The cemetery pines were the only green leftover from summer—the only reminder the land would not always be brown.
I liked the hay rolls. The windbreaks between fields. A hawk in a bare tree. Even the vapor trails crisscrossing the sky.
In the end, I wasn’t much of a rebel. I was a crone, a hawk on a leafless tree, barely holding on against the wind. The blue mood stayed with me as a bird. No—a bat. It rested in my hair. Its wings up-tipped in the wind.
—
The country I knew as a child visiting my grandfather’s farm had diminished. It was invisible, actually. I could tell my children what it was like in my memory, as I did when the lights went out in a storm, but they could not really understand. Sometimes they seemed bored as I talked, only listening out of politeness. They could know it happened—that I was a child on a farm in a different world than the one they knew, but they could not know it. I could say it was all a matter of perception, or experience, actually—or perception that comes through experience. Otherwise, it is someone else’s tale.
Do you know there were times we ran in the fields and played in the potato cellar and climbed on the tin roof of the pig shed? There was the barn. The pond in the field. Grandfather Nyland walking behind his horse in the distance. The farmhouse, with its kerosene lamp in the darkness as soon as the sun went down. No news from anywhere. Nothing from nowhere. All was isolation on a farm. The whole world. The heat. The cold. The water pump at the kitchen sink. The pantry. The black hole of the attic. All of it gone.
They did not understand the absence of electricity. It was there, they said. It had always existed. Yes, but we didn’t know how to connect with it. Or my grandparents didn’t. We had it at our parent’s house in town, but wires had not reached the farm. How could I expect them to understand?
Soundings
A ziggurat is an ancient tower made by Assyrians and Babylonians in the form of a terraced pyramid with each story smaller than the one under it. Also called zikkurat, zikurat, and zigguratu, meaning height or pinnacle. That is from the dictionary. But a ziggurat is an inverted jar in which insects crawl. When I look closer, the insects are human. Beyond them, but still inside the jar—a plane full of people unaware of one another, all wanting out, but there is no way. That was my Moanings-in-Hell piece.
I have to remember I had a chance to change. I knew there was a way I should follow, but I did not. I could babble as I wished in clay. The Plain of Shinar was my first piece that had a showing. Frank placed it on a table in the basement of the church before a fellowship dinner. It was met with mixed reviews. Shinar was the place where the Tower of Babel was built (Gen 11:2).
It was the death of our first son, Daniel, that led to other titles: Let the Day Perish (Job 3:3). The Waters Close over Me (Jonah 2:5). If I Go into the Pit, Who Will Praise You? (Ps 30:9). Why Have You Cast Me off? (Ps 43:2).
I had terrible dreams before Daniel died. I knew it would happen before it did, and I was helpless before it. Ziggurats were falling. Once, I heard them shriek.
Addiction is a dye that seeps everywhere.
—
We had a party once, and I invited a clown who bothered the guests more than he entertained. I finally asked him to leave. I forgot the neighbors had a dog they let roam at night. We heard the dog growl after the clown left. We heard a commotion. When we called the dog to the door, it had clown fabric in its teeth. In hell, it is flesh that the dogs have in their mouths.
—
We got together on Sunday evenings and read The Divine Comedy. Frank, my husband, had a circle of friends. It was Frank who called the meetings, but I gladly went along with it. John Winscott, Frank’s uncle, was the other constant. Thelma, his wife, came also. She kept an eye on the children—Daniel, Winnie, Warren, and her three, John II, Lizbet, and Thomas.
“This is not a comedy. It’s heaven’s revenge on us for not paying attention. Ignoring it. Or mixing it with other messages,” I heard them say as I listened. “God does not share his kingdom with anything that is not his.”
—
A ziggurat has altitude. Elevation. There’s a pitch to it. A style. If a ziggurat was an animal, it would be the giraffe. But that’s too easy. If it had depth, it would be a copper mine in the Arizona desert.
Hypsography is the measure of altitude. Other words are altimetry. Hypsometer. Altimeter. Summit. Cloud-capped. The opposite is lowness. Depression. Pit. Shaft. Cavity. Abyss. Crevasse. Infernal pit. Subterranean. Abysmal. I still like to read the thesaurus and dictionary. I like to warp the forms of my ziggurats.
I was always making soundings. One reason I liked ziggurats is that they contained both. These oppositions were what I used in my art. It was Jack and the old story of the beanstalk. Ziggurats are both horizontal and vertical. You feel like you’re walking on a level plane—well, maybe you feel the slight gradation, but you are rising, or descending, if you turn around—and you are at a different level before you realize it.
It is possible that the earth itself is a symbol of the shape of the afterlife. It is hot in the center, and the sky is cold above it. The earth is the settling point. The platform of decision—that’s what I would call life on earth.
Does speaking on one’s own always have to mean Babel? Does God knock buildings down, as we did to one another as children?
—
Many religions are a ziggurat—an attempt to reach God by one’s own hands. I will not make many friends saying that. But I don’t think they want to be friends. They are like the neighbor’s dog after dark. And we are the clowns. Don’t they already have some cloth from our clown suit in their teeth?
“We are broken before God, who had a Son he sent to the cross to become broken for our sins,” Frank continued as he always did. “He did the work. He is the tower. The upward path to heaven. All others go downward on the inverted ziggurat of their own making.”
“That’s enough to start a war,” I said.
“More than enough,” Frank answered.
I believed my life was in my breaking before him.
“But haven’t Christians been terrorists in the past?” I asked Frank. “Maybe still are.”
I am not a prophet, even with my ziggurats. But sometimes I listen to Scripture when Frank and John Winscott talk, and there, in a little wormhole, I find the universe.
I believe each believer believes in their own way.
—
These things have I spoken unto you, that you should not be made to stumble. They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that when whoever kills you will think that he does God a service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me. But these things have I told you, that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them.
—John 16:1–4
“You’ve got a scary book there, Frank,” I said when I heard Frank and his uncle John Winscott discussing the passage. I tried to ignore them, but it seemed to me a possibility of what could be ahead—in the last days, in the tribulation, if there would be a tribulation, or before the tribulation, when Christians and Jews are once again persecuted, as they are persecuted now in other countries. I tried not to be concerned with such thoughts, but in that Scripture, I saw a little dark alley of time in which terrible things happen. Often, in the past, I refused to listen to Frank and his uncle argue over translation. My husband wanted to make another attempt at translating the Bible. It seemed his uncle John wanted to work with him.
Thankfully, I had a call from Winnie. I was on the phone listening to the glories of museums and restaurants during her visit with Helen. Thankfully, it took her a while to tell me everything they had done. But when she finished, I returned to Frank and Uncle John’s conversation as though I had not been gone from