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.