Firn
hybrid by Claire McQuerry
I wake to moonlight
paling joined lakes,
peaks rising skyward from tattered shores
towards where my plane crosses
how thin and cold the air.
On looking longer I see: no,
not lakes at all
but snow, spilt like milk
over the ridges.
The boys name was Jason. Wed walk home after last bell, school bags dragging over lawns, where on hot days Id turn cartwheels in long bands of shade
Big-boned and slow, he was never to be mocked. Id been admonished. The other children, his mother said, are so unkind. Once, I opened my finger on sewing shears. (Shed let me make doll clothes from scraps of cloth). She held my hand under the faucet, as dark clouds of blood raveled across the bottom of her sink.
Across the airplane aisle a mother
strokes her sleeping sons hair. His mouth
rests open slightly. How smooth and unmarked
the faces of the very younghow enviable
the lack of trouble, their undisturbed
drifting into rest. The flight attendant
offers water from a plastic carafe,
passing it over the boys head.
Jasons father did something mechanical at the power plant. Hed come through the
door at 6
and then wed all know it was time to leave.
I cant imagine what he did when he came home that evening, long past childhood, to what we all read about in the news. I cant imagine because he was such a silent man I knew almost nothing about him.
The grown son, a perpetual child. The watchful mother.
Shed shot him once in the back of the head then shot herself.
Glacial lakes are milky
and green, sometimes the blue of aquamarine.
Colored pebbles along a remembered shore,
the mirrored trees, sear of such cold
locking over my feet and ankles.
Rock flour, someone tells me, is
what turns the water to milk.
Ive already understood
what I saw from my window were
not lakes but hollows of firn, invisible
to mostso remote
and inaccessible those peaks.
Even seeing, the mind deceives, stitching perception to memory.
He and I would scale dirt knolls of the empty lots between houses, sifting sand through our fingers. We played a game of winging stones into troughswhere workers would soon pour cement. What was empty closed in then, disappeared.
Jasons mother kept him home from high school. No one understands him, shed say. Hes very special and no one, not even his father, understands.
Once, much later, I saw him on a visit home. His large back could have been anyones at first, turned as he was toward the mini marts register. Even as he rang up my purchase, his gaze slid past mine. A fluorescent light washed out the glassed-in room, lending his skin the hue of sour milk. It was unclear when I said hello, whether he knew me.
Now weve begun the descent. The child cries
while the mother hefts him to her lap.
Hush. Hush, she tells him dreamily. Soon
youll be back in your own bed.
Even seeing, the mind deceives. Even seeing,
perception stitches.
The mother, who was she, really? Her lumber, the faded cornflowers of her dress, the doughy hands and breasts. She was safe, we thought. The safest. Sometimes shed take me to the plant nursery. It pleased her most when people thought I was her daughter.
The car smelt of hot vinyl. It all recedes
Those snow gullies
somewhere I could never locate
again, somewhere vaguely
midway between the coasts
may thaw or
persist for seasons, if never again
to my eyes, at least
then, in the mind of God.
I remember my own mother, teaching me to read beside the sunny window. A cat stretches on the warm cement. Next door, Jasons mother plants carrots in neat rows while the son plays indoors.
Seasonless rooms of memory. Rooms of all we think we know.
Shifting, aglow with unreal light.