Ironic Witness. Diane Glancy

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      Contents

      The Visit | 1

      My Work | 12

      Soundings | 15

      At Its Deadliest | 19

      Sparses | 22

      Several Nights after Daniel Died | 28

      What Is There in Ziggurats That Words Cannot Say? | 30

      A Ziggurat Is a Funeral Umbrella | 33

      Ziggurats Are a Figmentor of Imagination | 35

      If I Start to Nap, I Growl | 38

      Casting Doubt | 41

      What Had I Understood? | 42

      The Spiral of the Galaxy—the Spiral of My Ziggurats | 44

      A Freak Snow | 49

      Grounding | 53

      The Prophecies of Ziggurats | 55

      Daniel’s Visions | 62

      A Collapse | 64

      Lot’s Wife | 67

      Rock City | 70

      Flaw | 71

      Daniel’s Funeral | 73

      Back Flash | 75

      A Brief Confrontation | 82

      Ironic Witness | 84

      The Blue Scarf | 87

      Off the Road | 90

      Uncle John Winscott’s Funeral | 93

      Frank’s Years in the Ministry | 97

      Frank’s Death | 99

      Another Visit to the Cemetery | 102

      Wired | 104

      A Sign on the Road | 105

      In Hell There Is No Night | 118

      Fragments Came to Me and Patterned Themselves as Ziggurats | 121

      How Could A Minister’s Wife Be Found in Hell? | 129

      Far | 131

      Daniel in Hell | 133

      Ziggurats for Sale | 135

      Frank in Heaven | 148

      Ironic Witness

      Copyright © 2015 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Wipf & Stock

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-744-3

      EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7046-5

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      I would like to thank my writers’ group at Azusa Pacific University:

      Christine Kern, Thomas Albaugh, Katie Manning, Luba Zakharov

      What I was living, that I am dead.

      —Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto 14

      I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.

      —Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

      And the whole earth was of one language and one speech.

      And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

      And they said one to another, “Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and slime for mortar.

      And they said, “Come, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach heaven.”

      And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which they had built.

      And the Lord said, “Behold, the people are one, and they have one language. Nothing will be withheld from them that they imagined to do. Come, let us go down, and confound their language.”

      So the Lord went down and scattered them upon the face of the earth and they stopped building.

      —Gen 11:1–9, KJV

      The Visit

      Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it. I would implore you to make the effort. It’s for you, as much as for me—maybe more, for eventually, I am no longer in the place you call here.

      At first, there was distancing of what I knew. There was Frank’s death. Daniel’s before that. The sound of the mower in our yard. The buzzing, always buzzing, at the window of my work shed. I think Daniel mowed because he needed the repetition—going back and forth over the same ground. Other times, a friend of Daniel’s mowed while Daniel stood in the drive and watched him as if part of his mind were caught there in the mowing.

      Daniel was not our only child. We have two other children, Winifred and Warren. But Daniel was the focus, and all that followed him. I leaned on Frank, my husband, a retired minister and professor of biblical studies, as we traveled through the turmoil of the Daniel years.

      —

      Christianity. The sweet tangle of my life. I could shred it with my teeth. It was ever before me. As a young woman, I married a minister. Forty-two years later, what did I expect? Certainly not a son staked on drugs. Dead on arrival with an ear chewed by broken glass or an animal in the night, and an assurance from Frank, my husband, that Daniel was in heaven because he’d accepted Christ as a boy, though Christ was never a consideration to Daniel as far as I knew. Daniel seemed never to stop running from him. Or he acted like he wasn’t there at all. I expected Frank to say, “like his mother” in his despair, though he never did. Did Frank blame me and my СКАЧАТЬ