Change of address

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Slavitt, David R

1

In the still of the night, the works of a quartz clock advancing the sweep second-hand make the sound of a child in the next room, bored or mischievous, stupidly

popping bubble wrap and, as he turns real, my patience, never great, dwindles, exhausted, but the guise of the god of time reveals itself-- a relentless, destructive brat given to tantrums, whom it's prudent (but also torture) not to confront.

The walls of the house meanwhile, grown soft and gummy, would, if I pressed my palms against them, give way or, like mozzarella, yield to a finger's persistent probing. I know this, having learned to distrust what the senses report, for empiricism yields, as it would to faith, to desperation and panic.

2

Desire is always for something other, later and elsewhere, abstracting the here and now as it hurries and harries us into a future we are too shrewd to suppose will be an improvement. Meanwhile, rot sets in and the present's rich presence pales, diminished as if by a doctor's report-there is never a reckless mention of "cure" but a temporization, that "five-year survival" in which time changes its flow, no longer a placid stream but a rush, a race of white water with eddies and roaring falls we knew were there but behaved as if that deadly current had nothing to do with us. This bed, I can feel, is floating. I try to hold on to a piling or branch overhead, compiling lists.

3

Motion came later: our earlier order was fixed, the life of plants to which we return each night burrowing into the bedding as if to take root and resume, at least for a time, a vegetative

condition we never forgot. What we call the love of place is our sense of connection rootlets absorb with the pungent nutrients only that loam and that water offer. That geologic concinnity's taste is what we know and who we are. Transplanted, we may, elsewhere, survive if not quite thrive, but at night, for months, for years, the neuron-fine filaments still will stretch forth in search of terrain they recognize, the marrow, the special tang by which we bloomed, vivid still in our dreams.

4 In strangers' rooms, empty or full of their stuff, you look not merely for housing but what might be right as the lair of a possible self, that furtive creature the merest sign of which would give you hope.

Most of the time, what you see are displays of ruin-- why else would they decamp and move on? But now and again, you have a sense of his having been there, or even of his impending entrance, proposing what you for an instant consider and then, for whatever reason, reject. And you drive off with the agent, leaving him there in those empty, gloomy rooms to languish. You're right and feel relief but also distress for that stillborn wraith you recognized with his claim of kinship from which you turned away.

And then you find that plausible place, the space, the location, the light, the things that can't be changed, just what you wanted, but. . . what are they asking? Sordid questions we put to ourselves about money and time.

But the market is not what I know about, and the experts' advice is only advice: it is in our guts that we choose to take the plunge or not. Can we hope to find something else at that price anywhere as good?

It's stress, and I'm wide awake before dawn and making plans-to avoid the larger task of deciding, which happens all by itself. We feel plates shifting of what we supposed was solid ground, and the shape of the landscape is different. Do you know you are falling in love or only realize that you have fallen?

6

And the house that was your house, whose spaces you'd learned, your accurate hand reaching out for a light switch, your sure feet counting its steps with no need to trouble your head: in an instant it's different, a burden you barely bear. And that you are the one who has been unfaithful only makes matters worse, for it keeps its silence, a wronged wife who knows it would do no good to complain. But her silence accuses. You also suspect these rooms, even now, may be letting themselves imagine other, better furniture, pictures, hangings, and livelier conversations, and surely better and more attentive cleaning and gardening. Houses, having their own lives, and with longer spans, like the long odds and can play a waiting game.

7

We live in our heads mostly but not altogether, and at moments like this we have to own up to the choices we seem to have made-appliances, furniture, clothing, the clutter and junk of a life, much of which we're discarding with regret, relief, or, after a while, just numbness. And whatever remains will get packed and put in a van that is not-I keep telling myself-an enormous hearse, which is why they are not preceded by flower cars.

Still, what's a house but a resting place? That this one has not turned out to be my next-to-last from which they carry me out is no small surprise. The ancient olive trees, budding once more and leafing, feel a bit foolish; how much more absurd is the staff of legends that, stuck in the ground, blossoms.