Ironic Witness
Diane Glancy
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.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-744-3
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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 indifference to what he preached? He never said so to my face, even when he went in by himself to identify Daniel’s gobbled body. It was a holy calling—a calling of the holy Christ to bear up as Frank did. It was as if Daniel, our son, had had enough and would spare himself and us further exasperation, and begging, and warning, and failure after failure, and use and reuse and reuse until we knew it would not change, not even by a blazing miracle of a high God, though I’m sure Frank held out hope to the end. Daniel wouldn’t have been in my heaven for all the grief he caused.
This is about the terror I faced. Evident in the weather—in attacks of other sorts, both from inside and out—in attacks of despair—in attacks of terrorists—in attacks of aging, which are terrorists in themselves.
I can look back at myself and say, “a gulf separates us.” Often I retreated into my work as if the upheaval could be terminated in the kiln, where I fired the clay as if it was the circumstances Daniel handed to us.
I was a maker of ziggurats. I shaped clay into the likenesses of ziggurats. I was a maker of their clay forms. The various gradations that climbed from them. I worked mainly with shape. There’s an edginess that comes when I’m working—a vision of sorts—a zigzag line or the jump of a lightning bolt, jagged as the jaws of life and as disconcerting as tearing a car open to extricate what is caught there.
I kept journals of my work on ziggurats in my work shed, which I titled, The Ziggurat Journals, or Ziggurats and Me, volumes 1 through 7. I was now