Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and a wiry, feral-looking man of indeterminate age, who glares at me with naked hunger through coyote eyes and hesitates in a way that makes all the hair stand up on my arms. I let him see the hunting knife I carry on my hip, and he reconsiders. 

You are all I have.

This place only a year ago was a noisy, shabby hub of neon gas prices and clustered signs for pizza, subways, fried chicken, and burgers. The red-blue Open signs on liquor stores and pharmacies and laundromats and dollar stores. The wide carious mouths of automotive repair shops: mufflers, tires, oil changes, brakes, shocks (strangely mirroring the human narrative that got us here: muffled, tired, changed by oil, broken, shocked). It’s a place built for the automobile, and here I pass its one-time temple, a motel already gone to seed even then and here entombed in dismal slabs of graffitied particle board, like a thing bygone with shame now blinded and silenced.

For a moment, my heart leaps when I notice a nest tucked beneath its mossy roof, and I stand and wait awhile, dreaming of swallows. When after many minutes no birds appear, my heart returns to its dolorous sway, leaden within me.

Gas stations arid watering holes withered by drought in a concrete savanna, vehicles downed like the corpses of wildebeest thwarted by their maddening thirst. 

The McDonald’s is a ruin, its iconic sign an outline with much of its golden plastic gone. Golden? It always looked piss-yellow to me, even when times were okay. An empty produce stand has somehow retained its cruel sign proclaiming ambrosia apples for $1.79 a pound, Okanagan cherries at $4.99. Charred pieces of abandoned palettes spiked like warnings encircle it.

In a better world I would bring you home cherries.

A busy east-west road used to bisect these two strip malls. I don’t know why they called them strip malls; I never saw a naked person once. That road used to be the hunting ground of great screaming, hissing semitrailers that helter-skeltered along its length, eager to see our unremarkable town in their rearviews, perhaps take out a few locals as they passed. Only the buses were doomed to stay, but they don’t come now either.

There’s no right side of the tracks here, those too now rusted and quiet. Where once it writhed with sockeye, the wide and filthy river still heaves and disgorges the occasional corpse to the south.

In the parking lots, a few stripped and rusting cars sit in eternal hiatus, awaiting drivers who won’t ever be claiming them. The loneliness and the silence are uneasy allies in this war we lost long before the devastation loomed clear. Once it became undeniable, it was too late.

I’m heading home now, my love. 

Before I round the corner of our street, I hear someone humming quietly. I stop and listen. It’s a shaky voice, raspy with senescence, and it sounds like it’s coming from a backyard shed. I recognize the melody. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. I bark a corvid laugh and the old man quiets his song. Guilty, I call out, “Don’t stop!” but he stays silent and I continue on home.

I think about laughter, its strange harshness cutting the stillness of the world like an angry trickster god. Robert Plant was wrong; we did remember laughter, or at least its humourless kin, but in the end it was love we forgot.

What else did we forget? Will you not answer me?

The door is still unlocked as I left it, and I wonder if anyone came in, though I doubt it. Home. I stagger; I call your name. The smell of your corpse is worse, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you. Or with myself now you’re gone. 

________________

Image © Esther Voisin

Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer hands.” 

“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”

The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”

“I prefer things that way.”

“Mayhap a poet too?”

“I didn’t mean for me.”

A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.

***

She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.

He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.

Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.

Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.

Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.

***

After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge. 

Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.

Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.

We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now. 

__________

Image © Thomas Holmes

Lit By Fire

"If you must die, sweetheart, die knowing your life was my life's best part.” — Keaton Henson

They said it was Banksy. The last painting. The howling boy on the wall of the capitol. We’ll probably never know, but I saw it, and it sure looked like a Banksy. 

You can’t really miss a black bear. The dripping, flexing arms of the forest murmur their shades of green, some a pale jade whisper, some an emerald shout, some so abysmal they’re nearly black, and within those dark branches lie shadows, blacker still. Yet a black bear, once it crosses your visual field in front of or within those varied shades of green, is a piece cut out of the world, a stark absence, a patch of lonely void in the shape of a bear. At which point, is it even a bear?

We sit in a quiet corner, you with your floppy hat and me with my eighties obsession that I can barely articulate.

“Try my hat on,” you say.

“I’d prefer not to.” I realize this is a hat store, and I balk. 

“Ha ha, that’s why I love you! You let me down gently, like an escalator.”

“No idea what you’re talking about, but you’re my friend, and I love you too, of course. Why are we even saying any of this? It’s a given.”

“Nothing’s a given. We’re renewing our friendship vows.”

“Um, you can stop now. Stop talking, that is. For fuck’s sakes. My toes are cramping.”

“Which only makes me love you more.”

“Shut up. Uh. Please, shut up.”

“Let’s go see some sights.”

“Yes, the new Banksy. The one we literally dropped everything to come and see.”

She had a way about her, a mood, something impossible to say no to.

But yes, back to art and stuff. Life. Banksy or not. 

What matters? Stale toast and the late, lazy flap of corvids against a peach sunset. An avocado pit sending tendrils. A butter churn. Scaffolding arched above a sidewalk, mauve and crimson night leaking into the tubular screens of its graceless folded geometry. Umbilicals. A honeybee nudging petals, reticent as a new lover. “I can’t breathe.” Do unto others. Me too. Make me an instrument of thy peace. Do what thou wilt, though it harm none. Keep on truckin’. Just do it. The great oil canvas of Serengeti brushstroked by wildebeest. Boreal trails of the caribou. Helpless, tenacious Marlowe balanced on the unlikely ridge spanning love and cynicism. The shock of a black locust on the whitewashed farmhouse wall, droning stark on stucco. Slanted dusty rays of old gold across grocery scales. The micro worlds of toys, all those chimes and astonished faces. And she has gone to Carterhaugh. How long, baby, how long? Stripe of the Bengal tiger, the lion’s nasal folds, the cougar’s stern and diffident brow. Howling alien nowheres blazoning the arrant vacancy of forsaken love. Pissing your name in a snowbank, or better yet an obscenity. Reeking fresh leaves of basil torn and open as the Sacré-Coeur. Bats exploding from a granite mouth, hurtling like scorched sparks in the quiet fire of twilight. Reciprocity: mouthing a woman to orgasm and being sucked. Croissants warm in the slatemine morning beside the drifting river. Dreamed unearthly cathedrals. Black lives never not mattering. The hart of the wood, the heart of the would, a-bloom with grief and guilt. Kiln-baked pizzas assailed by artichokes. Rooks prattling in a copse, jackdaws likewise on ramparts. Blastocysts zapped by lasers. Terror cells cleansed by drones. Eyelashes shipped free by Amazon. Thirst, in all its forms. 

Smiles like an ocean horizon, faint, blue, where the sky is stitched. 

A baby crying on the floor, abandoned. Cold concrete and a massive ceiling. A bear seeking entry, quivering snout attuned. Junior’s alone and loud, his laments a looping echo of their own discordant song.

“Come back now. Did you hear me? Where did you go?”

My ears half-closed, my heart is like a cannonball, shock aroused by alcohol, patterns like a dream tattoo. 

Open my secular breast. These dripping fragrant delicacies I’ve saved for you.

Fury

She is bound on a cold stone floor in a spare cottage by a crag, the wind a tuneless piccolo through cryptic slits.

A flurry of dark birds arc jagged across a slate sky past twilight.

The ink upon her arms and chest echo both flocks and sundown: three tiny boiling hearts on her inner right forearm and a stutter of crows below her clavicle, above her breast.

Outside, some black and odious structure silhouetted on the cliff edge: pitiless, stark, and mannish.

Pricks. If they are going to deem her a witch, then she will damn well rise witchlike.

A beetle meanders by her feet pursuing crumbs, flakes, specks.

These are fragmentary things, these moments, what she sees, hears, smells, feels. Nothing good will happen if she resists, but things far worse are pledged by her compliance.

The beetle is by the wall now, still seeking and vacuuming tiny morsels. She envies its autonomy, its thralldom to its own rudimentary will.

Her will is more wilt than heft. She stares between her legs at the stone and shudders. Imagines something ludicrous. Some unruly erection. Resistance. She must resist. Weakness now is unconscionable.

She is a woman not some failed man.

As if in answer, heart all slashed and ragged, Blossom appears in the murky air, her friend long slain by similar hands, twirling a familiar dance.

Speaks.

"Oh, Blanche, this is it. The inevitable. The moment you decide how to leave this aching world. I urge you to choose well. Its about you now, not them. They are filled with impotence, choked redundant by hate and unwarranted envy. Believing they're the heart, they are the true outcasts of our tribe. The overarch, the arc is in our favour. Even when they kill us, they don't win."

"Yeah, yeah. You always knew how to speak, my poet. I appreciate the pep talk, hon, but I ain't ready to die."

Sudden silence. No sound. The wind itself has swooned. Even the surf has ceased its assault on the rocks. No Blossom, no beetle, no beating heart. For a moment, no battery. A hush. This is the cold edge at the end of things, the blood loss, the muffled aftershocks.

However grim the lookout, love—love—is the thing.

The throng is coming, my brave and blissful amour, with their whetted instruments and their senseless rage, frail and pitiful as the keening of birds.