Glenda Burgess - The Geography of Love

Contents

a Barolo, amore mio

The Human Heart

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,

ochre, graph paper, a funnel

of ghosts, whirlpool

in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinance,

an artifact of human agency

in it maverick intricacy,

its chaos reflected in earthly circumstance,

its appetites mirrored by a hungry world

like the lights of the casino

in the coyotes eye. Old

as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,

fashioned from moonlight,

yarn, nacre, cordite,

shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.

We build the human heart

and lock it in its chest

and hope that what we have made can save us.

Campbell McGrath

Physicists say we are made of stardust. Intergalactic debris and far-flung atoms, shards of carbon nanomatter rounded up by gravity to circle the sun. As atoms pass through an eternal revolving door of possible form, energy and mass dance in fluid relationship. We are stardust, we are man, we are thought. We are story.

Its always a story, my girl, my father told me one summer evening when I was young. Falling stars, rings in a tree trunk, the river as it swells by, all stories.

We were camping in the wilderness north of Vancouver, Washington, along the pebble shoals of the Lewis River. It was an hour after sunset, and the sky was deepening to an inky lavender at the edge of the black canopy of trees. We crouched beside the water, washing up after a quick dinner of cowboy stew. I asked him what made stars shoot. At nine years old, I was ready for real explanations, heavy truth, clues and answers to bigger mysteries than long division. My father had studied physics as a young man. I knew he would take my question seriously.

He reached behind him to loosen a flat river stone and skipped it out across the burbling rapids. Please, I begged silently, tell me the truth. I knew with deep inner conviction that the way my father answered my question would somehow affect the way I asked and answered questions the rest of my life.

He tossed out another stone as he considered the darkening sky.

Just a bit of chance and chaos, Sunshine, he said. Atoms that dance.

I think back to that long-ago conversation as I ponder the effects of luck and disaster on the human heart. A child then, I had no real awareness of human fragility, but I absolutely knew shooting stars pirouetted across the universe. Life, my search for truth, seemed dusted by a dash of magic.

Only now in the wake of fortune, do I truly understand.

Quintessence

SUMMER, 1988

I awoke to the sound of the unfamiliar. Disturbed by the rustle of feathers and harsh caw of a crimson and teal parrot perched on the balcony railing four feet from my nose. The bird sidled along the railing toward the balcony patio table, eyeing the remainders of a late-night fruit plate. A brilliant green slug curled at the bottom of an empty champagne glass.

I lay still, coming slowly awake, registering another unfamiliar sound: the muffled snores of the man sleeping beside me. The sheets were crisp, expensive linenhotel sheets. And the bright sunlight streaming in through the filmy drapes was the hot sun of Rio de Janeiro. The man was my lover. I was thirty-one years old, and this was happiness. I had nothing to compare it to, but you know the sweet from bitter, and this was most definitely sweet.

I slipped out of the sheets careful not to disturb Ken and pulled on his dress shirt from the night before, walking through the sliding glass doors to the balcony. A breeze salty and cool whipped in from the sea, carrying the lush green smell of the jungles and bluffs that shouldered the white sands of Ipanema. The beach was visible from our room, a scimitar of glossy heat that ended in a sparkling sea, rimmed by high rises and hotels, exotic gardens as far as the eye could see.

I hugged his shirt close, inhaling the musk and sweat of the man, memories of thrilling guitars and Latin drums, the salsa dancing of the night before. Who travels an entire continent in order to salsa dance in Rio? Ken Grunzweig. Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever couldthe phrase from Something Good by Oscar Hammerstein drifted into my head and I hummed the lyric with a smile, flicking a rind of kiwi toward the parrot now hovering in the tree canopy below. My grandfather had sung the song to me as a child. He and my grandmother, on one of their periodic visits east to New York, had booked in at the Plaza, picking up tickets to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music. Broadway, 1959. I was not yet three at the time, but I remember the song, the way Grampa would twirl me and plant a big kiss on my neck as he sang, Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.

I looked back over my shoulder at the man sleeping rumpled under the sheets, one arm flung over his forehead in vulnerable disregard for the world. For our many mistakes, the unexpected tragedies, the sadnesses rounded with time, life had produced the unfamiliar. Something good.

If you were to ask me what three things I know to be true of life, I would tell you these three: what you dreamed of yourself at fourteen reflects your purest wish; dont marry the first person you kiss; and all the great questions bounce back from God.

Fourteen is the first time we ever really ask our future selves, What do I want to be? and the self answers back, pure and free of rationalization. And love. Romance plops the macaroni salad right beside the ambrosia. Grandmothers tell us not to marry first crushes, unless were the type of person who has only ever liked bologna sandwiches and always will. And while the question of God himself frames the universe, the great mysteries exist in the human heart, unsolved. What is faith, intuition, if not human sonarhope that pings the universe, mapping life? Sometimes gut instinct is the only way to answer the big questions for ourselves.

Ive learned to listen for the echo of small answers.

My father taught me that science was the puzzle play of God, that the mysteries and theories of all creation were understood in levels of revelation, degrees of understanding. There was no wrong answer, but there were inadequate questions. The scientific path to God, my father believed, was the pursuit of Why?

I grew from a child to a young woman, and the question Why? seesawed for dominance within my life with the bleakness of Oh well. Short on answers but long on questions, I learned to protect myself, to avoid the complicated detours in favor of more well-traveled paths. For me, these paths were particularly barren in matters of the heart. Dating the guy sitting next to me in class, on the subway, in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, I encountered a profound lack of imagination and magic.

Needless to say, I made a pretty good hash of things learning about love. I know now that first loves are scooped from reflecting pools, mirroring back to us, as the cool waters revealed to Narcissus, how greatly we yearn to perceive ourselves as lovable. The self, in its innocent quest to survive, takes no prisoners. I think back to the sweet high school boyfriend who just seemed to