“Can you stand?” my father says.
The ice, I see, is swept, wet, white. “Try standing,” my father says. “Up.” There is forcefully dampered music, piped. There is no sky. No rain, no threat. “See it?” my father says. “Look.” No hint. It used to be something else, this forceful place. “Before your time,” he says.
He looks like my father.
“Gone,” he says.
“Dad?” I say. I am gaining my feet. There is something, I think, or nothing, hairline, cleft.
Deep. The voice. “Steady.”
A person could be dizzy.
“You almost can see it.”
“Dad?” I say.
It is dizzying.
“Things I could tell you,” my father is telling me. He is inflection, timbre; unfamiliar and expected in the faraway, fatherly way he always has. “Gloves…” he says. “Folds…” I feel the after-rills of phrases, words between the words I am invariably failing to catch. “A curtain there…an arch…”
A ramp’s slope.
What I want is to skate. I do. Want to. Want and want to want. Pulsing my toes, my fingers restless, ragged-nailed. “Now?” I say.
My father is talking marble and Saturday. “Nights,” he says, whatever, I don’t know. “Glass,” he says, or “Hats,” he says.
“Tails,” he says.
“These skates,” I say. “My toes.”
My father is pressing for fit, says, “Gutted.” I feel it. “Better?” he says.
I have had practice.
“Better,” I say. “Better, please.” My ankles flinch.
There is a woman in the middle of the middle of the ice, going backward. Curve and grace is what she is, and speed, and speed.
There is knowing in the body. My father is touching my elbow, glancingly, knowingly, fluidly moving beside me, before me, ushering me from behind.
“The center is lower,” my father says, “in a girl.”
The woman appears to me to be weightless.
“Why?” I say. “What center?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” my father says.
She is all lift.
I am in a wobble.
“Never mind,” my father says.
I am making my father fall, almost. I almost could.
“Easy, easy does it,” my father says. “Use your head, for heaven’s sake.”
I am flailing for his arm. “Tell me,” I say. “Now.” My father is smartly just past reach. “Why?” I say.
“You know,” he says, “a person can not hear you.”
Habit. Fearborne. Sleeves, snaps, cuffs. I am speaking to a bead, to a fearful pearlish glinting in myself. “This place,” I say, “was what?”
“Careful,” my father says.
There is a ceiling, of course. Always was. Flight’s worth up. It burns, the ice, rebukes my back. Flat flung limbs. Nothing is broken, my father says. Birds, I say. It is terribly high, even given style, even given flights, even given tricks with scarves. A person could stand on a person’s shoulders, given even balance, a bent for stunt, feint — a lady fluttering, swooning, waft and lilt and pale, light, sweet perfume, airily, deftly arcing off a balcony — taken down, removed.
My father is furrow and how many fingers.
“Who?” I say.
“Who do I look like? Please,” I say.
“My name?” I say.
“What day?” I say.
“Wait,” I say. “My ankle,” I say, “hurts.” It all comes back — oh, the power of the powerfully helpless. “Hurts,” I say.
“Let me,” my father says. “Will you?”
“WON’T,” I say. “Will not,” I say, “help.” This is only a portion of an answer in advance.
Now you see it: My father’s skates are scarred, if from daring or storage, I do not know — in houses, cellars, wrecked and vaulted rooms, strewn, or bound, paired, dolled in attic rags, sleeves, yokes, the ruined drapes, the molded sheets — in plundered trunks, a chest; a lavish efflux: See under spawn and brackish fissure, over sunken seams, ridge, reef; see under floe; see under yaw, in another time zone, found.
By the way, I am married.
“Won’t,” I say, “help.”
I am kneeling and fanning and lying.
I am not a child.
“Let me,” my father says, “see it?”
I say, “Will you?”
I SAY, “Please,” or I say, “Look,” or “Hurts,” I say. He is touching my elbow, hair, my arm. We are in an aisle; he is touching a veil, net, necklace — luminous, inherited; I am carrying lilies; there is no breeze; I am carrying nothing, blood; we are in rooms, in years, in the rending of an instant, cleaving in the yawning dark, curled, here, gone. He is touching a shoulder — blade, wing — nobbed, insistent back. “What?” he says. “I can’t,” he says, “hear you, make sense of you, the way you turn away.”
HE is holding my foot, my father is. “Flex,” he says.
The woman jumps.
“How does it feel?” my father says.
“Sore,” I say. Impossible, the height.
“Very sore.”
…The woman lilts, floats, rises, impossibly rises.
“Sprained,” I say. (I have had lessons.) “Horribly sprained.”
“Not likely,” my father says. “Couldn’t. You hardly were moving.”
“Was,” I say.
“Can’t be,” he says.
“Could,” I say.
“Could so,” I say.
“You are so small,” my father says. “You didn’t have very far to—”
“Wait,” I say. “There was a second in the air, I remember, when everything—”
“Slipped,” my father says. We are all interruption.
“Spun,” I say. “It—”
“—Most you did was slip,” my father says. “Scratched, tops. More or less—”
“Please,” I say.
“More or less nothing.” My father is moving. “I am waiting,” he says.
“Still waiting,” he says.
“Can’t hear you,” my father says.
I am on bony, graceless knees.
The woman is glowing, effulgent.
I could be imploring.
“TELL me,” he says. “What?”
There is a way that whatever you turn away from owns your heart. There is a way that it doesn’t.
He is touching my neck, a clasp, mesh. We are under a shimmering sky.
He is still waiting.
I am in white. “Carry me,” I say.
NIGHTJARS
FROM there, they went north. Not due north, but north. What difference? Fearless, or nervy with fear, young — she younger than he was, unless she was lying. Cold, too. She was cold, she said. He turned cuffs. No coat. No heels. Deliberate earth. “I am never cold,” he said. He unbuttoned. Rude streets. The sorrow of commerce in a town passed through. A qualmy, lonely light. It was always a certain kind of day in the places where they were not expected. Broken. “Salt,” she said. She liked to lurk, or said she did, or mostly did, or did not mind, she said. She was keen, she said, of certain necessary senses. Torsos, armless in windows, beckoned — faces planed and shopworn chins aloof. She registered keenly, slanted into arrogance. He inhaled. What she smelled was salt, she said, greasy and vended, and sweat-soaked flannel, and rusty, wasted cats. She predicted weather. Board, chalk, brick. Cashier. An alley, germy and wrappered, delinquently wet. She stole. He paid. They stole. Squares peeled off, gray as the rumbling vehicle gray of slow escape. She was hoarding unnatural heat. Planks and spires — nowhere for his knees, he said, on this poor bus; litter in the aisle — poles and lean-tos, shambling, water-rotted shacks with laundry drably flapping, a chicken in the dirt looking lost. “No?” she said. “Yes,” he said, agreeing. He was tall in these parts. She chattered. Futile, this artificial heat. Nothing was growing. A vista gaped: grainy, reliefless, limbless nothing, corroded, expired, until the eyes renewed it. Their eyes did. Birds rose. Stiff fields cropped up. Trees sprawlingly rooted, restless, wormy flanks, a river veering gangly, passably north.