Starlight

“When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelop you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists—as it surely will. Then act with courage.” — Chief White Eagle, Ponca

***

I climb out of the back seat, and they are momentarily awkward, as if searching for the right words for a farewell. In the end they find them.

“Get the fuck out of here, Geronimo. We see you again and it’s over for you.”

“It’s already over, and you don’t know my name, wašíču.”

They stare, both of them, eyes near icy as the lung-scouring air, then get back in and punctuate the conversation with the acrid screech of rubber. 

I’m alone and relieved and instantly frozen. 

I see a white buffalo hidden in the spill of stars on night’s great canvas, but I might be delirious. The red and blue of the only other lights blink off as they recede the way we came, freight delivered and already forgot, back toward a mirage of warmth amid vast dormant sheets of wheat. 

There is no loneliness greater than this. Discarded on a border no one can see, either with eyes or the spotlight of the past, under cold that makes the hairs crackle inside your nose and can fuse your eyelids shut with your frozen tears.

My home to the east is forbidden to me now, so I turn and gaze west, at cognate stretches of dim grassland under a black felt dome sprayed by diamonds. The pewter grey of the highway an arrow shaft pointing to an unknown country.

In my dreams, vivid as you could wish, I stumble on a remote home and the people take me in. They are Cree, Ojibwe, my own people, and they cleanse me with sage and sweetgrass and as we talk softly around a hearth fire a great warrior appears in the flames like a bird or some mythic half beast and tells me of low-built homes and carved trees and how I might find peace if I can continue west and make it there beyond the scoliotic spine of Turtle Island. Like I said, a dream. 

Whichever way I go, whether I live or die, I am but a single doomed spirit among many, like those stars I crane my neck to revere, and it matters little; a great sorrow has swept this land and continues to arrive in unheard waves and will return with boundless reinforcements someday hence, like a ghost herd of tatanka (to borrow from my Lakota brethren), agitated and restless, vengeance deferred.

At least they left me my shoes, threadbare as they are. I must get off the highway and walk to the next on-ramp, or more faceless uniforms will bring further animosity. 

It’s quiet and late and my odds are slight, but before the cold can fully wrap me in its caul I look east at approaching headlights, hoping for a gentler soul free in their heart of the rot of bigotry. Though cold assaults my bones, I am still. I hope beyond hope. My only weapon now.

What matters in the end and also matters not are the details. The pattern on a woman’s shirt that reminds you of a candy store. A girl from São Paolo whose eyes can’t hide a thing. The call of a loon at daybreak stirring tiny spirals in the mist that hovers like the breath of our ancestors over the waters. The proximate eyewatering stink of bear. A signal from deep space. Walking home alone. Walking. Alone.

When the thing comes it comes and it won’t be rescinded.

*** 

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” — Black Elk, Oglala

________________

Image © Alyssa Best

My Favourite Abuser

“All things said and not said, you’ll likely wish you’d never met me on this or any other road.”

“But our meeting made a tale, at least.”

“A tale to be ashamed of.”

“For you, perhaps.”

“I was never looking for you at all. I was searching for someone I lost.”

“Way it goes sometimes.”

I met Nick Cave up in the clouds, and he spoke to me. The birds themselves paused to listen. He tried his very best to let us know how grief can be outrun, but I don’t think we or the birds fully heard. It’s a lifelong thing and honestly, honey, it’s a struggle. 

Another way to say it is the torch that through the blue dream fires the cosmos. Though at this point, that just feels like parody. Who doesn’t love a Dylan cover?

Look. You met me. Or maybe I met you. We were lone snake trails in the dust of other people’s befuddlement before they could admit we’d utterly fucked them. Our dry sinuous curves were never meant to meet. But they did, and here we are. You are the flashback on my stuttering film reel; I am the static on your sputtering radio. 

For as long as there was a stage, we danced. And did we ever dance.

Glimmering cauldron howls in the treetops, I cranked up Ulver for our eldritch frolic, gyrating to the slink of wolves, the glamor of witches, and the yowl of the wildest woods. Black, blacker, blackest metal.

Dreams: electric capillaries flash on a cobalt horizon. I think of X-rays and remember all of our last days. Hallucinogenic black spiders in a speakeasy. Aiming straight for the eyes. But dammit, at least you’ll open your hellacious eyes.

Then winter. Then the remains of winter. Then a guarded breath as we dared to dream of one more spring. Sporadic remnants of old snow, greyed by road dirt, the scattered bones of long absent giants.

And memories. We looked to windward as we traversed the canyon, and we saw the lone bison, the big old front-loaded fuck, snorting and steaming in the diminishing gold of the air, mucus streamers flung like molten flags. A giant knot of this dirty-sweet earth’s best fuckery and love. A shaggy fist given life. 

Life.

I’m near done with words; luckily this doesn’t need words.

I saw in you a tiny flickering beacon, and I went to you for warmth.

You are a woman looking for peace and endlessly, maddeningly doomed to stumble on trouble. Something has been coming for you all your life. Now it’s almost here. 

And me? My life is a rusted sword blunted on the cold diamonds of my damnable dreams.

We are—literally, tragically, hilariously—each other’s just deserts. 

____

Image © Daniel Freeman

Lonely Comin' Down

Do you know pain? Do you know where to find it? Follow the hoofbeats on dry grasses. Follow the sun's arc.

On the day he became a man, he found her drenched in blood and viscera, the cavernous wound across her midriff a silent, dripping howl at the world's indifference, and she told him they'd cut her baby out and macheted it in two. He asked why they'd spared her, and she couldn't tell him. After he sutured her together again, her body at least, she cried for days, and a small part of that was the hard blunt urge of her engorged breasts, the desperate milk of which she convinced him to suck. Not as a sexual act, she insisted, but a pragmatic one. He meant to agree, and on one level he surely did, but soon the daily ritual of her motherhood expressed into his acclimatizing mouth was quite literally a sweet arousal. She was almost twice his age. 

Thus was their baffling and atypical bond established.

But one day they had to leave the shack and join the convulsing world so maddened in its throes. 

The throng of bison boiled across the plains like darkening suds. 

Blinking, stumbling, sometimes gasping, the man and the woman followed their simmering decadeslong passage into an evensong. Then reached the silver shimmer of the coastal sweep, frail as eggshell.

We think we're lonely. Want to know what lonely is? We think it's when someone won't hear us, when our words fall dry on quieted plains. Yeah, it's that. We think it's when we're misunderstood, misconstrued. Sure. It's also that. We think it's when we've suffered shame in public, been abandoned, no ally in sight. Yeah, it's that too. We think it's when we're strung from a tree and spit on, without a friend in close. Uh-huh. That too. We think it's the whistleblower's fear, the revolutionary's grail, the dissident's rage, all quelled by tyrant malice and worse, the silent savagery of indifference. Which it surely is. We think it the panic of doom in the great brimming eye of the wounded straggler as the zealous pride closes in. The shear of the desert hawk oblique to the hot wind. The last distraught arrival at the site, ribcage like bellows, as the final liftoff launches forlorn above. The lone white bear lurching on the only unmelted floe. The last bee spiralling clumsily down like our double-helix undone. All of which it is. But when I say lonely, I mean the impossible and pitiless interim between the brief age of life and the eventual relentless stretch of each atom and its subatomic parts into an unimaginably vast abyssal chasm spanning the entirety of what is and what will ever be, space itself expanding to a point that light can no longer be shared between points, so all the particles ever created drift alone and unencountered, no hope of warmth, or hope of even a glimmer of a friend, no hope of anything, no hope even of hope. Not the end, but the end of end, the loveless eternal void, the almost-nothing cruel enough to not quite ever be fully nothing. 

The pair, hollowed out and Oedipal, stand like stormstruck trees at the cliff edge and watch the vexed and undead ocean heave with blind grey malevolence, with lunacy, as one by one the stars are doused, all light and tide withdraws, the last things seen on this or any other world two scorched and doting human hands entwined, love's final say.