Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura

windfall soon. But the coming upon, the space called come-upon, with its soft breeze and footpath, torches the idea of harvest, of gleaning. Detonates “just taking a walk.” A bird pinned in air is a measure of wrongness. Walking can’t counter it. Redirecting attention towards kids won’t erase it. Even if moving quickly past—no progress instills; the sight can’t be siphoned from the scene. The bird’s presence impinges, like bait.
    But yellow gets to be glorious, too. And its brightness not wholly awful. Such a yellow scours sight, fattens it. It is uncorruptedly lemonlike. And the sharp bolt of black on the wing shines like a whip of licorice. At the end of the path and around the bend, here’s the coming-upon again. The moment itself doesn’t close down. Its brightness is not a slamming door. Yellow’s not trying to make up for the end.
    Time crests there.
    The weather patterns.
    Fish in the lake. Dogs by the shore with laughing kids.
    Why must a last moment be made so visible? And held aloft! Why must it dangle, and shift so softly, and keep on making a finality? From it, light rises. On it light settles. Slippery as tallow. Shushing in breeze.
    I think it’s good to be in a place where thought can’t form the usual way, and a familiar scene—a bird-in-a-tree—gets overturned. Dissembled. Made into a precarity. Looked at one way: cornucopic. Tilted another, it goes sepulchral. How close those can be.
    Someone might come and cut the bird down. Or I will, tomorrow.
    And after the bird’s gone, what would be there, as I come through the trees and around the bend—what, besides shots of memory? An arch of branches over the lake? A green frame around a spot of blue sky, rowboats in a fringe of rushes, the cattails and milkweed about to burst—and past the tangle, just the lake again?
    Once, that spot worked like a bower. I liked to walk there and pause at the turn, and enter it, and feel contained. Then, into the bower rained a bird. Dropped a bird. Now swings a bird. Hangs a bird. Yellow shines and yellow ripens. Somewhere are sparrows in a field, seen and watched over the story goes, and counted, even as they fall. But come stand in this clearing, late afternoon, the still lake fuzzed with gnats in the shade, the oak’s heavy green branch overhead, and lean just so. Center the goldfinch in the frame, squint a little, hold in sight—a planet, flecklet, blot on sun.
    A ripe pear, a portent, an airless balloon.
    A being whose falling was noted, was seen, whose end was tallied (by the hand of, if you believe.)
    An occasion for wondering what it feels like to believe.

There Are Things Awry Here
     
    I found a perimeter, thank God, and I’m walking. I’m making an hour of it, finding a way to get my breathing going hard. These four big lots with big box stores must compass a mile. Measuring helps. I am here (quick check: yes, panting and sweaty) but it feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers at all. So I’ll get to work, in the way I know how:
    Here is a farmer entering a black field. He’s a proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery, with a serviceable rope looped over his arm. But the farmer comes out of a logo’d truck and the rope links up to a ChemLawn can and off he goes to tend the weeds asserting through the blacktop. He pisses I don’t know where during his long day in the sun. His hat’s a tattered, red, GO BAMA cap. His tin lunchpail is a bag from Popeye’s, just down the road (I mean highway ).
    Here is a rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock. He’s nearly cantering over the brown grass, it’s already cropped short, but hey, he’s on contract, it’s the 15th of the month, so he comes to harrow the edge of the lot. The rancher rides masterfully and the mower goes fast; he turns sharply, leans into the bit, and the beast resists not at all.
    Here are the animals branded