WHERE ARE YOU GOING? by Gretchen E. Henderson
She’s going home. Not straightaway, crow dart-of-a-black-arrow going home, but a curvaceous, loopy, round-about, colorful waving (good-bye, hello, good-) course of going home, not by plane, train, coach or car, but by foot through labyrinthine halls and echoing galleries, where marble athletes lack legs, hands, noses (breathing); floor-to-ceiling canvases, blue nudes & strung guitars, head-dressed gazelles with locked horns, beaded earflaps, iron mudfish in pendant masks (breathing). Like a whorled conch, murmuring: voyeurs whisper, stare and bend to listen (knees crack, she hears, shuffling and Look!) to incisions and scars – what doesn’t speak is broken (between each line & curve) echoes:
This is what happens when there is space & time & hope, she thinks, listening while walking among pedestals & glass cases with palmette finials, rearing maned horses, carved paws on lotus leaves beside bronze belly guards (“Aisonidas, the son of Kloridios, took this”), dolphin-riding hoplites (“foot soldiers”), flute players, incised choruses, bronze & terracotta sphinxes perched on horizontal flanges, greaves (“shin guards”) & spears & water jars & kernos (“the receptacles probably contained foodstuffs of various kinds, perhaps also flowers”), pomegranates on oil lamps, stelai depicting ravens & a leaping white fox, an omen to decipher, as it races down a horse’s back on an architectural frieze between a colonnade & funerary monument, with two lines of dactylic hexameter, expressing grief over death in a pattern called boustrophedon (“ox-turning”) because the text turns at the end of each line, as oxen turn a plough at each furrow’s end, right to left in alteration, zigzagging like she coils through echoing galleries and labyrinthine halls, among pedestals and glass cases – her: the one among statues and foreign tongues, the one who’s going home.
Home.
She’s going home.
Not straightaway, crow dart-of-a-black-arrow going home, but a curvaceous, loopy, round-about, verdant waving, weaving (good-bye, hello, good-) course of going home to love, not by plane, train, coach or car, but up turbinate staircases that pit her face-to-face with honeycombed vents for incense on a bronze cat-like creature with removable head (love?), before a tessellated tile fountain with water leaping, lapping Seals of Solomon in aqua-colored six-&-eight pointed stars, indigos & reds, carpets with knotted gold medallions, and a map marked Maghrib (with dots beside Marrakesh and Rabat, the farthest west of Africa, finely printed “sunset”) above half-palmettes unfurling like arabesques (on carpets, bowls, fountains: leaves, flowers, anything that grows – love?, patterns start to emerge, everywhere). The museum echoes, Look!, where juxtaposed captions begin the story – interrupt it – to lend clues, access, by meanings and origins signaled in minute details: etched in the foot of a pot (acanthus leaves reveal Roman influence) or painted a certain color (cochineal produces a scarlet red & originated from dried insects in Latin America). There is so much to learn, she absorbs –
Following arrows. Going through doorways. Next text. Next. Look! (the gallery, captions, her memory of) the sun is halved in one painting and elsewhere shines whole, above the horizon line. Placards refer back and forth, where curators planned a course through display after display, on podiums behind glass lit indirectly, YOU ARE HERE. In the Seljuk Period. She finds herself (breathing) at a fork in the road, beside chess pieces (complete save for a single pawn, “check-mate” from sha-mat, “I give up,” Iran XII century AD, the translation resonates with her) a queen & rooks, square by square, once maneuvered for kingdoms, beside an elderly couple who hovers over the explanation, whispering, So that’s where and when it began (as if beginnings are singular; as if knowing makes a difference; as if chansons shaped like hearts mean more than unrecorded words). She’s looking for an inroad, to follow any beginning that can be traced from here and back again, woven with other beginnings as endings, not encrypted but translated to bridge what came before with after. She needs to write about hearing music while being amazed at what resides under one roof, like a house shelters (what constitutes a home on an ever-covered foundation); how did all come to be, worlds, every day dawning, granted and taken for blessed, or cursed? Everything fills her with wonder, which often brings euphoria, but sometimes makes her sad. She cares too much, she’s been told, for love of living, for love of loving; for love of visiting shimmering miniaturist paintings from the epic Shahnama, so fine and detailed, painted with brushes made from hair on the bellies of squirrels and kittens, & calligraphy sweeping like Shivac arms in a penumbra of fiery dance; for love of circumambulating galleries like gated chambers of a temple, & of navigating faith by hope by love: the possibility of going home:
(Home. Hone. Home.)
And more: galleries don’t seem to end – one opens another, way leads to way, into way – she’s been here often enough to know she could stay for life and not see everything (could have been yesterday, taped and braced, she was here among dismembered statues but disguised by turtlenecks and gloves, so no one would have noticed, as they read about Apollo chasing Daphne, who branched into a tree; or Daphnis picking a love-apple); today, she wears nothing unusual under her clothes, her skin glowing from the sun) one moment to the next, galleries, the park, sky, streets, key in the lock – she anticipates all, after being released from work early, with time to circumambulate the Met before meeting her beloved at home:
At home! Home is where the heart is, so the saying goes, so she wears it well-fitted all around and inside her, like a snail’s shell, able to leave behind for a hermit to inhabit. She doesn’t want anyone to be homeless (even as a state of mind) and thinks while wandering in search of the Ancient Near East – Catal Höyük, Uruk, Anatolia – by way of an arsenical copper ibex stand, cuneiform impressed on clay tablets, ceramic jars, cylinder seals & kudurru (“boundary stones”): What did they bound? Should you cross the threshold? Before “Glimpses of the Silk Road” offer an ivory rhyton carved as a lion-griffin, reassembled from 350 fragments, beside carnelian stamp seals with portraits along the balcony, across from blue & white Ming porcelain flasks, linen-draped tables, & a baby grand (Steinway? Yamaha? Baldwin? too-fine print from this distance) & four music stands for a string quartet, it’s almost Friday evening (a performance she can almost hear, Mozart Schubert Vivaldi) – over the ledge, people cluster like pinwheels among admissions booths, coat checks, the gift shop, information islands, security checks – humming:
Leaving noise behind by entering Southeast Asia, she encounters a limestone sculpted pagoda enclosing decapitated bodhisattvas across from “Pure Land of Bhaishajyaguru, The Buddha of Healing” (a pigment painting on clay & straw) before a pot-bellied Yaksha and voluptuous Yakshi (male & female nature gods, in stone – material that stiffens her thoughts of ephemeral mediums, as she chips away at blocks: to shape all of this, to make it endure) bronze metal stupas, inscribed schist reliquaries, a red sandstone Four-Armed Vishnu (missing his conch) & Garuda (with broken wings), copper Shiva as Lord of the Dance & a teakwood meeting hall (whose dome lacks eight large figures, known only from early photographs, of musicians and dancers rising upward toward eight Regents of the Directions, keeping watch) as she goes round, round, round-about home:
Round & round, she feels as if riding a carousel but one that stops and starts, so she can get off & on, choose which creature to ride, now that she can climb, mount, hold, move: keeping pace (breathing, absorbing, watching, wandering) around hanging scrolls inked with bamboo “In Wind,” “In Rain,” “In the Four Seasons” & “With Banana in Rain,” until she passes through a moon-shaped door, into an open courtyard based on the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets, where she stops. Water splashes. Sunlight slants through skylights. No echoes seep from exterior halls. Leaping; lapping. For the moment, she feels as if the fountain of limestone feng (“peaks” made from monoliths set on end) & jiashan (“artificial mountains” made from piles of stone), flushed with pink orchids & bamboo – are within her, growing (contrasts of “dark, void, soft, yielding, wet, cool” and “bright, solid, hard, unyielding, dry, hot,” yin & yang,), bubbling & curling her lips into a smile, under a covered walkway (whose open walls “create the illusion of space beyond space. . . . lattice of each window is a different geometric pattern”) enclosing & disclosing, so the inside & outside fuse (exchanging, bubbling, soothing) as light slips across gray tiles & shadows, evoking Basho’s lines: Even in Kyoto – / hearing the cuckoo’s cry – / I long for Kyoto. Light & time & space invite her inside the half-pavilion across the walkway beside the fountain, orchids & bamboo, to call more words to her mouth, to summon birds like “starlings”:
Alight. A-light. A light!
Home. Hone. Home!
Time is passing. Her watch reveals 3:30 in Roman numerals, so she wistfully picks up pace through the rest of China, past more large screen paintings with waves & “auspicious” dragons (“a symbol of the elemental forces of nature”) & fish (“a symbol of unencumbered happiness that is also a rebus for abundance”), past trailing Japanese bokuseki that dance across pages as if alive & breathing, down a wide marble staircase, whose landing displays a cast-iron Head of Buddha, to the ground floor where visitors swarm and buzz, See! A granite sarcophagus, she breathes, considering entombment within boxes like a nested doll, leaked of thoughts & heart, bottled and balmed with fractured poetry and incantations, in painted caskets facing a single direction within walls, ideograms, figures (whose doubled limbs signify movement, following the lion’s gaze) – in a hidden room at the end of a dark tunnel, echoing:
This tomb is empty. Captions push her inside her thoughts, memories, her escape by groping in slow motion, like a wind-up toy without the key, raising her fingers to reach (a key-board, no longer communication, instead “opening of the mouth” as if to sing) – here, there: resonances. She keeps believing: temperament is more than technology, if she listens more closely, she may hear Music of the Spheres (untempered, chromatically untampered) played-by-not-playing, contradictions in terms that grant comprehension, if she listens like tuners who once distinguished purer intervals: between the lines.
And that could be one way to begin: the story of their coming home – as if larger forces (aural & planetary motions; the expanding soul & universe) had caused the Fall.
Fall, falling, falling in love. . . .
More palmettes & she’s on her way again (home to him, not straightaway, crow dart-of-a-black-arrow to love him) curvaceously, by Dendur’s tomb with nineteenth-century graffiti chiseled among ankhs & cartouches, LPOLIT 1819, VIDUA 1820, KI 1872, before a glass-smooth pool filled with pennies that reflect ceiling lamps (make a wish), guarded by a red sandstone crocodile that lacks a tail, under the largest skylight she’s ever seen, which frames tree-plumes like strutting peacocks (eyes above the obelisk, feathers & fist clumps of petals, foaming, ocean-waves) she loves watching from the inside out, but also can’t wait to be by pedestrians, cross-town blue buses and bumble-bee cabs (reflecting, refracting) through atrium-glass she watches them pass, summer autumn winter spring, yes, it’s spring, when the Nile floods on Geb under Nut, surrounded by Nun, in a circular world of dismembered incantations, for those who break apart to be re-pieced (Osiris by Isis), so suns rise again, rear new harvests under shifting stars & signs, so they (he & she) will have the chance to be born & find their way to each another, to a new home.
Home. Always there’s heading to & from. Not one particular place, but orbiting one another: home. She thinks of both (him&her, joined) two places at once (three, four, five), how they’ve laughed about mutual coincidences, where the other was the same moment years ago, tomorrow & today, apart but together, with thoughts of & for the other (in their own miniature painting, the horizon line rises) by lines connecting & bisecting, pulling apart & re-piecing (he&she, heandshe, she&he, sheandhe) again & again & again, slants of light converge & illuminate paths coincidentally crossed & re-crossed (where they met: in the arch, by the fountain, again & again & again, re-pressed keys & hammers & strings & soundboard: music plays between the lines). The site could have been anywhere or nowhere, here or there, it might never have happened at all (the thought makes her shudder, quiver with fragility in seeming solidity, delicate as a butterfly, hatching – humbled every moment) at once, she remembers (a dream? Look!) – past & future in echoing galleries, like underwater waves of light, luminescence encases her thoughts in sloughable skeins (to cast off every season), as she wanders earlier & later, closer & farther, to & from:
Home through the American Wing, speeding her pace past grandfather clocks, wing chairs, baseball cards, Madame X’s black V-neck gown, Wright’s arithmetical room, Tiffany glass lampshades & a red marble fireplace spacious enough (if she had canvas & stakes) to pitch a tent between waist-high andirons – Arms and Armor. European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Medieval Art. She doesn’t have time to circumambulate all galleries today & must leave something to return to (another wing, another room, another skylight, like the one above Rodin’s marble-chained prisoners, whose massive hands – she’s always noticing hands, opposable thumbs, which neurologists believe have driven human evolution & the creation of art, communication, technology, social organization – remind her that his unfinished sculptures of hands, arms, heads, legs, & torsos were heaped in his studio & nicknamed “brushwood”), stopping only to glance out the window at leafage flitting among plumed petals, ocean foam, fluttering masts & hooked anchors on the other side of glass, in the park, light splintering inside clouds, drifting & shifting shapes, birds & butterflies & bees, amid maples & oaks (who seem to whisper, drift & shift, shhhhhh, she’s seen them another season, exposed, shhhhhhivering, remember autumn, that Fall, falling in love); she is remembering but turning, behind and ahead, looking to new views in mirrors that reflect brocade bed curtains, drawered Wunderkammers, inlaid armoires, tiered teardrop chandeliers, brass astrolabes & compasses & timepieces, before the choir screen straddles (everything echoes, breathing) her passing through Byzantium, where she glimpses Roman numerals and a second hand on her watch & realizes it’s time. To go. Home!
Home! She’s going home! Delight! Anticipation! Dart-of-a-black-arrow, as close as she can (if possible, sprout wings, to fly like a crow) home, past pedestrians in jeans & suits & sweats & strollers, as much as she loves Rembrandt, Vermeer, Blake (all about light, burning bright) she’ll bypass them to revisit another day (always leaving something to come back to see) children asleep or giggling at guides who murmur mysteries about Rapa Nui phalli, gathering in the Great Hall (en route to Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas) among audio guides, sketchpads & notepads & hearing aids & wheelchairs & maps & coat checks & information (islands – everything echoes, home). From above on the balcony, glasses clink inside strung cadences (violins, viola & cello) a recognizable tune, on the tip of her tongue beneath the balcony, she listens & pockets her metal M (tags collect in a jar at home: pink Ms, purple Ms, green Ms, yellow Ms, millennial Met) & walks out of the museum empty-handed, without looking over her shoulder, keeping the tune in her head, heading north past tinged bronze windows, streaming with sunset, marbleizing mansions along Fifth Avenue into golden eyes, blinking at a wide sky:
Getting closer! She’s going home. As straight as she can (among sparrows, pigeon-holing) speed-walkers, roller-bladers, bikers, venders, dog-walkers: through the park at a sprint. It’s spring, early in the season when buds verge on blooms, pink & yellow & blue edging a palatial turret on a hill, glowing like a steam silhouette but colored, cherry petals bursting upon sky among crabapple & strawberry fields, hopscotch squares & green kites with trailing tails, whirling, lilting like the rising cadence of a song (lulling) sky to ground, carpets unfurling from fallen blossoms. Heat palpates inside buds, whiffs of breeze, feathers of bird & bees & butterflies, curling & unfurling (bees, birds, buds) not autumn-loss, not sunset but: dawn-pink, dawn-violet, dawn-golden. Sunlit chorales lift from branches, from birds & a carousel, camouflaged by limbs like clasped fists that hold petals, fluttering fingerlings, unfurling tidal foam (crests & crashes & hushes) dispersing flocks of sea-birds. A light! A-light! Alight! A hawk inks the sun, sea-clouds, peacock plumes, flying higher across the sky, circling then descending over a boarded green theater toward a rock of carapaces, clawing & glinting in a mossmurky pond, landing on a turtleback and cocking a lidless eye, before realighting –
The sun slips behind a cloud. Tonal shift. Grâve. In that moment: spring falls back to winter behind ice, freezing what came before & will again. Leaves, fallen. Time slows. Glistening icicles, lace traceries, crystal sills: in that season (everything has a season), she retreated inside, slowed her pace in the too-long winter, cold and confining, what kept her climbing walls (of her mind) in her pre-war apartment, where a radiator pissed steam and leaked tears on the hardwood floor, like a steel-heat accordion – plinking, sighing, hammering – under the sill of a window that framed a frozen world. It was a long winter, but then came melting: crocuses, popping through snow like butterflies from cream cocoons; buds, like mist among foaming clouds & shimmering sun; herself, unwrapping bandages and braces, molting & reaching out to unlock windows, open the bolted door of the pre-war apartment to navigate halls, leave her house & enter the street.
Sun seeps through the cloud, shining. Tonal shift. Allegro. The reservoir glistens with emeralds & diamonds (she feels rich, with cherry trees in blossom around the lake and on the water, crabapples) dispersing a gaggle of goslings, who ripple wakes, glide across rings & waddle ashore into golden brush. Along the running path, smudging footprints: she’s sprinting home past the trees, geese, jewel-strewn reservoir under canopied petals, through the park back to the pre-war apartment where the radiator is off, windows are open so air moves freely inside out & outside into the kitchen, living room, study, dining room, bedroom (there’re all one, in a studio), where her husband is headed at this exact minute, 5:00 p.m. (done with work for the weekend) so they’ll meet & make dinner, dicing & sizzling with orchestration – Von Bingen, Bach, Chopin, Villa-Lobos, Tan Dun – they’re all there and more, in the pre-war apartment, where music sings from the stereo & seeps out windows, under cracks in the door, through walls, into he&she, and (even when turned off) keeps playing. For them, it is not a silent world.
She said, What’s this about?
He said, It’s a love story. You know about those, don’t you?
She thinks,
Love, love, Look! At the sky, at sea-clouds, ocean waves, ebbing and rising, white numbers in red circles, paved stairs leading down, down, down (listen: rumbling) turnstiles and newspapers, rats & rattling, light at the end of the tunnel, approaching. Lights, bells, voices! The loudspeaker announces, “We’re being held by. . . . ” Poetry in Motion:
“Living” –
A red salamander easy to catch, dreamily and long tail. I hold
so cold and so moves his delicate feet my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
“. . . 3 p.m.”
A single light Perhaps reading Not thinking
Where someone As I drove past This poem
Was sick or At seventy Is for
Whoever had the light on.
“The Suitor”
. . . turning all at once
like a school full of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer. . . .
Commingling with commuters, lights & loudspeakers, she recalls the afternoon today, her life, all time, dawns & dusks, shifting earth & sky, paperbacks & paperbags, bebop from the duo who enters the subway from the end of the car, “Spare a dime, anything you have,” tinkling cups, 10¢ a minute long-distance, Subtalk <<Add wings? <<Ban automobiles? <<Convince customers to exit at the rear. . . . yes, that’s it!, SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GO BACKWARD IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD, “Stand clear of the closing doors,” opening, closing, opening, closing, gathering momentum, speeding through the tunnel, slowing heeeeeeere, heeere, her:
Who (her)? Where (here)? Why –
Home! She’s arrived, at the nearest station stop! Sliding doors open, and she bounds up the stairs, two at a time, glances at her watch (“Next stop . . .”) can’t come soon enough (home, home, home) through rows of light-twined trees (breathing), past Low and Butler out the quad through black gates & stoplights & sirens under an overpass (down, down, down) at a moderate slope past The Last Word, Popover cafés & cleaners, Ye Olde Appletree near the intersection, where she turns & starts skipping under the purple-tinged sky, bronze clouds & honeycomb windows which appear at twilight (echoing, home) on the verge of daylight savings, turning night into day & day into night, shifting, shadowing & illuminating – a light in their window, he’s home! Home, ehom, meho, omeh, home, ehom, meho, oooooooooooommmeh. She rushes inside the U-shaped courtyard of planted urns (home! him! home!) to a switchboard, doesn’t stop to find keys, buzzes 202 in signature rhythm. Call & response: a bell answers back, and she pushes open the door coming in from twilight, into the warmth & low light of the pre-war foyer of the pre-war building, where her entrance (lapping & leaping, the front door smacking shut) echoes against the mosaic floor & metal mailboxes (good-bye, hello, good – neighbors), as she climbs the stairs two at a time, as her soles skid against tessera tiles, to reach the second floor and turn down the mosaic hallway, where she hears his click of the bolt, unlocking:
Gretchen E. Henderson has published an essay in Slant and a poem in California Quarterly. This is her first published story.