laura bernstein-machlay
DIRTY CITIES
Because it’s Sunday and finally spring, I go to clean my dirty house. I scrub dynasties of spider webs from corners. I bag clothes too tight and sheets too narrow and tchotchkes from God knows where for Goodwill. I harrow Daughter Celia into organizing tumbling heaps of mail while I pull books one at a time from shelves, choke on the dust rising in little mushroom clouds, then place them right back into their snug caves. I throw away a bouquet of inkless pens, some rusty pans, a tattered rug thick with dog hair and stained with coffee, a chair half hobbling like an old man. But when I get to Husband Steven’s hoard
of National Geographics, he says Nuh uh, no way. And because I’m easily defeated after the long winter, I grab a random stack, crawl into the hole in my ancient couch and read about ocean life, about jungles vanishing like fog from the face of the earth, and island nations eroding to nubs. I read about trade routes disappeared beneath millennia of sands, about dirty wars and dirty cities across the globe. And when a recent issue reflects my own dirty city winking at me from the depths of the pages as if to say Ha! I showed you all, there’s nothing to do but shrug a little and flip to the next story.
And because what’s familiar—no matter how sharp—hardly dents the skin, much less settles beneath it, when I drop into half-dream against the cushions, I leave behind the broken buildings, the fields of foot-high grasses and abandoned tires just a couple miles up Woodward Avenue. How easy, really, to forget cop cars patrolling my good neighborhood day and night, to ignore the wild turkey strutting across my yard in the cold rain, the people in their fancy duds right this moment leaving one of a dozen local churches, arguing over who forgot the umbrellas and where to eat their early supper—all the stuff of my slice of landscape.
With a soundtrack of rain-gone-to-hail knock knock knocking at my roof, I close my eyes and think about secret hydrothermal vents a mile, two, three miles down at the yawning bottom of oceans, fissures in the sea floor perched atop spreading tectonic plates, crevices so deep a diver’s blood bubbles at descent, ascent too fraught for him to bear. It’s always night there, a sunless, airless hell-scape, pressure deflating the lungs, thrumming like a perpetual vise around bone. Awful, it seems.
And somehow I am full of awe for the interminable spew, the vents’ boundless discharge as the planet goes on purging itself of minerals, toxic slurry of chemicals. Like smokestacks belching soot across a wide city, the fissures gush through coldest water. And in this endless blackness, where life couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t—it somehow does. Here of all places, briny and close, poisoned with earth’s boiling innards, here the spark,
call it holy if you can. Here earth-sludge feeds microbes so teeny they sit billions to a pin’s head, yet together make more mass than all flesh of land and air combined. This furtive seascape—another dirty city no one believes in or much wants to visit—nonetheless keeps chugging away in the gloom.
The vents go on venting while red-mouthed clams clutter the sandy ground and tubeworms grow colossal in the microbe bath. And when, for science’s sake, a subterranean probe drops on their fat worm heads, they squish red blood that diffuses in clouds across the face of the camera, amongst swarms of blind shrimp and crabs that eat the worms and in turn become supper for bigger fish.
It’s a tough world all over. Two decades ago, before I left the West Coast for home, an ex-lover said of Detroit, I’ve seen it on TV. It’s awful there. Why would people stay? But if I met him today, I’d say no one can understand the honest shape of a place ‘til he’s swimming in it. And I’d tell him about my houseful of stuff, about my city of ashen skies—how they hold us like a blanket. How I’m so grounded nowadays I get a psychic version of the bends when I skip town for a weekend. And if he cared
to visit I’d show him a city under layers of gray that, in spite of every forecast, never quit breathing. I might even hold his hand and, skin to skin, remind him that redemption churns in unlikely spaces, in pockets far undersea, veiled in midnight. Within dirty buildings half-crumbled, people half-wrecked who get out of bed every morning despite ozone alerts and gravity and shifting continents.
From neighborhoods of people who wade unblinking through waves of ghosts just to wait patiently in a freezing spring rain. At a bus stop on a corner that looks like all the other corners. To reach some church pew downtown or stand in some checkout lane to buy apples still sweet for all the bruises, people who go home to scrub their sinks and sort the clutter from their winter-full houses,
these people who long ago figured out how to take their blessings as they come, and how to just get on with it.
Because it’s Sunday and finally spring, I go to clean my dirty house. I scrub dynasties of spider webs from corners. I bag clothes too tight and sheets too narrow and tchotchkes from God knows where for Goodwill. I harrow Daughter Celia into organizing tumbling heaps of mail while I pull books one at a time from shelves, choke on the dust rising in little mushroom clouds, then place them right back into their snug caves. I throw away a bouquet of inkless pens, some rusty pans, a tattered rug thick with dog hair and stained with coffee, a chair half hobbling like an old man. But when I get to Husband Steven’s hoard
of National Geographics, he says Nuh uh, no way. And because I’m easily defeated after the long winter, I grab a random stack, crawl into the hole in my ancient couch and read about ocean life, about jungles vanishing like fog from the face of the earth, and island nations eroding to nubs. I read about trade routes disappeared beneath millennia of sands, about dirty wars and dirty cities across the globe. And when a recent issue reflects my own dirty city winking at me from the depths of the pages as if to say Ha! I showed you all, there’s nothing to do but shrug a little and flip to the next story.
And because what’s familiar—no matter how sharp—hardly dents the skin, much less settles beneath it, when I drop into half-dream against the cushions, I leave behind the broken buildings, the fields of foot-high grasses and abandoned tires just a couple miles up Woodward Avenue. How easy, really, to forget cop cars patrolling my good neighborhood day and night, to ignore the wild turkey strutting across my yard in the cold rain, the people in their fancy duds right this moment leaving one of a dozen local churches, arguing over who forgot the umbrellas and where to eat their early supper—all the stuff of my slice of landscape.
With a soundtrack of rain-gone-to-hail knock knock knocking at my roof, I close my eyes and think about secret hydrothermal vents a mile, two, three miles down at the yawning bottom of oceans, fissures in the sea floor perched atop spreading tectonic plates, crevices so deep a diver’s blood bubbles at descent, ascent too fraught for him to bear. It’s always night there, a sunless, airless hell-scape, pressure deflating the lungs, thrumming like a perpetual vise around bone. Awful, it seems.
And somehow I am full of awe for the interminable spew, the vents’ boundless discharge as the planet goes on purging itself of minerals, toxic slurry of chemicals. Like smokestacks belching soot across a wide city, the fissures gush through coldest water. And in this endless blackness, where life couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t—it somehow does. Here of all places, briny and close, poisoned with earth’s boiling innards, here the spark,
call it holy if you can. Here earth-sludge feeds microbes so teeny they sit billions to a pin’s head, yet together make more mass than all flesh of land and air combined. This furtive seascape—another dirty city no one believes in or much wants to visit—nonetheless keeps chugging away in the gloom.
The vents go on venting while red-mouthed clams clutter the sandy ground and tubeworms grow colossal in the microbe bath. And when, for science’s sake, a subterranean probe drops on their fat worm heads, they squish red blood that diffuses in clouds across the face of the camera, amongst swarms of blind shrimp and crabs that eat the worms and in turn become supper for bigger fish.
It’s a tough world all over. Two decades ago, before I left the West Coast for home, an ex-lover said of Detroit, I’ve seen it on TV. It’s awful there. Why would people stay? But if I met him today, I’d say no one can understand the honest shape of a place ‘til he’s swimming in it. And I’d tell him about my houseful of stuff, about my city of ashen skies—how they hold us like a blanket. How I’m so grounded nowadays I get a psychic version of the bends when I skip town for a weekend. And if he cared
to visit I’d show him a city under layers of gray that, in spite of every forecast, never quit breathing. I might even hold his hand and, skin to skin, remind him that redemption churns in unlikely spaces, in pockets far undersea, veiled in midnight. Within dirty buildings half-crumbled, people half-wrecked who get out of bed every morning despite ozone alerts and gravity and shifting continents.
From neighborhoods of people who wade unblinking through waves of ghosts just to wait patiently in a freezing spring rain. At a bus stop on a corner that looks like all the other corners. To reach some church pew downtown or stand in some checkout lane to buy apples still sweet for all the bruises, people who go home to scrub their sinks and sort the clutter from their winter-full houses,
these people who long ago figured out how to take their blessings as they come, and how to just get on with it.
~
