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

The day was so beautiful that I laughed, the sky so absurdly blue, June first, it seemed apologetic, a making-up-for. I laughed, and the laughter was not tinged with sadness of any kind, for the game we played was of a certain time and place. It was meant to be contained, I know this now, and looking back, the game itself was absurdly blue and lit, a respite even, like this day, in which nothing, for once, came up about this all going, me going, everything too soon gone. I crossed the street and saw a parked truck covered in AstroTurf with hundreds of little plastic animals hot-glued on at all angles. As I passed and looked back, I saw, hand-painted in white on the bumper: “Laughter drives the winter from human faces ha ha ha. . . .”
    I was not of two minds at that moment. Instead, I laughed easily, without thought or effort. Whereas two minds come in . They find you. They wrestle and present cases, part waters and curtains. There can be legalese with two minds, and wranglings, and shadows vying with rays. But this was one mind—the freedom from sadness, from missing the game; the bright weather; the truck with its tailgate afterthought; and the day, or moment at least, unbeseiged.
    Then, closer to home, came a yellow rose in the yard of the hands-down best gardener in the neighborhood, wet at the top of the climbing bush, bent far from the lattice, heavy and shirred on its stalk, but upright.
    There is a way a flower can be frightening, and this rose was emphatically so. It was doing exactly what it was called to do at the moment, in that instant, the only moment there to receive it. Wholly in time, it was fixed to its task, with all consequence still ahead. It did not refer to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 50, which earlier I had been reading: “For that same groan doth put this in his mind: /My grief lies onward and my joy behind.” No. Centrally commanding as the rose was, as a heart is, it was not a scooped center posed between griefs. It was the yellowest buttercream custard and bowl at once. Unto itself, unhinged from time, I saw it. Not “timeless” in its beauty, but loud. It was, I think, laughing. That yellow might have been a “peal.” There might have been “mirth” or “glee” in its face. The rose might have grown “on a lark” (then flown!). But not then. Not just then. It was fat and its wings were folded. Nimble and fearsome in its flight contained, its one aureate face/body/mind bent on neither staying nor going.

    Really, I think there are more than two minds.
    But a third, bent on settling up: that’s not the state I’m after here. Not a perfectly pleasing, measured harmonic, a synthed and kindled happy medium. A balance, a stasis; form on its way toward resolve, that cant.
    I think we are up to—out there—eleven dimensions.

    I do not believe the earth is flat.
    But I still believe in the humors. I subscribe to all that good theory, from Hippocrates on down, about the origins and travel patterns of feeling and disease, trade routes of blood and phlegm, the yellow and black biles coursing or slogging, the charts measuring consequences of overflow and congestion. I believe in the humors with their assigned temperaments, dispersed and roaring throughout the body, each with its province bounded and hued, its climate matched to the elements residing in spleen, heart, brain, and liver.
    Of course when I’m driving long stretches, I still pull toward the horizon , numinous line that exists and doesn’t exist.
    And when I saw the autopsies performed, the blood therein was poppy red, red unceasingly, and no misty or frothy, clotted or blackened bilious poisons rushed forth from even the most ruined bodies.
    Two minds certainly complicate one’s mythopoetics.

    When I read Dickinson and Whitman back to back, I am reading for the precipitous rise and fall between them. If styles are territories, I want to tack along those open ranges and consider the America that holds them both. I read as if