196
SARAH PLIMPTON
the owl hoots they are caught pinioned beneath the
sharp
claws
which precede the heavy body as it falls. I heard the hoot every
once in a while, even in the city at night in the park near your
house. When it comes, it strikes down deep into a group of cells in
my body and the dread flows out winging its way in the form of
miniature winged beasts who have only one clawed foot held out
by two legs sheathed in feathers and purple moth scales. They have
enormous heads, black curved hooking and scraping beaks, large
round flat lemur eyes and they project themselves on the walls of
children's bedrooms at night appearing suddenly big and frightening.
When they approach adults, their claws clicking like women who
play the piano with nails that are too long, they strike not with the
unreasonable horror and fear that cause children to burrow deeper
under their covers screaming for their mothers and babbling of
shapes, but instead they carry diseases up to be seen. They pop at
the surface of consciousness calling to me in their high pitched
voices, talking of cancers and ulcers, the ageing of tissue, the dying
of cells, and I look down to see my body transparent cleared and
actively decaying. The warmth of the sunlight is fading fast, re–
treating, holding itself back, its eyes now doubtful and worried,
suddenly deceived. The beasts are silent and fly around, scales falling
off their feathers stuffing my head with fuzz.
You have turned your back and looked into other corners of
life for temptations and satisfactions. You knew my ways and I
hope that the ones you have chosen instead will give you gnawing
doubts, that your dreams
will
wake you in the middle of the night
and you
will
stare at the ceiling shaking your head trying to rid your–
self of those voices which suggest that you might have made a
mistake, that you took the fork in the road that led you not to the
castle and the town which sits gray and many-turreted in the back–
grounds of the old masters, but the other road that leads into the
woods and shadows, down into the caves of hell where flames
will
always burn and flicker, slowly roasting the happiness which you
think
you have found. I don't want you to have great pains but
subtle ones that catch you when you are least thinking about it: as
you hold the door of your car for your wife sheathed to the ankle
in black, or press the bell of an elevator and listen to it humming
down the shaft toward you, or as the pigeons that have been walking
