Selections from The Garden

The faint sting of dish soap will linger on the lip of the cup, regardless. Similarly, my friend the diviner had reems of paperwork still to “do.” We sat, eating potato chips, surrounded by children who had come to see the bones and the stones.

 

 

 

These bone-seeking children moved in groups, sorted by size—the smaller, the more often fed: the larger, the louder. Limbs in motion

 

                    like scythes through grass

 

 

they made, for themselves, a way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was watching her eyes. We leaned on a railing overlooking the duck pond. A lone duck came near with its green sheen. I watched the duck, but as intently and at the same time, I watched her eyes, bordered by no makeup, infant-like in their nakedness. Sliding from here to there, they determined what the diviner saw. She saw, she told me, a tower, the salt still in our mouths. It was cold, but not cold enough. But I am so glad, she’d said earlier from her soft and low seat in the museum’s bone-room, that my parents are dead. Never have I felt

 

closer to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The synthetic flavor of our safety: we swallowed it with the salt, the reams of paperwork, the wild limbs of adolescents seeking bones, for the killing moves all throughout. That night, as I walked through rooms, carrying it—the killing—the vice principal’s breath was shaky.

 

 

 

I hear you, he’d say through his uneven breath. My daughter, he’d say, breathing unevenly, I would not send

 

her to school were I to be afraid. Both of us knowing

                    our luck catches fire in the night.

 

 

 

 

 

I just wanted to think about the smoking woman, her pursed mouth under her slim tree, but now the optometrist intruded, a disorder between his hair and his legs, between jacket and slacks. My daughter’s eyes had been imaged and glowed beautifully green, garish and deep, like forests. His hair, white, flowed backwards, but softly, as a river’s current in late summer. He was the best optometrist, though he had no card, worked on Sundays and only on Sundays, did not, he said from his straight back, which was turned as he adjusted the instruments, share a philosophy with the other optometrists, the ones with cards, a philosophy, as he explained, of only Band-aids. His philosophy was of sources. The source in this and all cases being, we—or I—supposed from my darkened corner, DNA. But from whence does the DNA emerge?

 

 

This was the impossible question at the root of all other questions. Shining yellowish green, crawling along at the base of the eyeball, in the tongue, blood vessels were, the optometrist told us, if diseased then diseased at the heart and eye at the very same time and in the very same way. It was then that I noticed the tear

 

 

 

 

 

 

running along a seam in his jacket—its flap, because of the tear, longer and looser than was right. From there it was only a short journey to his slacks, their soft fade, and a sock, inside-out and so

 

a little furry. But still, the hair flowed, branching bright redly, thicker at the center, her eye’s blood vessels carried the objectionable DNA as they also moved the breath of her heart to her greenly glowing iris. How, I wanted to know, did the nerves interact, and which system was it that had her admiring so absolutely the paws and snout of a dog?

 

*

 

The faded slacks wrapping the thigh that was bone, almost only.

 

            I coughed

 

 

 

 

 

 

later in the scented candle shop. Had the bees whose glands had produced the oozy wax been harmed by these chemical scents either before or after scents were, with wax, mixed? In another version of the same: the hospital slices legs off those whose bodies have been poisoned by the foods that it, the hospital, serves. Not, I thought as I thought this, to become preacherly in our sadness, but my husband’s voice cracked. I could not tell whether this cracking was a result of the mouth surgery he’d endured or because, with heart failing and leg amputated, his father had been by the nurses turned. Shit-covered, and still they cleaned.

 

 

*

 

It was that moment in history when we did not yet know whether the DNA should be altered or let be. We could alter it.

I coughed. Everyone liked fire.