The Green Unruly

La tristesse

How this all came together, no idea, but I arrive at the place my love once lived, crossing the tracks that divide two parallel roads, into the heart of this small Pennsylvania town, while my ailing car radio works to stifle “Oh My Heart” by R.E.M.

So little time to hunker down and wait till washed-out roads are cleared of floodwater and if necessary fixed. Waiting unaccompanied amid drear fall memories. The doom-tolling railroad crossings. A boxcar barroom in matte black punctuated by neon, and windowless. Standing water in stubbled fields reflecting only grays. The chrome yellow of a receding school bus the only daub of true color anywhere.

Rubber and diesel, tires and fuel. Caught amid a squall of semi-trucks and the crawl of a combine. The green unruly. Belligerent. 

I pull onto the shoulder and tell you of the whispered voices in the twilit woods. You are silent, doubtful, which stings. I might not be hiding something; maybe you just aren’t looking.

durera 

We pivot on an island, gasoline spraying, how green is my valley, the kneeling martyr flinching for the axe.

Thinking we might go start a bar fight just to recall what it was like to feel something. 

We’re ocean-dwellers clinging to a washed-up buoy of apparent certainty—the sands shifting around us—while pretending the sea hasn’t sucked itself backward.

The wide horizon. Anticipatory. A quivering knife edge.

Phantoms of the forest scaling shredded trunks under the quarrels of ravens. Under yet darker things.

toujours

Could there have been a moment of reconciliation? Was there a frail song on the wind, obscured by the flapping of laundry as the gusts arrived? Lost to the ravenous monster we call the past. Lost to the hungry, decadent ghosts.

Long dark blues. We were here once—is that even enough?—and we think this is how it felt to be us.

___________________

Image © Monica Lunn 

Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical falsehood. Glitter and attenuated nudity. What, after all, do you dream?

She wanted to remember all the stuff from before, her oldest friend, her first unencumbered love, and yet she stumbled on it, fumbled her surety, and never quite picked it up. This was the ravens’ time. 

Her sister tried to warn us. She squeezed herself into a space by the Mexican place, the lime of her dress translucent in the late afternoon, Frankie Valli joyous on somebody’s radio. Locale, locale, O margaritaville, I will love you over and again for your sweet fucking face.

My heart so wide, kitty corner, my girl was getting off shift.

“Where is any of this happening?” we heard our mama say. 

“Not entirely sure,” the consensus managed. 

She was right, though, to ask. None of this felt real. Perhaps our stage had been displaced, or endless asphalt suddenly emerged like a new undreamed-of stage, where quiet Canadians might just drive a monster Dodge and jump the curb and grind the bones of the infidel. Or more likely the innocent. Blastocysts and freaks. Thermonuclear glow and schism and shear and bellow and bloom, a groan from bellow. A killing ground upon which our raven idol endlessly chides and scolds.

We’ve been hearing auroras and cicadas wrong all this time. Loneliness is breaking us.

Sometimes you think I know you love me, but I just jumble all those words. 

I met her out back, and we merged our hands and strolled beside the canal after sunset. Lights in some of the barges orange-cozy hearts. Inns and taverns looming and leaning, a night of sheer, an urgent whisper: be here, stay here, be heard, always heed the night birds. 

A lonesome drunken song lamenting paucity. 

“How is it we only meet when everything is wrong?” she asked.

I was quiet. I had no answer. 

“Well?” she tried again. 

Perhaps, I thought, it takes our twisted theory of string to find some unravelled knot and tie a new entire universe atop our flailing premise, but thankfully I never got around to voicing such a desperate and stillborn thing.

____________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Mercy

“We had a mind to party, but not no Donner party.” — Unknown 

I never scrubbed that sound from inside my head. That muted eternal shriek. It weren’t anything, really, just a noise that followed us 'cross the salt flats and then the desert into the Cascades, though we heard it every goddamned revolution, each time the axle turned. We tried to plane the wood at night, slice away them nicks and burrs. Nothing worked. Felt like the admonishment of the land itself, crying, wheedling, greeting, long before it had a mind for uprise or defeat. It hollered its plea in earth time not man time. 

Oh woman, you barely have a voice. You cook and you mend our boots and you lie awake nights wishing the very stars would align, like pragmatists. You urge the world to settlements, you mediate. Within this burning valley, and most places yet, you are the best of us.

Dry bone shacks and half collected cairns. Sterile cries across such barren miles. These lands are jawbones aching with carious teeth, sung to by ragtag coyote choirs. Ridgetops bristling. Stout moon rising yellow as infection.

The West, the offhand West, its fragile trickles covert, generous of light though skinflint with drink. No pass unimpeded, no voice left to speak, no dry throat slaked. 

***

“Our house is on fire,” the air whispers.

Chafed and stunned to deadpan, I walked for a day or so and only two vehicles passed. What is this?

The sky is brown umber, the sparsity of trees silhouetted conifers. 

I walk so I can get away from the thing that happened. It was abhorrent. I am only one small girl with a queerly knotted gut in a wheeling galaxy. 

One of the vehicles was a worker bee, some kid on a scooter. He slowed and almost stopped and when I yelled for him to talk to me he spooked like a deer electric and whined his way past. The other was a pickup with a bed full of women and men. The faces of the women in particular told me stories. The men could barely manage a glance. I turned my back.

But where did the world go? Did I flinch and miss it? Feels like just yesterday I was listening to Lana sing about the perils of hope and about Kanye and Plath and how we had it all.

What happened to jasmine and juniper? To the heady riot of spring? To the dance of honeybees and butterflies and the twilit helix gyre of bats? Fireflies and the backdrop trill of cicadas?

How do we measure from span to everloving span, the unutterable link between worlds?

The sky is old blood and stinks the same. 

Our house is on fire. 

I’m here at the cool rusted railing of the bridge. No idea what waits unflappable below, but tell me exactly why I shouldn’t climb over.