As part of one of my applications, I had to write a book review. I decided to write about Richard Siken’s Crush. When I googled “Richard Siken” to see if Crush was indeed his only collection of poetry — which it is and, by the way, you should totally read it if you haven’t already read it, and if you have already read it, you should totally read it again — I saw that he has a blog.

That’s right, if you managed to make your way through that convoluted sentence, you just learned that Richard Siken has a blog. Naturally, I checked it out, and I saw that he also has an e-mail account. Should I e-mail Richard and tell him how much I love his book was of course the question that immediately crossed my mind. I quickly decided to play it cool and leave the man alone.

As soon as I’d decided to play it cool, I decided to ignore my better judgment and e-mail him. So I did. What I sent was essentially a love letter to Crush, with a little bit of Gee, I’m so jealous thrown in on the side (for I am jealous, don’t you know, very much so).

If you think the story ends there, you are wrong. So wrong. I actually heard back from Richard. Sure, it was only a one-sentence reply, but it was a wicked-awesome sentence. I won’t tell you what he said, because that’s between Richard and me, but I will tell you it’s the best sentence anyone’s ever sent me via e-mail. Ever. And it’s a sentence I would not have received if I hadn’t taken a little gamble with some poet stalking.

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Note

I’m just kidding about the poet stalking. I do not make it a habit to stalk anyone, especially not poets who, out of everyone in the whole world, probably least deserve to be stalked. Poets are fragile, haven’t you heard? They can’t handle being stalked. We must leave them be.

Today on my way home from work, I made a turn near my house and came around the corner to crows, crows, everywhere crows. The sky so thick with them, it was almost black. They moved through the air like a single dark aggravation. I say aggravation because the ones that were flying clearly wanted to land, but there were no more surfaces to land on, every power line and street lamp clustered with them, every tree branch shaking with their weight and motion.

They were cawing so loudly I could hear it inside my car — the flying ones as if to say to the perched ones, Move on. You’ve sat there long enough. Let me have a rest, too. The perched ones as if to say to the flying ones, Find your own damn spot. I shit on this one already, which means it’s all mine.

Soon enough, I was past all the commotion and back under the stone-gray Seattle sky. Now, I find myself wondering what the crows are doing. I imagine them all settled in for the night, turning green, then yellow, then red with the methodic change of traffic lights.

We’re having another winter storm in Seattle. All day, I’ve watched the wind manhandle the trees in my neighborhood. Our power has flickered repeatedly, as if it’s flirting with the notion of going out entirely. Now hail is clinking (make that clanking, since the hail is getting larger) against our home’s gutters and windows. I just moved my car to the bottom of our hill, which means I should at least have a shot at making it to the GRE testing center tomorrow morning, when the weather is supposed to be even worse than it is now.

When I got out of my car after safely nestling it on a side street at the foot of the hill, I noticed a familiar sound. At first, I thought it was cicadas, but there aren’t any cicadas here. Even if there were, they wouldn’t be out this time of year. Still, the momentary misimpression of hearing them stirred something in me — a longing for the Midwest, for late-night walks down quaint, flat streets, the bark of the oaks and elms and maples and magnolias covered with them. The surround-sound of them above us, beside us, near and far. Every morning, the rattling was gone. Then at dusk, they’d start up with their modulated drone, vibrating their tymbals and turning their bodies into diminutive chambers of sound.

But I digress. The sound, as I was saying, wasn’t cicadas. It was the hail. I’m not sure how hail created that kind of din, but it did. While I walked back up the hill to my house, shielded from the hail by my umbrella, I felt happy as I thought about the joy of plucking abandoned cicada exoskeletons from branches and tree trunks, something I relished as a child in Oklahoma and as an adult in Kansas City. (Aaah, the wonder of their split-open backs, banded abdomens and finely haired bodies. Their alien eyes. Their hunched posture. Their clawed and crooked front arms. And oooh, how lithe they must be to crawl out of such a thin casing without destroying it. And wow, the thought of them rising up out of themselves — soft-bodied with pale-gold wings and red eyes and black bands on top of their heads — and wafting on the breeze like miniature German flags.)

But I also felt sad about moving so far away from them, both in terms of distance and, increasingly, time. As more time passes, I will forget about cicadas (and all the other details of my old Midwestern life), recalling them less often and with less specificity than I do now. One day, I will hear hail that sounds just like those ugly little racket-makers, and I won’t even make the connection.

But that’s what we do, right? Move forward. It’s the only choice we have.

So, with every step I took toward what is now my home, I exhaled. The tiny droplets of water and ice I breathed out into the cold night hung under the arc of my umbrella until I stepped forward, leaving even my last breath behind.

Tonight, the kinnikinnick leaves in the median, wet with rain, were a thousand green mirrors reflecting the golden glow of streetlights.

Still, I wished for long, hot days and clear skies. I wanted to see the kinnikinnick dry and brown as a cigar, unable to take the heat. I needed the sun to slip through my windshield, without asking, and use my skin as a resting place.

I want to tell you about the moon, shining behind a single cloud. I want to say that the cloud is like tissue under magnification. If I wanted to be more specific, I would say it’s like my husband’s brain reproduced in sliced images after technicians injected him with contrast and slid him into the MRI machine’s lonely tube. I want you to know about the cloud’s highs and lows, its irregular shape that almost looks like folds. And about the moon, which makes the cloud’s edges bright — just like contrast makes any human brain appear to have a light source. In the cloud’s center, the moon shines through, round and white, lighting the night sky like a tumor.

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Note

I really did see a cloud like this on my way home from work tonight. I wrote this piece before realizing that seven years ago this month is when LoveShack was diagnosed with a hemangioblastoma in his posterior fossa (a brain tumor, that is).