Elk Dreams

Faraway from home in some past decade, he found himself in a hotel on Main Street on the Canadian stretch of the Rocky Mountains. Elk like sacred ungulates wandered into town unmolested. Icesprays broke from nearby glaciers, cold unheeded squibs. He alighted from a Greyhound, someone else, some long-gone September afternoon. Bright skies, clean rivers, a cold stealing in behind.

He accepted a viewless room and closed his eyes, slept an hour. Dreamed:

The night is urging silence, the shush shush shush of lawn sprinklers a giveaway. Only the occasional dog defies it, a sudden inexplicable bark against the hum of warmth from lawns and gardens rising into the cooling air. Your intaken breath a parody of weather. The offshore eventide breeze sucks westward from the hills, more heat extinguished like stealth. 

When he woke, he came down to a hotel bar that was quiet, a group of young men his own age clustered at one end, a cowboy at the other, and a young woman tending it.

***

Trembling at the tip of a leaf, a jewel of dew quivers with infinity. 

***

Then stories happen.

***

An outdoor teagarden with elderly women in floral dresses. A man is to their left. Although he’s not a man; he has a man’s face, stretched over various mechanical contraptions, and his entire body is a riot of steampunk gadgetry, all whirring and moving while the man’s mouth moves. I can read his lips: “Can you hear me?” But we can’t, especially the dainty women to whom he addresses this. After a while, you see his face contort with rage and what looks like agony as he screams, silently, “Please listen to me! Please help me! Please help me!” over and over, his neck skin flapping and stretched between levers and pistons and oiled joints. He thinks they’re ignoring him, but they can’t hear him.

***

So here’s the release, the literal release, and I don’t know what to feel. The clang and clangour of the past, its grime and grimaces, dolour and doom, have coughed me into some future that has hidden in wait all my life for a moment when I’m least robust, least able to shoulder its new weight and keen tangle of angles, drag its ass and its drastic unfathomable mass.

Where do I go now? I want to buy a newspaper but where? A coffee, perhaps?

Come find me at the riverbank, activate your turbine scream, your Rickenbacker growl. Is this tide ebbing at last?

***

The road is the night. The yellow lines like grooves under the needle of your car wheels, and the song they make. When as a doe I stepped out entranced by the eyes of your car and was hit a glancing blow, I heard the most melancholy of odes playing in the shimmer of night, in the exhaled breath of a thing we might name “accident,” but is only one small part of the symphony. I staggered, hurt, buckling on stilt legs, and all semblance of story was smeared against the subdued street-lit facades and the glow of neon, stabs of faraway sirens, until I came to you in the sandstone courtyard and you had waited all your unrewarded life for this part of your own keen story where you were avid to help me so you could also be helped.

You think we’re ignoring you, but we can’t hear you.

***

(I think they’re ignoring me, but they can’t hear me.)

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Image © Asa Rodger