Maw

Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends. 

Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?

I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.

The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.

Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.

Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was. 

I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.

Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.

“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”

I answer you.

“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”

Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?

I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?

The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.

____________________

Image © Kathrin Swoboda

Atrocity

Love, regardless.

Not only ghosts but people. Even the ones who faded. 

Recall delivering letters amid narrow ice-filthed brick-shored places, breath a whorl of futile, fingers iced, eyeing gun-shy frown-marked dogs, brown and surly with an inkling to hurt.

A battalion of believers moaning surety. True balloons. Obliterated grooms. How does your compliance make them come? 

“Let Jesus in; I promise you’ll be saved.”

This place amid the human tribe is crushing, our tracheatic wheeze an outlier where birdsong once prevailed.

Policeman. Copper. Sworn to protect. 

Ever hard.

You crossed paths with her and thought it better to erase her path. 

Such unmitigated hubris.

Not only the path but every step she took upon it. 

You read that map, you read each step, you nightmare godforsaken failed reptilian fuck.

“I can’t even bring myself to trust a cop, so why choose Jesus as my guide?”

We don’t want this to grow into a poem by default, so listen, pay attention. Reinforce this. You’re weak and low and appalling, and you always will be. Worthless, I want to say, but what we lack we boost, reshape into what we can hardly tolerate.

How glorious our acts of charity, how unrehearsed. Make this our cenotaph. Our radical, ramshackle, gimcrack tribute.

“What the almighty fuck is a Jesus?”

No longer will I turn away from cataclysm, especially when it’s made, especially once the red-streak gaze, the blaze of shame, the razor-face of naked blame spans the climb and ropes the bleating escapee, coveting exoneration, floating jailbreak, tempting everlasting flight.

Oh baby bird. 

You darling fledgling underneath the rain.

“Will you come back at last and hold my trembling hand?”

What untenable schemes unravel and bring you face to face with all things lacking face? What untrammeled endless waterways remain and even drain beyond this thing we deign absentia? 

Claim this. Claim your phantom legacy of pain. Let’s not let the boorish blamelords block the meritful petition of the rest.

“I’ll come back. Yes. Whenever I am right, I promise I’ll come back.”

Avenge this, all my dearest compañeros, walk in numbers shouldered by the highways as they flit and dash, reminding them of how our multitudes will some day trounce their flimsy hold, how sheer exuberance will rout their angry grasp, how dreamscapes wake from sleep, how such astonished love surprises overreach, how this damn good thing eclipses all of this and most of that.

____

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Ink Into Blue

All the warm lights settle into the glow of evening, that umbra of deep blue before it accedes to black. You can still see the ridge with its dark fractal conifers and a deepening gloom beneath, backdropping this pretty town, beyond the amber necklace of I-5 lights. This melancholic summer twilight. All our crew and passengers anticipating night.

"I walked for hours alongside the interstate and no one noticed me. Till I stumbled. Then everyone gathered to watch me stumble again."

"The way of things. Said it before."

"But surely it ain't right. Ain't normal!"

"There is no normal; only what we become accustomed to."

The bay is flat as a hockey rink, barely a ripple on its reflecting expanse. Blue and blue and more blue, deepening to ink, punctuated by the copper and brass of streetlights, passing ships, the breathless tremor of awakening stars.

We are on an ark amid those stars.

You write like HST, like Hitchens: whipsmart and hairshirt honest. You're a heartbreaker the moment a heartbreaker's required. Because the truth barely hides within all the voices. Hurts, though, hurts so good.

It's a dark room, massive as a hangar. I can't even tell what the floor is made from, whether it's natural or even solid. A doorframe filled with light gleams on the other side, far away, and every footstep leads me there yet doesn't. It won't come closer. I walk and walk before the traceless course is set. 

People have been seeing stairs in the deep woods—in the peace and the pure dark of those woods, stairs and no floors, concrete risers absent handrails, going up, descending—and have heard music notes that rise and fall with the wind on still days. Like a sudden mist, a shudder, an air of something terrifying, trees inhaling en masse then holding their breaths.

***

They left me here. To deal with Mother Russia, or one of her misbegotten spawn. Inside this grim building that feels like an institution. Flats, I hear; never apartments. One syllable will suffice. The single pane windows are framed in cold metal once painted a green so pale it's almost grey and is grey where it flakes. I stand at one and hear the spite of the windflung snow like grit on the glass. Did you know glass is a liquid, one very slow tear from an eye that cannot blink? I hear someone moaning, not close. Outside, a narrow road set back beyond an open area that is barely ever grass, even in springtime. Now it is patched with snow and strewn with ugly, unwanted things. Unloved things. A scarred dog the colour of dysentery investigates. The deep fissure between its eyes suggests something treacherous; I see the same in some men. The dog first sniffs then begins to chew on a used condom, and my nausea returns, beached like a gulping fish. There is nothing out there. I am in some blighted quarter of some nexus where all Cold War stereotypes happened upon truth for once. Someone left me here and isn't coming back. Nothing moves on the road and the ghosts of centuries hurl cold grit at the window and I try not to blink.

*** 

The man who speaks to birds divulges troubles. An emphysemic blues harp trailing in sync with the failing blue light. A hierarchy of blue. Near-black to india ink to royal blue to cerulean to shimmering abalone, that inbreath, the vestige of light unreal.

Bird man is on this. Where is the two-step hoot of the cuckoo in the bluebell woods? he asks. Our childhood springs were punctuated by its veiled predation. Its dulcet faux-solace bored into our brains unnoticed. Those auspicious Aprils. That banded marauder. Now silence presides over the wildflower lake that laps against dead bark, its waves curling midbreak and browning. How is it the birds are silent, the odd lone interloper gallant in its solo aria? Did we make of progress a ligature with which to choke the rest?

Bile and drool. Factories, refineries. They all sound like chickens. Astonished and blest.

Great swaths come of age defrauded. Cheated of this: supine in fragrant grasses as the lark spirals skyward buoyed by its own sweet song. Twitter is scant compensation, is weaksauce.

Close those massive doors and stop dreaming. Nostalgia is the devil's favourite trap, your fretful yearning throat in a capo grip, your flustered avian heartbeat faltering. 

Undressed.

Behold the false spring. Here, things live in things that grow on things. Cryptic. Larval. Something lives inside the holes, appallingly aware. You came and lived among us. The earth itself cries torrents.

"I'll never be accustomed to this."

"Shhhh…"

"I'm right, though, ain't I?"

"Hush now."

We are all writers. We lay upon this world black ribbons. We lay upon this world vile detritus. We lay upon this world our open, defective hearts. Sigils and glyphs. We lay upon this world our fathomless regret. 

Amen

After it all came down and we knew the fires burned most everywhere, we cowered in our various holes and waited out the worst. But the worst kept on coming, so some of us lifted our heads in the oily air and, timidly at first, stepped back into silent streets that had once screamed our gaudy dominion.

Almost silent. In those dark canyons, between the edifices we once called skyscrapers, high rises, their very names dripping with hubris, flapped the occasional bird that had found new places to nest. Pigeons, hawks, more and more crows. At night, the bats came instead. These buildings, especially the older, more organic stone and masonry types, had become strange cliffs, home to small creatures, looming shabbily above quiet streets dotted with abandoned or burned-out cars: yellow cabs, tourist buses, delivery vans, once-black power rides gone charcoal with dust and debris and the shame of recall.

The hollow silence of the streets, punctuated by the lazy flap and echo of some baffling new bird, both awed and frightened me. That we'd been brought this low. That while we'd thrust and bellowed, our Achilles had been sliced. And behind it all, the greater silence of the East and Hudson rivers, absent their ghost freight, and the even louder silence of the shocked continent, everything from sea to gunmetal sea rocking back and forth like psychosis.

It was about this time I first saw you. Despite the grime that clung to your clothes and hair, the dust and human stink, you were a tarnished apparition, a stained goddess to me.

I held out my hands in supplication; you side-eyed me and moved away.

The next time I saw you, all of history was being reduced to the echo of a long howl, our planet's geometry incised by lines of brilliant sun fire and blackest shadow, you and I alone in a dwindling penumbra where all nuance was leaching away, taking all hope with it.

I was brokenhearted. You were stern. Then angry. And finally exasperated.

"What is it with you?" you screamed at me. "What the fuck do you want?"

I thought about it and we locked eyes—me inconsolable, you incandescent, all else irreparable. For all I knew, my answer, moving no god to pity, yet a human cry to match the avian shrieks and screeches, was the last prayer ever uttered in this condemned place.

"Place me in a bright house on a shining hill under cerulean skies and with views of a luminous bay. Return to me the fresh, inchoate world."