robby

Going for my soak, she called, pinning her hair up as she made her way to the bathroom.

Their apartment had been created out of dormered attic space on the top floor of a three-story Victorian house. The dying elms stood even taller than the peaked roofline and through most of the windows one had to peer through the peeling white bark branches and the hand-sized leaves. The house stood resolute and glorious with a postage stamp backyard and just a hedge between the porch and the cracked sidewalk in front. The first half of its centuried life had been as a single-family home, the last half as a multi-family building with five units. Two on the ground floor and two on the second floor, the attic a sprawling dwelling space comprised of nooks and crannies tucked beneath the eaves, long coveted in the downtown art scene and handed off from one hipster to another whenever vacated. They had lived in it happily for three years. The first heady year of finding themselves exactly where they were supposed to be was gone and some weekends they spent touring open houses. They wanted to believe themselves to be people who could renovate their own Victorian.

She was settled into the massive claw foot tub, scented and bubbled, candles lit, her day washing off her skin. She reached over to a stool for a jar of clay mask and began slathering her face. He came in and turned on the lamp that stood on an antique table beside the door. He had a book in his hands.

What will you regale me with tonight, my librarian?

Bathtime story hour? Hmmm. Might have to pitch that at our next meeting.

She laughed.

I found this old civil engineering book in the depository this morning. It’s about designing inner townships, gridded streets, parks, dedicated shop fronts, municipalities, no mention of suburban boroughs whatsoever.

Sounds riveting.

Doesn’t it just!

Some things are not written to be read aloud.

All things are written to be read.  He settled on the floor, his shoulder blades against the curled edge of the tub. The giant tome opened on his upraised knees. There’s a lot of diagrams.

As there should be. Read the poems in between.

He began at the beginning and the low sonorous sound of his voice ran along the patterned lino and individual words became hard to distinguish.

It’s putting me to sleep, she complained.

A diabolical plan when you’re immersed up to your chin in water. It’s putting me to sleep, too. Admittedly.

But

Yes

Can you imagine how we came to this. How we left our caves and discovered the meadows and then somehow devised city planning. Concrete.

Not intended as a jungle by any stretch.

No. But then why did it become so primitive?

Imagine Pan and a maenad lying on their backs in long meadow grasses, a creek burbling nearby. Birdsong and breezes in the treetops.

In Arcadia!

And somehow urbanism surfaced in their consciousness. The goat foot god must have known that would be the beginning of the end for him. The religion of the slurbs. The slow but sure death of the villagers.

Should we become pastoralists?

Too late for that, I’m afraid. Transcendentalists, perhaps?

She filled the cups of her hands with bath water and rinsed her face. You’re not joining me tonight?

I think I’d rather you get dressed and let’s walk down to the park, feed the ducks.

O’ that they were swans. The waterfowl are all asleep, my dreamer. Tucked into the bushes.

Beneath the debris of the unhoused.

You’re getting morose. From a book! I’ll get dressed. Go mix us up some drinks and pour them into our Stanleys and we will wander the city for a while and get slightly drunk. We can look for new For Sale signs.

No escape to a life in the country for us?

What on earth would we do in all that wide open space?

She was asleep, dreaming. And in the dream

there was a girl child,

innocent but serious, opened but mysterious,

blonde ringlets and bare footed

Running to and fro

A forgotten joyousness ensouled

They were upstairs, in his front room, all of them

Herself and himself,

her summer girls and their goat boys,

his messenger and boatman,

and even the moon. Lounging as was their wont,

drinking and smoking, bantering and laughing

listening to the grandmother clock tick the seconds

as though each minute was a favourite song

The child a focus of no one’s attention

but her own

and she was fiercely focused

because somehow

the girl child had found her secret heart,

clutching it against her body with both hands as she scampered

Let me see, she told the child,

show me what you have there

Imploring and intentful

Aware she did not want to frighten her

When at last she heeded,

Solemnly obeying,

Coming forward, leaning against her knees,

she gently gently lifted her heart from the offering hands

and settled back into a rocking chair

beside a hearth

She opened her blouse to offer her breast

because her heart was a nursling daughter,

slick with blood and vernix and

new born.