Ecotone | Articles

This Noise from My Fingers

Poem by John Rybicki

Thoreau and the Lightning

Poetry by David Wagoner

Thoreau and the Loose Cow

Poetry by David Wagoner

Those Moments

Poetry by Richard Garcia

Thrall

Poetry by Natasha Trethewey

Three Maps

Three Maps by Aimee Bender

Three Maps

Three maps by Clyde Edgerton

Three Maps

Three maps by Rick Moody

Through the Apple Orchard

All Alan wanted to do that last summer was go over to John’s and smoke cigarettes with his friends. We’d wait until John’s mom backed her car out of the drive—she had the late shift at the county hospital—then start rustling around in the pantry. If we got lucky, there would be a few cans of warm beer or some cooking sherry, and we’d kill the rest of the night up in his drafty barn loft out behind their ramshackle house, shooting the shit and listening to Zeppelin and Hendrix. The whole summer seemed to go that way.

In a few days we’d all be starting high school—Alan a Catholic school over in Concord, John the local public school, me all the way across the country. I couldn’t have articulated the feeling then, but I remember the whole summer having this sense that something big needed to happen—that Alan and I had to make it happen—before it was too late. Before what was too late? I wasn’t sure. Before the summer ended maybe, and with it my childhood. As if a screen door might somehow slam shut in the wind and mysteriously latch.

It made sense, then, when John’s sister agreed to buy us a case of beer, to throw a big end-of-the-summer party. Made sense to hold it in John’s loft, the perfect party spot. If Alan kept hanging on John’s every word, following him around like a puppy, it wasn’t like I had much choice. John and Alan called up everyone they knew, then John drove us to Concord in his beat-up Duster (though he only had a permit), his long hair whipping in the wind. We sat waiting in the New Hampshire state liquor-store lot for over an hour, paranoid about cops. I felt bad that we skimmed ten bucks off John’s mom’s stash, but John said he did it all the time, she never noticed, not to worry.

His sister finally showed, on her lunch break from Papa Gino’s, sexy in her candy-red uniform. She had to pass alone under the new highway—her quick, staccato steps echoing inside all that concrete, signaling her arrival before we could make her out in the rearview. Then her pretty, other-side-of-the-tracks face there in the passenger's-side window, expression blank when she saw who was in the car.

“You’re just kids,” she said. Her name was Cindy or Sherry or something like that. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

We laughed nervously. Alan fiddled with the radio knob. I had this terrific urge to lean forward and take Cindy/Sherry’s face in my hands and kiss her. She looked at me like she guessed my fantasy and stuck her tongue out, darting it like a cat. Which was, in and of itself, almost enough. She got us the beer, though, and when John stepped out into the afternoon sun with a case in his arms, a shit-eating grin spreading full across his farm-boy face, I almost liked him, almost forgot that he was trying to steal my best friend. We hooted and hollered like we were at a rodeo.

I remember that drive back down the highway as one long rush of wind and blaring radio rock and roll. Little flashes of it filtering back. The cracked leather seat, the case of Narragansett under my arm, its cool cardboard pressing on my skin. John stiff-arming it down the highway. Alan turning back and smiling, crooning along with Tom Petty, She’s an American girl.

John stored the beer in an old cooler full of ice while Alan and I pulled out all the best records. Styx. Kansas. REO Speedwagon. Aerosmith’s "Toys in the Attic." I’d been listening to new music ever since the move, stuff John had never heard of or would ever like. Had been turning Alan onto my secret stash of New Wave 12” singles, some inner-city soul and prehistoric rap. But tonight it was classic rock all the way.

Alan and I tried to clean the place up, but it wasn’t easy. John left his shit lying everywhere. I cracked Alan up by throwing a whole pile of John’s shirts onto the floor. John walked right over them. So we went outside and made road signs out of old cardboard with magic-marker arrows pointing where to park. We knew we were acting queer; we just couldn’t help ourselves.

Through the Particular We Come Home

For two years after my youngest brother, Bryan, was born, my father called him George. Come here, George, he would call, holding out his arms to his third child, then running his fingers through Bryan’s softly curling hair. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t remember his name or that there had ever been the chance that Bryan would be a George. Rather my father called him George because, for the first few months of his life, Bryan was struggling to remain alive. Seriously burned over his entire body when a grossly negligent nurse immersed him in scalding water right after his birth, Bryan spent the early part of his life in continual and what can only be imagined as excruciating pain. He lost most of the flesh on the lower half of his body. There was an enormous chance that he would die. Even when it appeared that Bryan would be okay, my dad continued to call him George. As if “George’s” loss could be tolerated in ways that the loss of “Bryan” could not. It was only when Bryan, at the age of two, told my dad that his name was not George that my father began calling his son by name.

I have grown numb to the wavelengths below, overwhelmed by the endless blue, bewildered by the thought of waters deep enough to conceal mountain chains. Not since leaving the coast of California five hours ago have we had continent beneath us. Such oceanic dislocation is what makes coming upon the Hawaiian Islands so startling. Land was something we left behind, shed like a wet bathing suit, with the last bits of island clinging to the West Coast. Yet here it is again, quite literally in the middle of nowhere. The most geographically remote place in the world, the islands float, a strand of land pearls, adrift on the Pacific plate. And they appear out my window like a gift.

I love returning to these fragile, impossibly slight islands. I love the way my heart fills when I see them, read them letter-like from left to right: Kauai, then Maui, then Molokai. A familiar alphabet of land arranged on the chalkboard of the sea. Or perhaps I should be more honest here, say that I love the idea of my heart filling. I want my heart to fill. Then maybe I would be home.

When I was a child, the cupboards in our kitchen were always full of other people’s dry goods. Things my mother never would have bought at the commissary: raspberry Jell-O, dried manicotti shells, unfamiliar brands of baking powder. Refugees from the shelves of neighbors who had recently relocated to military bases in other parts of the country, they always had the feel of the exotic. I would marvel at how my mother would transform the tubes of pasta into something more familiar, slipping the Jell-O into a cake mix without my ever knowing it was there. Slowly the supply would dwindle and with it the memory of the family that had left the goods behind.

Tiny Man

Poetry by Sydney Lea

To See the Whole: A Future of Environmental Writing

I was fourteen when I first read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. That his 1949 book was hailed as “landmark” or, in Wallace Stegner’s words, “a famous, almost holy book in conservation circles” I knew nothing about. What appealed to my fourteen-year-old sensibilities were the intimate images of land and seasons in place and the seeming openness of this man’s struggle to frame a personal truth. In the last essay, “The Land Ethic,” Leopold enlarged the community’s boundaries “to include soil, water, plants, animals, or collectively: the land,” and his call for an extension of ethics to land relations expressed a sense of responsibility and reciprocity not yet embraced by this nation but embedded in many indigenous traditions of experience.

Tornado at Chester

Poetry by Angie Macri

Tourist Canoe

Poetry by Andrew Gottleib

Toward a Carefree World

Poem by Mary Ruefle

Town

For several years now I’ve wondered in a slow-burning ache if I’ll ever be able to chronicle what it’s like to live in a small town in the middle of Michigan that’s struggling to hang on, if I can somehow take the trains passing through night after night, offering up their long, drawn-out wails, and make of them, or of the water tower standing above abandoned oil fields or the rickety porches on the south side of town, a kind of sense, if only to myself, in order to say this is what it’s like here, without sanctimony or censure or the least trace of sentimentality.

It’s very important, perhaps even critical, to say something about a town like Alma, to arrive at some understanding of it, even if it’s partial and imperfect, to tug on the sleeve of the cosmos and inquire after this particular tiny corner of its staggering debris field and set forth an accurate portrait about the place where I have lived for almost eight years now. How I came to be here isn’t that important, only the fact that enough time has passed for the spirit of this place to gradually fill me up so that I must appear like someone afflicted with bouts of inexplicable sighing, sudden bursts of exhalation that suggest resignation or ennui but which are just a way to maintain stability in the midst of the town’s continuous outpouring of moon vibes.

Traveling to Pridesup

Otilla cooked up the water for her morning tea and opened a carton of ricotta cheese. She ate standing up, dipping cookies in and out of the cheese, walking around the enormous kitchen in tight figure eights as though she were in a gymkhana. She was eighty-one years old and childishly ravenous and hopeful with a long pigtail and a friendly unreasonable nature.

She lived with her sisters in a big house in the middle of the state of Florida. There were three of them, all older and wiser. They were educated in Northern schools and came back with queer ideas. Lavinia, the eldest, returned after four years, with a rock, off of a mountain, out of some forest. It was covered with lichen and green like a plum. Lavinia put it to the north of the seedlings on the shadowy side of the house. She tore up the grass and burnt out the salamanders and the ants and raked the sand out all around the rock in a pattern like a machine would make. The sisters watched the rock on and off for forty years until one morning when they were all out in their Mercedes automobile, taking the air, a sinkhole opened up and took the rock and half the garage down thirty-seven feet. It didn’t seem to matter to Lavinia, who had cared for the thing. Growing rocks, she said, was supposed to bring one serenity and put one on terms with oneself and she had become serene so she didn’t care. Otilla believed that such an idea could only come from a foreign religion, but she could only guess at this as no one ever told her anything except her father, and he had died long ago from drink. He was handsome and rich, having made money in railways and grapefruit. Otilla was his darling. She still had the tumbler he was drinking rum from when he died. None of father’s girls had ever married, and Otilla, who was thought to be a little slow, had not even gone off to school.

Otilla ate a deviled egg and some ice cream and drank another cup of tea. She wore sneakers and a brand new dress that still had the cardboard pinned beneath the collar. The dress had come in the mail the day before along with a plastic soap dish and three rubber pedal pads for the Mercedes. The sisters ordered everything through catalogs and seldom went to town. Upstairs, Otilla could hear them moving about.

“Louisa,” Marjorie said, “this soap dish works beautifully.”

Otilla moved to a wicker chair by the window and sat on her long pigtail. She turned off the light and turned on the fan. It was just after sunrise, the lakes all along the Ridge were smoking with heat. She could see bass shaking the surface of the water and she felt a brief and eager joy at the sight—at the morning and the mist running off the lakes and the birds rising up from the shaggy orange trees. The joy didn’t come often any more and it didn’t last long and when it passed it seemed more a part of dying than delight. She didn’t dwell on this however. For the most part, she found that as long as one commenced to get up in the morning and move one’s bowels, everything else moved along without confusing variation.

From the window, she could also see the mailbox. The flag was up and there was a package swinging from it. She couldn’t understand why the mailman hadn’t put the package inside. It was a large sturdy mailbox and would hold anything.

She got up and walked quickly outside, hoping that Lavinia wouldn’t see her, as Lavinia preferred picking up the mail herself. She passed the black Mercedes. The garage had never been rebuilt and the car had been parked for years between two oak trees. There was a quilt over the hood. Every night, Lavinia would pull a wire out of the distributor and bring it into the house. The next morning she would put the wire back in again, warm up the Mercedes and drive it twice around the circular driveway and then down a slope one hundred yards to the mailbox. They only received things that they ordered. The Mercedes was fifteen years old and had eleven thousand miles on it. Lavinia kept the car up. She was clever at it.

“This vehicle will run forever because I’ve taken good care of it,” she’d say.

Otilla stood beside the mailbox looking north up the road and then south. She had good eyesight but there wasn’t a thing to be seen. Hanging in a feed bag off the mailbox was a sleeping baby. It wore a little yellow T-shirt with a rabbit on it. The rabbit appeared to be playing a fiddle. The baby had black hair and big ears and was making small grunts and whistles in its sleep. Otilla wiped her hands on the bodice of her dress and picked the baby out of the sack. It smelled faintly of ashes and fruit.

Inside the house, the three sisters, Lavinia, Louisa, and Marjorie were setting out the breakfast things. They were ninety-two, ninety, and eighty-seven, respectively. They were in excellent color and health and didn’t look much over seventy. Each morning they’d set up the table as though they were expecting the Governor himself—good silver, best china, egg cups and bun cozy.

They settled themselves. The fan was painted with blue rustproof paint and turned right on around itself like an owl. The soft-boiled eggs wobbled when the breeze ran by them.

“Going to be a hot one,” Lavinia said.

The younger sisters nodded yes, chewing on their toast.

“The summer’s just begun and it appears it’s never going to end,” Lavinia said.

The sisters shook their heads yes. The sky was getting brighter and brighter. The three of them, along with Otilla, had lived together forever. They weren’t looking at the sky or the empty groves which they had seen before. The light was changing very fast, progressing visibly over the table top. It fell on the butter.

“They’ve been tampering with the atmosphere,” Lavinia said. “They don’t have the sense to leave things alone.” Lavinia was a strong-willed, impatient woman. She thought about what she had just said and threw her spoon down irritably at the truth of it. Lavinia was no longer serene about anything. That presumption had been for her youth, when she had time. Now everything was pesky to her and a hindrance.

“Good morning,” Otilla said. She walked to the wicker chair and sat down. The baby lay in her arms, short and squat like a loaf of bread.

Twinkle Twinkle

For a while you were not allowed to go within four cubits of Spinoza, because of his incendiary ideas; getting close to him was like getting close to a fire. He had to abandon the dried fruit trade and find a more solitary job. Spinoza died in 1677, at forty-four, of a lung disease exacerbated by breathing the glassy dust generated in his work grinding telescope lenses. That was the same year Edmond Halley of Britain first made a note of Eta Carinae. It was an apparently ordinary star––not too bright, not too faint––of the fourth magnitude. Fourth magnitude is 2.5 times as bright as fifth magnitude, which is 2.5 times as bright as sixth magnitude, and so on: seventh magnitude is too dim for the untelescoped eye to see.

Many students of the stars begin with the sun, that reliable yellow star outside your window that makes you hatch out of your sleep every morning and makes all your houseplants grow lopsided. But I would recommend starting, instead, with Eta Carinae, for it is erratic and could expire within the next million years.

Two Abodes

Two Finches, the Last, Perch on the Power Line Hitting Notes Just for Song, or An Empty Street before Dawn

Poetry by Suzanne Frischkorn

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