Under Layers of Strontium and Snow
by Julie Gard
My friend Sheila says, “We’re all lost and missing,” and it’s true. Look at where we used to be. Eating goddess bars at the coffee shop with the little strung-up lights: now there is no one. At the art gallery with the unpronounceable name and the cozy scattered rows of chairs set up for a poetry reading and the plentiful boxed wine: now there is no one, and no art. In the downtown library, each book waits for a missing person. Our shared human spaces are as quiet as current-day Chernobyl, as Pompeii.
Other people are dangerous. I keep my distance but some live by different rules, like the woman in the park who is desperate to talk and moves close in her big blue coat. “Did you see the wedding in the gazebo? Can you imagine getting married in the cold?”
I smile, more like a grimace. She says, “My dog’s friendly.”
I say, “Mine needs space,” and we back into the woods.
We disappear into the trees on our snowshoes and paws, following the hard surface of the river to the railroad tracks running behind our own house. The dog pulls me into underbrush and along a deer trail. Twigs stuck in fur and hair, we come across tall arranged branches. At first I think they fell that way, onto each other, but it’s clear that someone gathered and forked them, and arranged the long logs to sit on. There’s the metal rim of an old fire pit, and a couple of bent shapes, like bodies. I hold my breath and approach, gently touch. They are sleeping bags covered with snow. People lived here, probably last summer. Why did they leave their gear behind? Why did they leave so quickly?
I imagine bent figures telling stories around the fire. They could hear the hum of the EPA building and the wash of traffic like we can from our house. They were close enough to the lake to bathe there in the morning. They are gone now, like the rest of us. We have abandoned where we used to be and who we used to be.
I return to scour the underbrush for clues; I go on mental tours of empty woods and empty rooms. Here’s where you will find no one. Sometimes I lie on my back in the snow under the red pines, just trunk for hundreds of feet, their mouths so far away they can’t breathe on me. They grow just close enough to fit each other but never touch, even in the wind. A mosaic of brushed needles and even gaps of blue sky. Such proportion and unity, and a rhythm of steady, perfect distance.
Julie Gard's prose poetry collection Home Studies (New Rivers Press) was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, and additional publications include Scrap: On Louise Nevelson (Ravenna Press) and two chapbooks. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in Gertrude, Clackamas Literary Review, Blackbox Manifold, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.