Makeup: a nested, ordered pair.

       

I was 16, and she was 41, the day my mother got her first, and only, tiny pimple.  She came to me

 pointing next to her nose, asking me what it was.  I had to look hard to see it.  “A pimple,” I said, rolling my

 eyes.

            She washes her face with water, and soap if she’s showering--she's done it all her life.  She has never used a moisturizer, ever.  She owns one lipstick which she bought for my wedding, 29 years ago, and the tube is almost full. She is 81 and her hair is heavy, and thick, and still mostly black. They want to thin it when she goes to get it cut.

             Makeup: my mother calls it “war paint”; my mother has perfect skin.

                        *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            My grandmother’s lipsticks stood on her dresser in a brown plastic rack which was swirled to look like tortoise shell.  They stood between a crackle-glass perfume atomizer with a strange, golden, pod-like bulb, and a hinged, pink, satin box in which she kept her pin-curl clips and metal rollers.

            In the lipstick rack, each tube had its own little place where it fit standing up--a circle into which I dropped it after uncapping and twisting the tube to see what color emerged: Persimmon, and True Red, and Poppy, and Coral; Cinnamon, Sea Shell, Nude and Frost-Pink.  I stood them there like soldiers at attention, ready to serve, waiting for her to go out.

             My grandmother had perfect skin, too--white and soft, and smelling of roses. She washed each day with cold-cream--never with soap—spreading it on gently and removing it, always, with an upward stroke.  She patted her face dry afterward. “Never scrub,” she told me, “Gravity doesn’t need help. Your mother, you know, is ruining her skin.”

            I loved to watch her do her face: first the cold-cream, then a face lotion for wrinkles, then liquid foundation, then rouge for her cheeks-- “Ever so little,” she said. I sat on the tub handing her things from a plaid, vinyl-lined, cosmetics pouch.  It had a zipper with a leather tassel and when I pulled it open all her pencils and pots were in there.  She had a brown eye-brow pencil stamped Hollywood Arts, and black eye-liner which I loved to twist out, and out, to its very end, and a rosy-pink pencil for her lips with almost all the gold lettering rubbed off.  For her eye-lids there were tiny pats of silky shadow: blue and green and gold and brown, but my favorite was a pot of shimmering white shadow cream which she smoothed along her brows and dotted at the corners of her eyes to “open them up and make them wide.” Finally, came loose powder: a soft, beige puff for her face, and a cardboard box into which she dipped it.  The powder was nearly white and smelled like her. 

            My grandmother’s stockings came in slim, flat boxes.  They came folded into tissue paper, perfectly creased, light as butterfly wings.  Lifted out they held the shape of a woman’s leg—ankle, calf and thigh.  Cocoa and bone, nude and black, she pulled them on--crossing one leg over the other, bending forward to tuck her narrow toes into the scrunched toe of the stocking, lining the seams up.  Then with a deft and practiced hand she quickly eased the fragile net up her leg--pulled it over her thin ankles, dancer’s calves--over knee-caps pale as inverted porcelain; over thighs as slim as a girl’s—and I sat watching for the moment she would tug them up to the clips of her girdle, sliding smooth tongues of metal over rubber tabs.

                        *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            It’s dinner time; I can smell pork chops cooking.  I can smell corn. I can smell the wet iron smell of the radiator and hear it clunk and hiss. I hear Willie and Charlie playing Zorro on his horsey, circling round and round on the braided rug downstairs. I can hear my father talking. 

            I am kneeling on the sink looking into the mirror. My new eye-brows are very black. My new mouth is very red.  I am a new me looking back at the old me.  I am six years old and someone I know, and someone I do not know well. The Halloween face paints are itchy on my skin.  They smell like wax, but I don’t care; I am beautiful--I am princess beautiful--and I have never been beautiful before.

            When my mother calls me for dinner, I walk downstairs slowly, my hand on the rail.  I enter like Cinderella, late for the ball, everyone is already there.  I take my seat and say--wearing my face, proudly, like a choice, mind made up,--“This is how I want to look when I am big.” 

            “Who knows,” my mother says, spooning out peas, “Maybe you will.”

           

            *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

            “Where are you going?” I ask her.  My mother is leaning into the sink, peering at herself in the mirror with her lips in a tight, wide, oval putting on lipstick.  It is very red.  She finishes the bottom lip, turning her head a fraction of an inch as she presses her lips together making the color even. 

            “Hand me a tissue,” she says, still looking into the glass and reaching behind her towards me as if her image in the mirror might disappear before she like an eyelash if she looks away, or blinks. I hand her the tissue, and she blots, kissing the white Kleenex then handing me back the print of her lips.

            I sit on the toilet seat, pleating her kiss.  “Where will you be?” I ask her again, needing to know how far from here to there; how far I will have to run to get to her; how loud I will need to yell for her to hear me.  She is putting on her bracelet now, a silver one with jet black stones.

            “We’ll be at the Heishen’s.  Just down the street.”  She is doing the clasp of the bracelet, turning her white wrist to the light. I kick my foot against the radiator -- clang, clang, clang.

            “Mrs. Ofterheidi is coming to stay with you,” she says. Then she looks at me, and her eyes say: don’t make a fuss. I want her to just stay here in the bathroom talking to me and not go out.  I make a face.

            “You can stay up an hour later,” she adds, as if making a bargain.

             I am trying to be a big girl; but my throat feels like it wants to cry: she is going away from me.  She frowns, leans over, kissing my hair where she won’t leave a mark. And then she stands up in her pointy, clickity shoes and turns away. She is already almost in the hall.  

            “Mama!” I say it quick; I run to her, “I need a hug before you go!”  I know I sound like Willie; I am whining. I want to be Willie, so little he can hold on tight, and cry, and not let go, and nobody minds it. But I did that once—held on to her so she couldn’t stand up—and how mad she got, and my dad too, and how I couldn’t put any of it back the way it was before; I couldn’t put it back inside me.

            She turns back again--leans over, hugging me. She is warm. She smells like lily of the valley. I love the smell of it. It comes from an aqua bottle with a golden cap.  The bottle is shaped like a tower, and it’s cool and powdery on the outside when I hold it. You can’t see through the bottle, even though it’s glass. “Careful,” she always says. Tonight when she sprayed it on, she rubbed her wrists together then rubbed them onto me so that now, when she stands up, moving through the door and away from me, pulling on her coat, I can still smell her on my skin when I press my own arm up against me face, when I press my arm to my nose to help the tears stay in.

             

             

           

Objects of Childhood

 Slinky

Bright spring of silver
I push my hand through.
Cast of metal-
bracelet,
gauntlet,
glove.

Pull it off
of itself--
each ring coming away
from the next,
separating out
from the whole.
Slow skein of alive tension that cuts the sky
into segments of blue.
I lie on my back looking up
through the broken world.

Slinky, like a chest expanding , a breath pulled in,
and then let go.
All of it collapsing into itself with a sudden
ching!
Or a slower shush--
if you let it go on a carpet,
one end snaking toward the other one,
coils kissing coils,
coming home.

Put it on a step
and watch it find its way,
end over end,
in a slow balletic tumble.
And when it stumbles,
the frantic rolling, springing, crash
as it rushes down the stairs.
That could be you.

And the smell of it
like pennies on your skin.
The smell of it, like the taste of blood in your mouth--
The metal of your body,
and the ridges there on the edge of things
where you could cut your tongue.

Spirograph

with it's teeth, teeth, teeth
and its tight little circle of holes.
The way your eyes go all hazy,
sleepy like a dream,
waiting for the whole of it
to come round again.

A mandala of green.
Or blue.
Or red.
Or black.
And then another smaller disk, after,
to make another smaller world
inside the other.
Snowflakes of ink,
like the symbol of the atom, spinning.
Or a flower.

Sometimes, though, the pen-tip was too short.
Or the ink ran out.
Or the teeth came out of the other ones
and it was ruined--
the pen off track--
marking the place where you forgot
to push into the paper, forgot
to push back into the world, forgot 
you were part 
of making the magic 
of it happen,
after all.

Etch-A-sketch

Lines that show the places
where I trace and peel the silver back
from the world's eye.
The mirror of this
negating
what I will not see,
replacing what is there
with what I imagine it
to be.

Two hands twisting the tongue of things
to say a line
that shakes
and will not go
where I ask it to
unless I run it straight
to the edge
and out of room.

Circle back
to make a nose,
then back again
for the mustache with its bristling comb-like hairs
because you can only go over straight--
all things connected,
no thing coming out of nowhere,
everything showing
what came before.

There is this tension,
and the skin of it
like a skater on a blade,
a wobbling beginner who can't stand
where the thin edge of things
once made will take her.
So break it.
Shake it.
Begin again.

Popsicle

White paper that sticks
to the frost on top
of the smooth twin tongs
of a Popsicle.
The tongue depressor handles
that will taste of grape and wood
when you get done,
and the way you break it
down the center,
give half of it away
like friendship bracelets,
then suck the edges smooth.

Frozen finger of ice.
Tongue against the cold of it, the burn of it,
drawing out the sweet from the center,
and how it fills your mouth with colored juice--
grape, or orange, or green whatever-it-is . . .
lime?

Warm spit on your achy-cold teeth.
and the sun on your face
and your arms,
sitting on he curb
on the corner
in the brand new summer air--
the rest of June, and all of July,
and then August after that
in front of you, and
"Look at my tongue!" you say,
"It's purple."
And you feel it,
fat and numb in your mouth,
and strange,
like you just arrived on this earth in a body,
or it just showed up like that, suddenly,
this odd new lump of meat
you can talk and taste
and touch with.

What’s in a Name?

Virgin

My name is Elizabeth, but I grew up as Lisa (a common name at the time due to the popularity of actress Lisa Gaye). At any rate, some folks spell Elizabeth, "Elisabeth," so I was Lisa . . . and MAN were there a lot of us. In one of my high school English classes there were six Lisa's, and in college, there were even more! Finally I got tired of it. I was tired of being part of a crowd.

I didn't really feel like a Lisa, either. I liked the name all right; it’s a pretty name. But I thought of Lisa's as "sweet" and "good", and at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in either one of those things. I wanted to grow up--not worry so much about other people, be more straight-forward, embrace my edgier self, figure out who I really was (I’m still working on it). So I “changed” my name.

Lover

“I’m Liz,” I said at parties. “I’m going by Liz, now,” I told old friends. And soon I was her. I was Liz. I turned when people said the name; I wrote it on my college papers; I felt it when my lovers whispered it in bed.

For years I’ve been Liz: Liz graduated college; Liz got married; Liz bore children; Liz went to graduate school, got a job, bought a house, paid bills; Liz is going gray. 

Mother

But what happened to Lisa? Where did she go, that little girl, that adolescent, that young woman I once was, for so many years? I still answer to the name; I still look up when I hear someone say “Lisa” in a crowd. And when my aunt and uncle--those living links to the long-ago "me"--call me by that name, it’s sweet. It touches me. I’m still her to them . . . and to myself in that moment. How odd! And even more surprisingly, when I hear my old name coming from the people I love, and they mean me, and something in me answers them--something long-ago and real and deep--I feel a bit sad, maybe regretful even, that I just dumped Lisa off on a street corner somewhere in Ann Arbor and said, “Don’t wait for me.” Didn’t I have some responsibility for her? Shouldn’t I have given her a little warning?

But, well, Liz wasn’t as nice as Lisa, right? Not as thoughtful? She didn't care more about other people than about herself like Lisa did. At least she didn’t want to. Liz wanted to be free: to be a writer, a poet, an artist, a wanderer, a lover, a singer, a seeker, a seer. Liz was trying to leave Lisa behind.

We can’t, though, can we? We can’t leave ourselves behind, not 

Queen

any part of us. We are who we are because of all that we have been. And my parents were smart. They gave me a name that could be a hundred selves--Bess and Betsy, Els and Elspeth, Betty and Beth; Eliza and Ellie, Bet and Tibby, Lisa and Liz. And this is good thing for a restless chameleon like me, somebody who enjoys trying on all the perspectives, writing all the characters, listening to everyone’s stories, leaving nothing out. Being a million shades of me.

I was speaking with an old friend on the phone the other day. He asked me how I was. I said I was doing OK, but I was trying to figure out how to “come out of the closet” so to speak, and be who I really am now that I’m middle-aged.  

He said, “You’ve been trying to do that for 25 years!” We both laughed; because it’s true.

I added, “Well, It’s a really long closet, and I have to try on every outfit from here to the door to figure which me is going to open it!”

“Maybe,” he said, “it would be better if we just came in?” And there was a pause, “But then, we might never get out again.”

I think that’s my fear, actually, that the whole of me--Elizabeth, that girl with a raft of possible selves (with all of their ideas and enthusiasms and fears and perspectives and needs)--might gobble you up, you people I love. Better to keep it short: Liz. Better to make it sweet: Lisa.

The people who love me don’t seem to be buying it, though. These days my closest friends are starting to call me “Lizzie.” I’ve noticed it; they’re calling me by the pet name my mother, and father, and grandparents used for me in that long-ago time when my everyday name was Lisa. I don’t know exactly when “Liz” started morphing to “Lizzie”--I didn’t tell anyone to use it--but I guess I can see why. They know me.  Lizzie is more vulnerable, less edgy, a bit (can I say it?) sweeter--more (if I’m honest) true of me. Am I really Liz with her razor-sharp “z” pulled at the ready? Am I that straight-ahead sure that I am right? I’m a Liz who keeps her “Z” tucked up within her unless she really needs it, a person who begins with the “L“ of Love--has a temper tantrum of resistance in the middle of things, waving that “Z” around--and ends with the “ie” of “cutie“ and “sweetie” and “sorry” : a Lizzie.

So who’s coming out? I’ll keep my public Liz; she’s the one I introduce myself as.  I publish as Elizabeth (it’s a beautiful, classic name, with a great, big closet of possible selves). My aunt and uncle will remind me of the Lisa I still hold inside. And when my friends call me LIzzie, well, I won’t correct them.

Me?

Footnote:

The great and powerful Wikipedia says that “A hypocorism (/haɪˈpɒkərɪzəm/; from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a shorter or diminutive form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment. Also known as pet name or calling name. However, shortening of names is certainly not exclusive to terms of affection, indeed in many cases a shortened name can also be attributed to expressions of hatred, it's a grey area.”

Cardinal Truth

 (picture source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology )

As I sat on our little back porch last night conversing with an old friend about love, and loss, and the beautiful and sad world we live in, a brilliant male cardinal swooped underneath the grapevines that have wrapped around the corner there to create a cool, green bower. He landed not more than five feet from away, twitching his brilliant tail, his crest rising and falling as he turned his eye to look at me. What a beauty, with his orange beak and crimson feathers! He took me in; then off he flew.

Not more than a moment later, I saw him with a female in the bushes near to the house. She had the same bright beak, but was a muted, salmon-color, just as lovely but more subtle, and she was shy. The male flew to the porch rail several times, then back to the bushes while the female looked on. Each time he joined her they seemed to confer, though they didn’t make any sound that I could hear, and then suddenly, all at once, they both flew into the vines above me. When I looked up I saw what this was all about: They had built a small nest high up in the grape vines near the roof of the porch. It was right above where I was sitting and I hadn’t seen it! Poor things; there I was, all big and threatening, just where they needed to be. I didn’t go though; I sat still to watch.

Their nest is quite different from the one the robins built at the other end of the porch where earlier in the summer we watched four babies hatch, feed, grow, and fly. This cardinals’ nest is made of stiffer stuff, and it is lacy, so much so that I could see the little bodies of the baby birds (I think there are two) right through the twigs, and even a flash of a pink mouth. For the next 10 minutes I sat there as the parents--red and salmon, bright and subtle--came and went, came and went, tending and feeding their young in a fluster of parental concern, both of them often bending over the nest together.

One of my precious Buddhist teachers, Khenpo Palden Sherab, once said, “The world is always speaking to you in metaphor. But you have to pay attention,” and another great teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, said, “You can even learn the Dharma from nature, from the flight of a bird.”  On a day of contemplating death, discovering this unexpected new life above me, hidden in the sheltering leaves, was a small, sweet blessing and a teaching:  hidden in joy is suffering, and in suffering joy; hidden in life, death, and in death, life; hidden in samsara is nirvana, and in nirvana, samsara. Actually there is no difference between the two. There is only this world, right here, but it can be experienced in two very different ways.

How to Write an Essay (If you're me)

First you resist. And Agonize. And hope the essay will go away if you ignore it. You clean your house, and sort the mail, and eye the essay from across the room, obliquely, hoping it won’t notice you there if you whistle and water the plants.

And you wait. You wait until the last minute. You wait until it is the day before the essay is due, and then you panic. You panic and yell at your dog, at your husband, at your kids. You walk around the house banging cupboards and cleaning very loudly. It is someone else’s fault that this essay is not done: It is your teacher’s fault who assigned you this stupid essay in the first place; It is your kids’ fault because they are too noisy and so you can’t even hear yourself think, let alone write a stupid essay; It is the stupid dog’s fault because he barfed on the rug and you had to clean it up instead of writing this stupid essay. And it is definitely your stupid husband’s fault whose stinky, dirty socks you have to waste all your time picking up instead of writing this, stupid, stupid essay!! You have to say all of this out loud, VERY loud, to write an essay. If you have a lot of self-control, you wait until no one is home to begin (Come on kids, let’s go to the park. Mommy has to write an essay.). The door slams shut. “Shit. Piss. Fuck!” You stomp around hollering at the top of your lungs, “I am not going to write this essay! I don’t have to write this essay! No one can make me write this essay! I hate this class; I hate this teacher; I hate my WHOLE STUPID LIFE! 

When you are done yelling and banging and stomping, and are all good and tired out, you flump yourself into the couch and sit there breathing hard with your arms crossed. You swing your foot wildly. You imagine ways to escape. You imagine a tragedy that will save you-- a hurricane, an accident, a fire, a flood. You imagine hitting the highway, “I’m out of here,” and the note you will leave. You imagine buying a yellow school bus and filling it with spider plants, and jars of dried beans and pasta, and putting in a wooden floor, and a hammock, and a tiny woodstove, and traveling to New Mexico in it where you will live like a gypsy selling jewelry and reading astrology charts…and where you meet a man with kind eyes who plays a wooden flute, and you get pregnant with him and forget your other children, and your husband--but not your essay—though you can’t write it, of course, because you are nursing and smoking pot and sleeping out under the cold, white desert stars. Or you drive to California, and you stand in the waves, and you learn to surf, and you live on fish, and Tangueray, and oranges, and you never get old.

Now, you have wasted an hour. Now you have wasted a week and an hour. You eyeball the clock. You chew the side of your thumb. You count out how many hours are left before your class: 11 and three quarters. You can do this, you think to yourself. You have done this before. 

You get up and put the coffee on. Then you climb to the attic with your cup, and you find the box with your yearbooks, and the one with your diplomas, and the one of all your school papers from sixth grade on, and you haul them all out of there and look at them. Papers from high school and middle school spread out around you with their 85’s and 92’s and 78’s ("Lisa, Why did you turn in a DRAFT as your final revision? Use more care!”) These are supposed to give you courage, prove your competence, give you ideas. Maybe you secretly hope that you will find a paper you’ve already written on this topic and somehow forgotten--a brilliant paper from that one class you had—what was it called?— the teacher who said that you should be a writer? A paper that you never turned it in for credit, but will be there near the bottom of the box all ready for you. 

You have wasted two hours. Your knees ache. Your back hurts. Your coffee is stone cold. You climb down from the attic, warm up the coffee, and begin:

“How to Write an Essay

The most important part of a well-crafted essay is…..”

And then you stop. What is the most important part? What is it supposed to be, anyway? You remember a little about “thesis” and about the importance of having an “outline,” but isn’t there a “body paragraph” something or other – more than one of them—which makes you think of paragraphs with legs coming out the bottom. How are you supposed to write an essay if you can’t remember the rules? Now you are having a little bout of hopeless self-loathing: you are clearly stupid, and you can’t write and you never could write, and you know nothing whatsoever about grammar or punctuation, and you wouldn’t know an adverbial clause if he jumped off his sleigh and handed you an nicely packaged “LY” word from his big red bag. Sooooo…. you pour yourself a glass of wine at three-thirty in the afternoon and sit in the winter sunlight feeling like you’ve wasted your life.

Your family comes home and you lie to them. You say brightly, “I’m almost finished.” You play cards with your children. You mop the kitchen floor in penance, then you take a hot bath and stay up late goofing around on Facebook.

* * * * *

In the morning, you are desperate, repentant, and ready to write. An hour and a half before class, you open up a Word document and start typing. You dive in like an Olympian. Your heart pounds. Your fingers race. It’s you against the clock, but you are in the groove now, and the words flow out of you like out of some font of language, like you were made to do only this in life—to write with passion and power and grace. You are a word machine, you are a Craft-Mastah. Caffeine and a deadline are your best friends.

Five minutes before class you hit “print”—no spell-check, no proofread, no edit, no draft—It’s just you on your snowboard, taking the jump: there is one moment of flight, then you land it, or you don’t. It’s just you at half-court at the end of the game with the score tied: the ball has left your hand in a perfect arc, and the buzzer is sounding: the ball will or it won’t go in.

As you jam the pages of your essay into your bag and grab your coat, racing for the car (hoping there’s gas and that there isn’t a wide-load going up East), you vow to yourself, once again, that next time you have to write an essay, you’re going to start writing early . . . ..

My uncle called my mother to say the house was burned to the ground by an arsonist last week: RIP old house, old memories.

                                                      The House

The house sits close to the road, square as a die, its empty windows watching time pass. It was built when the road was little more than a dirt track leading from the lake and fairgrounds out into a monotony of small farms that cut the Pennsylvania countryside into 100 acre parcels.  Now, cut and cut again, the pieces are measured in halves and quarters. And instead of homesteads, there are trailers and white painted tires ringing petunias, feigning a kind of permanence where once there was a sea of greening corn.

           

The house was built to stay though, and it has. Now it is falling into its own cellar and becoming one with the land: the ultimate commitment to place.  My uncle has tried to save it, hoisting it up like a drugged cow, propping it with timbers and metal posts, but still it sags and shrinks.  Entropy is a powerful force, things falling back on themselves.  

             

My grandfather, the son of a traveling Methodist minister, tried in middle age to capture the past and make up for his childhood of always leaving everything, of never having, anything: he bought the farm with all its sad and faded ghosts.  It is the place inside of me where summer lives.  For every summer memory, small and terrible, or golden and tentative, is hinged to that white clapboard house purpling in the twilight.

It was always only a summer place, holding the musty secrets of its eight unoccupied months.  Each May we’d drive out in my grandparents’ long Buick to open the house.  We’d sit on the hot red seats, shiny with automotive upholstery wax, testing the power windows, raising and lowering the plush armrests, clicking the ashtrays open and shut.  We let the hot wind rushing past the windows dry our tongues until they clung to the roofs of our mouths. We splayed our hands against its weight, while it pushed our fingers back and back, pointing the way from which we’d come.  Then the car would slow, gently turn into the dip that marked the drive, wind past the crippled apple tress and stop at the back door, pinging and clicking as it cooled.  We never got out right away.  We always sat there, together, looking at the house.  Then the crooked back step peeling paint, the jangling keys, the rusty lock unlocking, and the door swinging wide from its jamb letting in the summer light.

             

Each year we cousins moved through the closed rooms of the house reestablishing our dominion --  raising window shades, banishing shadows, brushing aside the curled and desiccated bodies of flies trapped in those rooms, born too early.  We turned the glass knobs on every door, met the closet’s hangers ringing empty against each other.  We found the robes we’d worn last summer, dusty, too small. Our grandmother’s faded apron; our grandfather’s brown canvas work shoes.  We opened drawers in old bureaus that stuck like grief, and emptied the cracked pitcher in the front bedroom into its basin finding nothing but air.

A memory: 3 am.  A train lows its warning into the night, moving freight from Erie to Cincinnati, steel to plants and presses.  It roars, steadily eating the miles, a one-eyed dragon breathing steam and smoke, shitting clinkers along the rails. I lie in my grandfather’s Lincoln bed, the cherry-wood curve of its upper lip rising far above my head, the lower licking my feet.  I lie in the maw of the Lincoln bed, sweating, the only one awake in the pith of the night.  I lie stick-straight beneath the heavy sheets, pulled out of a heat-stunted half-sleep by the train’s cry, now unwinding itself down the long valley.  The house itself is leaden with silence, only the out-of-doors contains sound: the soft pat of a moth bumping at the screen; the crickets’ endless drone; and, rising and falling like the sweet-sour breath of my cousins sleeping beside me young with dreams, is the peepers’ thrum, against which I unravel and fear takes hold.