Redwind Daylong Daylong Other Books by Gail Sher

redwind daylong daylong other books by gail sher Prose The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice (Penguin 2002) One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers (Penguin 1999) From a Baker’s Kitchen • (Aris Books 1984) Poetry Birds of Celtic Twilight: A Novel in Verse (Night Crane Press 2004) Look at that Dog all Dressed Out in Plum Blossoms (Night Crane Press 2002) Moon of the Swaying Buds • (EdgeWork 2002) Lines: The Life of a Laysan Albatross • (Night Crane Press 2000) Fifty Jigsawed Bones • (Night Crane Press 1999) Saffron Wings • (Night Crane Press 1998) One Bug . one mouth . snap! • (Night Crane Press 1997) Marginalia • (Rodent Press 1997) La • (Rodent Press 1997) Like a Crane at Night • (Night Crane Press 1996) Kuklos • (Paradigm Press 1995) Cops • (Little Dinosaur 1988) Broke Aide • (Burning Deck 1985) Rouge to Beak Having Me (Moving Letters Press 1983) (As) on things which (headpiece) touches the Moslem (Square Zero Editions 1982) From Another Point of View the Woman Seems to be Resting (Trike Press 1981) redwind daylong daylong Gail Sher Q night crane press 2004 Copyright 2004, Gail Sher All rights reserved. Night Crane Press, 1500 Park Avenue, Suite 435 Emeryville, California 94608 www.gailsher.com Cover art: Gail Sher No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner and the publisher. ISBN: 0-9726115-2-5 For Brendan book one The Painter’s oils were flat The painter’s oils were flat. Single-toned except for the dribble down the linen’s periphery. Sometimes it soaked in. Or left wedges of naked cloth. Sometimes little globs of color piled up in one spot. Within the canvas, the crosshatch of opaque/transparent sections, like windows on clay or brownstone yellow. Caressing the color or the movement of the color, framed or gathered up. A woman will emerge at the edge of a skirt. Not the woman but her emergence is what the brush captures. ❍ A gust of chirp. First light flickered through the trees and onto the drenched pavement. “It must have rained during the night,” she’d thought, surprised, tiptoeing over the courtyard’s shallow puddles. 3 Her pleasant dream resurged. Woodwinds, pianos, violas, bassoons — in what had once been a rather large, shabby room with Formica tables and linoleum floors. Reaching toward the dream . slipping back . toward the color of hay. Her urge toward this color, its precise, crisp (nay brittle) mix of yellow, brown and green. What did it hold, she wondered. 4 Black sky and whirling flares Black sky and whirling flares tailgated her — some place. Should she stop here? There was nowhere else, but “here” seemed like it was still road. She slowed down. Her hands trembled in the spinning lights. New sun oozed its way over slimy land-fill water. Mount Tam yawned like a cat behind the Golden Gate. The previous day, as she’d gotten out of her car, a sable cat, comfortably curled on a neighboring hood, had stared her down. “What’s he doing here?” she’d found herself wondering. She imagined some scenario where the owners had run back to their apartment for a moment, but when she’d thought about it, it made no sense. They would have left it inside the car. Still, the cat seemed settled, not about to budge. Slowly the tears formed. 5 Wind howled and pellets of rain Wind howled and pellets of rain — bop bop bop. The world was black. Her neighbor’s light, off. She lay still. The window above her bed was partially raised. Sheer curtains fluttered, then poofed crazily over her head. Shrill wind sounded like a cat. Spray, first a film then driblets down her neck and onto her sheet. Wind, aired out, smelled clean as it poured mistlike through the slot in the dark glass. Then it pooled and felt sloshy. The front part of her room faced a quiet street. She rarely pulled the blinds. An evergreen had blown across one of the windows. From her bed it resembled a (huddled) homeless person. Just then she heard a cat. A real cat. Pink light from a street lamp distilled its way through the storm. A pack of dogs was pacing under it, lurking, carousing, sniffing. One sharp nerve panted its way over two front lawns. The floorboards creaked. “The old woman is restless,” she thought, helpless to even think of assisting her. 6 The four children “The four children playing twenty questions downstairs in the children’s room could be heard clearly on the second floor.” Such was the opening sentence of (in her opinion) a way-too short story. The quickest child turned out to be the youngest, a second-grader, who correctly guessed the word “raindrops” from four hints. The precocious boy’s mother was insisting that the neighbor’s child (the child who asked “Does it sound like — drip drip drip?”) had clearly known the answer and “let” her child win. “If rain makes noise, it’s raindrops,” she’d said. “That’s not true. The sound of rain and the sound of raindrops aren’t the same,” retorted a supporter of the second-grader — not his mother — who, it turned out, was, to begin with, embarrassed by her other (older) child’s choice of the unpleasant word “raindrops.” She felt that the neighbor’s youngster, knowing that her boy (when leader) always picked unpleasant words, would easily have guessed “raindrops.” It was obvious to her, and therefore doubly humiliating, that he had more or less “given” her little one the glory of winning. The squabbling of the children plus the symbolic distances of both the parental eavesdropping and subsequent commentary, duplicated later in their 7 own marital squabbles and distances, fascinated her. But the real hold, what carried over to the next day and even the next, was the author’s unequivocal distinction between the sound of rain and the sound of raindrops. Of course it was so, but she had never thought about it. “Well, that isn’t entirely true,” she thought, now that she was thinking about it. Quite often, especially at the junctures of the day — dawn, dusk, midnight — she found herself particularly relishing the multi-layered — “screened”? — sounds of gushing rain, the whoosh of it, against the weighty drip drip drip from the eaves. She would actually stop work, close her eyes and listen. Could “raindrops” (the word) be ugly? (She had been reading a translation.) 8 Kawabata’s fifty-ninth birthday Kawabata’s fifty-ninth birthday had been only a month away when the collection of stories was published. That was her age now, she thought, unsure of the import. The story, entitled “This Country, That Country” was the byline of an article featuring England’s Princess Margaret who apparently had changed her mind about her betrothal to Group Captain Townshend. Four years previous (while visiting Balmoral) the lovers had hoisted a stone onto a mound of similar stones, publicly acknowledging their feelings. The article showed a picture of the very mound in question. The journalist made the point that while it was impossible to tell which stone the Princess and Group Captain Townshend had added to the pile, since none looked as though the Princess alone could have lifted it, they must have lifted it together. When reading the article, Takako, Kawabata’s heroine, had tried to picture the Princess as she would have looked hoisting the stone onto the mound in tandem with the Group Captain, but the image that came was simply an image. Whereas the previous day Takako had felt sorry for the Princess (who was forced by church law and royal custom to abandon her beloved) that 9 feeling was now gone. Her empathy itself seemed like a foreign story. That an image which one day earlier had held this person enthralled was today simply an image — that the empathy she had felt (not hard to imagine feeling for one pushed to such an extreme) had evaporated — the accuracy of the depiction jolted her. 10 Rich night air Rich night air, liquid air, soft and bubbly (champagne air). Soon it would be morning air. The memory of that other air, close to morning, but not as close. Funny how a few hours made such a difference. That other air had stars. So numerous their ring echoed through the mountain valley. Indeed you could smell them. They lay at your feet throbbing. ❍ Snails and roots. The dug earth exuding, breathing a calliope of themselves. She had belonged. Home was here, though she knew nothing about the land. Gushy mud. Slobbery and clay-filled. The wetness had oozed its way inside, soiling her. (The mold as she dried.) Be sleeping in it. Upright, though not at first. Upright walking and at first seeming-to-be. But that was not the night’s fault. The shiny stars would have held her had she been weightless. Gooey mud was burdensome in addition to being black, skulking. 11 So what was the dread? Why did she fear the black part of day? ❍ A lamp draws to it night. A collection of lamps, night and the smells of night-pushing-on-toward-morning and light and morning-sounds already throbbing. Making things. (A policy helps. “I will do this under these circumstances.”) That other air held policies out. “Here,” it said. Here she felt none of that. 12 The rain had stopped The rain had stopped.

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