A Curious Moon

By Tim Snyder

1

A few years ago I walked with a friend through a horse farm just as the leaves had begun their short ascent into fire colors. The odor of fall lifted from the fields of mown hay and grew with each fence post we passed. At the base of one post a small brown triangular shape stuck up out of a tuft of hay. I bent down and picked it out. I recognized immediately the collection of closely knit, tiny parallel barbs attached to a hollow shaft had once lived in the skin of a wild turkey. Doomed or blessed to rot now, discarded like fingernail parings or skin sloughed off to begin the next stage of life as dust—this feather. Or smaller yet, the bonds of electrical attraction between the atoms broken as microbes digested the feather, and I wondered what wild new face those atoms would rise within. 

A child once asked an American poet, What is the grass? The poet said he didn’t know. He talked about one experience of it, or maybe another, and I wondered what these things were that the birds shed and I collected and gathered in a vase on top of my bookcase. I don’t know why I’ve collected them. Maybe the atoms carry the memory of flight, like the old man who once waved to the eight-year-old me with a black feather and said in the tongue from his first life that he too wanted to fly while I flew away on my bicycle. And the turkey feather, like all the other stories which start in the middle of their telling, waits for the name of the face it will rise with to speak the next story.      

4

If a bird flies into the house there’ll be a death in the family, or so my mother said. She was full of old wives’ tales which never seemed to come true, maybe, because in the late twentieth century threads of science wove through our apprehension and light spoke the fabric of being. Or, maybe, I’m simply a cynic and the simplicity of superstition invited a shadow into the well-lit place of language. I asked her once, does it really matter if a bird flies into the house, we’re all headed down that road anyway. She shook her head and mumbled under her breath. Apropos that I excavated her words from long ago in Mount Hope Cemetery. I was leaning against the saddle of my bike, in front of Susan B. Anthony’s grave, when I thought of them. 

I had aimlessly ridden around Rochester when I passed the huge, wrought iron gates and wandered in. One of the first things I noticed were the cobbles. After the first easy hill I hopped off to walk. As I pushed my rattling bike across the flat peak of the cobble paved hill, under the huge oaks, past the thousands of monuments, I noticed the sign: Susan B. Anthony, painted in white letters over a brown field with a little arrow pointing to the sky. I hoisted my bike to my shoulder, carried it up the berm and there she was, or rather, the stone, behind which a field dropped away and thousands of other stones in tight rows fanned out from Anthony’s final resting place. 

Leonardo da Vinci wrote that life is made by the death of others. My mother and father died to the children they were and raised me and my sisters. Perhaps something stronger: my grandfather emigrated from Portadown, south-west of Belfast in Northern Ireland, to a suburb east of Hartford called Manchester in Connecticut. He never returned to the place of his birth. Anthony never lived to see the legal right to vote. Her slow, careful steps toward equality, could that have been the kind of death da Vinci had in mind? And many of the men who left Rochester to fight and die in the Civil War were buried here. Did Anthony know any of them? 

Pvt. Robert J. Van Reypen, a name with the dates of his birth and death embossed on a plaque not far from Anthony’s stone—I’ve run my fingers between those dates, and the man who wore that name probably slogged though rice patties, heaving and wet and far from home with both fists wrapped around an m-16. Or maybe he was a desk clerk who walked into a bar in Saigon one night and never left. I read somewhere that crows carry souls to the undiscovered place from which no-one returns, and Van Reypen was killed the day I passed into this century. How he lived is private property and how he died is research that wouldn’t reveal his laugh, his smile. I’m here. He’s not. His story is safely anonymous like an unfound feather. 

7

If a bird flies into the house… but I already said that. So I’ll say there is a certain surprise and wonder, almost like shock, the way gravity doesn’t seem to exist in an Escher rendering. I held the front door of our house open and my wife stepped through and screeched as she ducked and it flapped its starling wings through the kitchen air, through the dining room, grazed the living room wall with wings and thorny feet and fell helplessly confused to the floor. I managed to get both hands around its wings. My wife opened the door. I stepped out and lifted my hands. It launched into familiar space and disappeared into the greenery of the neighbor’s Buckeye tree. 

That was early October. I don’t remember where we had gone that day, but I remember the silence in the car and the telephone poles flashing by like the second hand on an old analog clock and we both seemed to be waiting for home where we could hide from one another. We had argued about her son that morning before we left. I thought he needed to do something more than play video games all day. She thought I was acting too much like my father. She never met him. He had died before we met. I reminded her of that and she reminded me that her son didn’t live with us. The remainder of the day was a procession of vague pleasantries indicative of married couples attempting not to scratch at a new scab.

I remembered that confused bird on Wednesday, January 30^th, about 30 seconds after I had closed my flip-phone. My wife. She had just told me her son died the night before. She could have been telling me that she had picked up the dry cleaning or went grocery shopping. Shock drained emotion and left a matter-of-fact tone. I sat looking at my closed phone on the faux-wood Formica desk-top, and that was when the starling flitting around our dining room and living room popped into my thoughts. How the hell had the damn thing found its way into our house? I stepped out the front door of the school where I taught to rush home. The early afternoon had gone dark as though there was a hole in the sky where the sun fell through and the birds had all followed. Snow was in the forecast, but like the promises old wives’ tales make, none would fall that January day.   

One of the things I learned from my father was to not put my emotions on display for the public to view. So, I held my angst close to my chest with both fists. Some days I had trouble breathing. On a Wednesday, the second week in February, a colleague walked up to me in the windowless hall outside of my office, tears streaming down her face. We were alone in the hallway, and I held up my hand. Oh please. Don’t. I can’t. Not here. She nodded and turned back toward her office. 

That Saturday my wife and I went grocery shopping. I pushed the cart and she walked point, guiding our patrol down an isle and she blindly grabbed at the items that had become necessity and tossed them into the cart. Two or three more isles of the same and then I noticed her back stiffen, shoulders drew back, head straightened, but her voice seemed to smile. Her colleague…I walked around to the front of the cart. The niceties of unexpected meeting, and then her colleague said, I’m so sorry for your loss. My wife smiled. I didn’t lose anything. I know exactly where my son is and I look forward to the day I’ll see him again. My shoulders slumped and I felt both fists tighten around my angst.  

Sometimes apprehension happens in dark places, the way you look at your shadow and recognize your gait. I was standing in the kitchen that third Sunday morning of March and heard a small wail. It seemed far off, like the inexorable spring only after the last ice storm. The wail grew in volume and intensity. I could make no sense of it. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, insistent that it be acknowledged. At first I thought it was one of the cats yowling about a bird outside the window he could not kill. I looked under the table—nothing. Behind the couch—again, nothing. I could see myself, as though looking at my shadow, searching for the cat who would not be soothed as the wail grew louder and louder. I turned in the living room where my wife had stood silently behind me. She threw both arms around me and held on tight.

9

Three years old, I placed my hands on the bottom rung of a bright green railing. Just beyond it a scraggly juniper had latched itself to a nub of brown rock. The air was hot and dry, and my cotton shirt was scratching my neck. I stuck my head between the top rung and the bottom rung to see if there was anything beyond the nub of rock with its tiny juniper hanging on. Far below I could just make out a trickle of muddy water. Mommy, I said, let’s go down there and swim. She told me there wasn’t enough time. Grandmother was waiting for us in Flagstaff. 

The next time I stood on the north rim of the Grand Canyon I was eighteen. The railing still ran the length of the visitor’s park. All morning I had searched with my camera and a telephoto lens for scenes which seemed familiar. I had shot three rolls, but nothing sparked my memory. I popped a wide angle lens into place and snapped a few panoramic shots. Then I found the nub of rock. It had a distinct cleft in one side where the juniper seemed to have finally let go. On top of the rock a small black feather wavered in the breeze. I popped the wide angle off, dropped it into my bag and fumbled for the telephoto, all the while watching the feather. The tip was perfectly rounded. I could make out little bits of white skin still attached to the quill end. As I pulled the lens from the bag and snapped it onto the body I heard a small tink-tink-tink off to my right and I lifted the camera to my eye, zoomed in, metered for light, focused and snapped a couple shots. 

When I lowered the camera the feather skittered off the rock. I popped the lens off, set it in my bag, and noticed the three rolls I had shot were not where I had left them. I looked around my feet. Nothing. 

11

A mid-April Sunday and I stood in my living room looking through the sliding glass door of my rental house, out over the waves of Ontario rolling up the sandy beach. Spring buds had popped on the oak in the front yard. The ice had melted early. The house was set about a hundred yards back from the shoreline and maybe eight or ten feet above the water table with the road between the front yard and the lake. The house was a rickety bundle of boards thrown together with a leaky roof that moaned when a storm blew in off the water. It was 800 dollars a month 20 miles or so outside the city with a yard in which my dogs wandered. It was in a quiet neighborhood tucked along the shore, and even in the summer when the big water drew thrill-seekers and sportsmen with jet-skis and power-boats this stretch of shore was shielded from most of the noise. In about two and a half months I’d be swimming in the lake.

The kitchen phone rattled in its wall cradle and I turned and lifted it out and held it up to my ear—hello? My mother. She called to let me know they had arrived home from their latest two-week adventure, a drive from up-state New York to Clifton, Arizona and back. A few stops along the way…the gleaming arch in St. Louis—gateway to the west…did I know how it had come together, a great crane lifting the last piece into place… Another sojourn after a life of work. Retirement compels people to talk about how great retirement is. How’s dad, I asked. He was cleaning up two birds that had somehow found their way into the house. They’re dead, I asked. Yes.       

July Fourth came on a Sunday that year. The water was still too cold to swim but my sisters had driven up that Friday for a visit anyway. Saturday night we sat on the deck, perhaps the sturdiest feature of the house, just beyond the sliding glass door. Our chat ebbed and flowed, each taking a turn to tell of some new piracy while dusk rose out of the early-summer shadows and the steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the small waves marked time. Beyond the shore the lake was nearly flat. The inevitable screech…pop of the first skyrocket shot up and over the water. Moments later fireworks began in earnest, pop-pop-pop-bang-pop-pop…the calm surface turned to a riot of reflected yellows and reds and one of my dogs crawled into my bother-in-law’s lap. 

Seven in the morning the next day I was poking in my fridge when the phone rattled—hello? My mother—emotion drained from her voice. Your father didn’t make it. Gravity seemed to stop…I could have walked upside down on the ceiling as though that was normal. I asked if there was someone there who could take care of her until we arrived. I didn’t know he was sick. I headed toward the stairs to wake my sister and her family. 

A Friday morning in February, 18 months later, and all the history of her widow’s walk lifts her silent gaze down the length of her legs, past her blackening feet, past the footboard of the hospital bed, through the door and down the hall and out the window where the cardinals crush corn kernels with their cone beaks like old wives’ tales unrepentant. Unresponsive, the nurse had said, catatonic and a lifetime of vices-turned-habits arrive at a single point of time where a son and two daughters sit by the bedside of their mother, taking turns holding her hand and telling her it’s okay to leave and she stares unmoved. Afternoon and the doctor steps in-between birth and death to pronounce the terrible liberation.

12

Twelve months. Twelve feathers. Twelve experiences. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Fragments of memory, a story with gaps and holes between the experiences without thematic thread or chronological order like a meandering stone wall in need of spring mending. So many gaps, no-one has seen them made or heard them made. Yet here they are, a collection of memories chaotically stratified under layers of time and a road ravels out below me as I race toward some ineluctable and unwritten history. So many holes, the things I’ve forgotten blending with the memory of petals on a wet black bough I remembered while standing on the platform of a subway, somewhere. I’ve forgotten the place, the people, their faces flowering into an apparition as they rush toward work, toward home. 

Somewhere there’s the memory of two hundred years of tradition. The first President who knows that slavery doesn’t comport with the ideals of the fight he had led but couldn’t figure how to keep his plantation without them. The Property who escapes chattel and wonders aloud what the 4^th of July means to slaves. The president who says that his Address wouldn’t scour and thousands of men still march due south that this nation may not perish from the earth. The actor who hates him and aims a pistol at his head. The Devil Dogs who rush the lines of Belleau Wood and return heroes—broken forever. The games in Munich and a signal of light and sound transmits over the earth announcing superior German technology, a signal which flashes away from the earth at the speed of light while the gold of Jesse Owens runs in black and white reels. Rosie pulls her overalls on and drives rivets through sheets of aluminum—the wings of a p-51, Mustang, tank buster, angels on our shoulders. The president’s challenge to the moon and back because it is hard and three years later his head flops forward and his car speeds past Zaprudder’s eye. Five years after Vostok 1 and Gagarin’s MiG smashes into the ground north of Moscow two years to the day after Van Reypen is killed. Of earthrise from the moon, no maps or borders, simply land and water and silence passing through twilight into night. Of the earth in its orbit, the elliptical path passing closer to the sun while the northern hemisphere plunges toward winter. A single heart beat. A feather tumbles along the sands of a great beach as I gaze far distant, over the waves. Listen.

Tim Snyder, originally from Rochester, New York, lives with his wife in a small house on a narrow road with a dog and six cats in Northwestern Ohio. He divvies up his time working on his house, teaching composition, and interpreting for Deaf folks in his adoptive home state. He has published his work in journals such as The Poet’s Billow, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Aphor Magazine, and Albatross.