Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin

cup.
    “Francine,” I say.
    The half-light of dawn is showing me things outside the window: silhouettes, our maple, the eaves of our neighbor’s garage. Francine moves and stands against the glass, hugging her shoulders.
    “You’re not telling me something,” I say.
    She sits and makes her pills into a circle again, then into a line. Then she is crying.
    I come around the table, but she gets up before I reach her and leaves the kitchen. I stand there. In a moment I hear a drawer open in the living room. She moves things around, then shuts it again. When she returns she sits at the other side of the table. “Sit down,” she says. She puts two folded sheets of paper onto the table. “I wasn’t hiding them,” she says.
    “What weren’t you hiding?”
    “These,” she says. “He leaves them.”
    “He leaves them?”
    “They say he loves me.”
    “Francine.”
    “They’re inside the windows in the morning.” She picks one up, unfolds it. Then she reads:
     
Ah, I remember well (and how can I
But evermore remember well) when first
     
    She pauses, squint-eyed, working her lips. It is a pause of only faint understanding. Then she continues:
     
Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was
The flame we felt.
     
    When she finishes she refolds the paper precisely. “That’s it,” she says. “That’s one of them.”
     
    At the aquarium I sit, circled by glass and, behind it, the senseless eyes of fish. I have never written a word of my own poetry but can recite the verse of others. This is the culmination of a life.
Coryphaena hippurus
, says the plaque on the dolphin’s tank, words more beautiful than any of my own. The dolphin circles, circles, approaches with alarming speed, but takes no notice of, if he even sees, my hands. I wave them in front of his tank. What must he think has become of the sea? He turns and his slippery proboscis nudges the glass. I am every part sore from life.
     
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest
,
A famished pilgrim—saved by miracle.
     
    There is nothing noble for either of us here, nothing between us, and no miracles. I am better off drinking coffee. Any fluid refills the blood. The counter boy knows me and later at the cafe he pours the cup, most of a dollar’s worth. Refills are free but my heart hurts if I drink more than one. It hurts no different from a bone, bruised or cracked. This amazes me.
    Francine is amazed by other things. She is mystified, thrown beam ends by the romance. She reads me the poems now at breakfast, one by one. I sit. I roll my pills. “Another came last night,” she says, and I see her eyebrows rise. “Another this morning.” She reads them as if every word is a surprise. Her tongue touches teeth, shows between lips. These lips are dry. She reads:
     
Kiss me as if you made believe
You were not sure, this eve,
How my face, your flower, had pursed
Its petals up
     
    That night she shows me the windowsill, second story, rimmed with snow, where she finds the poems. We open the glass. We lean into the air. There is ice below us, sheets of it on the trellis, needles hanging from the drainwork.
    “Where do you find them?”
    “Outside,” she says. “Folded, on the lip.”
    “In the morning?”
    “Always in the morning.”
    “The police should know about this.”
    “What will they be able to do?”
    I step away from the sill. She leans out again, surveying her lands, which are the yard’s width spit of crusted ice along our neighbor’s chain link and the three maples out front, now lost their leaves. She peers as if she expects this man to appear. An icy wind comes inside. “Think,” she says. “Think. He could come from anywhere.”
     
    One night in February, a month after this began, she asks me to stay awake and stand guard until the morning. It is almost spring. The earth has reappeared in patches. During the day, at the borders of yards and driveways, I see glimpses of brown—though