POEM · AFTER EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
Above the cul-de-sacs, the house had gone on being unfinished after the man who meant to finish him died. Below, almost everything had been finished: lawns brought to one obedient height, driveways poured cleanly to the street, kitchens shining with objects that knew what they were for. Doors opened onto rooms with names. Edward did not have hands. At his wrists the invention simply stopped—hinges, blades, bright articulations of steel where touch should have become ordinary. He could separate one thing exquisitely from another: leaf from branch, hair from hair, ice from ice. What he could not do was hold what remained. A woman from below found him there and brought him down. The neighborhood gathered. There was curiosity first, then pleasure. The pleasure mattered. Nobody had to pretend the hedges were better before him. Under the machinery of his wrists, blunt green walls gave up birds, bears, spirals, improbable beasts. Dogs emerged from their own fur looking astonished. Women sat beneath his blades and rose laughing, carrying unfamiliar versions of their faces into the afternoon. He saw the shape early: the swan before the hedge, the face before the hair, the figure before the block. For a while, everyone was delighted to be shown what had been standing in front of them all along. Every welcome contained a request. Come in. Cut this. Try mine. Look what he can do. And because he had lived so long where nobody called his name, he had no instrument fine enough to measure the distance between being wanted and being wanted for something. From across a room, both sounded remarkably like love. Summer accumulated around him. Sprinklers clicked across lawns. Cars cooled in driveways. Women called to one another from bright kitchens. Somewhere a television laughed for people who were not laughing. Then the requests changed. A locked door. A favor he mistook for loyalty. A frightened body moving too quickly near the blades. Blood, small at first, astonishingly red against the pastel houses. Nothing happened to the steel. The town changed its grammar. By evening the verbs had moved backward. He had always frightened me. There had always been something wrong. I knew this would happen. Memory, obedient as a lawn, trimmed itself to the new property line. He went back up the hill. The unfinished house received him without asking what had happened. The machines that had once been intended to complete him stood where they had been left, their belts slack, their purposes gone. No one there asked him to be useful. No one watched his wrists. Years gathered there as dust did, quietly, in places no hand could reach. Below, children became adults in houses he could still see from the windows. Paint faded. Roofs were replaced. The animals he had released from the hedges grew shaggy, were cut back, disappeared. People who had known him found ways to tell the story in which they had behaved reasonably. The hill remained. Then there was ice. A block of it taller than a child, clouded at the center, keeping its cold silence beneath his blades. The hedge had wanted to go on being hedge. Hair kept growing after he left the room. A dog shook itself and ran home. Ice agreed to disappear. He began. The first incision gave almost nothing: a white scratch, a handful of chips bright on the floor. He turned the block. Cut again. A shoulder entered the world. Then the suggestion of a wing, or an arm lifted from the body, or only the clean curve by which one substance ceases to resemble itself. Nobody below was waiting. There was no chair turning toward him, no woman touching her hair in disbelief, no child calling another child over, no voice saying look. He cut anyway. Steel entered ice. Ice answered in fragments. The fragments rose. Some clung briefly to his black clothes and disappeared. Some crossed the broken rail of the terrace. Some went farther, caught by the warm air above the houses, and what had been waste from the making became, somewhere between the hill and the roofs, something the town knew how to name. Snow. It fell first where no one noticed. Against a dark window. Into an empty swimming pool. On the hood of a parked car still warm from its engine. Then everywhere. On the clipped lawns and the roofs. On the hedges that no longer remembered being swans. On houses whose occupants had once called him wonderful and houses whose occupants had once called the police. On people who had fed him, used him, touched him, feared him, loved him badly, forgotten him completely. The snow kept no ledger. It fell into every yard. High above them, he worked deeper into the ice. With each exact cut, what he removed traveled farther than what he kept. Below, identical roofs received different drifts. Children woke and ran to the windows. They believed the sky had done it. No one had invited the weather.