asymptotes

01
The horse was slick and black as the bare trees in the rain and it stood behind the wire by the road cropping grass. Its stablemates were scattered around the pasture, heads down like supplicants, staring at the ground in their coarse winter coats. He watched them awhile, the motor idling, then he pulled onto the main road. Over away in the trees by the river some crows called to one another in their mad, broken laughter.

02
As children they would play fantastical games, the more absurd the premise the better. The dock float at the cabin by the lake was a prison and they swam, circling it, to keep the inmate from diving off and escaping. Always there was only one prisoner. If you found a key to a secret room what would you do. If you had to pick being deaf or blind which would you choose.

03
The weather was fine so they packed a picnic lunch and took the train to the arboretum. They walked the path for awhile to see the seasonal blooms then struck out cross country to find a place to spread the blanket. As they ate they could see a storm was coming and after that the rain began. They gathered their things and ran laughing until they came upon a giant weeping beech, its great leaf-leaden branches reaching the very ground. They passed into the green enfolding space within. She laid her hand on its ancient knotted bole and they stood getting their breath while the cloudburst poured down on this cathedral canopy.

04
The river was running again in the springtime and she stepped out of her shoes and waded in to check the creeltrap above where the water entered the lake. It was ice cold and braced her shins and took her breath away. The stony bed crunched underfoot, and though she found the wickerwork empty, she was happy, the sun clearing the treeline and the rush and plash of the water a simple chorus, inflow and ebb, and she smiled when she stepped out of the water, ankles aching in the cool air.

05
In the workshop behind the house he knelt by the old tractor and bore down on the wrench but could not loosen the lugs. He stood to and put his boot on it, pressing his weight against the grime and rustlocked nuts but they would not give. A fly buzzed, alighting on his head, and crept across the crown of his ballcap. In the mechanics of things there is a contrivance against the works of men. He swept the cap off, drawing his forearm across his brow in the same motion. The fly sprung away and buzzed against the gray light of the window.

06
In the evening they sat on the porch at the cabin by the lake and watched the storms roll in on the cooling air and the ozone smell of coins, the wind sussurant in the treetops and the leaves turned over in its freshening face. Are we not called upon to become alike our forebears. The light was failing and she made as if to get up but he put his hand on her arm and she was still. Were not the highest peaks once sunless trenches in the deepest sea.

07
It was a spring morning and an early fog robed the trailhead and obscured the mountain. The dogwoods in bloom here and there were like ghosts or clouds descended and gone abroad in the land. They crouched and reached back into the knapsacks and shrugged them on, pulling their shirts and adjusting them just so. He hooked his thumbs through the shoulderstraps and steepled his fingers across his breastbone, pulling to settle the load across his back. They looked at each other and at the inscrutable summit and started, their boots sounding on the hardpack, walking sticks beating counterpoint to their footfalls.

08
Floating on his back in the cool water, he gazed up at a night sky impossibly filled with stars and the galactic plane arcing across like a smoke rainbow. In the beginning there was but one star, an avatar of brightness to which we still avail. Now its billion twins plumb the glimmerglass of the lake and it is small comfort to number ourselves so among the infinite. In the reeds and scrub at the shoreline the frogs and night insects chirred an accompaniment to the white noise of the sky.

09
They stood on the rocks together and watched the waves pounding in, searching the immeasurable distance of the sea. They had their picture made by the weathered beadboard of the lightkeeper’s shed, windswept hair and smiling faces showing all the promise of youth. They were as close as two could be and took comfort alike in their talk or in long unwinding silences. Will you marry me, he asked, holding her hand and lifting the secret ring from his pocket. Yes, she said, yes, embracing him, and they both shed a tear for happiness, and also for what had just been lost.

10
After they were married they bought the little clapboard house by the horsefarm. The children came and they were happy and raised them and put them through school and on into their own lives. After they had their savings they chose the spot for the cabin by the lake and speced it and hired out its manufacture. When it was ready trucks delivered all of the framing logs, the flooring, joists, windows, stair stringers, rafters, doors. Everything but the blood, sweat and tears, he said. After the trucks left they stood staring at the piles and pallets and smiled. We’ll need a few more hands, she said.

11
Smoke from the thurible hung in the air and rose in slanting sunbeams that shone through the windows and lit the chancel with a rainbow glow. The early spring weather was unsettled and at the Eucharist the priest had to raise his voice to pray over the rain roaring down the roof. Later, their hands close but not touching as they lay on the bed together. I invite your prayers and intercessions at this time either silently or aloud.

12
They lived for a time in the city and would walk in the evening to the river and watch the first lights play across its oily surface. The small waves came in and lapped the bank where misshapen shore trees yawed out over the water, their writhen roots pocketed in the muck like skeletal hands. Ill-cast lines hung from them like witch’s hair and along the strandline other flotsam lay beached or snared in the reedy shore tangles. Fishhawks soared overhead like vectors, their searching eyes mirroring the deepening dark.

13
When the servicemen came to the door she would not let them in but stood with her face in the sidelight saying No no no. One of the men took off his hat and said through the door, ma’am may we please come in. And she shook her head and leaned against the door and cried. Then he came and looked out at them and he stared at them with his mouth agape. He stood stiffly by her a moment and then he said quietly, now mother, let these boys in now. He put his hands on her and moved her aside reaching for the doorknob in the same motion. She cried out and tried to push it closed, calling down her grief in a helpless faith-cursing fury.

14
Standing on the hot bluff overlooking the water, he watched it crash and seethe foam on the cliff face. The summer breakers rolled ashore, heaving up a timeless grist, the ground up bones of the deep. The laughter still comes but when they were younger the petty grievances never surfaced, tempers were slow to fire. He had been around the sun 41 times. A line and a curve are tangent only at infinity.

15
He arrived early at the cemetery and parked in the shade of a spreading tree. Near a memorial a workman unfurled the flag. When grandfather taught him cribbage he was not precious about defeat, laughing and ribbing him in camaraderie. He told of how they had played endlessly on the troopship coming home, a quarter a game, and when they docked one owed the other a quarter, he couldn’t remember whom. The workman leaned against the pole and attached the snaphooks to the grommets and raised the flag hand over hand, then wrapped the slack halyard around the cleat, pulling taut. He turned off the ignition and lay his head back, weary at this waypoint of the larger journey.

16
When he was drinking he would go to the bookshelf and take down the Meditations and read them to the children. What do you think about Marcus Aurelius, he would boom out, reading. You have lived as a part. You shall disappear in that which produced you. You shall be received back into the creative principle. And the children did not understand and all through the cabin by the lake, where they had all come in summer joy, the others would pause and decry such stoicism. But they knew.

17
He felt alike a constant traveler and an ascetic, at once restless and rootless everywhere but likewise loath to go farther than the cabin by the lake, his wanderlust checked by an equal inertia. It was a cold fall day and he drank his coffee and watched out the kitchen window where a riot of waxwings had descended in a mob upon the rowans, tearing the new fruit from the receptacles. After a while, some unseen signal was given, and they suddenly started and took wing as one and were gone.

18
At the train station they kissed on the platform and he boarded and walked through the cars. He sat by a window and when they were underway the conductor came through feathering tickets, inquiring and punching them for each rider, swaying expertly with the movement of the car so as not to be put off his task, the chads snowing down into the aisle. He sat back and looked out at the tumbledown buildings and wild grown fields and stands of trees, moving through a forgotten strata of scenery.

19
The great cedar by the horse pasture was riven by lightning and lay across the road, its shattered bole standing like a monument to its former self. Some people who lived on the road had come out and were standing and looking. He got out of the car and heard the thunder moving away over the trees by the river. He pulled a strip of the fibrous bark off the tree and smelled it, closing his eyes and falling through time and the broken scenery to grandfather’s workshop.

20
She sat at the desk with the shoebox of old pictures looking at them and then putting them in the lid of the shoebox. They were at the lighthouse, on their mountain, at the cabin by the lake, in this house they were soon leaving, hair and clothes oldfashioned, alien. She looked at them all and out the window. A bird crossed the gray sky, then a split second later its twin flew across the glass of the desktop. The budbroken trees by the river wore little red fists holding the first green leaves.

21
They sat by the seaside and watched the waves come in shattering spindrift from their crests. The water was green and farther out it was flat and like a jewel azure and it filled footprints to pools that quickly emptied into smooth sand. Some girls had waded out and were screaming and jumping over the swells, the cold water crashing against their white bodies. Overhead the gulls laughed and shrieked and a tern like a flying scissors studied the deep and at once dove into the shimmering sea.

22
When they finished their lunch they sat by the lake a last time and spoke of the coming cold and the work of closing the cabin for the winter. A light breeze stirred the water and it came almost silently in to shore. There is always a sound in the water. Why don’t we stay through the winter, we’ve never done it. Maybe. We would have to go to the house and close that down and then come back. In the ocean the sound of the water is thunderous and final. But it is a greater beauty than the silent burning sun or mute, impassive mountains, than all artifice of words for sounds.

23
He looked out the train window descending through hayfields to the forested bottomland where the great trees rose from the muddy water with rings of cypress knees arrayed around them like children or a druidic order. He saw rusted hulks of shunted cars and the old railroad outbuildings and shacks from a forgotten time. The train slowed to pass through a town and crossed a road where the people waited, their way blocked by the more urgent passing of others.

24
In the dream he wore father’s suit and sat crosslegged in a desert scrubland, at rest from some questing and restless urge. Around him lay the bones of jackrabbits and dogs and hulks of old cars, ungassed neon signs, surplus aircraft and bombed out shanty shacks, an analog world hung with the frippery of the human passage over it and of its fruitless pilgrimages. Does revelation lay in the landscape or within, in a stark realization where we see ourselves cut from a given template. From this he woke.

25
In the car the wipers stuttered across the windscreen. A girl and her mother slowly rode past on bicycles. They stopped by the pasture and each held out a hand to a horse near the wire. It craned its neck toward them, then tossed its head and backed away. Had his father felt so, had his father’s father and farther back into memory, felt this unnamed melancholy that yet had its own sort of beauty. What inescapable imperatives are being played forward.

26
For a world away he drove, on into an imaginary west, the verdant land he knew slowly turning to a giant red flatness of the earth that met the reddening sky at every turning. The sun was setting in the vanishing point of the road and he wanted to stop soon before it got dark in the open country. On the map hard by on the passenger seat he traced the road, seeking junctions, wanting to fold himself into the creases, to fall into a finitesimal plotted path.

27
After the children left home and they retired to the cabin by the lake, an inner geology began to work. Sometimes they bore it with bemused indifference, the erosion of intimacy and health, their old friendship a last bastion. Old man, can you manage those groceries in from the car, she would taunt. But sometimes it was a great force, wearing through the riverine windings of their memories, leaving their fullness behind like an oxbow lake. Over time each turning began to close off, and they were like islands in an inland sea.

28
She lay in the old fainting couch on the porch in an old housecoat reading drowsily a dogeared and musty book she had taken down from the attic. She stopped and closed her eyes and took off her glasses and listened to the overlapping cicada calls high in the trees that rose and fell in cascading decrescendos against the sibilant wind. A song sparrow lit at the rake of the roof and piped its call. He had left and they had not spoken all the day, the cabin become a crucible for the restless free running and doubt of her mind. Apologies are made meaningless on repetition.

29
Some distance from the cabin he stood on the riverbank and watched the clear water roll by and shoulder past the upthrust boulders. It turned and went down before it flattened and played out and came gently into the lake farther down. The lichened boulders ranged across the water like a childsize archipelago and in among them steelbright fish hung nearly still against the push of the water. A dragonfly blue as seaglass lit throbbing there with its multifocal eyes taking in the whole world askance. He knew the dark would come soon in a totality he had never known, but he crossed the stones and set out further into the wood to seek its sister silence.

30
In the hospital bed she lay in sedated oblivion. He sat next to her reading with one leg propped across the bed where she wasn’t. His arm in the sling throbbed and his hips and bottom ached on the hard chair. When he grew restless he would limp along the endless hallways with the painted lines on the floor leading to the surgeries, the griefstricken rooms and nervous infant wards. A timeless vigil. What is plan B. The room was cold and silent and the only window gave onto dead space between another building.

31
After the fire she took away his cigarettes and the flint wheel lighter but he went through and through the cabin looking for them so she gave them back. When he sat out on the porch she sat in the kitchen by the window so she could watch him lest he nod off and drop a burning butt. The doctor said he was gone to the cancer but he rose a sequential eternity of mornings like a priest or soldier with purpose and pride only to subside brooding in the chair on the porch as if he’d taken an oath of silence running down the end of his days.

32
After the accident, she awoke often in the night and lay in her pain for hours in rapt sleepless lucidity. Each thought shining singular and crystal as a polestar, every sound amplified and significant in the blood rushing silence. Trying to recall them in the morning, she felt only their suggestion, like shadows chased by the sun’s passing.

33
She saved their toys as her daughters grew older, and kept them in the attic over the garage. Undressing the dolls, wrapping and packing them at the foot of the folding ladder, she wondered what the girls thought when they had dressed the dolls that final day. Had they meant such an ending? What signal made them lay them by that last time, never to be played with again, in such clothes as these. It was an autumn dusk, cold coming over the trees by the river, the sky a deafening orange.

34
Spring would not come easy, and the early blooms fell to the cold wind and ceaseless rain. He woke at dawn with lightning flaring close like camera flashes through the blinds. The thunder rattled the windowpanes to waken the baby, had there been one. She was not in the bed next to him and he wondered was it the storm or the pain or sleeplessness or the mind running on through its saga of worry and second guessing and doubt. The rain slackened and he lay staring as the room slowly came into the broad light of day.

35
Rainwater pooled on the mildewed stair treads and ran down the risers in little cascading runnels like a falls in a woodland stream. He went up with the stepladder, stood it under the sagging gutter and climbed up. He pulled a handful of leaves and pine needles from the downspout and the water drained in a rush. The backdoor opened and he turned and saw her come out from the bath, her hair wound in a towel and another wrapped round her waist. She walked to the railing and set down her coffee and looked out at the woods and the lake, unwinding the towel from her head and slowly drying her hair.

36
Before they left each bent and clawed up a handful of gravel from the footpath and stood on the dock together. They counted three then threw the rocks scattershot out into the lake. They landed with overlapping splashes and the myriad ripples ran out to the far shore and back in to the dock. Make a wish she said and they each closed their eyes. The parts of learning one can call wisdom are often those found only at the end.

37
When she died they took the boxes down from the attic. Unpacking them, each chose favorite tokens of childhood – funny or sentimental things. Trying to forget the times they were hurtful or a disappointment to her, they threw away what had gone to dry-rot, put some aside for the church sale and filled a box for their own children to choose.

38
All things of consequence happen on a mountain. So it seems in tales, battles, journeys, proposals, memory. Just at the timberline, the cutbacks lay like contradictions in the thinning air. He passed the last stunted trees wearing his old GI boots, feet smarting, carrying it to the summit. At last he stood in the overawing silence and height. He removed the lid and set it on the rock. Looking out over the green valley a last time, he held the urn to his breast, then cast her ashes from the peak.

39
Cleaning out old things in the flyblown and wasp papered workshop he found a keyring with three keys. Their ovoid bows, stamped with forgotten hardware names, were unfamiliar, tarnished, faded. He tried them in all the doors of the house, inside and out, but no keyway gave to their cuts. He hung them on a nail over the tool bench, puzzled that such tokens of entry should be closed in mystery.

40
After she died he moved in a waking dream as if he had no claim to the authorship of events. He swam in the lake and walked the woods and sat on the porch smoking and staring for hours. He ate the frozen food and then all the canned food in the larder. When it was gone he drove the dusty old car in to town to eat. When he saw that the dog had died he left him where he lay in the grass and the next day he was gone. When the car wouldn’t start he called, and when his son came it was for the last time.

41
On warm evenings he sat on a bench in the garden at the resthome watching the martins feed. Blueblack in their chase they would fly and fall, fly and fall, shadows tracing circles as they wheeled around the nestinghouse. He thought of a river and an ocean, an end as of an end, and of the end coming into being. When philosophers talk of mercy they credit it to God or the silent forbearance of mothers. When he came to the water would they be as one. He could not feel the earth.