I left the vacuum out. Aristotle said nature abhors a vacuum. Me too, sucking up lint, cuticles, hair, and tiny flecks of who-knows-what. I’ve observed that nature loves a possibility. Cavern and the open mind. How I long for the emptied space that ventilates a longing that no lover, no country, not even air, can fill. Vacuum. Not a pretty word like swivel or shark. Sometimes I want to be a canister of oblivion. There are other words I prefer. Chasm, flume. You can fill them with the perfect life, everything you think you want. You can hide your suffering there.
The uncloaked goddesses of the deepwood lean into the skeletal air, their serpent branches twisted into impossible lattices. Maybe I am wrong, after all, to think they required no maker. Maybe the solstice sun had to be taught to silver against the ample trunks, and the serene bark to blotch, and the muted sky to be sky. Maybe we must be humbled, stopped in our tracks, breathless pillars of winter, made to wonder what else we might have been, whether we are good for more than our bareboned selves.
It’s hard to keep on being good. Maybe each creature has some limitation dealt out. A flush of clubs or wild card. Each of us our own version of a legless horse or swimless bird. Seahorse, peacock. Isn’t this power, too, the striven need for something to do with our hands? Our winglessness humbles us, briefly, before the crag. Conscious of flight, our pioneer fingers won’t stop reaching. I want to be a rebel. I want to revel in risk. No one to call me back. Not even the dead. The planets blissfully emitting purple light as if uttering I am I am. I want things too.
There’s so much to be angry about— extremes, plastic. When the preacher says repent, he means you. You watch the people nod, hellfire escaping the open windows of their souls. But there’s no prophet in your kitchen. Here, where you break a terracotta flowerpot into burnt orange tongues of fire. Be careful not to walk barefoot. Clay can puncture. You collect the remains of earthenware, bury the largest shards in the garden as apology. Who are you sorry for? There’s something you need to get on with. Earth is the only body worth redeeming. The only world that keeps taking back what’s broken.
Sandra Fees has been published in The Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Moon City, Witness, Nimrod, and elsewhere. The author of two chapbooks, The Temporary Vase of Hands and Moving, Being Moved, she lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a past poet laureate of Berks County and a minister.
Illustrations of varieties of pigeons from Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen (1906). Text by Emil Schachtzabel and illustrations by Anton Schoner.
