I
When my daughter watched the explosion
of Mount St. Helens on the evening news,
and saw those houses smashed by the mudslides,
she could not have known this wasn’t
likely to happen here, and she was worried,
for the first time perhaps, over such concerns-
someone’s house crushed and gone completely,
someone’s father breaking down and sobbing,
who had just been told for certain what he’d lost.
Nor could she have understood how often
we’d seen that shot, that man
among the wreckage, a broken toy in his hand.
Nor, at three years old, could she
have expected that he was going to cry—
covering his face with both his hands
as if embarrassed by his grief—and then
look up, bewildered, at us.
2
Accustomed to the daily
summaries of loss, it’s easy to believe
the news, by definition, happens elsewhere,
and in a world that’s always worse
than it is, each day, for us.
But when I watch my wife and daughter
drive off to school, sometimes I can’t
help but see myself standing beside
the warped and twisted metals of the car.
Inside, they’re looking up
at nobody. And I can’t move away
from the edge of this imagining,
where no one calls me,
or comes crawling out of that fire.
III
In Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree,” the perfect
beautiful wife wanted a child so badly
she died of happiness when he was born,
and then was buried, as she had asked,
beneath that tree. But the stepmother
envied the boy, and one afternoon
when he was looking inside a chest
to find an apple, she slammed the lid
down on his neck, and his head flew off.
Now what will I do? she thought,
then picked him up, set his head back on,
and when her own daughter, Ann Marie,
returned from school, she said,
“Go ask your brother to share the apple
I just gave him, and if he doesn’t answer,
box his ears.” The girl did as she was told,
then ran back sobbing. “O Ann Marie,
what have you done? But we will stew
him in the sour broth, and no one will know.”
So the woman cut him up and served
that black stew to her husband,
who couldn’t help but eat, saying,
“What good food this is! Give me more.”
And the more he ate the more he wanted.
IV
In the newspapers I read about a father
who put his son in a bathtub filled
with scalding water because
the child needed to be taught a lesson.
So much that seems essential
is simply not included.
And this: in California
a young woman named Betty Lansdown Fouquet
left her five-year-old daughter out to die
on the center divider of the interstate.
Twelve hours later, when the girl
was rescued by the highway patrol,
they had to pry her fingers from the Cyclone fence.
She told them she had run after
the car which was carrying her stepfather,
her brother and sister, and her mother,
“for a long time.”
V
But Ann Marie saved her brother’s bones,
tied them in her scarf, and laid them
in the grass under the juniper.
All at once that tree began to tremble,
and a bird flew out of the branches, singing
so sweetly no one could resist, even
the stepmother had to go outside
to hear it, and a millstone fell on her head,
and she was crushed. From that spot
fire rose. When it was gone the bird was gone,
the brother was restored, and he took his father
and sister by their hands, and they went back
inside the house, sat down and ate their supper.
VI
Driving to work one morning a man
sees this little girl running right along
the divider by the chain link fence.
He’s half a mile down the road before
he gets angry that her parents would let her
play in a place so dangerous. Some people,
he thinks, shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.
Then he can’t imagine how she crossed
the lanes to get there, but tells himself
there’s got to be an explanation even if
he’s now too far away to find out what.
Later, at home, he doesn’t tell his wife
the story, worried she might ask him
if he stopped, and he would have to tell her
how he couldn’t, not at that hour,
with all that traffic, which she should understand,
but he knows she wouldn’t understand.
VII
“When I die,” my daughter asked me,
“will I still have my fingers?”
I can’t remember what I told her.
That day I must have thought
any answer would be sufficient.
Some stories seem impossible
to explain with any other story.
The boy in the bathtub, the girl
running along the divider,
her brother and her sister watching
from the back seat of the car as if,
perhaps, they were the ones who needed
to be taught a lesson. What kind of shape
would hold this, even briefly, all together,
with no magical bird, and without its song?
As my family sleeps I step outside and see
the early morning air glittering
in the arms of the pines, and clouds
lifting from the mountain into a sky
already clear and weightless,
while on the lawn in the frost
each shrub and tree has laid its own
brief white ghost.
VIII
Let’s say the boy survives, is sent away
to live with a family who always wanted
a child to care for. Years later
he receives this letter: All that I desire
now in my life is for you to forgive me,
but if you can’t I know I will understand.
Or the little girl grows up and marries,
has a daughter of her own and for a time
she’s happy, until her husband
leaves her, one morning, for no reason
she can figure out. His note says only,
Got to get away for a while.
Will write soon and try to send some money.
But he doesn’t write, and no matter
what she does her child keeps crying
until all she can think about is how
to keep her from crying.
IX
It is a long time ago now, as much as two thousand years maybe, that there was a rich man and he had a wife and she was beautiful and good, and they loved each other very much but they had no children even though they wanted some so much, the wife prayed and prayed for one both day and night, and still they did not and they did not get one. In front of their house was a yard and in the yard stood a juniper tree. Once, in wintertime, the woman stood under the tree and peeled herself an apple, and as she was peeling the apple she cut her finger and the blood fell onto the snow. “Ah,” said the woman and sighed a deep sigh, and she looked at the blood before her and her heart ached. “If I only had a child as red as blood and as white as snow.” And as she said it, it made her feel very happy, as if it was really going to happen.
10
One by one the bones are gathered.
Not even the smallest is left behind.
Such care is taken that when the body returns
it will not lack à finger or a toe.
Mist rises, spreads, and blurs the landscape.
Later it will rain. Later the sun
will rise, the morning’s haze burn off, and birds
assemble once again in the juniper. Years
will pass, and the bones will grow still whiter
waiting for the body to come back to them.
Other children will be born, some loved,
some feared. And the parents who loved them
will find their places in the ground beside
the ones who did not, as the wind futters
the branches of the tree, the birds repeat
their most familiar notes, and some who listen
imagine they can sense a shape beneath
this song, which for a time contains the grief
each believed was his, or hers, alone.
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