| Beginning
of Summer |
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| ALAN SOLDOFSKY | |
| Published in Grand Street #42 – Volume 11, Number 2 – Fall 1992 |
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| A
brightness in the skies even after dark. A remnant sun splotch. Backlit turquoise deepening to indigo, then black. Lavender afterglow of clouds over Mission Peak. The wind's delicate sharpness on my neck, as if dusk were a saturation of lyricism. Intolerable beauty, heartbreaking by definition, and we are relieved by its passing. I am appalled by the sensation of being governed by the body. Swallowing, yawning, having to pee. |
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After the 235 steps to the bottom of the cavern, our guide turned off the lights. Total darkness. "Put your hand in front of your face, you think it's your hand you see." I had a feeling almost giddy. The mind sees what it wants. It's why lovers close their eyes when kissing. I could not see a single thing, words from my eyes did start. Difficult for that to continue. Small interruptions—a child's anger, breakfast dishes, getting toilet paper. |
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The expected and incalculable distractions— Car pools, dental appointments, the boredom of children. How easy to give in. To do nothing and let the hero become the absence of narration . It's easy the second week of summer, heat washing the wide streets, air yellowing over the valley, altocumulus scattered and sullen, and, of all things, rain like a crystalline dust spattering the concrete, leaving a smoky, acrid scent of evaporation. |
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The child won't get dressed because the clothing isn't satisfactory. He wants to wear the stretchy black bike shorts with pink fluorescent stripes and black tank top he's worn the last three days on the camping trip . But they're in the wash. So, naked, he wanders around the house wailfully because what I have laid out for him— the seersucker shorts and light blue T-shirt I thought he'd be cool in—isn't cool. What in nature can be more hurt than him? Just give in. |
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What if the least daylight could harm him? His blood photosensitive, so that to live he had to be kept where it's dark like the two girls whose strange affliction was a story I remember from the news on television . Who only at night could leave their house banked with lead curtains, rising to eat breakfast in the dusk, then going out to play, the moon their sun, their birds the owls that by day sleep hidden in the sultry trees. |
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Give in. For a brief second in the cave, I thought I glimpsed how we make the world up with words. How we lie to perfect memory. After it rained, gnats swarmed through the ruins of light, the evening turned lustrous . Vireos flitting about the chamise and bear brush, a few stars in the east. A small wind stirring the oatgrass, rustling the digger pines up the slope and the sycamores below along the creek where two boys, balancing from rock to rock, crossing the shadows, were ignored in the twilight's slow perishing. |
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