Author’s Note: “A System of Seeing” recomposes John James Audubon’s proposal to the New York Lyceum of its collaborative investment in a book project that would eventually become– with largely British sponsorship—his masterpiece, The Birds of America. My poem amplifies the vocabulary of “vision” and “correspondence” that makes its music on the margins of the predominantly transactional pitch of Audubon’s original letter. It belongs to a sequence of twenty poems (and counting!) that treats episodes, encounters and images in Audubon’s ruthless pursuit of a transcendent “system” of seeing.

A System of Seeing

      J.J. Audubon to the president of the New York Lyceum

My Plates are a rifleman’s
captures more than  

ornithological charts,
yet no feature demanded 

by science is denied
in them or overlooked.  

My watchfullest pictures
encompass some seventeen 

subjects or more; a hawk
mauling a flock of great 

grouse-hens; a robin’s nest
stormed by a snake. 

Your best fellows might
lend prudent comments, 

each naturally bearing
their name. Correspondence 

should then fill the vision,
each page spreading 

the imprint of God. Then
will this book open a region 

and increase our love
of the birds.

⧫

Colin Jeffrey Morris’s sequence-in-progress poems on Audubon have recently appeared in descant, Lily Poetry Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He was born in Liverpool and raised on the Lancashire coast of England. Morris lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.

The Delmarva Review has been published annually from St. Michaels, Maryland for sixteen years. Its editors selected the most compelling new poetry. creative nonfiction, and short stories from thousands of submissions nationwide (and beyond) for publication in print, with an electronic edition. At a time when many commercial and literary magazines have closed their doors or reduced literary content, the Review has stood out to help fill the void in print. Selection has always been based on writing quality. Almost half of the writers have come from the greater Chesapeake-Delmarva region.  As an independent literary publication, the review has never charged writers a reading or publishing fee. The Delmarva Review is available worldwide from major online booksellers, and specialty regional bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: After my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I believed I was preparing for his death. “The End of the Story” weaves together this period of caregiving, mixed with fear and love, with my work as a writer, who often has trouble ending stories.

The End of the Story

A NOT FAMOUS WRITER who nevertheless publishes a fair amount, I am sometimes interviewed about writing. One question comes up more often than not. “What is the most difficult thing you find about writing?”

My answer is always the same. “I have trouble finding an ending.”

And so it is with life. Or at least it is with my life in the present moment. The best story of my life recently came crashing to a halt. I’m now stalled in front of a massive concrete wall. At the moment, I don’t see any place I can go. Heading back the way I’ve come is impossible. Going forward, or even to the left or right, won’t work. The only word to describe my situation is stuck.

My husband, partner, friend, and really, everything, has moved on. I wouldn’t say he abandoned me, as that has the ring of intention. In truth, my husband wanted to stay with me forever, far longer than the nearly three decades we were lucky enough to form a twosome. He struggled to live for four and a half years, while cancer fought hard to take him out. If I said cancer won, such words would imply that Richard lost the fight. It’s impossible to imagine anyone gliding over the obstacles this horrid disease put up as gracefully as Richard did, until the end, when he just as gracefully bowed out.

A loved one’s long serious illness can make you believe you’re preparing for when he or she is gone. I thought this, especially since I knew the end of the story. We’d received the first news on an April evening, in a call from Richard’s doctor, following an MRI. My husband had lesions in his spine, probably metastatic tumors, the cause of his persistent back pain and the result of a cancer in its advanced stage. At that point, I feared my husband was going to die right then and there, or at least in the coming week. As the story I’ve partially revealed makes clear, he survived. For four and a half years, he continued to live. Yet for four and a half years, I knew how the story would end. I just didn’t know when.

I am not an optimistic person. My usual thinking borders on the hopeless and bleak. If I were a character in a famous novel, I would be Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Like Mrs. Bennett, I almost daily need to tend to my nerves. As also happens to my literary double, a small bit of bad news can throw me into a tizzy. Worse news, such as a stage four cancer diagnosis, turns me into a sobbing mess.

Surprising to me, I did not take to my bed for four and a half years, as Mrs. Bennett would have done under the circumstances. I was Richard’s sole caregiver, which meant I had no choice. He was the person I loved most in the world, devoting himself to staying alive. That made me a partner in this race, in which we did everything possible to outrun cancer cells trying to overtake the healthy ones left.

A pattern emerged as Richard and I traveled the road of his illness. Some crisis would appear—a fracture in his spine, intense digestive issues, cancer moving to his brain—and I would sink way down. Not only could I imagine the worst, but I also let him know this terrible fate was on the horizon. But in a few hours or a day, I would unearth some slender thread of hope and follow it to a place that hadn’t existed for me before.

I went on as if reading a novel in which we’re told in the first chapter that the main character is soon going to die. In preparation, I did all the practical things. Like most married couples, Richard and I split household and other chores, each handling what we liked and were good at. Gradually, I convinced Richard to let me do things he’d always handled, such as paying bills. As time went on, he took it upon himself to teach me what I didn’t already know—how to open the safe or where he kept his passwords.

I understood that I probably couldn’t prepare for the emotional trauma the loss of my husband would cause. But at least I would be ready to take over the mundane everyday tasks.

Still, as his condition worsened and we feared the every-three-weeks treatment wasn’t working as well and one day would not, I imagined I was getting ready. He slept a lot, appearing for breakfast, and then returning to bed. Weeks wore on, and he started to sleep even more. Alone much of the time, I thought, Well, this is what it will be like when Richard is gone.

Earlier in my life, stories seemed to emerge nearly whole. Tales I wrote were short, two thousand words, no more, and came out of me like I imagined an infant would, if I’d ever had children. In those days, I didn’t search for endings. They arrived naturally, as if the story could end no other way.

Two years into my husband’s illness, when COVID shuttered everything in our small city, for the first time I found myself writing longer stories. Many days, I searched without luck to find resolutions to those tales. It was as if the unchecked malignant cells in Richard’s body and the Coronavirus spreading everywhere had seeped into my pen.

At the same time, I spent hours each day alone with my thoughts, worrying about the latest crisis or concerning symptom that might only be a side effect but also a sign of the impending end. Over and over again, I calculated how many more weeks or months Richard might live. I worried and worried and worried, and then would try tricking my doomsday mind with a bit of mindfulness, reminding myself that what would happen was out of my hands and worrying wouldn’t change that.

Every writer has heard one piece of advice—Write what you know. Since my beginnings as a creative writer after a decade as a fact-writing journalist, I have written about what I want to know. In other words, I write to learn. Beforehand, I don’t know the characters and their stories. I write about them to find out more.

I knew almost nothing about cancer before Richard’s diagnosis. Though I fretted endlessly about his dying and how soon that terrible event would occur, neither Richard nor I cared to ask his oncologist for a prognosis. We chose instead to take each day, week, and month as it would come, to make the most of his time, rather than cross off each day on an abbreviated calendar and see how few days of his life were left.

At the urging of a social worker in palliative care, I joined a caregiver support group, two years into Richard’s cancer treatment. The group met once a week on Zoom. Monday mornings, I stared at all these strangers’ heads and listened to their voices, frequently relating truly terrible ordeals. The worst stories came from people caring for loved ones close to death. There was talk of twenty-four-hour care by husbands, wives, and children not trained to be doctors, nurses, or nursing home aides, yet suddenly thrust into those roles. One wife hadn’t left her bed for two years, having been in hospice all that time. Another partner needed more oxygen every day than the provider was willing to supply. The stories were wrenching and frightened me more than I was ready to be that scared. I thought, what a mistake I had made agreeing to join this group. Instead of helping me, I felt far worse when I turned off my laptop at the end of each group.

I’m not sure why, but I hung in there. My reason for doing so might have been because I listened to a voice in my head that said, Eventually, these people will be able to help you.

In addition to outlining horrors at the end of life and the toll that can take on the person doing most of the caregiving, members of the group offered resources, easier ways to do this or that, along with helpful products. They shared the adoration they felt for their patients. Most important, they let me know that more than anything, love would power me through the hardest times.

I started to see the end of the story in the caregiving group, though I still didn’t know how or exactly when my story with Richard would end. Group members were caring for loved ones with a variety of serious illnesses, but most who had died were suffering from stage four cancer. One of the many lessons I learned about a life ending from cancer was that the last days often arrive without warning, as if someone snuck in and suddenly flicked the switch from on to off.

As much as I feared this shift happening to Richard, I couldn’t help seeing it in every new crisis. An MRI done on his neck after he injured his shoulder and arm trying to lift a heavy weight, what he used to do easily at the gym before cancer robbed him of energy and strength, showed a tumor at the base of his brain. The next day a subsequent MRI of the brain revealed two more. This is it, I thought, before learning that targeted radiation could destroy the DNA in those cancer cells without a bit of damage to the surrounding healthy tissue.

Six months later, Richard suddenly started speaking in nonexistent words. I panicked, asked him what was wrong, and when he couldn’t tell me, I called 9-1-1. In seconds, burly firefighters and paramedics crowded into the hall of our small ranch house, checking out my poor confused husband, while shooting rapid-fire questions at me. As I waited to see Richard in the emergency room, I kept thinking, This is it. Finally able to go to his room, I was relieved to find that he could speak normally again. The doctors had no idea of the cause for what they labeled temporary aphasia.

A few weeks later, following a more precise series of MRIs, we learned Richard had even more brain tumors. And yes, I assumed this was where he would now take the rapid turn, hurtling him to his final destination. But once again, I was wrong.

As a prolific writer of short fiction, I’ve learned the essential technique of foreshadowing. Because I almost always write to discover the story, rather than plotting the tale ahead of time, I often need to go back and add hints of what I know is to come when the piece concludes. Looking back on the progression of Richard’s illness, I can see that, yes, the appearance of the first brain tumor was one of many signs in his final year foreshadowing the end coming not far behind.

Yet we held on to hope. In the three and a half years before brain tumors were discovered, every seemingly life-ending crisis had resolved. With the second appearance of even more brain tumors, the kind, excessively smart and cheerful radiation oncologist assured us following the treatment that he’d gotten every single one.

Yet, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Richard’s condition was worsening. Numbers that used to go down on his tests following chemo were climbing to levels we had never seen. Also rising was his pain, prompting the need for more and more medication. His weight, on the other hand, was dropping, even at times when his appetite reappeared, and he ate more. He was also sleeping a good part of the day, eventually spending more time asleep than awake.

If I had been writing a story of someone dying from cancer, I might have realized the ominous changes signaled the end was near. In real life, though, people are complicated. Richard wanted to stay alive. He also used every ounce of his diminishing energy to hold onto some semblance of a life. A landscape photographer who loved traveling to beautiful places in nature, whether on day trips or longer stays, he still found ways to use one of his many cameras to make memorable prints. Every so often, he would muster up the energy to take a walk with me around the neighborhood, his camera tripod doubling as a walking stick. Some afternoons, he only had enough strength to step out to the backyard, photographing our delicate old roses, then making prints inside, even matting, framing, and hanging them on the wall.

The life Richard gripped so fiercely helped me push the end of his story further into the future. Many days I would remind myself of how long the spouses of other caregivers survived after entering hospice. Since Richard hadn’t moved into that end-of-life care, I assumed he would go on that same amount of time.

We knew, though, that whatever time he had left was growing shorter. As his energy diminished more and more, the one place left where he had the strength to venture out was the backyard.

Without any planning, Richard and I started a daily ritual of coming together in the late afternoon outside. We each sat in one of the black wicker chairs set beneath the fig tree. By this time, Richard’s bones were destroyed from the cancer that had found a home there early on, which made sitting hard. To ease the discomfort, he would place an oversized cushion down on his chair.

In our meetings under the fig tree, we began, without prior agreement, to prepare for the end of the story. Each day, one or the other of us would start. Initially, we spent those precious afternoons reminiscing about the wonderful life we’d shared, mostly recalling favorite trips and hours spent outdoors.

The look back on our life turned out to be the prelude. Before long, we eased into talk of what would happen when Richard was gone. More than once, he asked if I would be all right. Each time, I assured him that though I’d relied on him in our years together, I could manage on my own. That did not mean, I made clear, I wouldn’t be sad and miss him forever, which I would.

We next eased into Richard’s future, which, as we agreed, was far more uncertain. He admitted to being afraid, mostly of what would happen before he died. He worried most about the pain of dying, and that no amount of medication would ease it.

And of course, he feared what would happen after death. I told him again and again that I believed he would be in a better place, where the pain and all the terrible side effects had finally vanished.

On a sunny and warm fall morning, Richard died. In the days before he took his last breath and his heart stopped, he seemed to move on, barely getting out of bed, as if he realized life as he’d known it was done. The end of the story I’d dreaded for four and a half years had come, and sorrow washed over me, an enormous wave under which I felt I might drown. Worst of all, the man who had comforted me through so many hard times was now gone.

If ghosts exist, since Richard’s death I have acquired one. He is friendly, like Casper, who I adored as a child. I hear him around midnight in the hall and assume, like Richard, he is walking to the kitchen, where he’ll grab a ripe banana from the basket I keep on the top shelf.

My ghost hovers over the bed where Richard spent so many hours in his final months. This friendly spirit lets me talk to Richard and cry, letting him know I’m sad, but I’m also doing all right.

The ghost and these early days of widowhood have taught me one thing. When it comes to a great love, there is no end to the story.

Isn’t that, I ask myself, what Jane Austen taught us in Pride and Prejudice? Even after Elizabeth Bennett made it clear to Mr. Darcy that she would rather swallow sharp knives than marry him, he couldn’t give her up, no matter how hard he tried.

So today I will walk to the backyard and take my place on the black wicker chair to the left of the small matching side table. I will turn my chair slightly to face Richard’s chair and the towering redwood tree in my neighbor’s yard. In those moments, I will contemplate the upcoming chapters of my life, which has always been unpredictable, in both its high points and times when the road has headed decidedly down.

♦

Patty Somlo, from California, has published four books and three short story collections. She has won numerous writing awards including a Notable selection for Best American Essays, several nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her books include: Hairway to Heaven Stories, The First to Disappear, and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace. Somlo was a reporter before focusing on literary fiction and creative nonfiction.

The Delmarva Review has published annually from St. Michaels, Maryland for sixteen years. Its editors have selected the most compelling new creative nonfiction, poetry. and short stories from thousands of submissions nationwide (and beyond) for publication in print, with an electronic edition. At a time when many commercial and literary magazines have closed their doors or reduced literary content, the Review stands out to help fill the void in print. Selection has always been based on writing quality. Almost half of the writers have come from the greater Chesapeake-Delmarva region. As an independent literary publication, it has never charged writers a reading or publishing fee. The Delmarva Review is available worldwide from Amazon, other online booksellers, and specialty regional bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: A constant source of inspiration for my poems remains, unabashedly, the natural world. Nature so often provides for poetic inspiration, insight and restoration of the soul and the creative spirit. Sometimes, too, it provides a sacred space to simply reflect upon memories and key events in our life that still affect us in some way. The poem was written after a walk in winter at a time when I was thinking about the many people, including friends and family, who were once such integral parts of my life experience. The bleakness of that day seemed to reinforce a sense of isolation, the temporal nature of life and, strangely enough, it also seemed to increase the weight of anguish — and regret — inside me. Hence, the title of the poem.

Something More Than Winter Weighs (Upon Me)

Slowed by missteps and an unshakable
grief, I’m approaching the trail’s end,
watching the waning light dust the top
of the tree line where a few solitary
leaves of Klimt gold flutter like torch-
lights set atop the crowns of beech,
while a flock of juncos, shaped like
lateral buds, seem to blur and bend
the low-hanging branches, noting
how even the wind’s weighted, too,
with woodsmoke and rank with
leaf decay. In the further field,
snow, as soft as fly ash, is swept
across the thin, translucent icing
of the pond, adhering to the edges
of tombstones leaning away from
wind and much too close to earth,
and I pause to consider how all
seems to be near or at an ending
and so take on the season’s muted
hues of heart-sore gray, and I see
what little light is left to this day,
knowing, too, that I’ve done few
things well in this life and that it
is not so easy to displace loss, or
cast aside regrets or to somehow
ease the even greater weight of
those I still carry deep inside me. 

♦ 

John Muro’s work has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and two times for the Best of the Net Award. He is also a 2023 Grantchester Award recipient. John has published two volumes of poems, In the Lilac Hour (2020) and Pastoral Suite (2022), and both are available on Amazon. A third book, A Bountiful Silence, is slated for publication in the near-term. John’s work has appeared in Acumen, Barnstorm, Connecticut River, Grey Sparrow, New Square, River Heron, Sky Island and the Valparaiso Poetry Review. He lives in Connecticut and remains a lover of  the arts and of all things chocolate.    

The Delmarva Review, published in St. Michaels, MD, selects the most compelling new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of submissions nationwide (and beyond) for publication in print, with an electronic edition. It is produced  at a time when many commercial  publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content in print. Selection is based on writing quality, and almost half of the writers have come from the Chesapeake region.  As an independent literary publication, it has never charged writers a reading or publishing fee. The review is available worldwide from Amazon, other major online booksellers, and specialty regional bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note:  My mother died in my arms when I was in my early forties. She wanted to die at home, and my sister’s and my willingness to be her caregivers made that possible. Over the arc of my mother’s final weeks, she only uttered a rare few sentences, but each one took up resonance in my heart as my teacher. One of those sentences was a question she asked of me days before she took her last breath. It is the true center of this piece—the answers to which are both lastingly unknowable, and not.

Unknowable

ONCE, AFTER HEARING A SINGER’S lyrical lament that the angels might turn their backs on some—and what a mystery it would be, if so—I read an entire book on the history of angels in the hopes that I would find an answer to this riddle. When, indeed, would an angel turn its back on any of us? 

In that history, I found the intricate map of a celestial hierarchy arranged in a circular triad—closest to the circle’s center are the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; then the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; at last, there are the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. None of these beings are the sweet nothings we now associate with our conception of angels. They are matterless, purportedly voiceless beings charged with duties that they never predictably fulfill. (Who knew?) Those that find their job descriptions involve an interface with humanity, and with Earth, are too often seduced by evil and lastingly corrupted. 

When they make themselves visible to us, the Seraphim have four heads and six wings covered in all-seeing eyes; the archangel Michael had one hundred and forty wings. Wings to cover head, back, feet, face, and genitals. (Apparently, angels have genitals.) The mystery, as it turns out, was no mystery, just some measure of ignorance on my part; clearly angels could turn their backs on us as suddenly and for as many reasons as we might turn our backs on them. 

What remains with me is the vision at the center of their circular triad: “an unknowable center point which is called God…an emanation of pure thought of the highest vibration…” Around the unknowable center, the Seraphim ceaselessly chant, “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh–Holy, Holy, Holy…” This monotonous activity is described as a possible “song of creation…the primary vibration of Love”. The frequency of this “pure thought” changes its vibratory speed as it travels in subtle waves away from the center, coalescing into “pure light” in the second triad, before wholly condensing into matter at the outer reaches of the orbiting rings. It is here that you might find all of us—hovering and bustling around our unknowable center. 

In my life, I embrace no hierarchies nor are there celestial and circular triads, though surely, I have caught glimpses of some unknowable center. Around me at my desk gather traces of those glimpses—rings of images, clippings, hand-written notes, letters—held close by the gravitational pull of my life. I find brown sugar packets marked Istanbul Modern. A purple post it with ATC/NPR 1.22.07 written on it above “Iraqis tattoo their phone numbers on their bodies so someone can be called in case of their deaths.” On the back of a plain American Almanac calendar sent to me annually by my chronically suicidal high school friend, intricate first aid instructions for shock; artificial respiration: mouth-to-mouth; convulsions; heart attack; snakebite; poisons; burns. A pamphlet entitled A Flower Seed Planting Table for the Middle South, in whose legend it says, “T  is for tender; H is for hardy; HH is for half-hardy.” A chart that lists “the Number of Shrubs or Plants for an Acre calculated by their Distance Apart”—for plantings three by three inches apart, there is room enough for 696,960 plants. An old Altoid box filled with thousands of small typed HAs, individually snipped out from a larger piece of paper, and dropped into the container’s emptiness. There is Bruce’s Christmas card from 1997—a black- and-white universal signage symbol of a man blowing his brains out with a pistol, an empty cloud of smoke drawn in just where 

the pistol meets the universal man’s temple, all of it printed within a dark gray circle with a diagonal line drawn through it indicating Don’t! Jane’s first xoxo letter written in a vertical hand on a cream-colored sheet of paper crowned by a Japanese print of a woman bearing a lantern. A spherical lead fishing weight adrift on my desk from several years of experiments surrounding the design of my “Weft Removal Machine”. A mini article extracted from the Herald-Tribune, whose headline reads “Melted stalagmite leaves Hindu pilgrims dismayed.” My mother’s watch, which is always one hour slow, no matter how often I reset it, just as it was when she was alive. The announcement for a show entitled The Last Photographs—imagery by a man named James Fee who, believing his fixer to be his fifth of scotch while working in the darkroom, took a deep swig of it under the red light and died. An image of my friend John Lilly, emaciated from leukemia and wearing his favorite fake pearl-encrusted pink fifties sunglasses, giving a manicure to the fiberglass fingernails of a Jonathan Barofsky mini-man under our pepper-dripping tree. The script for a Yoko Ono painting entitled Painting to See the Skies that reads, “Drill two holes in a canvas. Hang it where you can see the sky. (Change the place of hanging. Try both the front and the rear windows, to see if the skies are different.) 1961 summer.” 

And then there are three portraits of my mother—when she is in her fifties (as I am), ambitious and striking and bold; when she is sixty-nine, in her first week of chemo, and she is thin, distilled, facing out toward us, but facing the abyss within; when she is seventy-one and just a year from her death, her face is fluffy with its sense of fun and with the chemo, but she looks into the camera at me as if there is nowhere she would rather be and no one she would rather be with. I rely on this image to keep me riveted to my joy, and not to my sorrow. 

Of course, the unknowable center can never be named, but I would venture to say that the vaguest form of it—its luminous self—slipped into my consciousness just days before my mother’s death when she asked me, “Do you have to stop loving to die?” 

♦ 

Mary-Cecile Gee holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in studio-arts from California State University, Fullerton. Gee attended the Community of Writers (in the High Sierras), studying with C.J. Wright, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, and Robert Hass. Gee is a Buddhist Chaplain at the “no-barriers” Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. She is a dedicated visual artist. Website: marycecilegee.com 

The Delmarva Review, published annually from St. Michaels, MD, selects the most compelling new personal essays, short stories, and poetry from thousands of submissions nationwide (and beyond) for publication in print, with an electronic edition. It is produced  at a time when many commercial  publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content in print. Selection is based on writing quality, and almost half of the writers have come from the Chesapeake region.  As an independent literary publication, it has never charged writers a reading or publishing fee. The review is available worldwide from Amazon, other online booksellers, and specialty regional bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: I find it a terrifying thrill that as a parent I am responsible not just for a child but a childhood, and whether or not she remembers these days with love or venom, the days proceed. Even my best self with my best intentions make mistakes. And yet, there is so much sweetness, whenever I follow her lead and look.

Traumas

My daughter learned from a goat
that there is sweet sap to be sucked 
from honey locust pods in early autumn.

She takes the fibrous capsules to her mouth 
with ecstasy—mmm, she sighs—inciting horror 
in mothers who watch from the swing set. 

My wife fears the traumas we bequeath. 
Traumas like mountain ranges submerged 
under flat lakes: some will surface 

as islands of visible grief, but most will lurk 
and stub a paddling toe or wreck a canoe 
out for a pleasant float. My wife says 

she pushed her away from her body,
says she was done being consumed 
before our daughter was done consuming, 

reads that crying to sleep etches abandonment 
into the brain. Graduated extinction, they call it, 
as if an absence can be tempered, as if the child 

knows the night as anything but complete. 
The pericarpal flesh, if you’re unfamiliar,
is a viscous goo sinewed with woody threads: 

delicious, my daughter states, spitting 
marble-black seeds into the playground mulch, 
reaching to pluck another from the branches. 

♦ 

Andrew Payton is a writer, learning designer, teacher, and climate advocate living in Harrisonburg, Virginia with his partner and children. His writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, among others, and he won the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. Born and raised in Maryland, he is a 2014 graduate of the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University. Website: andrewdpayton.wordpress.com 

The Delmarva Review, published in St. Michaels, MD, selects the most compelling new poetry. fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions nationwide (and beyond) for publication in print, with an electronic version. It is produced  at a time when many commercial  publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content in print. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com, other major online booksellers, and specialty regional bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: Dusk is my favorite time of day. While I don’t have a direct view of the sunset from my house, I can often see swathes of various colors streaking the sky and a commotion of clouds. I find the quieting of the world leads to quieting of the spirit. The intersection with night usually comes in a slow sweep and when the clouds allow, begins to speckle the sky with stars.

Now Dimming

lucky the leftover
light
of a long day now
dimming in small
chapters as shadows inch
and colors emerge
more frantic
than mere description
such as gold, violet,
tangerine
the hour that empties
to evening, a caress,
a settling of the
soul
before the first star
beckons to the rest
and night falls
like the sweep
of a great cloak 

⧫

Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks and the collection Vestiges from Kelsay Books. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Another Chicago Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other literary journals. She’s been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, Small Measures, was recently published by ELJ Editions. She frequently publishes short fiction, as well, and was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to  discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s note: “It’s a weary psychological truth that one is often one’s own worst enemy. It is also true, to paraphrase Proust, that the only veritable voyage is that which is undertaken within the Self, though in a foreign land, absent the habitual repères, these aforementioned truths may impose themselves upon the consciousness with an unfamiliar intensity. Here, then, is the story of a man who, in an elsewhere in which he believed to find the comfort of escape, instead stumbled upon the imperishable intensity of loss.”

Un Bouquet de Debra

DURING HIS YEARS OF DECLINE, in which the last of the youthful fires were quenched in dissipation, he rented a room under the mansard of a Haussmann-style apartment building. Furnished with a shabby sofa bed, a porcelain washbasin, an electric hot plate with a single heating element, a folding table and chair positioned in the only practicable corner, the dormer window high above the avenue de la Bourdonnais offered a distant view of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica upon its solitary knoll. It entailed no sacrifice to leave the room, and this morning, as every morning, he descended seven floors in the caged service elevator, crossed the cobbled courtyard, and gained the street via the porte cochère, making his way along the rue Saint-Dominique into the Latin Quarter. 

He marched back and forth between the Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Odéon metro stations for close to two hours, keeping pace with the perpetual locomotion of the throngs as his lowered eyes scanned the ground in front of him, before sitting on one of the slatted benches dotting the district, part of the ubiquitous mobilier urbain, the majority of which, from the Wallace fountains to the newspaper kiosks to the now virtually defunct vespasiennes, was painted the same deeply chlorophyllic green. He counted the small change he’d gleaned from the pavement here and there—centimes of diverse denominations—crossed the street and entered a boulangerie, where he purchased half a baguette from the female clerk. Emerging from the shop he gripped the bread in his hands in the manner of a dog clenching a new bone between its teeth, with an analogous air of vigilance, avidity, and anticipation. He turned into a side street, found another slatted bench to sit upon in the dappled shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, whose spiky fruit recalled the viral agents he’d once seen depicted in a glossy magazine. A few people straggled leisurely past, a mere trickle of humanity compared to the great murmurations of pedestrians swarming over the boulevards only steps away. He found himself in a tiny square. It was a sultry day late in August but coolly pleasant here. 

After bolting the half baguette, too nervous to linger anywhere, he rose and headed for the Seine. Climbing down a limestone flight of stairs abraded by countless footfalls, he roamed the quays watching the péniche barges, almost awash beneath their brimming cargoes, transporting gravel and sand downstream toward the Norman ports. Ascending once more to street level he proceeded in a direction perpendicular to the river, gazing into boutiques and bistros as he roved, their broad windows shuddering whenever a delivery or public transport vehicle rattled by along the uneven roadway. It was early yet. Waiters had only just begun casually spreading tablecloths over guéridons, distributing plates and silverware from sideboards, positioning wine and water glasses for the luncheon service. 

Turning left at a crossroad, he spotted a rose lying by the curbside, a lone bloom dropped unwittingly by one of the ambulatory vendors, and bending down, he snatched it from the gutter, where it lay like a forgotten relic. It was an intensely claret flower, perfectly formed, delicate, voluptuous, in pristine condition, ensconced within a clear cone of cellophane. Just then, as he straightened himself, an American couple emerged from one of the five-star hotels facing the sidewalk. He approached what he assumed to be the husband and said, “A rose for your lady?” He pronounced the phrase in English but with a spurious French accent, a marketing ploy, as well as a disguise of sorts, as if he were native to this land, as if he belonged here. The man glanced at his wife, who looked motivated to remain aloof from any eventual intercourse or transaction, and explored a trouser pocket, removing a crumpled bluish bill and a slew of coins he presented in an open palm, the poignant, if not pathetic gesture of the traveler unacquainted with a foreign currency. “Take whatever you need,” the man said. He grabbed the fifty-franc note, two ten-franc pieces—the exorbitant tribute of his desperation—and handed over the rose, his pulse galloping like a spooked horse and his tremulous hands just about useless as the couple drifted rapidly away from him. 

He reached the rue de Buci, waiting in line to buy a pack of cigarettes at the tobacconist’s situated there, and afterward walked up the street to the corner café where he consumed in company whenever he had sufficient funds, requesting a demi ordinaire at the bar. The beer was drawn to the twenty-five centiliter mark, the goblet plonked almost insolently in front of him onto a paperboard coaster imprinted with the logo of an obscure Alsatian brewery. Some froth overflowed the goblet’s rim like the spume of expiring waves upon a shore, inching down the bowl and stem to form a foamy puddle around the foot. He took a large swallow of this amber lager, whose peculiar malty aftertaste he’d grown to appreciate, and started recollecting the first time he’d ever drunk beer in his existence. 

One midsummer afternoon his mother permitted him to sip from her bottle as they played gin rummy by the swimming pool while his father was away at work and his sister, Debra, visiting a school friend. They sat together at a red cedar table beneath the thatch awning where they’d taken refuge from the sun, which that day had been especially torrid. The pool was bordered by an ivy-covered hillside scattered with several houses resembling his own—low, rambling, ranch houses of which a quantity had been built in the San Fernando Valley following the Second World War. Sunlight mirroring off patio doors and opaque windowpanes that juddered in the hot Mojave gusts caught his eye now and again. The calefaction of his skin ripened the smell of chlorine, tanning lotion, saline excretions, the evanescent odors of his boyhood. He found the beer immediately defective as children generally do; an acrid beverage only an adult would be grotesque enough to take voluntarily into the mouth. Yet barely two years later, at the wedding of a cousin to which the family had been convoked—he was thirteen or fourteen—he discovered champagne, and the experience had been a revelation. Not the sensual or gustatory aspects, but rather the internal sensations a few coupes induced in him: the giddy weightlessness of the mind, the sweeping away of all impediments, the addictive seduction of finally being unafraid. He came on to the attractive woman sitting next to him, no longer dissuaded by the difference in their ages or her imperial manner, nor by any kind of social conventions or barriers, while Debra, with whom he’d been enamored from the instant he grew aware of himself as himself, who’d splashed their mother’s No. 5 between her breasts dressing for the event, danced with another boy, her full, dark hair and laughter flying everywhere. But for once his jealousy did not punish him, corroding every pleasure—his heart had been inoculated with alcohol, rendered gay and wonderfully immune. 

He lit a cigarette and, his back to the room, considered his reflection in the mirror that ran the length of the metal counter. His image, fragmented by bottles of various wines and spirits below the bright galaxy of sparkling, suspended glassware, appeared spectral, enveloped in the hissing vapors of the espresso machine. 

“Beer does one good by hot weather like today, doesn’t it?” the woman beside him said. 

“How would you know?” he asked. She held a ruby kir royal; for a moment, he studied the bubbles rising to the surface of her flute like spherical creatures seeking escape into the atmosphere. 

“I am familiar with the qualities of beer.” 

“Though not to the point of partaking of one yourself under such favorable circumstances.” 

“It’s only that such a large amount of liquid can be an inconvenience. The facilities are so cruddy in these cafés habitually. You see what I’m driving at, I’m certain.” 

“Yes, I see,” he assured her, and, of course, he did. 

This affable young woman might have been carried off by the human tide at this juncture, as the café filled with a boisterous clientele come for the midday apéritif. But she stayed in close to him, and their bare arms touched two or three times over the next few minutes as they were jostled by new arrivals, which sent the warmth of her intimacy radiating through his body like a drug. Her skin was implausibly soft. By the time she finished her kir the noonday rush had subsided. She raised her flute; the cafetier hurried over. “The same thing for you, a beer?” she asked him. He nodded affirmatively, embarrassed, though exulting inwardly in the economy this would represent. She ordered the round. The drinks were placed before them, their section of counter wiped down with a rag. He thanked her. 

Some air wafted through an open window as they stood together silently, rustling the thin fabric of the woman’s print sundress. A few strands of her long, brunette hair were disturbed, also, or perhaps fell loosely of their own accord across her forehead, that with an unmindful motion she stroked back into place again. He perceived, abruptly, the scent of her perfume, floral notes of jasmine, orris, with some faint, fresh, polar reminiscence of snow. 

“You remind me of someone,” he whispered in a dreamy voice, as if noticing her for the first time. 

He was unsure whether she’d heard him. She responded, though, after a pause, saying, “I do?” 

Digging into her bag, she laid two coins on the plastic saucer they used for change and tips in every Parisian café he’d ever known. “A person from long ago, I bet. People tell me that quite often. It’s strange. There must be something about me.” 

She smiled a little ironically, which heightened the wistful, casual charm of her beauty. “But the past is always present in a way, isn’t it? We all bring it with us, I guess.  It was nice speaking with you.” She touched his forearm, peering briefly into his averted eyes, and exited by the door. She’d left a lavish pourboire—four francs—nearly enough for another draft; he hastened to pocket the money while the server, occupied preparing a sandwich for a hungry regular, looked the other way. Then, moved by a sudden impulse, he ran out into the street after the woman, believing once again the illusion from which he’d fled these many years, that an object of love might save him, however misguided his feelings. But she’d lost herself already in the crowd, and he began to wander, the same forbidden fragrance pursuing him, that imperishable remembrance of her. 

♦ 

Curt Saltzman was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in France. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Sou’wester, Atticus Review, Into the Void, Epiphany, Gargoyle, and others. He has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology. 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, provides selected writers with a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org