In a Landscape: II

“Ghosts are people who think they’re ghosts,”

my daughter Natalie said, starting off the period

we will refer to later as A Little Bit Further Along. Since then

(which was last night, November 3rd, 2009), I’ve been thinking

about where I am more, as a kind of goal,

and somewhat less about where I’m not. It’s a pleasure to be

where one is, given that someone

isn’t somewhere lethal. This is Pleasure One.

And now this is Pleasure Two, thinking about it,

so that this place, which was Place One, and a pleasure,

as we were there where we were and it was not a lethal place,

but a place where we were, is now this place again

as we’re here thinking about it, like America or a popsicle.

“Open the house and the house is empty,” Natalie also said, meaning

her dollhouse, as she’s seven, but when she said it, I had this

vision of all of us suddenly disappearing, maybe thinking

ourselves ghosts, even, or getting somewhere, out

and around her bedroom and then down the hall and stairs.

I’ll tell you how it happened. Natalie and I were looking out the window

at the backyard, and she asked me if I liked our house. It’s a theme

with her. The other night she asked me if I liked life. I said, “Yeah,

a lot.” And she looked at me a second and then said, “Me too.”

You don’t hear that every day, I think, until the accumulations

begin to remind me of every day: Carla, who donated a kidney

to her brother-in-law (Robin’s uncle), has just been diagnosed

with cancer, two months later. She sends hopeful updates

from the hospital, on Facebook. Like fountains, the footnotes

go on. My footnote or yours. The big questions can’t be decided

in this way. They demand coins or laws. And this is

much too important to be a big question.