We Agreed to Meet Just Here
by Scott Blackwood
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The river winds through the cedar and oak clotted hills west of our city. Along its limestone bluffs, where Tonkawa Indians once lived, now sprawl lavish Mediterranean-style homes. Gazing from the terraced deck of one of these, you'd see our city's earnest skyline to the east, a half-dozen crane arms hoisting new bones alongside the pink granite dome of the state capitol. To the north, the University Tower, its clock face and observation deck, from which a man once shot and killed fourteen people. Others have leaped from the tower, coaxed by the dizzying voice of the ground, some leaving behind shoes neatly paired on office window ledges, notes folded in pockets: I didn't fall, I wasn't pushed, I jumped. You might even hear that same dizzying voice now, standing at the terraced deck's railing one early August afternoon, watching a paddleboat move upriver past Deep Eddy swimming pool, pale green and winking in the heat. On the hill beyond, the peaked roofs of our craftsman-style homes, our shadowed porches and lawns.
      And in one backyard, Winnie Lipsy stares up into the gnarled branches of an oak, where her eight-year-old son Isaac sits. Too high, she says. Come down now. She can't help but raise her arms above her head as if she too were climbing. Come down now. And later, when we hear about Isaac's fall from that tree, his arm broken in three places, we remember Winnie's self-contained silences at our parties and homeowners' meetings, gaps between words which we anxiously fill with talk of rising property taxes, crepe myrtles, and perennial beds, and we think of this as her comeuppance. At the hospital, some of us embrace her, feel her body at first stiffen then give way a little, like a loose hardwood plank beneath your foot. We talk of our own sons' and daughters' broken bones, their near misses, their current troubles. Winnie listens, her face taut, expressionless, and we think of deer we sometimes still see along our greenbelt standing in groves of cedar, motionless, testing the air. We imagine she is thinking, not of her son, but of her long ago given-up daughter, and for a moment, she gives way to us, and we can feel the morning-dark quiet of our houses just before the children wake up, just before our hearts are gripped with doubt. We want to absolve her of all the lies she will tell herself and her children because we wish to absolve ourselves. We later come by Winnie and Dennis Lipsy's house to deliver jelly beans and cookies, to sign Isaacs's cast with our looping scrawls, and, like the dizzying voice of the ground, we say, See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?

From the first chapter of We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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