They sent him away from the Revolution, a child-package to America, a wooden label tied around his neck, the whales bumping and rubbing against his sleep. When he docked his dead relations had left him like a legacy to a Norwegian neighbor, a blond woman, who bent over him and raised him in a language neither of them knew. Half a century later, he's still baby-faced under a gray crewcut, pink scalp showing like white mouse skin. A retired marine, he sits among the beards of twenty years in the creative writing class and sings us deathly ditties like get-well cards or love poems to his faithfully imaginary wife. Denying the child lullabied by whales from Vladivostok to Seattle who grew up to survive Pacific wars and love a wife quite faithlessly real, he constructs his make-believe life telling us that rhyme and sentiment are the ingredients, that art's a kind of almond paste and trots his poems out like marzipan pigs. But just as in a woodcut folktale, beneath the sugar scabs that he mistakes for healing, deep within the sweet pink belly of the pig, a boy's soprano, clear as red wine in a sunlit glass, sings of apple blossoms and we are in a wood enchanted by a tongue most of us have never known and one of us forgot. |