Philip Gross

The Crossing


Behind the boat, a shimmer-smeech of diesel,
briefly. The sea unmarked by wake. Already

it’s been almost always we have been half way –
 
the coast, with the gull-speckled nick of the dock
behind, getting farther… Islands, never closer

and flat as the map smoothed on a plan chest
they’d seemed from a mile above.

Recently risen, with their memory of being seabed
still drying out slowly in cool northern sun –

six thousand years is nothing – now
that they’ve acquired a taste for rising, rising still,

the way they float up, off the grey-blue-
against-blue-grey sea horizon on the mirage;

how they part along the seam, quite gently,

like a dotted line between the real and the unreal,
with an instruction: tear here.


*


from Evi And The Devil



When I was small, I ran into the forest. No one came to find me. I lay in a heap of pine needles. Maybe the ants consumed me, I can’t tell. My parents still don’t know a thing about this. As far as they know, what walked out of the forest, what sat down with her dolls by the sand pit, was a little girl.

*

I found an old pipe in the forest. In it, pine needles and ashes, humus, and some very tiny bones. Like an owl pellet but burned. After that I heard it calling some nights, deep in the wood: the fire owl. Some mornings we found there had been another of those unexplained house fires in the night.

*

The kind man from the Youth League gave me the toy soldiers. He whittled them himself, with his beautiful knife. I think he noticed that whenever a game was being got together I wouldn’t be there. I stood them on the old tin tray, then made it make a sound like far off thunder. Then they all marched one way. They fell one by one, till they were a river of logs. One last man wading.

*

There’s a small lake of silence – OK, I mean a large pool, really – in the heart of the woods. I thought everyone knew that, but gradually I realised that none of my classmates did. Not the rough ones, who would punch me, nor the smart ones, who knew better ways than that. Imagine the thrill: to lure them to a picnic in the forest, then to see their faces stiffen as they looked into the water. Then to pour them a glass of it each, so no one could tell, or know there was a thing to tell, not even to themselves.

*

Thin-blooded, my grandfather slept on the stove. I used to wonder at the energy with which my father stoked it. I understand that better now. He wanted to dry him out completely, to a stick figure we could keep propped in the window making a rude gesture – you know that fearless scorn the old are blessed with – to frighten the Devil away.

*

There are more people living in the village. Yet the more there are, the emptier it feels. The more rustling with life the forest. Or maybe it’s the forest dwellers coming in to live amongst us, in their thin disguises. Crane Beak Woman, for instance – I’ve seen how she looks at Frog Feet Man. I don’t remember when I was told that I wasn’t to mention these things, or by whom.

*

I ran through the forest as fast as I could. I ran in a straight line, no ducking or weaving. The trees would dance out of the way. Then stepped back just in time to trip or catch a whack to anyone pursuing me. My brother broke his head like that on more than one occasion. Not that anyone believed me.

*

You know those sudden round clearings in the forest? That’s where the Devil squats, grandly, to fart. Things wither. It’s because he can’t resist the mushrooms. He asks the country people which are good to eat, and we tell him the bad ones. In the end, given time, he moves on. We build in the clearings. But you have to let the air clear first. This isn’t a story, this is history.

*

In a corner of the woods lives the Glass Man. I’m almost sure I’ve seen him now and then – sometimes a slight quirk in the field of vision, sometimes a thin prismatic glint like the edge of a mirror. Once, I think, he was just like us – opaque, corporeal – but completely consumed by his job, which strained out all the slight impurities that impede the flow of light.

*

The trees won’t speak to me. Or to each other, though somehow they have agreed on the subject of me. That’s what a forest is, its kind of silence. A conspiracy of solitudes.

*

Some days the mist lifts just a few feet from the marshes. It hangs around head height, so you’d need to climb a tree to see over, just there where there are none. Or you have to crouch down, wriggle skew-kneed, to see under. Which suddenly grants you the knowledge possessed by the toad beneath its stone.

*

The river appears where it wants to, going this way or that through the woods. It brings its whiff of moss and dark things, so that one or two days later you can still smell where it has been. No laws can explain this, so why try? All I know is that if you were to go with it, follow as it cuts a cleft down between stones, the place it goes to might not be the sea. It might be inland, deeper, where if anyone has been, they haven’t come back to tell.

*

Thank you, measles, or was it mumps, whatever – my first guide into that world that sits inside and yet is larger than our own. I felt my body round me, clogged with wrongness, like a city flooded knee deep, no one should have built there but they cope. The weeks of mud and struggle after, just to move or be. I saw myself moving through it, curious and not afraid to stare. I saw how many other people lived there. Old Mrs Groanma next door. Several uncles. We passed each other, measles leading me from day to street to week to doorway, free from explanation or politeness. We passed and glanced and nodded, enough said.

*

I was born old, to young parents. Trouble was, they kept on ageing, while I had to hurry up and grow down so I could pass myself off as their child. So we crossed paths in the forest, and waved, and went on. By the time these words reach you I might already be too young to remember what they used to mean.
 

Translating Silence
13     The Old Country
15    Introits
17    A Place Called Vaikus
21     Erratics
25     The Point
26     The Crossing

27     Evi And The Devil

Translating Silence
79     Now, in Vaikus
83     A Monument in Vaikus
88     Five Versions of Vaikus:
88         A forest, a real one
89         If it’s the silence
90         Aside
91         Just when we thought
93         Learning to speak

95     Another Shore