Doozie

Albert Goldbarth

       "A bun in her oven? Geez Louise, isn't that 

 malarkey（胡说）? Estelle? Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?" 

       "I thought it was bunkum too, 

 when I heard it. Really: you coulda knocked me 

 for a loop. But Alice told me, and she's jake." 

 Alice: the provenance（出处，起源）, the gatekeeper. So it wasn't all hooey. 

 It was the real goods. Aunt Ruby 

 hadn't shown up for her visit last month and, 

 well, Estelle was in a pickle, was between the proverbial 

 rock and its cousin the hard place, friendless, 

 paddleless up that famous defecatory（排粪的） creek and down 

 in the dumps, and while vernacular（地方的） studies 

isn't my speed, I love the way we used to talk. 

 We also used to say the autumn light is lambent（轻轻摇曳的） 

 on the lake top, and the waves display a heraldic curl 

 as in halcyon days . . . and that was also a fine, 

 fine thing to say. Or that some multibody hid 

 his second exoneural projecto-self in a pocket of subspace, 

 masking it over with molecules of landscape-sim 

 . . . that's how they talk in sci-fi-ville, while over 

 in the empirical records of science, someone is saying 

 the reagent（试剂） deliquesces although 

 in its previous state it underwent resorption. All 

 of the languages are appropriate to their purposes -- are 

fine. Jack Gilbert's poem in honor of wabi 

 -- that's the Japanese word for, roughly, 

 finding a beauty in ruin that one can only 

 find in ruin -- reminds us that to lack the word 

 for a concept is really to lack the concept. 

 Let the word occur, though, and then suddenly 

 in a fingersnap, in a trice（转眼之间）, and like a bolt out of the blue, 

 I can see my friend for whom Estelle is an avatar 

 in stanza one, and the formerly unacknowledged 

 stores of dignity and perseverance 

 that carried her through the shame of the abortion 

 -- her wabi -- flower forth. One story goes 

she fucked up big-time, Mick was a saint but 

nooo, she had to get knocked up by an asshole 

 like Kenny. Another story: her mind is part dissociative, and 

 so requires positive reinforcement from multiple sources. 

 Actually they're the same story, only told in different languages. 

 Or actually because they're different languages, they're 

 different stories. In mine, she's just returned 

 from the doctor, and needs to tell Mick. She's sitting 

 surrounded by thousands of happy memories -- the light 

 through the louvers is lambent -- but we all know 

 how the story goes: life is jim-dandy, a peacheroo, then 

 words get spoken, and overnight the whole world goes kablooey.