Cake + Mirror + Squirrels
April again and in the woods behind my house next to the railroad tracks, there is an ocean of garbage that has tidal timings. Its contents swell and recede weekly. It’s not the empty vodka bottles, or the beer cans, the rotten trays of macaroni, splat on the ground that disturbs me, but the crib and baby mattress.
I walked these woods more deliberately in lockdown. Exploring for the first time the access road that leads into an abandoned field where a factory used to be. It’s now all deer running behind the chainlink fences, dotting the tree line, and playing near the angry KEEP OUT signs. It started as aimless walking, but when I realized the forest roads back there had become an illegal dumpsite, it became an exploration. Small mysteries in objects. A way to travel. A way to keep in tune with a city and its people whom I could not touch or be with. A way to tuck under the frothy surface, deep-dive my city. The place where Gilmore St. meets Lyon St. suddenly an ocean floor.
What is a wave? I’ve asked myself this question many times in the last twelve months.
A reflection, the bouncing or moving of energy through barriers, or against them. A spectrum; a velocity. A virus ripping back and forth through bodies in a particular geography. A wave is the transferring of energy through a medium. Any medium is a conduit for energy; water, sound, light, your body. A wave is the movement of a medium back and forth. If this is true, then the ocean of garbage behind my house is the medium that transfers the energy of my city to me. Each object an electric message pushed by a human towards me.
What is my city telling me? First I notice old ceiling tile boxes that read, YOU BELONG UNDER CEILUME. I take a photo. The slogan strikes me as particularly persuasive. To tell someone they belong is peak cult talk. Burn pits. Window frames with glass busted out. Men’s black socks with red heels and toes. Gas station coffee cups. Tires. Used condoms. Untreated lumber. An Oscar Meyer Weiner whistle. Panties tied to the fencing. Two pairs. Black and pink lace. It took four months for them to melt away. Pinwheel half-buried; blue and orange reflective. A water gun in the shape of a handgun, spray-painted black so at first glance I thought it was a gun; I watched ivy grow over it until one day I couldn’t find it. A cracked porcelain sink with gold faucets. A blue bucket that some days is on the left side of the road, and some days on the right. Bottles: Hennessy, peppermint vodka, gin. Matted oil carpeting. Dirty doormats. A Little Ceasar’s Pizza fleece pullover. Large glimmering sequin confetti, a trail of it leading out of the woods. A bouncy pink ball with purple stripes slowly deflated into a pink rubber puddle and then one day it was gone. Another day, women’s size-5 snow boots showed up. Laying in the middle of the road toe-to-toe. The fur at the top slicked with mud and rain. A child’s metal bed frame and around it, dead nettles, ramps, stray grape hyacinth, their bed now.
One morning I am dumbfounded to find a vanilla sheet cake with bright blue frosting, bursting over the small tender new growth in the woods. A sad scream directed at the ground. The cake facedown, like a hand covering a mouth. Slashes of primary blue fatty frosting, stiff and wasted. A celebration dumped. I have missed some things in lockdown, but I haven’t missed cake. Friends and neighbors keep sending me cakes; triple-layer cinnamon buttercream apple cake, a careful homemade Easter cake in the shape of a lamb with jelly bean eyes, coffee cakes, lemon cupcakes. Cake for breakfast, cake for lunch. I am alone for months, but (luckily) awash in cake. I am paddling through a deadly pandemic on a lake of cake. This made the trashed cake even more puzzling. Was this a rage-filled act? Who throws a whole cake away in the woods?
Once or twice, late at night after some wine and boredom, I got brave and decided to walk the woods at night and see if I could spot someone dumping things, but as soon as I passed the street light by the train tracks I would start to chicken out. I was too scared to walk the darkest parts of the road by the fencing, my stomach lurching, telling me not to. I saw cars and couldn’t make myself walk towards them. But I wanted to catch someone in the act. Really see a car pull up, really see what comes out of it; up until now it’s all been like a slow static magic trick in reverse. Objects appear and the magician never appears.
But then I found a mirror. A beautiful one. A mirrored armoire jewelry box, really, I grabbed it fresh off a new junk pile next to a walker. The gold filigree and red velvet innards drew me right to it. I walked home, mirror in hands. As I cleaned the piece carefully I realized the mirror was slightly wavy, warped. Fitting maybe. This wavy reflection of myself. More accurate than the other mirrors in my house. The one that tells the story of yearning for energy, connection.
I call my crush on the phone. We talk until dawn, until we stop making sense, or one of us loses language. The low tones in his voice such a comfort to me. I lie in the dark and listen to him like he’s my favorite radio station. It makes me feel like a teenager again. Talking, just to talk even when we have nothing to say. On social media, people anguish about surviving a pandemic only to walk outside to the possibility that they might be murdered in a mass shooting. He brings it up over the phone. It’s 4 am and it’s too awful to think about so my mind goes to Arctic ground squirrels. I tell him about how I saw them in Denali two summers ago. How their hibernation is uniquely close to death. Their brains flicker above freezing, their hearts halting to one beat per minute. Ice miraculously doesn’t form in the veins because its body clears away ice seeding crystals, how exactly? Maybe it’s a closed system? We’re still studying. But most of all, after this August-to-April near-death state, the Arctic ground squirrel (after surviving a half-death) often pops out of the ground in April only to be eaten by bears in the first few moments of spring. But a bear has to eat. Mass shootings shouldn’t exist. My crush tells me the Arctic ground squirrel deserves a crown of sonnets. I wonder if he can feel me smiling in the dark.
Sometimes silence between us, I worry, is an ending. Permanent. I long for him to come rushing back. Circles, waves, cycles. Patterns are hard to break. Waves are hard to redirect. The peak is quick and then it’s downhill. I want us to be a multi-climactic, self-indulgent mess of a novel that just keeps going, not some classic American short story that gets so sour at the end.
In class, I teach the form of the pantoum and we look at the way it moves forward, only to take steps back. This dragging repetition. The waves. Incremental progress only to be pulled back under and under and under by the same images, same language, same lines. We end back where we started because the poem begins and ends with the same line. Did anything happen at all? Was the space between the first and last line just a dream? Was it futile? What is the point?
I read aloud from Donald Justice’s “Pantoum For The Great Depression,”
“And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.”
Will the pandemic end? Will we recognize its ending? Or is it part of our permanent rhythms now? Waves of sickness rushing back.
Yesterday in the woods I found practically brand-new chartreuse Grinch Who Stole Christmas slippers, a toilet brush, a broken dish drain, and some rebar. But there were new developments this morning. Someone had bagged up all the garbage. It lines the access road in neat blue plastic piles now. Who will take it? When will it go? Someone cut the wires on my garbage telephone in the middle of the night. How will I know my city now? Where do I look for messages now?
I am struggling so hard to feel close to anyone right now. My experiences creating more and more barriers between me and the people I interact with. My past an ocean of garbage to wade through to get to the tenderest parts of me. I am trying hard to be open and soft. But some days I want to let the garbage tide take me. I have wanted for so long to belong somewhere but I keep journeying. I have known the geometry of longing much more deeply than belonging.
April again and on the coldest spring nights, after I hang up the phone, after all the cake is gone, when I want to be held and no one is there, I bite my lips and cheeks until I fall asleep. I have learned to eat myself when there is nothing and no one else.
