Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura Page B

rancher into his stable, right up the ramp and the tailgate slams shut. And my farmer—he’s holding his rope low and firm while it leaks a bright poison as yellow and brief as a corn snake sunning, then startled, then disappearing back into the ground.
    Here in the lot is some corrugated cardboard I thought was an animal’s vertebrae (sign of hope, life in burrows!). Here the Brinks truck is outside The Cobb, and the driver is armed, as he’s been since the beginning of transfers of loot. Here, with a thought to my love up north, I pluck a dandelion (it escaped the farmer), the gesture complete as it’s always been—small, flowery symbol of tender missing. I passed a shard of—it looked like pottery (domestic life/human scale!)—but close up was a shorn chunk of thick plastic.
    And before the Committee on Irrevocable Mistakes chose this to do to the land—plant tar, seed commerce— here was what?
    What was here, that a body moved through it?
    Back in my room I can’t shake the sensation (despite my dandelion in a plastic cup, curtains wide open, basket of apples to naturalize things): a strangeness, an insistence is hovering. The strangeness makes me say aloud to myself—something had to be here, something had been .
    Something made me make stand-ins, cut-outs, cartoons. It made me possessive, led me to say “my rancher, my farmer, my good farmer’s wife”— mine, because I had to make them. From scratch. Out of something. Had to make them look like . A past. “The past.” I conjured clichés (which come fashioned with roots.) I had to make something, because the land couldn’t do it. The land gave nothing up. There was no plan, no narrative here, or tether-back-to. Just boxes to eat in. Big boxes for shopping. One boxy theater with nine movies plexed in. The parking lots gaped. Snipped, sprayed and divided. Unpeopled. Tidied for no one.
    Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts—voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks, sops and sprouts. But this land didn’t read. It babbled the way useless things babble—fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubly plaques for occasions, ConGRADulation mugs / frames /figurines. Capped, crusted, contained, so laden with stuff—how can it breathe?
    Here, surely, went people with thoughts, in the past—and not as I conjured them: fleet, makeshifty odes, dumb stock-assumptions, citified cartoons, with force of wind, vast stretch of blacktop shaping my story of them very poorly. (Points, maybe, for hale traits I imbued: reticence, dignity, industriousness, skill!) My folks were as flat as those cowboy silhouettes slouched up against mailboxes, but the drive to olden them, tie them back to the earth, give them good pastoral work was real.
    I’ll start over, since this is America, land of beginnings. Since overnight, here didn’t clarify at all, I’ll start again, very simply, with my simple problem:
    Here it’s February 2008, and I can’t figure out how to get my body to land in a land where the present’s not speaking. Where stories won’t take, and walking is sliding. I found a cadence to quiet the chatter, a word useful for focus and pacing out steps— “Refuse,” which I used as both re-FUSE and REF-use, resistance-meets-garbage, iambic /trochaic, sing-songy, buoyant—but alas, it ordered not much. So today I go searching in earnest. To the library first, then around the corner to Special Collections where I blurt my question to the expert on duty: Near the site of The Cobb—that whole south side of town (“mess of emptiness” I’m conveying with pauses)— by the Big K and Hooters (“that awful nowhere” suggested by sighs), before all that, what was there?
    Ah, she says, disappearing in the back, then returning with a stack of yellowing magazines. Here, try these.
    I find a clear