Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

. . ever drifting, drifting, drifting

On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;

Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart . .

and furthermore,

Far or forgot to me is near —

But the brownish man with the blue eyes murmured, "Very good, very good." And Margaret went on:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again. .

And when, on hearing her name closer by yet in a new way so she felt she was much older (this she told her grandson one day half a century later), she was asked by the Inventor her birthday, she told him hoping for a present; and then she felt a grip upon her arm that drew her away toward other pieces of the Statue so firmly the grip is like the tone of her father’s protective voice, with whom she is jointly visiting Bedloe’s Island. But(?) Go west, young girl, young woman? Who has the time?

For we felt late.

Yet replays are available. As we for them. So we saw whatever from new angles and in an order not up to us but we at least felt it could have been. Just as we got to be at high times the very angles we saw by, and knew in a rush this was none other than the angels sharing what they could with us— their intuitions not unlike what we term telepathy; their sympathy with another being or beings as close as what our own recent formulae infer to be Simultaneous Reincarnation; their patience much like the mind-bending trip our recent research promises, mapped of detours that arrive by curves that prove parallel by crossing. The replays will help and we should be able to replay them in future in any order why even a child could think up. But then we came down unavoidably and into another medium also watery but then we felt no more like angels. We did feel collective knowledge in excess of the event our preparation targeted: an event which was almost too much like itself, to wit a sort of execution. Weren’t we sure? And weren’t we there? Weren’t we even the ones meant? Breath breath breath breath breath. If you’re upset it’s because you want to be, it’s coming from you, you know, not the squad facing you in the prime playground. We already remember, and have we even seen it? Whatever it is, it weighs less while costing the same, yet can get into the habit of looking like it weighs nothing or is divorced from the concept of weight until we step quickly to one side of its shadow and see that, sure, it has weight. And then we see we remembered, unlike prior angels who needed no such process.

How we remember is something else, a whole nether question down the worm-road’s thread eroding some exact degree of blood between the diva’s doctor’s friend the Ojibway healer and guide and his one-third-Sioux part-Navajo cousin, a father-sky of turquoise upon his shoulders, a mother-earth beneath his pony’s hooves. And this cousin is in turn so distantly connected to a Navajo Prince of the early 1890s that we need even more justly define that kinship, maybe with this very patience coming to us periodically like refractions through waters of rain and bright dusts of air. So that in doing so we know more than we did or thought; and it will not go away, the northern bison tongue which that Navajo Prince held fast to the study of until violently interrupted and held fast to still, while he crossed the Pacific-Atlantic land-bridge between New Mexico and New York, holding always in his bag or pocket a section of bison’s tongue which he knew could yield active force immeasurable if only the layers of its fiber and light could be touched in a manner that the Great Spirit must already have told us in the loaded dreams some wide mountains experience. Meanwhile, we might just reduce that kinship to questions that are more lasting and alive than answers, if it had not already been done.

By at least one of our number. A grandmother who told stories upon stories to a grandson James or Jim long before his mother took her life if not her drawn, apparitional face away from him, and sometimes afterward also. Stories that often did not finish and were easy to understand, he thought; stories that passed the time. Stories that he retold himself to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not.

He kept an eye on both. This left him by our count one eye free for what was in between but put his moving feet in two places often at once like East-West magi even of that time, wise persons who they say could be in two places simultaneously, Grace Kimball on second thought among them though not for that feat (for she was always only here) but for having a total view, including healing change, finding as she must on what we will call her wheel a place and time and power for just everything:

Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier — Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and we are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.

(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)

And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?

It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.

What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into — that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view — or any view — of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was — slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept — we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.

Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse — and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.

Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.

"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve — so it is wondered if they will turn us in.

For, say two things at once — that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it? — make up your mind — I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?