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Its That Simple

you're so
country noir

flannel and wool
starry desert
gold light gold leaves
raining on the creek

smoke in your clothes
patience, patience

one lit up kiss
just the once

fireworks
of course

firebreaks to keep
fire from spreading

all the grasses dry as the
rough of your cheek to
my pink cheek

blushing.

Bessie Parks Polhamus

Last weekend Carolyn and I made our annual late fall trip to close the cabin for the winter. The air, woods, cabin and company were transformative, heavenly. On Saturday afternoon we spent hours looking at every object in the antiques house, filling our hands over and over: a sweet new old plate for the cabin collection, a 1940's cream and red transistor radio with the longest telescoping antenna for Owen, a tiny cermanic manatee. In the furthest corner of the upstairs corridor was a pile of old photo albums, postcards, and this slim linen-covered baby book, smelling of powder - kept in someone's top drawer I would guess. Each page carefully filled out by Bessie's grandmother, and detailing her weight, length, first laugh, gifts. And then, unexpectedly, under the benign heading of Babyhood Events, the brief story of Bessie's sudden sickness, decline, and then death at 8 months old. There were two photos tucked in the baby book's pages, one of her father holding her, and one of her mother holding her. Her grandmother wrote that they were they only two photos ever taken of her.

Well. How do you leave a thing like that behind? I'm not responsible for Bessie, or the billions of other babies, adults, children, anyone that have died. But I can at least have her home to my attic, find a spot for her book and only two photos. I'll forget about her for years and find her when we move or have the attic insulated. I'll be dead and Owen or Molly will have to clean out my things and wonder what this baby book is and decide what to do with it. I'm not going to try to research the Polhamus family and return Bessie to someone.

I can't assume responsibility for Bessie. She's not mine to grieve, memorialize, or keep alive. But I have room in the attic. For three dollars and a little humanity, I guess, I can keep her. That was the best decision I felt like I could make, at the time.

Await Your Reply

It made her think of the days after her parents died, the laundry basket still full of their unwashed clothes, the refrigerator stocked with food her mother had planned to cook that weekend, her father's cell phone filling up with calls from customers who wanted to know why he had missed his appointments. At first they would leave behind a few empty spaces in the world - customers who relied on her father, patients who were waiting for her mother to nurse them at the hospital, friends and coworkers and acquaintances who would miss them, for a time - but these were very minor rips and tears in the fabric of things, easily repaired, and the thing that shocked her most was how quickly such absences began to close. Even after a few weeks you could see how soon her parents would be forgotten, how their presence became an absence, and then - what? What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence, what do you call a hole that has been filled in?

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply