a golden fog. It glittered. Water streamed down your face and back. Your glove dripped. One of our guys had trouble finding the plate, and while I stood there creeping in on the infield dirt sweat actually puddled around my feet.
lol
In the bottom of the ninth, with the score tied at five and Reina’s kids full of Coke, hotdogs, peanuts, and ice cream and getting restless, with Asunción clutching her rosary as if she were drowning and Hector Jr.’s nose stuck in some book, Dupuy taps him to hit for the pitcher with two down and Fast Freddie Phelan on second. The eighth man in the lineup, Spider Martinez from Muchas Vacas, D.R., has just whiffed on three straight pitches and Corcoran, the Braves’ left-handed relief man, is all of a sudden pouring it on. Throughout the stadium a hush has fallen over the crowd, the torpor of suppertime, the game poised at apogee. Shadows are lengthening in the outfield, swallows flitting across the face of the scoreboard, here a fan drops into his beer, there a big mama gathers up her purse, her knitting, her shopping bags and parasol and thinks of dinner. Hector sees it all. This is the moment of catharsis, the moment to take it out.
The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective. Or a whole new scene, or the sudden emergence of an unplanned character who simply grows out of a phrase. Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure. A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions. If I may quote the second page of Atonement, this is the project’s highest point of fulfillment. Nothing else—cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews—will come near it for satisfaction.
In the beginning there’s something very nebulous, a state of alert, a wariness, a curiosity. Something I perceive in the fog and vagueness which arouses my interest, curiosity, and excitement and then translates itself into work, note cards, the summary of the plot. Then when I have the outline and start to put things in order, something very diffuse, very nebulous still persists. The “illumination” only occurs during the work. It’s the hard work that, at any given time, can unleash that … heightened perception, that excitement capable of bringing about revelation, solution, and light. When I reach the heart of a story I’ve been working on for some time, then, yes, something does happen. The story ceases to be cold, unrelated to me. On the contrary, it becomes so alive, so important that everything I experience exists only in relation to what I’m writing. Everything I hear, see, read seems in one way or another to help my work. I become a kind of cannibal of reality. But to reach this state, I have to go through the catharsis of work. I live a kind of permanent double life.
To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
q: What do you think is the ultimate impulse to write?
Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?
Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things —the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.
She told me that we had too many roads already; that the mountains and all wilderness were disappearing beneath concrete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.
It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries-old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.
But it’s not like I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminist curriculum. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January), I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life, while she lived one.
This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were; as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences — the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in —these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.
Martha loves, like so many of us, the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with — the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase and all of the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself?” And then she’ll think I’m making fun of her.
Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science, and more tolerant of mystery.
She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.
And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end? What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.
I remember the year Martha said she didn’t love me any more. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the landscape around us, and in which we live, reminds us to love one another. But that year that Martha flat out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one. I suppose in their own way, each year is tough, just as each of them is beautiful, but we didn’t know what to do about that one.
You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates —it either gets stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.
It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her— them —go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me any more.
But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.
A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.
We had to cross the river naked, holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.
It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light on the whole day, as if we were in some new stage of heaven. All day long, there was a light on our faces almost like firelight. The snow was frozen hard in places, so that we could walk across it like concrete for two or three steps, but then we’d hit a soft or weak spot that our feet would punch through, and we’d collapse up to our waists. It was exhausting work. But we were so in love: so in love.