Ashes, and: Summer Afternoon, and: Fables and Seas

Ashes, and: Summer Afternoon, and: Fables and Seas Laura Newbern (bio) Ashes In the waiting roomI notice my doctor's a painter, his name scrawledin the corner of a canvas depictingtwo mountains, a country church, and a streaked sky. And the painting is not on a wallbut on an easel thrust out like a hipinto the room, at hip level; and on the TV overhead is a woman who wants to bea millionaire, trying to decidewhether the Heaven Above company is in the businessof placing a loved one's ashes inside a firework, or,inside a stuffed animal.C or B. She cannot decide. She cannot decide and the waitis interminable; she wants it to beB, stuffed animal; minutes and minutes go byas she twists herself, in her striped shirtand her denim jacket, into one answer and thenthe other, smiling, grimacing, smiling again; she wantsthat sweetness, maybe, even more than the money. This is my country. My doctorhas painted the sky over his church a daring, devotional redand I imagine my mother or maybe my beautiful red-headed sisterblazing across it: a starry final act. And by then, at last, the woman contestant has it—reluctantlyC, she says, final answer. To which the host,creating suspense, says, as slowly as possible, You were all over the place,but you thought it through.And you, my dear, yes. You came through. [End Page 80] Summer Afternoon Those are the words of the writer, the one who deemed themthe two most beautiful words in the Englishlanguage—summer and afternoon. But who of courseloved not the words, but what they conjured.For him, maybe, it was his man, with a tray, descendinga slope of lawn in a black suit; and he himselfin a simple chair, in the shade; but an upholsteredchair, an inside chair brought out, and the shadethe shade of a great sleeping tree. I read a novelin which a man who had done something terrible stoleaway, in a boat no one had noticed, having descendeda cliff, away from a great house and all the way downto a river, all the way down to an also unnoticed dockwhere the boat floated, in wait. And dark cloudsraced down the river—not the word dark, northe word clouds, but the fact of the secret boat nowin the open; the man crouched inside it, escaping; the currentample, the ancient trees on either bank forminga hallway of sunset, laced with smoke: dark clouds, dark clouds. [End Page 81] Fables and Seas Once, my father sent me a wondrous letter.About a night when my parents were trulyyoung; when he and my mother, traveling together in Europe, drove into Luxembourg and knewthey needed, without reservations, a placeto stop for the night. We had you with us, he wrote, and at the latehour, at the inn with its lastroom, the owners worried over the baby— baby crying all night, in the blue bath-light of Luxembourg, your parentsyoung as they were. So we wrapped you up, tight, my father wrote, bentover whatever crib was provided, overthe glass globe now in a letter composed, and sent: the little red carparked outside …You did not make a sound, he wrote, from a far place, but close, and clear as ice. All nightit snowed. Like a bright ghost in the gorges. [End Page 82] Laura Newbern Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine in 2010 for the Kore Press First Book Award, and the recipient of a Writer's Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her second collection of poems, A Night in the Country, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the Changes Book Prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2024. She lives and works in Georgia. Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College