Dispatch #25
Thursday, September 26
Papillion, Nebraska

It rained yesterday. Long rips of lightning earthward, a whirl of beautiful cloud--greys and ivories woven together--and a glad wind. I walked in the rain in a long, hooded slicker for an hour before signing books in a bookstore in Omaha. For the ease of my leg and my hip it is best to walk, better to lie down, worse to sit and worst of all to stand in a single place. So I walked and enjoyed the strikes of hard drops on the hood around my head.

These enforced periods of contemplation--especially when they are rounded by intense activity, interviews, luncheons, rallies, receptions, at every one of which I rise on my crutches and discuss Lutheran Vespers together with the dreams we have for this ministry--make of loneliness a fine and private thing. I look forward to this unmooring of my mind, when it floats through the silences with no acknowledged purpose.

I experience flashes of old memory with all the emotional force that attended the event in the first place.

Once, in 1978 on the day that Harper & Row had offered to publish THE BOOK OF THE DUN COW, I permitted myself for the first time in my life to believe I was a publishing author. Late that same afternoon I went shopping for our week's groceries. It was an autumn evening, when the steam has been driven from southern Indiana skies by early snaps and first chills.

Glancing up as I pushed my cart to the car, I was struck by the lapidary, slightly green depth of the heavens above, cloudless, dimensioned, clear. In quick succession two thoughts occurred to me, the second one shooting a near narcotic pleasure through my veins.

1. "Ah, what an amethyst sky," I said to myself.

2. And immediately upon that thought, this: "And one day I will write that image in a book, and send it out to many!"

That such a passing image might have a public provenance delighted me past expressing it.

And these are the fish that emerge from my contemplative seas:

--My daughter Mary, at 13 years old, smearing her face with a ghoulish rouge and considering herself beautiful before her friends and her schoolmates.

--Thanne's face, filled with laughter, as she and I move through a high wind on the sidewalk outside of the church where we have just been married; and her veil like a glory soars above her head in that wind; and someone snaps precisely that picture; and I want to weep (walking now in the rain outside an Omaha bookstore) for the beauty of that day and for the length of the marriage compacted in that church.

--The northern beaches of Lake Michigan, where at 16 I was a life guard through one summer, where I met a woman two years my senior--Barbara Witzke--who granted me affection and humor and a summer's sweetness; the beaches in the evening; the sounds of slow waves seething near our bare feet walking; and youth, you know, owns the world.

But the changes wrought upon memory also surface and demand my attentions as I wander through my rootless contemplations....

Years later, upon the seed of that 16th summer--but after learning what age does to the things that in youth were limitless, hopeful, glad, and everlasting, I wrote the following poem, in which the speaker is a woman of past supernal freedoms:

Thee to the Sea

1.

O Sanderson, I want to hear you say my name once more.

There was the day we walked Lake Michigan's shore,
barefoot, northward
from the base of one high bluff to the base of another,
three miles between.
The heights of the bluffs were shoulders before and behind
our going, yours and mine.
I want to hear you say my name
as you said it then, O Sanderson,
on a laughing, clear blue wind.

2.

I wore a white shift and no ornament,
no line nor shape save the fall of the fabric.

To this day I feel the suck of the sand at my heel
and the bite of that northern water--
and the heft of our petosky rock,
and the edge of the letter gouged in it,
the chiseled initial "I,"
like a dimple, that natural "I."
Sanderson, laughing, you took it and skipped it.
"Thee to the sea!" you cried,
and sent that colony west to the water
which swallowed it against the future,
and I have found it again!
I have!
The selfsame stone on the beach of the evening
with the glyph that starts my name.
I laid the stone against my cheek.
Sanderson, I felt the flat of your palm
and I listened, I listened,
but I could not hear the name
you uttered sixty years ago,
Sixty.

Who would have recalled that day
except for this outrageous consonance:
the same petosky rock come back again?

3.

You wore a tight mid-calf pant,
white, a rope at the waist,
red piping down the seam,
and your teeth were whiter than cloud,
Sanderson, laughing man!

You threw back your head beside the sea
and the wind blew your blind hair eastward
and your cheeks were a speckled sand
and your eyes belied the sky
while you bellowed my name:
"Irene! Irene!" you sang to the bluffs:
Eirene: Peace! Peace!

Oh, my love, it was in the sound of your singing
that I spread my white wings.
The wind filled my shift, which unfolded in feathers,
and I, like an egret,
flew
(Peace! Peace!)
toward the northern bluff.
I, that silent, long-necked bird,
sailed white above the beaches
wearing nothing, no, nothing
but flesh and air and laughter
and nought but my name in your mouth, O Sanderson!

You cried after me,
racing the shore,
waving your arms,
exploding sand beside the sea. I lighted on one bare bough,
the tallest pine on the northern bluff
and waited for you.

But you did not fly.
You did not climb to me.
You spoke my name.
I scarcely heard you.
Your feet in the foaming water
you murmured, "Irene,"
and that was all.
I held my bough and wept.

O Sanderson, my misery,
how long I wept that day.

4.

Well, well--
I remove my flesh these darker nights
and fold it away in cedar trunks.
Sixty years, sweet Sanderson.
I am very old.
I sleep alone.
My sheets are white,
but I am bent and yellow and tired and very old.

Today I found the petosky you flung away,
that stone at the edge of an evening sea,
wet, its dark blooms shining,
smooth to the palm of your young man's hand,
and the "I" still gouged like a mouth in it.
I laid it against my cheek and thought of you
nd longed to hear you say my name once more.
I listened. I listened, but the stone is mute,
and the waves make an occluding thunder on the shore.

I am no egret.
I promise you, I do not fly.
I walk sandal-shod the miles between the bluffs.
But if I knew where you lie,
I would turn westward and walk the water descending,
stone-shod, the bed of the sea,
down to the place where your young teeth wait.
Sanderson, I'd say,
laying my bent age down beside you,
Sanderson, say my name the way you said it
the day your laughter gave me wings.
But no one knows.
No one knows where your white bones lie.

O Sanderson, if ever we loved when we were young,
Come, utter my name in the crashing laughter of the sea,
Peace, peace in the sad retreat of the sea.

Walt