North Carolina Conversations Summer-Fall 2008.pdf

Visiting the Wright MemorialMy Brother the PhotographerKitty Hawk, N. C.for LisaWalking the twilight beach I searchinto the sea wind, seeingwaves cold-brightly ascending,sliding back, blindly drying.Gulls walk pacing me, shabbyand old in overcoats of feathers,unwilling to fly. One whiteyet in the rosy lightrises onto tip-toe, mid-angledwings expanding, catching the air,its webbed feet suddenly graceful.I think of the Wrights’ first lengthof ascent, the kite-like wing boxshuddering, gathering liftfrom the prone man intendingit upward; the next flight longer —then Wilbur, mastering dune-distance,balanced them together in conceptalong the tensioned high wire of creation.I look out. One gull dwindles whereair down-bends at the horizon,in that endless finitudeas it turns with the Earthout of sight. My heart’s questnarrows with its white,a wing-arc liftedfrom the uncanny slight curve,of ocean marked against distance.The wing-line goes finer,my ache is with its edgeas it chalks their idea of flyingon sky in ever-recessionat sunset.The gull disappears toward a star.for HenryIn the photo my brother would have taken,an enormous magnolia flattens at evening,leaning in onto the ash-gray cabin.The clapboard absorbs the darkening, but isX-rayed for our eyes, to show the roomsjust inside, the straight-backed chairs,a quilt folded onto a trunk, the stark clockin its case on the mantel. The tablein the other room with its dried flowerin a Mason jar holds a smell of well waterfrom the kitchen through the door, wherethe iron pump in an enameled sink stillraises its handle, able to spilliron-spiced water from its jaws.A grandpa stands flat in his cloth,the suit jacket folded like metal, his stareframed in its moment, hung byan angle of wire from the beaded sheathing.We are standing on a ditchbank outside,across the tar and gravel road, noticingthe first swallows weaving abovethe magnolia leaning on this cabin like evening.We each drink a beer from the crossroads storethree miles distant, down the longstraight rise beyond Toisnot Swamp.The way the magnolia’s visual weightplays against the flattening cabin inthe coming evening prints our thoughts.He would have captured it later, without me.The negative must be hiding in the coolerhe filled with these reversals of light and darkacross the years, driving the countrywe came from, town boys, haunted bythe enigma of the farmland and its denim peoplegrowing up out of the rank feral fields.The magnolia’s cloud of ink seems froman octopus life beneath, bequeathedto the paling sky, helping it flatten, composingthe union of cabin and tree and evening,so that later his camera could catchthis outermost darkening in its innermost light.NC Conversations • Summer 2008 • 37