Читать книгу You Must Remember This - Michael Bazzett - Страница 15

When They Meet, They Can’t Help It

His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen

over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly

on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.

The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels

crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.

Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks

in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the

dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the

animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.

The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,

drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the

driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.

The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving

through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality

of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.

Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.

The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers

motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted

to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite

through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal

and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.

His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could

calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling

neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they

open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,

while the silence holds, he thinks of what they’ve done

and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this

forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.

She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What’s the sound

skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?

If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things

are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner

thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.