Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free PDF Page A

back, or worn away. The whites and creams, the holes for cords, the holes like sockets and the slendering snout—all turned back to gills/stem/cap; there was the shift from bone to mushroom, a rising from solid and going to pith, rigidity softening into flesh.
    In the space a mushroom now held, for full, long seconds, a skull had been.
    That pinned me to the afternoon.
    To concentrate a skull up from a mushroom . . . but no, that’s not it. It went very fast. It was vaster than any conscious thought. To be of a moment that folds up distance, finds no distance between mushroom and skull, allows skull from the first—though there was a patch of new mushrooms right there, shining, fat, rampant, creamy, just-sprung. To be part of a mind that flies past the known (until finally, the cues come on hard: all those days of good, soaking rain, the fast greening of lawns, everything sprouting and shooting like crazy), to be part of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous: at that tufty spot on my neighbor’s grass, with an airy/oceanic blue sky above, mushroom met skull, the resemblance bloomed and extended me. Right into the heart of the afternoon.
    Such resemblances get made in other ways, too:
    Once I spread my fingers and looked at the spot where thumb and wrist meet, and in that depression saw soup plate (what my grandmother called any shallow bowl, and hers were cream-colored, low-fire clay ones, with flat rims of green—how suddenly that comes back to me! ) then crux of a tree for holding rainwater; a hammock; a nest. I saw the imprint of another thumb’s work—I’m not saying God’s (that’s nothing I’d say) just where an actual thumb would have worked, should I have been clay. I considered, too, how other thumbs have worked, right there in that spot, but for pleasure, roiling oceans, vastly, in me—
    Once there was a wound I was tending. How high that highest candle lights the dark I spoke in my head, to steady it all, because the tending made me woozy. The wound was a taper that went far in and down. It involved the colors of a candle flame—what the body chooses for regeneration, chooses to light its dark passages with!—and this was a perilous passage. For a while the light moved like a tide, receding then overtaking the shore, the sweet, cool sand that was the good skin. The known world was there, beside the reds, fatty yellows, off-whites—colors by themselves not at all unpleasant, but on the small island that was the wound, threatening. A wound grows together from underneath first, the inner muscles knitting up, and the surface is the last to close. It all cinched slowly back together (with oxygen treatments, medicine, rest) regained the right pinkness, as the whole body did, regained, as we’d say, the rosy blush of health . And indeed, when it healed, it looked like a rose, was roseate, a furled, tight bud of a scar, and one day, exactly that— rose —was my first thought and not “wound.”
    And once, very suddenly one afternoon last spring, I saw that the apple tree outside my window had grown into the only spot of sun available to it. And so, because there are pines around it, thick, tall ones, and the sunlight is meager and hard to come by, the apple tree is terribly bent, sway-backed and leaning.
    A thing grows into the light available to it.
    This is not just a metaphor.
    And that a mushroom is also a skull, is not a trick of sight alone.

Against “Gunmetal”
     
    June. Cape May, NJ. Boardwalk.
    Rain coming harder. People hurrying. People jumping boardwalk puddles with bright sand-centers. Avoiding the spume of passing cars. Ingraytensifying the soft dunes with neon rain gear, all the ponchos calm and isoscelate, then blown scalene in wind. Now it’s more to watch, the dodging and pitching. More, maybe, “fun.” Of interest. “Human interest,” because rain alters people in unexpected ways. And the unexpected makes people so human.
    Remember that.
    Out there