mayfly pond skimmed with fallen blossoms.
Take the stairs everywhere. Take a table near the exit in cafés and tavernas.
The cardplayers sat in hanging smoke, making necessary motions only, somberly guarding their cards.
She learned that Edmund was in the north with friends, peering into monasteries.
She heard the surge of motorcycles on the hill.
She inspected the cracks in the west wall and spoke to the landlord, who closed his eyes and rocked his heavy head.
The wind caused a rustling somewhere very near.
She sat up at night with her book of water-stiffened pages, trying to read, trying to escape the feeling that she was being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant in time.
The acanthus is a spreading perennial.
And everything in the world is either inside or outside.
She came across the figurine one day inside a desk drawer at the school, lying among cough drops and paper clips, in an office used as a teachers’ lounge. She didn’t even remember putting it there and felt the familiar clashing agencies of shame and defensiveness working in her blood—a body heat rising against the reproach of forgotten things. She picked it up, finding something remarkable in the leaper’s clean and open motion, in the detailed tension of forearms and hands. Shouldn’t something so old have a formal bearing, a stiffness of figure? This was easy-flowing work. But beyond this surprise, there was little to know. She didn’t know the Minoans. She wasn’t even sure what the thing was made of, what kind of lightweight imitation ivory. It occurred to her that she’d left the figure in the desk because she didn’t know what to do with it, how to underpin or prop it. The body was alone in space, with no supports, no fixed position, and seemed best suited to the palm of the hand.
She stood in the small room, listening.
Edmund had said the figure was like her. She studied it, trying to extract the sparest recognition. A girl in a loincloth and wristbands, double-necklaced, suspended over the horns of a running bull. The act, the leap itself, might be vaudeville or sacred terror. There were themes and secrets and storied lore in this six-inch figure that Kyle could not begin to guess at. She turned the object in her hand. All the facile parallels fell away. Lithe, young, buoyant, modern; rumbling bulls and quaking earth. There was nothing that might connect her to the mind inside the work, an ivory carver, 1600 BC, moved by forces remote from her. She remembered the old earthen Hermes, flower-crowned, looking out at her from a knowable past, some shared theater of being. The Minoans were outside all this. Narrow-waisted, graceful, other-minded—lost across vales of language and magic, across dream cosmologies. This was the piece’s little mystery. It was a thing in opposition, defining what she was not, marking the limits of the self. She closed her fist around it firmly and thought she could feel it beat against her skin with a soft and periodic pulse, an earthliness.
She was motionless, with tilted head, listening. Buses rolled past, sending diesel fumes through seams in the window frame. She looked toward a corner of the room, concentrating tightly. She listened and waited.
Her self-awareness ended where the acrobat began. Once she realized this, she put the object in her pocket and took it everywhere.
THE ANGEL ESMERALDA
The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She’d been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease. Banded light fell across the room, steeping the tissued grain of the wood in an antique ocher glow so deeply pleasing in pattern and coloration that she had to look away or become girlishly engrossed. She knelt in the folds of the white nightgown, fabric endlessly laundered, beaten with swirled soap, left gristled and stiff. And the body beneath, the spindly thing she carried through the world, chalk pale mostly, and speckled hands with high veins, and cropped hair that was fine and flaxy gray, and her bluesteel eyes—many a boy and girl of old saw those peepers in their dreams. She made the sign of the cross, murmuring the congruous words. Amen, an olden word, back to Greek and Hebrew, verily—touching her midsection to complete the body-shaped cross. The briefest of everyday prayers yet carrying three years’ indulgence, seven if you dip your hand in holy water before you mark the