i.
The call came in February. Chipper Hanson had found a lost goat and tied it to his porch, where it was kicking and butting and destroying things. He called the hardware, and the hardware called me, because if nobody got it off his porch soon, his wife was going to get the gun and take care of the problem herself, and whether that would involve just the goat or the goat and the husband, no one could say.
Prologue
He leaps over two fire-painted blossoms resting on the stark cracked city pavement. Roused, these unfurl into late-Christmas-season orange-and-black butterflies that flutter into the violet shade of a smog-encrusted roadside jacaranda tree. A thrum becomes a hum becomes thumping footsteps, and soon he is entangled in a thicket of jeers and tossed gray, black, and brown stones as he flees toward a still-distant night. It is said that in combat some soldiers shoot over their enemies’ heads in order to avoid killing them. Some don’t even fire at all. Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda’s fingers tremble on the trigger of an old, shiny AK-47. He hurls the gun away with an “Urgh!” The weapon spills across the road—a low-pitched, guttural noise.
Before I moved to the United Arab Emirates, I sold the one car I’d ever owned—a four-door Honda, emerald green, white scratches webbed along the doors from the previous owners. I would be gone for just ten months, but the car had an old engine and a dashboard of permanently lit warnings lights, and, every month or so it seemed, a different part broke and needed repairs.
Dr. Nakajima had a poem in his head. It went something like, however far I go, blue mountains.
‘Ah,’ the Doctor thought, ‘I like the style of Taneda Santka. He is modern, yes, but his poems are easy enough to remember in volume. They are neat and simple and great for these summer days when the mountains grow taller on the horizon with every step. What a joy life is, when someone else puts words around it.’
The mind swings inward on itself in fear
Swayed towards nausea from each normal sign.
—derek walcott, “A Lesson for This Sunday”
On a lake, in the woods, in 1940, my grandparents built a cabin. One room, big stone fireplace, outdoor privy. They lived and worked outside New York City and spent summers in Maine, my grandmother often here alone with three young kids but no electricity, plumbing, or heat except the wood-burning fire. Surrounded by one hundred acres of no one. Up the road, there were neighbors: the Garnetts and the Hibberts—and the Savages, who lived up to their name, my grandmother used to tell me. They ate with their hands off the table’s pine boards. Mrs. Hibbert shielded her children from the Savage boys when they came around, sometimes en route to my grandparents’ place for supplies—whatever was lying around unprotected.
I’m no horticulturalist. I don’t have a garden. It’s renderings of flowers and plants that make me stop short and stare: a page full of small bits of white and domed yellow, the spindly green branching almost like a seaweed. A field of lines and colors on paper becomes a beautiful, vivid thing that recalls the plant I could see and touch and know, if I dared. But illustration owns its subject; as a deliberate man-made composition, it translates the natural world through mind and body, through a series of human choices and means, into an utterly new form. Nature moves from its vast, fascinating world of complex systems to another, smaller one of confinement and relocation. The illustration isolates and resituates its subject in the rectangular page, the book’s binding.
We had this landlord, tanned and wiry, creepy, and he always had this look like what the hell?
He would park his truck sometimes out front and wait there all day. One time he’d gone fishing I guess, so he left a bag of fish in the bushes by the mailbox. Nobody knows why.
Join us for an hour of art and literature featuring readings from Issue 06 of The Common paired with related works of art on exhibit at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum. Wine, cheese, crackers, and fruit will follow.
I still hadn’t learned to swim, after the MacVicar’s pool,
and this pool’s water was cold enough to mask
the pain from knees banged and knuckles scraped
I no longer have a home in New York City; I will always be at home in New York City. I will always love New York City; I no longer like New York City. I am no longer a New Yorker; I will always be a New Yorker.
I write out those sentences (with apologies to Samuel Beckett) like a contorting pledge of allegiance: disillusioned and desirous. Or, as if the clarifying middle-ground will miraculously appear to me if I just keep repeating the polar opposites. Or because there is no middle ground but repetition could lead to a more complex form of understanding than mere acceptance.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.