STORIES
Michael Brodsky
THE POSTAL CLERK
But what of the woman with whom I began
to
live, from
time to time. I remember the children who played in her garden. They
less played than studied the ferment of shadow about the base of one
tree. Eyes to the earth, they thought to learn all that transpired in the
upper air, where the boughs thrust and the twigs eddy. But shadows
omit much. But
to
focus on that region where tree becomes sky is
painful, like having one's eyeball shaved with a razor. They would
have been blinded, and so early in life. As if they weren't blinded
enough by the injunctions they received in abundance. I could have
talked to them, though only a postal clerk. Their fathers were execu–
tives, professionals. Professionals are true undertakers, they achieve
daily, minutely, the burial of the personality, winged chimera of social
workers and lady novelists. No one realizes postal clerks have time to
observe the trees and sky, view them dispassionately, forgive them their
trespasses on one's frame of mind, evolve theorems to tame the combat
of the boughs, and lemmas for the palsy of the stems. I used words with
which the children were unfamiliar. They seemed
to
refuse them. But
as they were refusing they were listening, refusal was the most accessi–
ble stance, protecting their fascination. They refused the word, they
returned it to me with a contemptuous question mark, a packet of
skepticism badly wrapped, but their assimilation was far ahead of the
formalities of acceptance and refusal. With such a stance they warded
off their vulnerability to themselves. Their relation
to
the tree was
altered once they knew words for its parts. Its boughs writhed a little
more than they should have. First the word adhered, an impediment on
the way
to
the buoyant bark. And then the bark became the embodi–
ment of the word, they looked in the shiver of the bark for the word's
emanation. Shining from shook foil. When I passed by they played all
the more intensely. But they were waiting to be interrupted. I flattered
myself that the game was a kind of invocation, if not of me then of the
words that came from me. So they were on the margin of activity,
