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L.A. JOHNSON DIPTYCH I ride a train through the night. Without outline, the spine of California unfolds. I travel across the land, searching for an explanation of the distance between the past and the present. The artificial light creates planets on the black windows. Years ago, I wiped wet rags across a forehead. I cooked chicken soup as if it was a cure, real as medicine, and tinctures of elderberry perfumed the attic. Knives rang like bells when I set them, gently, in the sink’s well. My dress is wet, as if I plucked it out of a bathtub without notice of its watery droop and slipped it on. My bag, a coffin for black clothes, shifts in the empty space above me. If this train ever stops, it must happen while I’m sleeping. It was New Year’s Day, I remember the heavy rain, sparrows low in the garden, my mother leaning across the weedy beds of a vegetable patch. Saplings were curled inside their seeds, redwoods yet to be born. In those days, in the rainy season of childhood, we collected water in blue bowls. I want to go back. Once, rain in street corners became little moonscapes of ice. The world I travel toward is one without my father. A world where my mother walks the slick hills with rain on her face, my grandmother counts each step from the yard to bedroom, the hours until dark. |