Jessica Fisher and Margaret Ronda
DEAR FRIEND
(M to J)
What goes through me like a sky, driving the car alone. A feverish thought is a shade drawn. Every day I am inching through the grid, the slowdown will continue for three miles. I’m lost in it. Gaudy traffic, angry data, unhinged light between buildings. Leaning against burnt-out alley walls, cattails and daisies sprouting up beyond the commuter parking lot where the new encampments are. Bright blue tents and cardboard beds, a few shopping carts. Sleepers waking. It’s an invented time, struggling from bed and hitting links, losing the signal again.
Were you dreaming of faces in rows again? The small city of a child’s mind? Voices shouting on the split screen, oh shut it off. Songbirds thud against glass. You could be crowded, pressed in upon. Or yielding. A crease across your face. Were you up late again, reading of another calamity, writing in that attic room?
Dear one, they’ll tear everything down again. Near irrigation ditches and fields of glyphosate, we might have hummed the old song, how did it go, as the dew flies over the green valley. In a car you can curse or cry, punch the wheel, imagine each suburban view dissolving. The whole infrastructure. Close to the four-lane highway there’s always a pipeline leaking into the soil, some kind of dust settling on the dark leaves, industrial park with a dried-up fountain.
There were little violet blooms in the desert, banks of snow on the mountainside, a candlelit party where faces glowed. We once sat beside each other, soft hands grazing, at the night fair. We talked about our friend, how her voice still carries, sometimes, in our minds. Up ahead the bridge over the bay, the sugar factory gleams. Did you ever hear that song about landslides? I’m singing it now.
(J to M)
It already seems a long time ago since we stood in the rubble where the fill juts into the bay. Someday in the future I will think back to us then, how we saw where sea touched earth; salt, sand. A way of framing things—I know that. Ever since the first class in college, where we cut a rectangular hole out of a sheet of cardboard, and she said, to be an artist is to select. She said to impose the frame on what we saw, so that it might become art, which means that what I was taught is that art excludes. I miss you. I see that through the frame. But I am torn now, writing this, between things: a book about the past lies open beside me, marking one writer’s fascination with lives seen only through the shadows; beneath this document other windows are open, one to the article on the spreading virus and one to the Decameron, which I have been meaning to read, and one to the grant application that would give me time to write. I am like a dragonfly, flitting. Like a fly landing here and there. I miss you. I am not at a precipice, nowhere near the sea; but grief is a watery thing, it meets the ground and undermines the shoreline. My father just now on the phone, saying that after his friend had died, his heart hurt. I didn’t know in which way he meant. My heart hurt, he said, missing her, and the doctor I know, and who knows me, said he felt that way when his wife died, and it was in fact his heart that was hurt. But she was only a friend, my father says. The doctor said he should have a stress test, only they aren’t really very reliable, they can say there is a problem when there is not one and they can say there is no problem when there is one. And so the doctor who recommended a stress test said, only if it still hurts when you’ve been walking on an incline. My father prefers the neighborhoods, which are flat, and meandering because they are built along a cliff, and therefore the edge they encounter cannot be subsumed to a grid. He likes to come to the view. But because he needs to know why his heart hurts, whether from illness or grief, he says he will walk the canyon or certain streets in the neighborhood which head uphill. He will not come to see us, because his heart might be fragile now or might be in the future, and at his age—well, he doesn’t take it for granted any more. And I thought then of you, the way your heart hurt, the speed at which it felt to be beating, and how, when they hooked you up to see what it was, they found it was just what it is to be alive now, something always nagging.
There is the stumbling sound of a hurry now as the girls—my daughter and her friends—rush downstairs. They are fascinated with murder. Jughead dead, but not dead, he faked his own demise so the preppies wouldn’t kill him, is basically how it goes. And when they are taught consent, they told me, laughing as I showed them how to peel garlic, they are taught to order pizza, are you hungry and how do you like it, which means that their love will be in language from the beginning. Will be about knowing. I didn’t know how to speak when I first was touched; it was electric, I was a current. Something like that. Thinking this—but they descend, want the couch where I am sitting, writing you. The oven timer has been beeping a long time, but I don’t want to give them the couch, don’t want to go turn off the timer. I want to remember that I was like a wire once, conductive, mute; desire surged through me. Want to be that wire. What are you doing, they ask, and I say, I am trying to write everything. Iris has squeezed in beside Sylvie, then Mira and Erin, on the couch; on the loveseat are Phoebe and Grace, looking a little left out. It does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty. They are watching Clueless. I saw it with Esther, or with Lara, when it was just out. Before I had become a conduit. When we thought the future would be a screen, and would remember what you had in your closet. Where are they now. “Lara would be an asset to any team!” the website assures, but Esther is lost to me, though I remember everything about her, her middle and last names, her aunt Kashia and her fake British accent and each long afternoon we spent in her rambling house, watching Inspector Gadget or flipping through porn in her closet. She wanted everything, had to choose.
It’s cool to know what is going on in the world, the brother says in the film, so I turn back to the paper. “The Only Choice Is to Wait for Death,” one headline reads, “along roadsides and in olive groves.” Now the car lights bend around the driveway’s curve, and Dylan is home from the basketball game in the town beyond the neighboring town. He is ravenous, a warrior returned from the field; when he has gorged himself, and the bones are left scattered about his plate, he turns to what he must become, Macduff to some Macbeth, in the fourth-grade play. That great bond which makes crow to wing. Meanwhile, someone has matched the CDC guidelines on how to wash your hands to Lady Macbeth’s “Out… out”—
(M to J)
Remember the coastline and the sweaty climb, horseshoe-shaped bay below? The cave where Hermes hid the cattle from Apollo. A cry and then clouds rush in, an army gathers force. The sky washed in the sea. Later the boys dug a hole in the earth to hide away from the adults, chanting, three blind mice, three blind mice. Each evening in the cool air we read Homer aloud, out on the porch beside the olive grove. Little jelly glasses of wine. I was trying to see that view with your eyes, how you took it in. For ten thousand years, storms, the black water, broken instruments, wars casting adrift. Someone fell asleep on the makeshift boat and no one to wake them. This morning my mind kept wandering back there, I let it go. And you are where? By another shore, in the sunny kitchen facing the green Atlantic, sea roses. Giddy voices traveling down the narrow wooden stairs. The philosopher said we don’t sleep or wake or go about our daily ways as they did in the ancient days, for in all their tasks a god shone, filled them with luster. What do you think of that? Today I walked Rowan halfway to school, he bounded off with a little impatient wave. So much goes unrecorded, a whole year vanished entirely. A woman with gold glitter on her eyes passed me by. I heard there was a comet last night. I miss you. You showed me how to follow a dream in words, plunge into strong waves, wayfarer. How to swaddle a newborn. There were clouds massing up, pink-edged but heavy with rain, and I’d forgotten my umbrella.
(J to M)
In the ocean, what might you find? This is a prompt for the child too nervous to write, for the mother who feels at day’s end that she has seen it all. And the essay still unfinished, which was to be so easy. The mind moves, but to what pattern? And that whale road we saw, crisscrossed by the mother with the notched tail, the baby with the white spot in the shape of a frigate bird. We ran starboard to port to follow them, before the boat turned—are they somewhere still crossing. Where are you? In an earlier time, evening still ahead of you. Citrus in the garden, and rose. And the child at school or just home, and the work done or almost done or not yet begun. Once I saw a school of flying fish leaping free of the water, and once a flock of birds that turned and wheeled, wheeled and turned, in the hot October, above the fresh grave, as if to give comfort, serving so readily as metaphor for the soul. Their wings disappeared in the bright sky, then flashed black and white, then disappeared again, some sort of text appearing and fading and appearing again. Since I am a teacher, and the papers are due tomorrow, I know there are dozens of rooms in which someone works or ought to be working; they feel their minds move or they don’t give a damn. I want it to matter that we were here at the same time, late capital post-industrial my sweet aunt with her one good eye my sweet friend who called as I was driving home. As always, we talked of poetry, what it is for, and the lonely tired night was full. Why do I tell you what you already know?
(M to J)
How to know a place? To kneel in close to its nests and molehills, its secret warrens. Little byways and peeking green shoots. There’s a war roiling up again, another winter heat wave, excavators ripping out almond trees. Daffodils here and gone again. A swaying sea of pink and white, soil subsiding beneath. Like the bright poppy and the charlock by Clare’s Helpston: a destroying beauty.
One morning I pulled up foxtails, traced the starry row of burrs down my sleeve. Listened to the Yolo loam hardening in the sun. The Berryessa Gap was obscured by a throbbing haze, a thermal grammar of afternoon heat. I wrote an inventory of all the birds I’d seen: swallows, raptors, songbirds, owls. Then I read about the undone work of bees, the migration patterns askew, the coming age of fire. No one wants to move, but the earth keeps subsiding all around. Clare walked long distances on unprotected feet, trying to escape what he could not change. He ate grass by a dusty roadside, slept aching on the flint heap.
Then I was thinking about a letter to you that would contain every shape, everything closed and open. Even the smoke, starting up in the air again.
(J to M)
I am looking out the window onto the patio where once we dragged the folding crib, put the boys inside to play. Trace of you here, trace of your voice in my ear. I used to wonder how it is that it happens, bodies that once lived inside coming to stretch their lengthening legs in the sun, knees grass-stained. Or, that you are no longer just there, beside me, bent over a book or writing something in your loose hand, paring fruit or letting the sand fall through. Not a rift—just, you who were so close, are farther now.
Attention widens, takes in more of the world, until it reaches where you are. Mind like the pond; something touches the surface, and the ripples form. “Lots of motion in the sky and ocean all the time,” you wrote, when the snow fell around me, the fields a canvas for shadow. Searched again to find what time is it there, what season—you are now always a little ahead. The moon, we share, slivered or gravid. How can it be that she is steady, though steadily changing?
I imagined her pulling the earth as a child does a toy, a dark thread linking her to us, tying her to our tides. And so I was not surprised to see the linea nigra emerge as if from the umbilicus, from the water body inside. I remember the rain fell as your contractions came, that you were very quiet in pain. Memory is just another thread, unraveling. There’s so much I don’t recall, time frayed or unwoven, though I can still see the soles of your feet as they were that day, the child’s eyes opening when he was mostly still inside.
None of this is for the history books. But I think of the woman who, when commissioned to make a memorial to the war dead of her hometown, turned instead to the living. There was a story from that place of a girl saved by a blue ribbon, which appeared from nowhere, carried by the wind, and led her out of the mountain cave, where the shepherds sheltered, as it collapsed. How to follow its lead?
The artist asked her townspeople to help her tear ribbons from bolts of blue fabric, and bind each house together, and then to the mountain. In the film of that day, you can see the women in their black skirts and kerchiefs rolling the strips of cloth on the sunbaked square, twenty-seven kilometers altogether, the children dancing giddily down the narrow streets, their arms filled with the tangled skeins. Between balconies and windows they tossed the bundles until the town was stitched together by a thread the color of the sky. So it is that love, too, distinguishes a crucial archive.
JESSICA FISHER is the author of Daywork (Milkweed, 2024). Her other books are Inmost (Nightboat) and Frail-Craft, winner of the 2006 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She received the 2013 Rome Prize in Literature and is an associate professor of English at Williams College.
MARGARET RONDA is the author of two poetry collections, For Hunger (Saturnalia, 2018) and Personification (2010), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Columbia Poetry, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, VOLT, and West Branch. She is also the author of a critical study, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford University Press, 2018). She teaches American poetry and environmental literature and theory at the University of California-Davis.
