Life Begot

Diminished, this.

Something dark and skeletal clinging to a whitewash wall ripples your skin with sudden cold.

We live somewhere between no place and so long, but we’ll go for answers anyway.

“Are you coming home?”

“What do you think?”

“You’ll be here.”

“In spirit, at least.”

We heard each other and we hurt each other and we can barely hear the difference. 

What is us? Most don’t have to enact this, but I’m moving across the plains this dusk and whispering to the team-huddled buffalo while bats like commas punctuate the clauses of tonight. A whole life sentence. An abundance of talent with no sure way to sell it.

You walk up onto the foreland, the ocean fronds astir below, like salt and lace, boom and hiss, and nothing happens or will ever happen even through the grim unwitnessed ruin of your ancestry.

Let me grip you and hold your switchskin body with my arms, oh precious one.

It takes so many increments to walk this road, the hedgerows and the cornbrakes slowly passing, sparse passersby, time a-waiting, hanging from a noonborn cry. A car comes by oh once in awhile, and the sun unfurls its blister arc above our heads and westbound, or northwestish, halfway hung upon a song, some hot and black diagonal thing. Hear it, hear the coyotes flinch then find each other days or weeks long since they split, and how their feral joy is tracings of contagion, chiming like fractured bells of wonder tolling their antic crimes in the piss-holy steam of this inferno canyon. The coming night. Things much dimmed. Yeah. Christ. The entirety of this.

You told me once you dreamed two worlds, two streams, two incomprehensibilities.

Riddle this: Why is all the world so red? This ultraviolence? 

“It’s not. It was with get that life begot. With dust that listen lost,” was all you said.

You want those words to mean a thing. Something dreamed and something proud. Make our motherloving life profound. 

The hardest thing to write about is silence.

_________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Fata Morgana

“It’s a hard world for little things” — Night of the Hunter, 1955

They kicked us off the train I have no memory boarding. It was a dream-pink dawn, the faraway hills aglow and the desert still cool. 

We tried to catch our breath while the long snake moan pulled away, far as it was concerned our existence erased. And blessed be that train.

Around us, an awakening and the assurance of heat. We set out across the desert knowing by the end we’d be less. 

***

My head plays Lana Del Rey on a loop. I can’t do this forever, me looking like you, you looking like me. We are genderfluid twins, my Rivka. Some days you’re all vulpine grace and others your swinging dick ardor is consummate, majestic. I follow the portent of your hips, the sway and flourish of your womanhood. Your masculine name is Beckett, though you wait for no one. You coruscate, play enchantress with the light.

Our history behind us, dragging, a trail to be shadowed. Other songs, snatches and snippets:

“O storm, you were clever; you came in the form

of a girl.”

And:

“They came at us from all sides, yet here we are, 

this killing floor, this abattoir.”

Few true predators anticipate the carnage; they only want to assuage the torment in their gut. Whatever pursues us is not like those others; this one craves the shrieks and the moans that shudder from the charnel house. This one is a horror.

“Morality is dead,” you once told me, your face quiet with import, and so fey. “There can be no light without shadow. Sensation is everything.”

My answer to that is stillborn. It falls from my numb lips and is formless. Let the hawk take it into the pitiless sky and be damned. 

So that brings us to now. The thing is coming; we can sense it in the heat shimmer, the Fata Morgana, a thing distorted however you choose to see it, a dreadful thing. The waiting is the worst. Distractions are like demons sweeping their dripping arms across those faraway hills and grinning and whispering, “Some day this can all be yours.” Distractions both carnal and cerebral could spell our doom. We wait. We dare not fight. We dare not hope.

At the place where all is shrunk to a point, we are each other’s world. 

And though—in the chill desert nights, serenaded by rawboned canines under the spill of stars—you curl your heat against me, I doubt we’re quite yet friends.

*

Image: Grant Durr 

Overdue

Harlan sat on his porch of worn uneven planks that, like our world and Harlan himself, had seen better days. We faced west, the direction that once meant hope. The last glint of sun had slid below the rim of the land and only a narrow yellowish strip gleamed through the dead and silhouetted trees, the darkened plain and the starless sky crushing it like a seam of gold in the ground.

We sat in silence awhile. Until we both seemed to realize something at once.

He was the first to say it. "Well, I'll be damned."

"Yeah."

Cicadas. The Collapse had brought such ornate miseries it seemed almost impudent to include among them the silencing of the insect world, but even on a subliminal level we'd felt their loss keenly. Ghosts come in many forms. Yet here they were. Tentative and hushed, but back in some facsimile of numbers.

"Thought surprise was a thing of the past," said Harlan, and I smiled. 

The scattering of bug sounds stabbed at the silence under gathering clouds we could sense more than see.

A breeze was testing the air, thinking about becoming a gust or two.

"Mr. Cutler… Harlan, I mean?" Dammit. How many times over the years had the old man corrected me?

"Son?"

"I want you to know you've kept me sane all these years since the Collapse."

"I know that, son."

"I know you know it. I just wanted to say it."

"Alright. Good to know. Let's drink to that—"

"Sir, I'll get it—"

"The hell you will. And the name's Harlan. How many times…?"

I lost his words on the gathering breeze as he made his slow hunched way into the cabin to fetch a jar or two of the crude cider he fermented from some unknown organic thing. Roots. Fungus. Squash, maybe. It always tasted about the same as it sounded.

I knew what he was gonna say before he said it.

"Bourbon, young fella?"

I laughed. We sat and drank, pretending it was Wild Turkey 101. Imagination ain't exactly perfect, but it can get you halfway there sometimes.

"They quieted down again," I said. 

"Huh. Mayhap the orchestra's done tuning and the symphony's comin'."

We wouldn't get to find out. Those gusts had turned to squalls and soon great hollerings, and the sky dropped its pent-up grief on everything. I scrambled to join him on the porch, and we waited it out, drinking slow and steady, hearing the mayhem of trees crack and splinter and jettison their bones in the dark.

Felt like wicked black wolves now governed the night.

When it was done, a sadness came over me and I no longer felt like pretending Harlan's concoction was even drinkable and I told him I didn't feel too good and took myself home, a ruder shack about a mile south of his place.

Next afternoon, a mite rueful, I hiked my sleepless and hungover ass back over to the old man's cabin. 

Harlan was gone. Debris covered his porch, but so much of it; dirt and bits of tree and even what looked like old coyote shit. From the storm, I figured. Some of it, at least. But after calling his name awhile and knocking on his door like a fool, I went inside. A layer of dust covered everything, the only places clear of dirt my bootprints behind me. What in the hell? I grabbed a jar of his moonjuice, a sandy film on the outside, a dark layer of silt inside, and sat in his creaky old chair on the porch sipping my friend's godawful liquor, hair of the mangiest of dogs. 

Things in my head didn't feel right. The silence in everything was too loud.

I listened for the bugs again, but nothing. Thought maybe it hadn't been a chorus but a coda after all. 

Astride a Pale Horse

I see it coming, mostly peripheral, but not always. Sometimes it looms upfront and winks and laughs. Heartily, even. Yet more and more I clock it as it struts along an urban street or lurks at the lip of a wood. It's a tendril, a blur, a shimmer. Often a goodbye. But I know it's real; I'm no longer dreaming it. Last week I saw it fall from a branch and shower golden green as pollen, slide off a wing as bright clear drops onto dry gravel and be absorbed. Heard it late in the gathered dark as the scream of a bobcat. Fucking? Fighting? Is there a difference? 

It doesn't always win, although it usually does. It's coming, though, however slowly. 

See the gluey trail, the fallen tree, the intaken breath at the passing of a hawk. The blinking slicked-back head of the harbour seal. Spawning sockeye stymied by falls. Raven calls, airless, sacerdotal. "Rain falls in real time." A wild pony drumming the land frantic. Stories of injustice, desperate killers exonerated by science, by reason. The mining disaster. That last travesty. The next. 

In the glare of a burnt orange sundown, we might even run out of steam, of breath.

A slag heap slipped and dropped on a school. Friendship ruined by envy. Abandoned lovers gathering at the wharf, circled by urban coyotes (two syllables), the blare of the darkened barge gliding oleaginous in the thick contrarian ink of the river. Congealed fluids of everyone ever murdered. Molars claggy with rancid meat. Butterfly migrations. Stars astonished by their own birth. Mosquito nets. Craft slingshotted past so many lens flares for alien readings. The trafficked. The raped. The genocided. The blazoned sins tattooed by monsters on the conveyor-belt corpses of women. The lost. The compromised. Those who jumped so they wouldn't burn. Challengers. I swear. Dreamers obliterated by the shortcuts of others. I swear. There is nothing more terrible than imagination. I swear. Nothing. None of this. No matter. Swear. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Seven Breezes Blowin'

Cold, like the world done spun off into space. Cold, like the devil's black heart. Easterly gale so fierce the snow don't ever settle, 'cept in precipitous talus drifts on the east side of the squat, shivering huts we tried to call a homestead.

Can't even hear the cries of my children, the storm's so loud. Five small bleats under a bareback shriek atop a deeper howl 'cross the gray plains, bending poplar and cottonwood like matchsticks to breaking, killing most everything caught outdoors in its path, which is wide and righteous, a godlike halitosic roar in the face of our damnation.

Braced for hunger and cold. For the wages of sin and the invoices of death. Flour ruined by vermin, our old mare brought low by a malady in her veins. Ingredients of this matchless storm were prophesied.

And we all know the answer to it.

Martha my love. Her eyes, like jettisoned moons, won't find my own.

Most Sundays she still looks for a cross where I only see wood too cold to even rot. Literally petrified. And bless her cloudless soul, she still believes in friends. 

Distance between the house and the barn seems more of a hike each day. I'm a man. If I can't do the basics of a man's calling, whose wheels am I spinning and in what chill mud, what slush, do I churn? Place feels so dirgelike even the crows are gone, scattered on a high keening wind like shards of black ice.

The children so thin they could snap in such blasts. Their own eyes dim as lost meteors.

Memories of the road in summer—its battalion of mailboxes, its heart warmth and quiet fields dreaming their long afternoons, its lone vehicles following signs, some lost, some stubborn not to hurry—might as well be ancestral.

Place has two seasons: hot and cold; variations of beige and variations of gray.

But seven shotgun shells—eight or nine for insurance—are inarguable, untenable.

The coyote tonight is alone, a single ululating cry, a reminder of solitude, a clear song of frost.

Truth is, I'd consider it a happy endin' if seven new people didn't never get born.

_____________

Anyone who listens to the music of Bob Dylan will recognize the debt I owe in this short tale to his 1964 song, "Ballad of Hollis Brown." The image is an edited version of a photo I took in South Dakota in 2011.