“Epic proportions,” says my spouse Janyce talking to me through the wall a room away. “She managed to get through to the comforter even.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“Oh yes,” she says. “It’s a real stinker.”
I can hear the scrubbing sounds from her fabric brush in the bedroom. It’s late Saturday afternoon and I’m slouching in the easy chair in the middle of the living room simultaneously looking out the windows to the back yard and over to the wood stove while Janyce cleans up after our dog. It’s been one of those drudgery days. I was out with the wheelbarrow and rake earlier, standing in the middle of the yard with my neck bent and craned up toward the clouds. Sleet-like rain would pelt the ground for thirty seconds then stop. I’d pull off my gardening gloves to wipe a few drops off my face, before putting them back on again to resume my silent task of picking up all the kindling sticks strewn about on the soggy lawn. Janyce spent the afternoon in the house sitting upright at the dining table doing taxes in front of the wood stove.
A friend of mine keeps telling me about seeing signs. She sees her numbers everywhere. “I’m just letting it all hit me and trying to stay open to meaning,” she tells me. She is looking to manifest the next thing, to step into the next chapter of her life aided by the synchronicities of the Universe.
I turn my head lazily to the right to gaze at the backyard. The bright red tips of tree branches, leaves on the verge of unfurling, are waving their long fingers against the white sky.
Some scientists think we can engineer our way out of the climate crisis— or at least slow it down enough for humans to find a way to live with what we’ve set in motion. The other day I listened to a reporter talk of the ingenuity of engineers but also heard him pause for a long silence, ultimately voicing his frustration that people don’t seem to appreciate the severity of where we are headed —or where we are right now, for that matter, and all the signs we’re missing.
The orange flame from the stove is reflected in the window. It dances superimposed and disembodied against the bird feeder. I haven’t filled the feeder in weeks, but that hasn’t stopped the bluebirds from flitting around the edges of the yard, or the nuthatch from crawling down the base of the maple tree, upside down. The other day I heard the Pterodactyl-like scream of the pileated woodpecker and watched it sail through the yard, its outstretched black and white wings resembling piano keys. It landed with a violent thud against the gray tree trunk, bobbing its red-topped head.
“The sun!” I say to Janyce. We’re back in the house from a chilly Sunday morning hike through the woods.
“I know,” she says, “the dog was just lying in a spot of it on the bed.”
“It’s teasing us,” I say.
I feel my gloom lift with each spread of sunlight across the wood floor, only to feel it sinking down inside me again each time the sun is sucked back behind the clouds.
On our drive home this morning, I made Janyce pull over so I could get out of the car and get a better look at the Great Blue Heron that was stealth hunting along the edge of a mossy swamp. The crouching bird’s beak would jut out slowly, followed by its body creeping along behind like a slinky. Just as I took the picture, my foot snapped a twig in half and the bird stood up straight and turned its head to the side, eyeing me warily, as if to say, “You think you know anything?”
Maybe I’ll call that a sign.
Signs by Larry Levis All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures. 2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone. 3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon, and one by one I would hear out my sins, hear they are not important—that I am part of this rain drumming its long fingers, and of the roadside stone refusing to blink, and of the coyote nailed to the fence with its long grin. And when there are no messages the dead lie still— their hands crossed so strangely like knives and forks after supper. 4. I stay up late listening. My feet tap the floor, they begin a tiny dance which will outlive me. They turn away from this poem. It is almost Spring.