One Autumn Before Computers

A giant puffball bulges among the dried stalks of goldenrod like a misplaced hope. I stuff it in my coat pocket & look around for others, without success. That evening, I chop its spongy cloud-flesh into a sauce with clams.

Then, too, there was the spruce tree a porcupine had recently girdled. It stood in the dense center of a galaxy of needles, some fallen pale side up, some dark green – a pleasing blend. Out at the feathery edge, a scattered pile of hickory shells. I crouched there tracing words with my finger over & over in the soft dirt, as if into the uncomprehending palm of a young Helen Keller.

I try to imagine what it would be like to write for such an audience: one autumn before home computers, on a Xerox machine at the university, my father making a copy of a copy of a copy until my poem rose from the page like mist. I forget the point of the exercise, now – something about the need to keep the originals, maybe, or to write as firmly as we could.

Or years before, at another college, going with him into the library after hours, to run off copies on what must’ve been one of the very first Xerox machines, enormous, full of lights & noises – the only thing stirring among all those wordless books. “Will it make a copy of me?” I was five years old. “Sure. Close your eyes.”

I remember the heat as its beam raked my face, my mounting excitement & the letdown that followed, squinting at a piece of paper heavy with drying ink. What would I have done if, as I’d expected, the machine had given birth to my identical twin? Imagine someone with whom deceit is impossible.

Thirty-five years later, I still recall how the sky looked when we went back out: fast-moving clouds back-lit by an almost-full moon. It was a revelation. “Clouds at night!” I whispered, taking one last glance behind me into the shadows.