This is also a matter of a little more
imaginative and merit and--
I'll just give you that.
It's so nice to see everybody I know.
Hi.
Let's break out of this.
"The Shaping Ground."
"Outside the snow is falling, falling.
She is reading a fat novel by the fire.
And he is staring blankly into the flames like a man who
hasn't found his feelings yet.
No unreachable itch yet, no desire
stirring in his pajama bottoms.
In her abundant novel about British country gentry life,
foxes and hares, incest and frivolity, the deepest winter
of the 19th century, and so on.
The sexual event happens not spontaneously,
but sideways, with cunning, ambitious steps from mansion
to mansion across the countryside in snow.
In his wisdom, he knows that desire is sometimes as far away
as Wednesday is from Saturday, as far away as Beijing
from Istanbul by train, northwards on the old trade
route through Siberia where cold is
so cold you barely mention it.
You're only passing through.
The snow is falling like infinite particulars
before they hit the blurring ground.
"What would it take," she wondered, "to get him going?"
Some small act of generosity, she takes his empty teacup
down the corridor to the sink, washes it, rinses it, dries it,
puts it in the cabinet.
He makes a reasonable mistake in idle conversation, some memory
about their honeymoon in 1968.
And he apologizes.
And she said, that's OK, and doesn't go on
to say everyone makes mistakes.
Suddenly, he looks up from the blazing fire
and says something he's never said before, never even
thought before.
"Honey," he says, "have you ever taken Jesus into your heart?"
And she turns down the corner of the page right
at the point where the shamed, repentant, forgiven, brother
and sister decide to go at it again to repeat
their error endlessly, to sire generations
of mindless blonde children, and the words
are starting to burn up on the page.
Right then, the wife, this prisoner
of the common groove and the common room,
this female anima of all the moods
of many years of marriage, she says,
like the hungry drunk to the Salvation Army chaplain,
like the soldier crushed in honest defeat to his enemy,
she says to her husband like an unhorsed rider to the horse,
like the wise thinking of a common scam,
like the present tense to the past tense,
like the anthem to the flagpole, the explosion
to the ammunition, "Yes.
I will take Jesus into my heart, in my heart
there's room for everyone."
And they both laugh, knowing that the distance
between the parlor and the bedroom
is the distance between tragedy and comedy.
Between the words of the spell and the magic event,
miles and miles of household corridors in which all lives
are lived knowing that this will be the arduous trek
between habit and passion.
Snow is falling, falling on the shape in ground."