I seem to be writing a lot on the theme of death lately. Here's a draft of a poem on that line from today, after reading a few by Muriel Rukeyser:

Ancestors
One from my line, young, with an innocent smile,
a collared suit, walked
into the night from a party,
Collapsed right there in the snow.
One, with a hat and cigar, drove his model T
Around and around the town square
Like a dog foaming with lowered head, stopping
At last on the train’s tracks
As it bore down.
One who wore wigs
And for whom I bought a vase
With paper route money,
Said quietly to her friend one day,
“I think this is it,”
And was right.

And fevers and childbed
and natural causes that today would have
Lain in ICU until despondent or complete
And bullets brass and bursting and
Outrageous arrows and spears
And sorrow and longing and confusion,
And despair, or stubbornness or
Indifference. A dull axe, an unchecked harness,
Cruelty, careful planning, accident,
the venials, the deadlies,
The elements, Its wrath,
Someone’s revenge, their poisoned heart,
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know
Stretching back in time to an infinitesimal
Beginning with something that It felt
Within Itself, that It feels still and we can’t
Get enough of, a taste of danger, the ability
To grieve. How we all want to cry from not
Enough money or sex or love or food, and those with plenty
Seeing others die and not enough and want, want want
and lord, lord, lord.

the boa

Mom was studying at the University to be a teacher, and she spent time in a few elementary school classrooms, and always ended up being the one to take the animals home—during vacations or for the summer or forever. We kids did our unconscious best to kill the animal or animals before the next batch was due to arrive.

So we got this boa constrictor that came in a wooden box with regular window screen mesh stapled to it. The box was about the size of a 1970's microwave oven. We put in a tree branch and a melmite dish of water, and of course the bowl kept tipping. Mom bought a white mouse to feed the three-foot snake, and put them in the cage together.

It seems now like we must have had that snake for months, but it was probably only a few weeks as it slowly starved. We didn’t know when it had last eaten, and had no idea how to convince a reptile to strangle a rodent. Actually, we think the snake, sluggish from its year in captivity in the kindergarten classroom, had forgotten how to constrict—it seemed likely that its former classmates had mortally wounded most of its previous meals, enabling it to grow slow and stupid.

We worried more and more about the snake as the weeks dragged on. Mom tried to make it positive and exciting for us kids by scotch-taping updates on the status of their match to the front of the cage, as if she were Howard Cosell calling the Ali-Frazier fight: “In this corner, straight from the jungles of South America, in the camouflaged suit, is the killer from Brazil-a. In the opposite corner, in white, the local hero, Mouse Mulligan. Who will win the match, folks? The mouse is looking good, but the snake has that lean and hungry work.” I embellish, but you get the idea.

We found the mouse dead first, which was disappointing because it had not become a lump inside the snake. A few days later, the snake stopped moving. I was sad, but really, I think I gave up when the snake didn't eat the mouse within the first 24 hours. It's hard to form a positive bond with a being that hasn't the will to live.

That old slough seemed empty--between the cornfields, where the water seeped out of the land’s sponge and dribbled toward the lake. I took walks down there sometimes, when the farmer wasn’t plowing, and after his season was done and the fields were crimped with spent furrows and dotted rough with straw and gopher hills. A few feet of old boards stuck out of the edge of the slough at a weird angle and I never paid them much attention, let alone tried to look under them. I just figured they were too dangerous and full of nails and that I’d start to bleed if I messed around there. I didn’t pay much attention either as, over a few seasons of rain and snow washing away the soil, a shingled roof started to jut out of the earth, too.

The Fox
Once, when Zeke and I were visiting my grandma, and he was about three, and I was trying to introduce him to the farm where I had spent so many dreamy childhood days, I scented a fox.

I was carrying Zeke around the farmyard, pointing out places of interest to my mind, and he just got bored and sweaty and peevish. Look Zeke, I’d say to him, there’s the door to the hayloft. Your uncles & aunt and I used to climb up in there from inside the barn and jump around on the hay bales. And see all this farm equipment under the box elders here? This one is a combine. You pull it from this hitch, and the grain goes up here, and comes out that chute. And that one over there is a pin-harrow. And on and on. He of course started struggling in my arms, wanting me to just go and push him on a rusted tricycle with a broken front wheel that we had retrieved from the pole shed. And then I set him on the seat of the old tractor and though he was still mad, I made up a song to soothe him and sang it as I took his picture there, and I had to make the song a little silly and sarcastic…even at three this kid understood sarcasm. The song was an elegy to the fate of farming equipment to the tune of the ABCs:

Tractor, tractor, orange and black-ter

Sitting in great-grandma’s yard with tires around ever after.

Zeke seemed content with singing the song for a while, and even ventured a few tentative pulls at the tractor’s ancient throttle and stick shift while he perched on that high tractor seat. It occurred to me that why he was peeved at the situation was that he was a little afraid, having never been on a farm before, and having never experienced toddling off towards the high weeds while grandmas and uncles and cousins chatted over plates of potato salad and baked beans and hamburgers with onion soup mix blended in for flavor. He also never experienced being shoo-ed out of the house with brothers and sisters by a busy grandmother, to run in the fields and avoid rusty nails in the barn and to bait hooks on the weedy shore of the lake while waiting to be called to supper. So all my explanations mattered not a jot to him, and he sat on that old seat like a skittish mouse in a teacup, and he whined.

Then I scented the fox, but I didn’t know at first that it was a fox. There was a musky, strange dark smell that drifted by in occasional airy ribbons while I cajoled Zeke on the tractor seat. It came to me that it was the same scent I had grown used to, near the beetle shed at college. On the campus of the college where I studied science for a few years, the science students would bring roadkills in, dissect them for their projects, and then bring them to the beetle shed to have the bugs eat the flesh clean off them, so the skeletons could then be used for study. This is all very scientific and proper, and Dermistid beetles are well-known and widely used in the scientific community for this purpose, of cleaning the flesh from bones. I never took the classes or did projects that involved the beetle shed, but I had been curious about it, the way you are curious to see a car wreck sometimes, or the way some people really like watching surgeries on that cable channel nowadays. I used to walk near the beetle shed at college sometimes, pretending to be interested in the nearby herb garden, and I’d look at its graying shingles and the condensation on its big windows. It always seemed to be warm in there, and the smell of death was always lingering about the shed door, heavy and dark.

The shingles and sweaty windows of the college beetle shed were what finally popped into mind, as I stood with Zeke at the tractor, waist-deep in a tangle of raspberry canes. I started raising and nodding my head like a hound to help my nose find those lingering, drifting tendrils of scent. I whisked Zeke off the tractor seat, and asked if he wanted to see something dead. He responded with the same peevish indifference that he’d had all morning. But I was looking for the carcass already, around the box elders and on the old lake path, sniffing, sniffing.

The scent of death grew stronger near an old basswood tree in the yard, and was almost overpowering. I looked down and there, in ochred tones, as though it had been gently placed there for a moment by a museum curator, was the intact skeleton of a fox in perfect silhouette. Tufts of tawny hair around the neck and leg joints trembled in little breezes, and a few bones had dark, dried ligaments joining them to their fellows, but otherwise the fox had been picked clean.

Zeke was immediately and briefly fascinated by this find. He wanted to touch it, and when I wouldn’t let him (I was afraid the fox had died of rabies), he ran back to the driveway and the bum-wheeled trike.

I wanted to take the skull home as a sort of trophy, the way beach-combers line their bookshelves with strandings and curios from their explorations. But I was afraid of rabies, so I waited till the next year’s visit, for the bones to hopefully bleach and get eaten more by nature, then went back to grandma’s. But I couldn’t find the old fox, and my mother said that she'd had the lawn service get rid of that stinky old skeleton.

So there you have it…death waits for no one.

Hi,
I'm trying to use this blog as a place to do my writing exercises. I started out doing morning writing today, for example, and ended up writing this piece called "The Fox," which I'm posting here. These entries aren't meant to be complete stories or amazing works or even entertaining to anyone but me. I'm just getting writing practice, and I need to keep doing it.

5/17/10
A dream last night that I was visiting another family's crypt, a long downward spiral staircase to their place of dead. Not frightening, I was honored to help my friend and her family...her grandmother alive again, we conversed,discussed my visits, my schedule, then I was relegated to background, as was proper with someone tending her ancestors. My bare feet slapping on the rough, hand-hewn grey granite stairs worn smooth from ages of footfalls, cycling down again, up again, down again, tending the graves.