Unvanishing

Watching the birds through the bedroom windows. The zip-velocity of their flight into the berry tree on the eastern edge of the lawn. The eclipsing of their feathers inside the skim of green.

The sun is fur behind fog.

The near air is steam.

*

After my father died and stories left me, I wanted paper, color, thread, ephemera. I don’t mean to poeticize my sudden vacancy. I want only to say that I grew to need the weight of the brayer, the blade, the awl in my hands, the bone folder and the needle. That I would wake early and climb out of bed and descend into the kitchen where, on a portable island beneath a warming bulb, I’d squeeze color from tubes onto a crusty gelli plate and fit what I made into the frame of our one table. I would fold, sew, Washi tape. I would slice squares into triangles and edge triangles into squares. Purple sticks of glue. Sticky fingers. 

After, I would drink my ginger tea while my husband drank espresso.

*

The birds vanish. They unvanish. The heat is white, and rinsing.

*

I bought Stonehenge paper, Arches paper, bright sulfite, facile newsprint. I bought multiples of the same waxed linen thread because I liked the way hope beat in me when new spools arrived in cellophane. I painted cards. I chain-stitched journals. I sent what I made to my father’s friends, and then to friends who had known my father, and then to friends who had not known my father, and then to strangers who did not know me; that is: I filled the mailboxes of neighbors.

It went on like this. Fall, then winter.

*

I wonder if birds always know what they want. If they know what knowing is.

*

Alyson answered the lonesomeness I had not known to name. I am not good at gifts, is what she claimed, but her gift—Bhutan Edgeworthia paper of magnificent density—straight broke me. Yellow Tsharsho. Bleached White Tsharsho. Khenpa Tsharsho. Indigo Tsharsho. Tong Fu Tsharsho. Chu Tsharsho. An incomparable luxury.  

I designed new shapes of books to honor the gift I had received. New stitchings. I ordered paper made from the Huun tree. Fuschia. Navy. Deep green. On the day the box was due to come I waited at the door, impatiently.

*

Ruta asked me to explain. I fumbled the vocabulary.

*

In time we rearranged the house so that I’d have room to work. Given more space, there was more need. Sharper blades and whole families of awls and stitches growing in complexity. How many scissors do you need? How many rulers? How much paper? How much greed to make the thin, blank things?

* 

The birds plucking their berries from their tree. 

*

In an old barn shelved with split peach crates, I found a book of Russian phrases, and a dictionary of foreign terms, and Assembly Songs for School and College. I bought these for my decoratives. At a flea market on a bitter day I bought Grimm tales illustrated by Maurice Sendak and the Maxfield Parrish iteration of Arabian Nights. I turned my duplicate of Virginia Woolf’s Diary Volume One into material. My auxiliary copies of Mrs. Jack and A Certain Climate. I bought but could not slice into use the air-mail letters of last-century war widows.

 *

I collected the leaves of gingko trees, tulip trees, toxic nandina. The cold leather of rhododendron leaves. The soft brush of winterized grasses. I pressed what I’d gathered onto gelli-plated color, lay down a sheet of Arches, and used my fist. Stopped fisting. Peeled.

That was my negative.

I removed the leaves, returned the paper. Fisted harder.

That was my positive.

I never got what I expected.

*

I wonder if the berries on the backyard tree would be classified, in the pharmacy of birds, as hallucinogens. I wonder because lately the birds in the rinsing heat have grown excessive in their frantic. They vanish and unvanish with flustering speed. Sometimes, flustering back out into the world, they strike my windowpanes. I rush from the bed to the window and look down, to the ground, to see if they’ve survived. They survive, shaking the bruise out of their feathers.

*

I bought khadi paper, bark paper, embossed ficus leaves. Kozo paper, bodhi leaf paper, chongco flower paper. More waxed linen. More needles—longer, thinner, sensually curved— until Katrina, working by the light of her blue and golden mountain, took fabric culled from distant lives to make me a pincushion. Unheralded, her box arrived. I opened it, astounded.

*

Bill shaped and baked clay beads, sizing the holes so they would accommodate my needles. He ordered me miniature brass keys and 1928 pharmacy scripts from the Peoples Drug Store in Abingdon, Virginia. He said maybe I could use these things in the blank books I was making, then he left me precisely where I had been standing, maundering adjectives.

*

 Then Carolyn sent a box of bookbinding clamps, and a story. After that she sent a papermaker’s frames and screens, tufts of old paper still wedged between them. She sent a bag of crisp dried flowers and instructions on color fasting.

 Then Ruta remembered a time when she and her brother and sister all lived in LA and traveled, on Sunday mornings, to the Rose Bowl flea market. She’d been searching for books, she said, and found buttons instead, hundreds of them snug in an oblong, nine-inch heavy cardboard Hershey Kisses Chocolate container. A rare delicacy of a box in hues of pink-silver and old-denim blue containing thousands, maybe ten thousand, maybe ten million buttons. Which she sent to me in a box that smelled of smoke, along with two Nancy Drew books, published 1949 and 1959, and the brown stuff of old tapped-out Western Union paper: Leaving seven fifty tonight arrive Chicago seven forty five tomorrow night via Northwestern.

Then Claire said, I will show you zinnias.

Then Mark said, Come to my garden. Steal my flowers.

*

It’s been nearly a year since my father died. The birds vanish, they unvanish, I am watching. They take what they need. They return when they can. The sun leaves the fog. The near steam rises.