Description
Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in The Clearing. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle—to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes—as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too.
FROM The Clearing
DREAM OF MY FATHER’S SHIVA, LAKE MICHIGAN, 1963
I pull a body out of the lake and it’s my size.
You are completely dry.
I drag you across the beach by the right arm
and right leg. I bring you to the shiva house.
It’s easy because you grip my hand.
I don’t have to do all the work.
Your other hand is missing fingers.
I trawl you back to the lake to find them.
Your freckles enumerate
and cluster, constellations, little myths
I flick off your skin like sand.
The sand dissolves into snow, which turns
to ice. I slide with you,
ice skating children playing on a snow day.
Faces of the family around the shiva table
seasons later, years later, waiting for us
to return from this desert of ice.
The hours, they come as an urn
to put you in. You do not fit
anywhere else—the mind, the house, the vase…
I am not prepared for the change:
when the grip tightens and then slacks,
it’s winter, it’s summer.
MOON CHILD
I think of these things to tell you when you are asleep:
Little pools of water filled with limbs. The sky is dull,
The sky in excess. I draw rings around your belly.
Sometimes I do things to you because I want you to do them to me.
In the morning, when you are still asleep, I reach my hand
Into your mouth, down through your chest. I turn your heart over.
