Winter's Journey by Stephen Dobyns

Author:Stephen Dobyns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

BALANCE

The other day I looked for Jimmy Hoffa’s grave

(I didn’t find it) as our southbound train sped through

the New Jersey Meadowlands buried beneath two

or three inches of snow—acres and acres of dead

marsh grass the exact color of Willie, a friend’s

yellow Lab — and I thought, why shouldn’t Jimmy’s

skeletal hand be poking up there, too? But it wasn’t,

or at least I didn’t see it in the time it took the train

to pass. Jimmy was last glimpsed in the parking lot

of Machus Red Fox, a restaurant in Bloomfield Hills,

where I once went for lunch in my early twenties,

about nine years before Jimmy left us, prematurely,

after an apparent meeting with two mobsters, which

was the closest Jimmy and I ever got to becoming

acquainted, and, who knows, I might have saved him.

Stranger things have happened, although I never

thought of it till now. Once as a reporter, I watched

a seven-foot-tall Teamster thug called Tiny toss a guy

six feet off a picket line as if he were no more than

a wad of wet paper, so perhaps Jimmy and I might

never have been close — he being the Teamster boss.

But Jimmy’s planting in the Meadowlands typified

a tough guy’s attempt to fix a problem, and effectively,

it seems. My wife and I were traveling to D.C. to see

a bunch of paintings, a city I hadn’t visited for at least

ten years. The White House and Capitol were ringed in

by more armed guards than hairs on a hog. And Al Gore

was in town to warn Congress about global warming

and was praised or sneered at along strict party lines,

but when Florida’s voting machines are under ten feet

of water, then perhaps the Republicans will think again —

pardon the oxymoron. Attila (not the Hun) once said:

That’s not me shouting, it’s the earth that roars. While

Clarence Darrow said the only thing in life that ever

matched his expectations was a baseball game, which

is how I feel about certain paintings. I mean, Cézanne

and Vermeer were good in the way Stalin and Hitler

were bad; in the extremity of accomplishment they

towered over their competition. Hard to know who

was better or worse. You might think my comparison

somewhat frivolous, but if it weren’t for the former,

why would I want to live in a world with the latter?

I have some friends who talk about a higher power,

which leads me to imagine a big guy with a big club

standing on a chair, but seeing Vermeer’s painting

A Lady Writing a Letter makes me think that if

a flawed human being can create an object so closely

approaching the perfect, then perhaps there’s hope

for the race as a whole, which is a notion I mostly

doubt and which I went to Washington to reaffirm.

In the painting a young woman in a yellow coat sits

at a desk lightly holding a quill to a sheet of paper

as she stares not at the viewer but a bit to the right,

as if pondering what word to put next, what word

exactly articulates her thought, a moment caught

three hundred and forty years ago and in the next

moment the correct word will strike her and she will

end her letter, though for all I know it’s a grocery list.

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