One filched wish -- could be anybody’s
They all check their hope boxes.
He runs away from school. He’s
tried; but he’s far too exhausted,
sad, to make it work. To
be rooted is perhaps the most
important and least recognized need of
the human soul. After hitching rides
for hours, he’s here, on a
country road, in stinging, horizontal snow,
opposite a little church so dingy
it seems grey in the darkness.
You have to cherish the world
at the same time that you
struggle to endure it Perhaps if
she’d gone first; but her teacher --
so proud of her progress -- places
her as the recital’s finale. Every
kind of reward constitutes a degradation
of energy. He wonders what all
those at home will say, and
then frowns -- knowing what they’ll say.
She tries so hard to attend
to the other pianists’ pieces, but
a worm slides up her spine.
At the keyboard, she intends to
begin immediately; however, the worm has
crept too high He awaits the
next set of headlights and imagines
sitting in silence in the car
that will drop him off in
front of his house. When something
is finished, it cannot be possessed.
He’ll trudge across the drifted yard,
ring the bell, and -- when his
father opens the door, say, I
came home. For two full minutes,
she’s motionless. The divine emptiness, fuller
than fullness, has come to inhabit
us. Then the teacher announces, This
event has concluded.
Request list. The woman who wishes
for a child white as snow
and red as blood, gets it.
He remembers his parents brushing snow
off the shoulders of their bulky
coats after they bustled through the
back door. If the best of
our personality has to be preserved
across death. She wants the window
frame red, so she paints it.
But the woman dies, and her
child is given over to a
stepmother. He’s always thought differently about
snow, after that. To feel also
the perpetual exchange of matter by
which the human being bathes in
the world. He’s always wished to
enter a house like that, and
to have his own child see
him. Is this possible without preservation
of our connections with such other
personalities who have become a real
part of our own-selves? She wants
the red frame and the window’s
glass to make the whole room
pink, and they do. Beauty is
the harmony of chance and the
good.
Ascent. Cliff -- eighty-five degree angle and
so high that once they float
to the top and gaze back
down, they’re far ahead of where
they’d been standing , at the base.
Everyone entrusted with a mission is
an angel. All they now see --
a grassy plain stretching away,
declined just enough so that the
horizon disappears. They’re not sure what
to do. Angels are not usually
left in such circumstances. Whoever perceives
God through matter is not all
fire: rather, there is some matter
together with the fire. They don’t
feel abandoned, exactly -- only somewhat weighed
down, Also odd, since they’ve just
been flying, hovering. The circle, symbol
of monotony which is beautiful; the
swinging of a pendulum, symbol of
monotony which is atrocious. For quite
a while of late, they’ve spoken
human, but now switch back to
angel. This helps, though before long
they experience -- what? One of them
speaks the foreign word, Gravity.
Previously published in Poetries in English Magazine, edited by Sterling Davis.
A flicked wrist -- a dove vanishes.
Her six-year-old twins are standing right
there, eight feet in front of
the magician. Her son begins weeping.
Isness is God. She pats him
on his back, but he just
cries harder. His sister puts her
arm around his shoulders, then says,
He’ll make it come back. Finally,
though, Mom has to usher both
kids out of the hall since
that wailing won’t stop. In all
beauty, we find contradiction, bitterness, and
absence which are irreducible. On the
sidewalk, her daughter remarks that now
they’ll miss the bird’s reappearance. It
won’t come back, her brother responds.
It is impossible for an order
which is higher, and therefore infinitely
above another, to be represented in
it except by something infinitely small.
Sister -- They always do, in magic.
Brother -- No! -- Not doves!
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Lana Turner, Survision, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, Golden Handcuffs Review, New American Writing, and The Brooklyn Rail. Underrated Provinces is recently out from MadHat Books. Bone Chapel is coming out soon from Chax. For more than forty years, Chace was a working jazz pianist. He is an NEH Fellow.
