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Traffic moves like blood cells, and grainy smoke filters everything. Forest fires blaze afar. The ardent pack gathers by the edge of the cliff face and we sense it's time.

I'm watching the burning edge of the sibilant bush and waiting to see how this will evolve, whether a spike-heeled lover will emerge or a stone-cold killer in work boots, one releasing its feminine musk or the other hissing its unfathomable rage.

Scorched orange. Knowing grimaces. A bright fury. A drop into oblivion. Wait a while and the truth will squirm in calico kitten ecstasy at your feet, reveling in its freedom to broadcast the words no one thinks they want to hear.

"Speak to me," you say.

Right. I want. I would spend a full day worshipping at the hot moist core of you, O my woman.

"Is this speech?" I ask, and you damn near moan—blooming, dreamy, anticipatory.

You almost understand me; I almost think I get it. Deliver to me your brimming, shimmering chalice. Grok me, absorb me, breathe me, drink me. Which is something rare enough to stop me in my tracks.

"It says good things, and for that we should revere it," you say.

Yes. Yes. You are serpentine. Oceanic.

I hate the sound of my narcissism. You not me are godlike. You glisten while I merely listen. I said I want. How respectable are we? Are we mortal? Confused? Intoxicated? Horny? Ghostlike? Puzzled, alien, and acrid as raccoon tears. Thirsty for salted rims and the sour wild tang of margaritas. Following highways and negotiating solemn guards. Blackish humourless sentinels. Brackish and hidden wonders hearing mordancy in salt flats and tasting the loosestrife arpeggios of minor chords. May we relax and feed brown-paper dime-bag peanuts to fat and homey prairie dogs, while both Dakotas—recent domesticates, and therefore diminished—wheel around some troubled and tawny fulcrum?

Could it be love? Could it? It's possible.

"What will survive of us is love," said the long-dead poet, adding, “Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.”

We stumble over arcane tales of love dreamed and recounted by flapping garments on clotheslines in purple alleyways at dawn.

I follow the ragged, steaming pack up through the dry, gap-tooth foothills and into the precipitous drop-offs, snorting their glorious life-death and crotch heat. Keen as goat trails carved into precarious ridgelines. Portentous as a ledge of desecrated nests. All braced for a holy war.

What are we, that we believe absurdities? What do we know? At what point do atrocities begin? Perhaps where we admit—as was once spoken aloud in Cambodia—"To keep you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss." Perhaps where our loving and kindly neighbours are now named inyenzi. Inexplicable enough to shred the hardest of hearts.

After we shake our heads, releasing the dust of bewilderment, what in fact do we know? Perhaps only this: that awful things will arrive in the blackest hour of the night to utterly annihilate our lives.

And one other thing we also know, another desolate thing: "By iron, iron itself is sharpened." — Proverbs 27:17

The Offering

They arrived from someplace else when we had all but given up on seeing them at all this season. The sun—that relentless scourge of the day—was mostly down, its last nacreous light diffuse and struggling to impress above the western hills, when the still air carried to our ears the hollow leather and iron sound of wagons, arcane things of magic swinging from their frames in the surrounding quiet, the soft murmurs of the carnies hoping not to disturb us townsfolk this first evening, at least. Thoughtful guests.

Summer itself had been a poor guest, boorish and truculent, overstaying its welcome, and all our fields were burned, our wells mostly dry.

It was impossible to tell whether the land had become larger or we had been reduced these last years. Things had changed in the world. It seemed a long time since we'd heard the distant fretful assemblage of a night freight or the horizon-spanning roar of a jet, let alone traffic on the highway. Yet the traveling carnival—also reduced—met its loose itinerary most of the time, it seemed.

Glances passed between us like dry lightning in the foothills.

While they set up in a hollow on the west side of town amid the encroaching darkness, the cool silver sound of cicadas commenced, and three dogs barked in succession from three different places, like they were describing our location, our dimensions, like they were considering treachery. 

It was a recalcitrant darkness that fell that night.

We gathered in the gloom, nobody speaking, listening to the carnies set up. Listening to the cicadas. Listening to the hush. Listening to a sudden muffled sound like someone coughing into the crook of their arm. Listening to the prolonged inhale of the world. Listening. And waiting. 

Some of us no doubt thinking about providence.

Not sure they were expecting any kind of welcome that night, and surely not the one they got, but by then we were hungrier than a pack of slat-ribbed coy-dogs, and we descended on them silently under a starless sky, each of us carrying something heavy and bladed, and we played our ineluctable part as soundlessly and tenderly as possible given such wretched, sorrowful circumstances.

Unraveled

What is this thing that seems to sew our differences together? Can we capture it and make it serve us yet? I watch in awe as it follows the white ridges of the northern peaks, impervious to the chill, and meets with the bright cry of morning. As we will meet one day in some form or other, in the throat of the dawn.

Wherefore Tatiana of the Desert in her robes of thorn? She who rode the terrible column of death in its roiling fungal glory and wrung its corded neck so we could live again. In my memory, the last broadcasts called her the Jesus of the Mojave, although that might have been a fever dream fuelled by apocalypse-mind. Messiahs live only in tales, I fear, while actual plagues still roam the actual land.

We come to a field in Iowa where mists lap at the weighty heads of sunflowers like the breath of the dead, where carefully signposted detours off the interstate take us to dreadful happenings behind barn doors and in root cellars, ravagements and heinous slaughter under big and lovely skies.

Much has been lost, too painful to be recalled even in sleep. Glimpses nonetheless. Blue glaciers. Windmills turning slowly in a small sea of tulips. Ambient metal. The curled yawn of a kitten. Zydeco wheezings on the bayou. Guinness on tap near the Liffey. Ferris wheels and tilt-a-whirls. Triassic dragonflies stitching the summer air. Mint juleps. Hardbitten investigators and shrewd, sultry women. Steaming tamales. A volleyed ball into a waiting net. Library cool. Cathedral hush. Blood-red lampshades. Flags and logos. A white boat coming up the river. A chalk-marked cue ball on green felt. Tiny neon fishes through thick glass. Antipasto. Dreams of star quests. The stem of a wineglass. Outdoor applause. Elegance. Sage bundle smudges. Yule logs. Exuberance. The howl of a storm through ruins. All my relations.

In the safety of the shade, an old man speaks of secret fires, reaches for a melody, but nobody's daddy is alive, wound steel and nylon are but memories, and the song dies on the scorched and windless air.

In the heat mirage, immense yellow machines with great burdened heads work the surface of the blacktop, rusted and vast in the early light, seeming to float like tawdry echoes of the giant lizards that once roamed this world of sorrows. 

Tar pits await us all, she said, the world is mostly a grave. And she was right.

Ours was fashioned from fear and greed, aided by inertia, and assembled by weak men feigning strength. First they came for the honeybees; then they came for the birds; then the butterflies. Small things, inconsequential to men who counted in real estate deals and fairway handshakes, men whose mouths said development when their makeshift hearts meant plunder.

In the sounds of patent leather on hardwood, amid conference call maneuvers and the market stall barks of commerce, they missed the sudden silences of the trees, the places rubbed shiny and threadbare like an old discarded toy. They desired the whole cloth but ignored when the stitching came apart. And not even Tatiana with her needles of thorn could sew it back right. 

The Hart of the Wood

© tibor jantyikHowever good a day it is to be alive right now, just know there will come another day when it's equally good to die. You don't need a Crazy Horse to tell you that. 

There will come a storm. A war. And in war all our darknesses will converge, will meet. Too late, we might want to quarantine ourselves, remove our lusts and terrors from all equations, but that moment will have passed, and into the noxious bloodtide we must wade as ravenous, reluctant warriors, taking a reckoning of our friends and our enemies both, and giving deference equally, however much one is conveyed by the sacrament and the other by the sacrifice. For they are one and the same.

And this is what the crow saw.

Abandoned islands in a smokestack sky. Industrial archipelagoes. The molten stench of the world's innards. What gave us pause. What made us flinch. How many of us were built for this remorse? 

Who, who will comfort you now?

Hidden from most, a blister erupted in the forest, while men drew crude vaginas in the dirt and women built phalluses from mud. The crow flew closer, alighting on a cedar bough. Only the crow loved both venerated and venereal, gleaning correctly their kinship. Which is love, really. The crow has solved a great perplexity.

And now the coyote speaks.

But its language seems like gibberish, and its strange music makes men want to kill, so no one hears the coyote song. It goes:

"Weep now, but laugh hence,

Dream of yesterday while

Gutting the hart of the wood.

Kill your clenched prey, but

Return its offal to the thirsty earth,

And sing its worth to the skies."

If men heard the song, they might put down their dull blades for a while and make more and better vaginas in the dirt, or sharper blades. If women heard the song, they would perhaps add more verses and take solace in their propensity for avoiding foolishness in the unforgiving glare of the eternal public square. If children heard the song, the stitching of the world might even meet.

But instead, the crow mocks the coyote, and the coyote bows his defeated head while hot visceral gouts are splashed across the chalk downs of England, wakening the fox and the badger, only to begin the whole hemoclysm anew.

The fox barks till he's hoarse, then returns to the vixen in the den. Wash cycle becomes spin cycle, ad infinitum. They stand stock still and search each other's liquid eyes for some truth or even a hint of their next move. She tells him he should have been gone a long time ago, and he follows the arc of a comet in the black dome of the night, then stifles his abject caterwauling.

The crow laughs, although it feels more like whimpering. For a moment, it doubts even the sunrise, but at last spies a pale shimmer on the eastern rim of a sorrowing earth. Its cry is coarse in the quiet dawn, rough as the beard of a rapist on soft skin, and like a coward, stupidly, the crow looks only inward.

Ashamed, gauzy, reprehensible, engulfed, abhorrent, pensive, impure, tarnished, rapt, dishonorable.

Nothing but words. Words. Sounds as created by lips, throat, and tongue. Then scratched onto parchment with an ink-black quill. Repeated as tales or incantations. For what? Turns out the best we can say is this: 

Today is a good day to go fuck yourself. 

A Man's Truth

Today's when y'all get to kill me. Some of y'all will see this as a good day, and most days I'd go along with that.

Yup, forget they candy-ass public defenders and bleeding-heart ink slingers—even Jesus couldn't save me, though I cain't hardly blame him if he never put his full weight behind the cause.

Why am I in this here predicament? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, what I done was a massacre, like what happened to they Injuns somewheres in the Dakotas back when this peacelovin' country was young. I don't know about wounded knee but I do know you can bury my heart right where you damn well aim to kill it, far as I care; goddamn shriveled thing never did me a lick of good while it still pumped, ain't that the truth?

And here's another truth: I was doomed from the git-go, pretty much. Least since I was a whelp no higher'n a tractor tire from a 1940s John Deere, anyways. If I hadna been hiding in the hayloft that day my daddy came out to the barn to slaughter sweet ol' Gus, maybe none of this woulda happened. But I was and he did, and in spite of the gloom inside I saw the glint reflected from his knife and the way Gus looked at Pa as if he knew what was comin', the fear in that soft, dark eye as bleak and knowing as any soldier's when the enemy's upon him and his weapon is empty, and how Gus thrashed and squealed louder'n I'd ever heard him squeal when that blade sawed at his pink and throbbing throat, and how it still took a while for him to quiet and be still as his steaming blood splashed in a ole tin bathtub my daddy had cleaned out and stoppered up for the occasion. Here's a thing: while all this was happening, I swear I saw a shadow bigger'n a man and blacker than a moonless prairie night step into the light at one end of the barn and stay right there 'til it was all done. Coulda been a cloud passing over the pale yellow sun, I guess, but I'm pretty sure it weren't. Meanwhile, Pa never knowed I was there, wide-eyed and shaking, reliving that scene in my head like I would for months after—not jus' the sight of it, but the sounds and the smells and how it felt inside. What I'm tryin' to say is, maybe none of this woulda happened if I hadna liked it.

So what did happen? What did I do to bring me to this place? Don't really matter now. It's done, ain't it? And you can read it in the dailies or go on that internet doohickey and find out the details to your heart's content. Not all of them were innocent their ownselves, case you were wondering; I knows that must be hard to hear for you kinfolk, but it's the truth. I never did it for the fame nor … what's that word they used in the trial to make me sound worse than I already am? The notoriety? Hell no, I did it for the pure enjoyment of hearing so many folks die slowly and in pain, to hear again the long and lonesome whistle through Gus's ruined throat, to watch hope dim in so many eyes, and to smell their lifeblood as it drained. That there's the long and the short of it.

Sounds crazy, but I ain't scared; not for me, anyways. They'll strap me with my arms spread like one o' they murderers they strung up next to Jesus Christ hisself—his brothers in arms, ha ha—then they'll fill my gnarly old veins with some chemical moonshine and barring some terrible calamity (oh, they happen, you better believe it) I'll go straight to the land of sleep like a warm little lamb, where guilt or innocence won't matter, 'cause whatever stories we tell ourselves to make the night seem less dark, there ain't no such place as any place once we up and leave this stingy, hardpan life.

But there's always killin'. And that's what does scare me some. You think this thing'll be gone when I'm gone? No sir and no ma'am, sure as the devil made little sour apples it won't. It steals in silent as a barn owl and more deadly. All it takes is one a y'all. To like it, I mean. To watch them push that poison into my veins and feel what I felt that cold April mornin' when my daddy done slit that hog's throat and I only wanted more, only yearned to hear that godawful shriek forever. Thing won't never end. Mayhap without even knowing it at first, one a y'all will greet the shadow, welcome it into the poisoned well of your filthy abysmal heart, and all of this will happen again. And again. World without end, as the good book says.

Now bring me that last fucking meal, won't ya? Telling the god's honest truth can make a man awful hungry, after all.