Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Robert Vivian's stories, poems, essays, and plays have appeared in Georgia Review, Harper's, Glimmer Train, Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, Cross Currents, New Intensity, The Best Men's/Women's Stage Monologues of 1996-1998, and dozens of other publications. Many of his plays have been produced in New York City. He currently teaches English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803296237 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2005 |
| Pages: | 150 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.37(d) |
About the Author
Robert Vivian’s stories, poems, essays, and plays have appeared in Georgia Review, Harper's, Glimmer Train, Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, Cross Currents, New Intensity, The Best Men's/Women's Stage Monologues of 1996–1998, and dozens of other publications. Many of his plays have been produced in New York City. He currently teaches English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Hereafter in Fields
The way the sun shimmers in the long Nebraska grass justoff the highway can make you feel hope again, like there's stilltime for lovelier, finer things. It hovers in every reed and dustmote, rippling out into the tiny eyes of grain that burn with winter'sfire, an ember so small and subtle you know something is burning insideyou, too. It's a destination that breaks the spell, that teeters intodread. Dusk can make the fields remote, haunted, the patchwork of allyour silent prayers. I drive because I have to. I drive to get where I amgoing, making the fifty-mile commute between Omaha and Lincolnthree days a week. But what about these fields, these grasses? Why dothey suggest something about time, about eternity? I'm just anotherpilgrim in his crude bark boat, making his way across the waters; I'mjust another commuter fiddling with the dial. But more and more Iwonder what it is to arrive; more and more arrival becomes the thingbequeathed, but not desired.
If only we could keep going, out of harm's way, and take with us onlythe best part of ourselves; if only we knew why we dream at the wheel orthink more clearly while moving down valleys and across rivers. Drivingtoward the horizon on Interstate 80 can make you feel this. Drivinganywhere flat and endless can. It can wear you down to sheer seeing,to that mesh of changing light just over the horizon that blooms likesunflowers drenched in a cut glass vase. Sometimes the clouds abovethe Nebraska plains contain such towering beauty that you sense thesky is exploding around you in myriad waters, bearing down on youlike grace before dying.The grooves of the highway moan, and justoutside Lincoln the view north is endless in rolling fields, undulationsfirm as a roadkill's thigh, a rigor mortis of earth chipped from themoving plates of time.
* * *
I could never really know these fields anyway; they are meant to be regardedfrom a distance, because distance is what they are all about, thetan, variegated earth I have grown—begrudgingly—to love. Who liveson this gradual, curving earth anyway? So many people I know cursethis Nebraska landscape, saying it is dull and uninspiring, strippedof beauty; one acquaintance I know even called it "the bland aftermathof oblivion." For most of my life I have been in this camp, too,disparaging the state where I grew up because it could not competewith oceans and mountain ranges, soaring skyscrapers and the freneticpace of urban life. It just sat there outside town like an existentialflat tire, devoid of inspiration. Horizon was all there was, a threadbarerim that took you to the edge of nowhere and plunged you deepinto sky, leaving your imagination with nothing to cling to. But now Ihave come to think that even here the landscape can work its way intoyou by the dreamy process of driving across it, a constant revelationof blue heaven that will never know boundaries, the land beneath itfilled to the brim with distance for all comers. Even Nebraska can be aholy place if you are willing to take on the cosmos and yourself, mile bypassing mile. I have learned this the slow way, as I learn most things.But see how the earth drops off just beyond the rest stop off Exit 432on I-80, how the fields to the north define the rough edge of distancelike a skinned drum, sounding the hollow notes of forever.
You could taste this north in the wind it brings down, carryingrumors of the pole. You could lose yourself in distance, the metaphysicalequivalent of emptying your mind of all worry. Then flatness becomesa virtue, the keen edge of your heart in extended space. I drivebetween swales cupped like a lover's arm, those secret places we loveto kiss and lose ourselves in: valleys that bottom out, humming withfine cirrus of light; the sense of wonder and time that these confer,again and again, driving among them because I am here. You are alive,too, as you read this, and may regard these plains as a boredom to beendured, or as a chance to daydream with your eyes open. But I thinkthe pressure of the plains could change you, the invisible pressure ofthe land beneath your tires.
Where are the unbroken spaces where the soul can go to be itself?We put so much burden on these fields, we mow them down and cutthem up. I want the wide-open spaces where the earth drops off; I wantto see the winter fire in the eyes of the hunkered grouse, where thesky moves in a whorl like the drying, spilled ink of the sun. This couldsustain you for a lifetime, maybe longer. We can enter the hereafter infields, moving over the earth, sifting through the fine grains of fire,lighting the sparks that take our bodies home.
I am not the same person after this fifty-mile drive to and from. Itdoesn't matter who I am in either city, but who I am in between.
I see the brake lights of other cars and the necklace of city lights asI approach Omaha. They hover in a timeless space above the horizon,these jewels, the forethoughts of city planners. They would go on along time, or as far as the last prefab home, bleak strobes of progressthat won't let us down. But progress does let us down, every time. Theyglow with a threadbare yellow leached of solar nutrients, tired, wornout,a jaded string of lights that loops around midwestern dreams.Your only defenses against them are the radio and spinning tires. Driveinto any city on the plains and you will see them from far away, blinkingand hovering like a lasso made of burning embers. But beyond thecity limits lie the fields unfolding in countless variations of repose,from the pure potential terror of snow fences banked against the skyto those fields of stubbled corn whose nappy heads ripple as if they asif they were asking the universe a thousand questions at once.
I return to Omaha each time a little tired and fatigued, a cleaned-outfeeling the fields work through me mile after mile. The drive givesyou nothing you don't already carry inside, waiting only for the appropriatetime and space to come forth. It gives you back your thoughts,spread out as if upon a smooth white table. The exact dimensions arenot important. They come out only in hints and intimations, nudgingsso small they're like a puff of warm air on the back of your neck.The drive can speak to you in barely heard murmurs, or in the wind-hollowedsilence of the landscape. What is it they have been trying totell me all this time? For years it has been like this, a moving whodunit,where I reevaluate my own small life and think of those who make itinto my dreams. Then the fields ring me out in their long-grass sieves,soundless harps that play with tiny fingers.
I would go into them if I could, wandering knee-high to the bendof a meandering stream. I would look into their tentlike gaze for somebrief, fleeting notion of grace. But no doubt this is a fanciful delusion,half-crazed, because what they do best they do at a distance, as a movingpanorama, the texture of the earth's body entire and not a particularvale or region where I stand rooted to one spot. I am a temporary voyeurof the moving earth, rolling over it a few times a week, wonderingeach time at the subtle mysteries of where the land meets the sky, howthey meet in changing juxtaposition, and how these work their wonderin fields. Then, sometimes, if I am lucky, I can get the whole feel ofit, and I am sucker-punched by grandeur, by my mote-like presence ina world that is meant to knock me to my knees. It has become the differencebetween hearing and listening, singing and saying, watchingand seeing. It's the hereafter in fields, waiting at the edge of every cityand small town, beckoning you to lose yourself in contemplation ofthe land and sky and your brief sojourn between them, joined by thespeed of memory.
Boring, wide-open Nebraska, unbroken by drastic change, unfurledpaper of an endless map, you have been nudging me more and moreinsistently toward the beauty of the sky and your own dipped hollowsthat move like shadows into the thistle of your reeds. I drive acrossyou to get where I'm going. I drive across you to come from where I'vebeen, and you lay it all out before me, a long and ideographed scarfthat contains walking pictures and voices.
If your fields wake, we are dead; if you lie still, or move so slowly thateven graves cannot hear you, how better for us that we do not know it,that we cannot sense your awful turning, that we cling to the skin ofyour cheek like mites on a granite face, making our way into the thincreases of your forehead.
I drive because I have to. I drive because I must. But now the drive betweenOmaha and Lincoln has become the deepest part of my day, thedeepest part of my week, the deepest part of my life. The realization hascome upon me slowly, like shadows moving out over the fields pullingtheir slow curtains, giving the threadbare world a dark clarity. I donot know why this is, why certain curvatures of earth should visit thismystery upon me in the declining hours. I suspect it has somethingto do with memory and how the earth exacts devotion. I am relievedwhen I cross the Platte River either way, and a little sad. I do not knowwhy this is. Maybe it is the way the winter trees hang near the water'sedge like some keening tribe of women whose sorrow would rock meto the core, or the gray way they gather sunlight into the nethermostpart of themselves, giving back nothing but deepening shadows andpartly reflected light.
I have seen these fields before dawn covered with mist until theybecome insubstantial in the clouds, haunted by the gravity of theirown churning. I could drive eighty, ninety, two hundred years and notknow why it is they haunt me so, why it is I keep coming back to them,chastened, wanting to know their secret and the secret of myself. Butneither shall be disclosed, not now, not ever. They lie back always justbeyond the meaning of time, waiting to come forth in small offeringsof silt and clay. Duly, I note my passage across them and come up withlittle to say, no dirt beneath my nails. This must be why some farmersseem touched with a far away spirit, their blue or brown eyes ineffablefor the kinds of sun they see there, and the fields that call to them indreams like the susurration of inland tides. I drive over the earth butdo not penetrate the cusp of it. Only in the glancing, improbable hereafterin fields do I sense a reason behind this sloping distance, or howthis distance works itself in me, or how they work together to createa yearning for a different kind of life.
Excerpted from Coldsnap as yearning by Robert Vivian. Copyright © 2001 by Robert Vivian. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.