"Does this do anything?"

Two Friends Books in Bentonville, AR. Mural by Kenza.

I flew down to Bentonville, AR, for a week.

I do and don’t want to tell you all about it. 

Thing is, I’m not writing a diary, I’m writing a guardrail. Keeping a lamp burning.

I’m reaching out in the dark to feel if the cat is still there, on a blanket at my feet. Her meow: just enough sound to convey that yes, she is.

*

I walked seven miles a day in a place where most people drive.

I saw gardeners working. Men on ladders, painting a mural on the face of a parking garage, stringing lights in the trees on the Square. Stagehands on a set, while somewhere in the wings, actors readied their faces.

I learned the names of the baristas at Airship, the names of the women working in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art gift shop. 

I began to recognize people. A brother and a sister in a cafe, Facetiming their mom to show off the sister’s stylish new haircut — the next day I saw the brother getting out of his car in a different part of town.

At night I startled deer, grazing on lawns the color of moonlit straw.

“What do you call this color,” I asked everyone I met. “This color is good for my city eyes.”

*

I wasn’t going to write about Bentonville. Thing is, I went to Bentonville to write, but not about it.

And I did write some, but mostly I dared to look VANNA in the eye.

When you leave a long messy draft too long, it freezes over, and it takes going somewhere new to break that ice.

I sat in Airship, drank coffee, marked up existing pages and darkened new ones with Japanese ink.

I moved through the Museum, collecting landscapes, gazes, color. I grew fuzzy with it, like a bee.

Sat on a bench with my eyes closed, listening to the gentle clinking of one thousand polished, mirrored spheres in Kusama’s “Narcisuss Garden.” The wind moved them on the water. 

Sat inside James Turrell’s “The Way of Color,” resting my eyes in the sky.

A woman stuck her head into the space — I’d heard her heels approaching —

“Does this do anything?” she asked.

“It gives you peace,” I said. “And the benches are heated.”

She didn’t stay. She didn’t even cross the threshold.

*

On my last morning in town, I watched a cat do all the things our cat does — but one story up. On the roof of the house across from Airship.

She swished her tail while studying the birds in the tree. Scratched her head with her hind foot. Blinked into the sun. 

A man came out of the house and sat on a rocking chair just outside the door. He drank his coffee and went back inside.

The cat noticed me watching her. She came to the edge of the roof and peered down, the way our cat peers over the edge of the bed. Then sauntered back up to the spine of the roof, closer to the branches of the tree.

An Arkansas champion tree, a beechwood or a bitternut hickory or a black walnut, I do not know, it was leafless.

Yayoi Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

*

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