Wagoner - After the Point of No Return

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, THE JOURNAL Where it went, what it came back to, where and why it laid itself down and tried to sleep, what happened to it without advice or consent, what it failed at, how it disobeyed its own commands to no purpose, what it held in its hands when it was told and told to let go, what it neglected to open its arms for, how it wouldnt stand still, not even when it might as well have had no legs at all to be running away with, or the times when it would sit and wait without knowing what it was waiting for in places where it didnt belong, how it broke down, how but not why it made marks again and again on pieces of paper.

He said hed open them like a present with his fingers next week when I was three.

You see somebody scary in front of you. You both open your mouths at the same time, and its you in a mirror. The floor goes crooked. Its jiggling. You have to go but theres nowhere to go. Too many lights go on, and suddenly go back off before you can shut your eyes.

Somebody uglys under a white sheet. Youre being sick on a rug that cost good money.

When all our games were over and after shed handed out the small edulis prizes, wrapped and trimmed and inscribed with her own neat, careful digits, she shouted toward the ceiling an exclamatio and fell down on the floor and began to shake, shudder, and jitter the whole length of her gray dress, her mouth uttering through white foam untranslatable words, then died post meridiem.Oh sunt lacrimae rerum.

When Reverend MacLaurie showed us pictures, we knuckled down and did it with bare hands, all thirty of which, if left idle a little too long, might have done the devils work instead of the carpenters. We bulldozed crooked streets with thumbs and Popsicle sticks, made temples and huts and Christ knew what out of cardboard. We painted it brown and gold, poured dunes out of real sand, and stuck real rocks on hills and out-of-proportion horses and chariots, not on fire, but on roads, and then we played Bible games for an hour, and Jerusalem wasnt looking too good when we went home. And the next Sunday, after Reverend MacLaurie sang a song by William Blake, we had to scrape Jerusalem off into cans out in the alley.

We didnt breathe because I didnt dare so close to her glasses and because she couldnt with her mouth shut tight against the deepest longings of asthma. With a gasp and a glancing blow of the hips we parted, and I sneaked upstairs to hide my life under a comforter. If only Id kissed her hard with a hard grin like Humphrey Bogart, cracking some kind of joke, or given her a sisters birthday peck or a Jimmy Cagney smack smack on the cheek. But Id done it scared and solemn, a dumb cowboy forgetting when to head into the sunset. All night, sleeping and waking, I tried to do it differently while the curtains billowed toward me like nightgowns, like the vapor from the machine that breathed in her bedroom.