Evening in the Balance

Autumn Equinox 2020 

Watching with my scotch this pink sunset in September, I’m on the little porch above the yard with the fountain in the garden working hard, pushing water upward past a clog of leaves, thinking of my father a year or so before he died, resting clothed on his apartment bed, hands folded on his stomach, not at all surprised by my coming to the room, my quiet approach: “Just contemplating the infinite,” he said in the curtained afternoon.

He turned eighteen the day after Pearl Harbor. By war’s end he was a captain in the Army. He commanded a segregated truck company, but it was an older sergeant who ran things; my father taught the men to read and write, to touch home, and stayed in Germany as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, and became a historian. I think of the letters of those young men now, resting folded in old boxes under beds and in attics, words absorbed in time: “Dearest Mother, I am fine. I hope you are fine too.”

The athlete next door slings her lacrosse ball hard into a net, lunges and slings again and again this evening of the equinox. She smiles, speaks under her breath. The squirrels and chipmunks hurry. The red hummingbird feeder hangs full of sugar water. My wife drags a bag of storm-torn leaves across the yard. The bones grind in my thumb, stealing the pleasure as I write but filling me, as Yamamoto said about the Americans, with a terrible resolve.

Sounds of other neighbors laughing; sound of the fountain, the lightly lofted water falling, the whir of wings. I think now of Harold Nicolson’s letters in the war years, the many letters of a complex man, civilization and sneer crossing in his musing; grace and regrets, cheerful dread. A late-season bee silhouettes itself against the last of the sun, sharply dark, the pink of the sky now diffusing. The clothesline leaps, neither bird nor beast upon it, and the sun sinks red.

DOL