My Little Golden Book of Phobias

“Will Exult Over You With Loud Singing” by Michael Lavers Posted: 17 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT Michael Lavers WILL EXULT OVER YOU WITH LOUD SINGING That’s my dad, I say, pointing to the man in the photograph with thin grey hair reflecting river-light. And that’s my mom. My arch of nose, my chin. I’m talking to my children, talking the way I do about things that are not lost, that are still here, knowing that it’s no use, that time and decay do not obey language; that the dumb flesh of a tree, for instance, doesn’t care about Samantha, which word my son, ten years from now, will carve into it; doesn’t distinguish between the pain of his love for her, and any old pain: woodpecker, beetle, axe, frost, flame. * * * Once, when I said she could not play with a dead mouse, my daughter wailed so loud I thought she might break. This was in Great Falls, next to a riverbank wafted with small blue moths. We’d strayed from the playground near an overpass where people seemed to be sleeping or hovering around fires. She yelled Mine, astounding even herself, as if at the end of the scream she thought there might be nothing left, nothing of her, nothing to listen to in this world. * * * The sad mechanic exercise … —Tennyson My mother was finishing a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing, writing a thesis on gambling addiction, on people who wear diapers so they can stay at slot machines for hours, even days, and when we asked her if we should try to get the last course waived and the degree granted before it was too late, she said nothing, as if keeping new and hidden counsel with herself, or with someone not present. And my father, dead ten years later of a heart attack in the bathroom of a movie theatre—the ticket-taker panting out that sad mechanic CPR—he must have felt a terrible silence growing inside him, or a noise too loud to hear, the crashing stillness after a long inertia, the indifference of that small wet machine suddenly reluctant to bear for one more second the weight of his body. As if the soul at the end of a long journey finally stepped through a door and put down its luggage. Thinking, maybe, if he listened hard enough he could make out why stars had lost their willingness to dazzle, or where they were going—through what dark nimbus or invisible crack—and why without him, why so fast. * * * Once as a child I drove a hammer’s claw into the trunk of one of the small maples lining our driveway, peeling bark away in strips as thick as fingers to the underflesh, the soft wet honey-gold, tinted a bit off-pink, off-green. It was like being, or imagining that I could be, everywhere at once, light right there in the palm of my hand, made still and, well, mine, in ruins. Light’s unsingable psalm, a thing outside our sad economy of come and go. A brief end to stagnation, briefly glimpsed. My father was angry, but mostly bewildered. He stared for a while, then said only that the hammer wasn’t mine to take, and that the tree wasn’t mine to do whatever I thought I was doing to it. And what are you doing to it, he said, and I said I don’t know. * * * Poor flesh, love says, baring her teeth. Poor agitation of heat, of stars, shaking and far away. Van Gogh in the final letter to his brother Theo: Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it—that’s all right. It’s true no metaphor can save us, store us like gravel in the cheek of Hallelujah Creek, Creek of Unclottable Light. But that’s alright. Why not exist, at least for each other, in love and thickly streaked and made to end, believing if not everything at least one of the minor prophets, maybe, Zephaniah: he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. * * * That’s my mom I say to my kids, that look she has like mine, of somebody enduring happiness, expecting grief. And that, I say, is her diploma, framed and hanging on the wall. This is your breakfast, bananas and toast and jam, our one life, ours in the only sense that matters, something that we make … make what? Come forth, I think, like stars, all flicker and distance, prodigal and dim, but not so dim that if they vanished we would not weep every night, or stop trying, though we knew we couldn’t, to describe them, to remember.