Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura Read Free Book Online Page A

dining car’s closed?) I felt, amid all the commotion . . . what? In such a chaos, listening for that sound-combination meaning my train and my destination (dear friends, in a foreign land always memorize the “from-to” construction and numbers at least to one hundred) suddenly, a fingernail shone promisingly out; it steadied me, there in my car, as it did one real and wintery afternoon years ago in Warzsawa Centralna. I was booking a couchette to Prague (do what with my visa—stamp? save? submit?) when that very same nail, mine own, seemed to offer answers about my journey—if only I could read its whorls and shy ridges, its dents, and the crescent of Polish dirt there collected!
    So what happened?
    I rolled down the window for a breath of air. At least I still knew to regard with pleasure the way the stiff, hand crank activated muscles in my shoulders and back, and sharpened and fixed my attention. The exertion felt good. The wind lifted my hair and found a way to my neck. Shifting into first gear and lurching forth caused a line of cold rain to slip from the roof through the window and onto my thigh. It soaked in and darkened to a tiny Brazil. I eased into second. Things cleared.
    What happened ?
    But I’ve already told what happened.
    All along, this has been the story of a moment.
    The cross-sectioning of a moment is the news. That a moment anywhere—here, on a street— does this, is news.
    Later that week, to keep the feel of that moment alive, I studied up on the construction of streets. I liked one particularly precise diagram I found, showing how different materials are layered to provide flexibility and skid resistance. Internal steel beams or meshing help a street withstand cycles of expansion and contraction. All kinds of seasonal flux is planned for. Subterranean drainage systems with rocks and sand control saturation. A formula called the California Bearing Ratio is used to calculate for appropriate loads. One cut-away showed the world of buried telephone cables, gas mains, sewer pipes and other bundled electrical stuff—all the systems collecting-from or delivering-to each nearby house its heat and waste, its light and voices. On top of the street was sketched the outline of a house. Then behind the flat house, a blue wash was meant to stand in for the sky.
    When I looked up, beyond the diagram and expanse of my desk, there in the frame of the window was grass-sky-trees, in no order at all. In no order at all, it went phone line, kicked silver trash can, far steeple. It moved from green coil of hose up to far-off pink cloud.
    I found, given a cross section to study, the eye hovers and slides, lingers on the most satisfying shapes, won’t follow a plan but pulls in, zooms out, sharpens some things, dissolves other things. The eye disarrays the neatest sequence.
    Thus in the frame of my window now: a white truck. And just to the right of it and up the steps, a porch swing with two people and a baby held close. A mailbox, a white post, a set of gray shutters. The baby in a bright red hat with a tassel (last week she was born) (the red’s easy to see). A mother and father laughing and singing. And a child, already moving in and out of the scene.

Being of Two Minds
     
    Our playing field is completely overgrown. I’m calling it a “playing field” though it was just a bare hillside with rocks we plucked and threw into a sewer grate for a game. But it was not “just,” as in “inconsequential.” I only mean the field was in no way official. And I mean to be neither sentimental nor nostalgic—though to say our field does mark it with an intimacy, I realize. To present a little history here, even if remote and sketchy, to let you know this site is charged and layered up is important, so that I might best grade into the state I am bent on exploring: being of two minds.
    Passing our field, some milkweed fluff blew onto my black T-shirt and I let it stay, thinking fuzzy-edged cloud, spun sugar halo....