Hydra

This is a story about place but it’s also about the kids in the grass. All of us played at living and dying in tall grass. We tore our clothes in grass; scraped skin from our arms; slapped at midges and mosquitoes. Sometimes we pressed our mouths into green and sucked moisture–though one of us, an older one–that knowing child found in every group—said the earth was radioactive and we believed her because she said President Kennedy said it. We were clear headed by turns, then knocked flat. There were, we knew, monsters beyond the grass. We played by following it. Following grass. The times were plain. Some of us knew the names of birds. My favorite was the White Throated Sparrow who we called the Peabody Bird. His little song could break your heart. Lots of things could break your heart. The Wood Thrush was also a heart breaker and lying face down in the woods he’d get inside you. He’d get inside us because we were playing dead. This was in the final days before television. We played dead and listened to bird songs.

**

I was the blind kid uncoiling in light, who ran just as fast as he could. That was a job for me. It was “the” job. I’d run a zig-zag staggering lurching tear soaked gambol while others threw pine cones and pebbles at my back and legs. I was the “Kraut”. The crippled kid was always the Kraut or the Indian or the Jap. Once a rock struck me in the back of my skull—not quite errant—there was too much laughter—but not lethal, not enough to run to mommy–but I was thoroughly admonished to be dead and so I lay down. Nice and easy. Beyond the grass stirred uncertainties, especially if you couldn’t see. Be foreign. Notice how the clover smells like hay. Listen to cornstalks beside a rail fence. Think about the darkness and sadness of joy because you’re blind and still. Think though you’re scarcely eight about the coppery gleam of names because you’ve been called too many for such a small boy—blindo, Mr. Magoo, four eyes, froggy, and freak of nature which later you will learn in Latin. Lusus is monster. In high school you’ll think of writing a play called “Lusus-strata” though you won’t. By the time you’re in your teens you’ll have other blue mantles.

But childhood grass was a democracy. Each of us played war and smiled the faintly sardonic smile of outcasts. Perhaps we were all chameleons hoping to be changed. For a time though, for that time, we kept to the grasses and weeds. But I was the only one whose blood red thickened name followed him as he crawled like a soldier. Blind snake.

**

Home again he’d listen to long playing records on a government gramophone for the blind.

It was a hot, lonesome Sunday. He absorbed words read aloud from a long playing record.

Hercules fought a nine headed snake. The needle quavered, struck at the paper label. He turned the thing over.

What were a blind child’s eyes worth? The answer: one name of the Hydra.

Snakes were half stone, half grass.

Some lived under the pond. Of course they couldn’t see.

Within her nine heads, all fanged, nine kinds of love.

No wonder he grew to love Hydra.

All she wanted was a lithic solitude.

**

A neighbor—an attorney–went to the meadow with a gun.

He was going to demonstrate heroism by shooting snakes.

When he was out of sight the boys taunted me.

“You can’t come because you’re blind!”

“Yeah, you might get hurt!”

A pine cone struck me in the chest.

“Look! He didn’t even see that coming!”

“A snake might bite him!”

Then they were gone.

**

Hydra I took you under my ribs, my darling who licked the words from stones.

Hydra, innocent, my speechlessness.

**

In the grass he wore fear, a homespun shirt. He raised the emerald spindrift in mind. He saw if you became the green you would not have need of it.

If the grass was democratic it was owing to unspeakable loneliness. Hydra. Long and low and still.

**

When he was grown he imagined other boys and girls had held themselves perfectly still in the green unspoken.

He found it difficult to tell the story of grass and the aspen that shivered and the names inside him.

Hydra was a reconciliation of what was practical.

Now he calls her the 9 X name of children who expect they’ll die. For whom it started as a game.

He supposes he should be more ironic about fealty and Romantic sadness, but finds he cannot.

He’s still there in rain and green, listening.

Even a child knows Hydra is formally incomplete.