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Stories Old and New

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2007.0049

1934-421X

Debora Greger,

American Literature and Culture

Stories Old and New Debora Greger On Storey's Way This is the hour an owl would head home to sleep through the dawn chorus that followed, blackbird and thrush singing their tiny hearts out philosophically, Teach me! Teach me I see a tree! What is a tree? Why is there no brown light like me? But first a cry broke in two, cut off by a call. The door of dream drew back from a story with nowhere to start. It started—think back a breath— with a screech tearing day from dark. A field mouse taken by an owl? Nailed to the wall of the garden for its own protection, a rose laid open a blood-purple blossom. [End Page 178] II Down Storey's Way I walked, out of my old life, into the cemetery. At the tomb of Wittgenstein I stood: a slab with his name and dates bore no other words, but someone had laid a pine cone and a penny there, on one of the few graves not overgrown. Grief was abandoned to its own devices but, over the wall, green wood burned near Storey's End. To this, his doctor's house, he came to die; from the upper room might he have seen this cemetery tree, and heard a blackbird phrase and rephrase a last treatise on color, the color of smoke? If a ghost appeared, it could glow, but if it looked gray, how would we paint it? [End Page 179] The Giant Octopus of Puget Sound That evening, the talk was all of sex— not why her husband wasn't home, which was never mentioned— but how the old Pole, her guest of honor, just back from Seattle, had seen the giant octopus mate. You ordered specimens like a meal, he said. You waited the days it took the divers to return from the Sound. At last your glass tank cleared, you still waiting to see the world's longest spermatophore leave one of his tentacles and enter hers. Slowly, a chair was brought for the professor of reproduction (retired). I forgot to ask if ink came before sex—how much I forgot. Of the higher animals present that most English of evenings, those not dead now are divorced. Those still together— you and I— read each other like old books, the pages best left uncut. Spilled ink, spilled ink! [End Page 180] To a Green Woodpecker Bird, you're far too bright to be believed, let alone British. Red crown, black mustache, green back, yellow rump— don't I know you from a book, you fashion plate? Edwardian dandy, self-taught scholar of male plumage, twelve-inch body just a footnote to the sticky six-inch tongue— out of old woods on the new edge of Cambridge you venture to feed. On college lawn— aren't you the soul of Frazer, once of Trinity Great Court, now of the graveyard town edges toward? For doesn't the soul pass into a bird, just as he noted the Malays believed? For, to a bough that catches fire in the late sun, you lift, startled aloft— I have come upon his grave. The gates of hell have rusted open. The river to the underworld is just gravel, the ferryman gone, a golden bough no longer gold enough to take you down to the dead, then light your way back. [End Page 181] The Dollhouses of the Dead To see the past better, you had to climb a little ladder, the Dutch dollhouse was so tall. In the attic of the seventeenth century, nothing dared be out of order; four maids saw to that, the lady of the house left standing by her bed, empty-handed, dressed in gold silk. She wouldn't meet the mirror's gaze. She couldn't be made to sit. In the nursery next door, a tiny back was turned: a child waiting to be fed, not by her mother but by a nurse hidden in shadow. Or was she...