The Door-to-Door Saleswoman

Robin Chapman

Look, I’m knocking on your door, satchel full of flyers for the best subscription I can offer you—deals for a scholarship to the school of the world, jars of honey, honeysuckle’s perfume, the sky swept cirrus by big bluestem, the zigzag work of bees, the four directions of the compass signaled by the compass plant, sunflowers’ fix on east, a wind to make a chime of leaf stir and branch when ice shackles the prairie grass—look at its brilliance flashing as it drips!                                   And maybe this is a return to my girlhood work, knocking on neighbors’ doors with deals for Time and Life subscriptions, scholarship to the college of my choice, in a town where Uranium-235 was carefully sorted from U-238 to make the bombs that could blow up our world— this wish to spend life tending what grows.

Villains: Move In, Move On (1.8, LWT, 1972)

"You're a studious fellow, aren't you?"

"D'you know, my old man wanted me to go into accountancy. Either that, or civil engineering."

"So why didn't you?"

A Ghost Story For Christmas: Lost Hearts (BBC, 1973)

And those other images of the brain lit up— faces here, hand tools there, words heard, words said, maps of the body, feet next to sex, happiness glowing in the left frontal cortex, grief with no words in the right, fear bright in the amygdala, self here, consciousness of self there, and mirrors of your mouth, hands, movements everywhere, intention a latecomer— what is it to live in this body, these bones, the world entering in a river of light and sound, smell of cut grass, gravity’s tug?

Now the indigo buntings are singing insistently in the walnut tree, their flashes of metallic blue a color that was never sky, and wild phlox the shade of rainy cloud are releasing a perfume that makes the bumblebees wild. Wind gusts the daisy patch and green rises up on a great scaffold of branches into the building thunderheads.