Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on the disappointing side of the ledger. You initially gained points for your relative hairlessness, lost most of them with this. Wear a damn mask, act like a fucking grown-up, and you might regain a few.

Ha, wait. You know what this is like, the strings sweeping over us, the low notes growling under your hallowed contralto like the final tales of long-forgotten wolves. 

“Something’s comin’ over the hill, and I ain’t so sure you gonna like it.”

“Well. Try me, cholo.”

Remember, compadre, we always came to this same piece of waste ground, filled with hazards, and each time we tried to create our own jogo bonito. The feel of the ball a-spin atop your foot, quieting its gyre at the exact right moment, the hock, the updraft, the rainbow, that feeling when you let it fall and check it with your instep, dead, or nestle it like an egg in the nape of your neck, the heartbeat pause, and then all your friends stream your way, laughing, cursing, slapping, and take the ball and do more joy to it, calling you always the best and most beautiful names.

Venerated, unseemly. The ribald colours of longing. 

“Come. This way.”

“You know where we’re heading? How long we’ll be riding?” 

“Follow the spiral dust, and give thanks to the night songs of coyotes.”

“Señorita, if we don’t make it, won’t you feel good about me right to the end?”

“Keep singin’ and playin’, music man. And meet me in Laurel Canyon. Your luck has to turn.” 

Drenched with salt from inside, collected near the shoulder of rock like scarabs, we peek around it, and we see the hopelessness the world tried to spare us.

A black hole spinning blind and silent, an accelerating cluster of stars sucked processional into its holy ravenous lightless maw.

Death. It’s not onrushing. At its moment of truth, it’s a quickening absence, a sucking of an ebbing wave pulling you into the riptide. You feel it hollow and infallible in your chest, an intake of breath and a twinge of hurt before a vast unbreathable pain and before pain is then erased. A great accumulative loss and a great mercy both. That moment. That volatile, hectic instant before everything’s gone.

True, the past echoes and echoes and echoes. Some of it is a story, poured from cut crystal, pored over by feeble old men, teased and unraveled and dreamed of again.

For who, no one knows.

Hear me, though.

The truth is a story too.

And while the landfill’s where it ends, for now—like love and loss—it’s only recycling.

______________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Blame

Wait. Rewind. Take the chablis instead of the pinot. Scream from the Shed End not the Kop. Deep fry the fiddleheads don’t steam them. Purchase don’t pirate. Rehabilitate don’t shame. Kill don’t maim.

We narcissists enamoured of minor difference. Our oil-smeared glories. 

You damn well wear me out.

We gather here on a darkling plain, you and me and your girlfriend and my roommate and my twenty-seven rabid first cousins, plus half of Europe under gawking Polaris. Friends and those we think we should have met. Loved even. That batshit horny aunt we wish we’d never fucked, though glad we did if only for wank fodder, though we were only twelve. Muslims and Jews. Bent cops, craven officials, a legion of weak and stupid fucks. The pointless inarticulate rage of white grievance. Aimless spleen. Doltishness in celebration of itself. Vicious dimwits. Old cunts we wish would die; yeah, fuck your feelings indeed. Those conspiratorial priests, milling like cormorants on pilings, spreading their robes lasciviously, fake as puppets coerced onto sweaty laps, shot through with voices and breath, the same breath moving the tide over stones, hissing and hitching and asthmatic under austere skies, heralding war but mostly unheeded, mostly unheard. 

I’ll give you Dover beach, you absolute fucking weapon. 

This is nineteen sixty-one. A flower already scorched. A film unspooled. The wolf that knows which root to dig. My life entire. Go vent this. 

We wait while the elephant gets to her feet. The matriarch. She once considered stomping us to death. Now she watches as we wait. And we wait, and she backs away, swaying like vines and hammocks, ropy and weighty and arthritic. Her breath is the surface ripple of the Nile, by the banks, igniting a flock of cranes. Igniting or anointing, what’s the difference? Flames or oil? All falls down to one or both. When aphids die the ladybugs follow. When the salmon won’t spawn the whales can’t eat. When corals bleach anemones die. We leave with fingers miming silence on our tight lips, and I can’t get the theme tune from The Walking Dead out of my head. What is all this? Are we in some awful tale? Are we the thwarted salmon? Or are we the dying orca? Are we frail and ill-starred jewels or hopelessly mundane?

We escape. We think we escape. We hope. 

But we know something else, some true thing.

She damn well should’ve stomped us. 

Aches to Emerge

Here, where the forest unfurls like a rug almost to the rose-gold beach, is where it all started. Where the eagle cries amid cobalt thermals like something abandoned. Forgone yet freed.

"You're a warrior. But are you my warrior?"

"Who's asking?"

The sky crackles like a death-throe radio. Old limbs dislocate at the first hesitant storm. Something in the trees aches to emerge. Don't let it. Please don't fucking let it.

Caffeine is masculine; tannin feminine. The latter leaves less residue, less darkness on the tongue, is cleaner. 

I am a man, so I wake and make coffee, and Annalise smiles at me, still partway gripped by her dreamworld. 

"I'm glad you came back," she says.

Rather than answer I take great pelican gulps of my coffee though it's too hot and I know my tongue will pain me for days.

Birdland is our purgatory. 

Neglect the equivalent of abuse. Indifference as keen a weapon as hate.

Please don't tell me about your dream, I think.

Against the window a ruby-throated hummingbird flits its quantum dance. There. Not there. Vertical. Tiny needle aloft. There again. Not there. Someplace else in an instant. The only clue to its trickery the vague blur at its shimmering sides. If this is the Matrix, hummingbirds are its emissaries.

Once looked at, a bird; unseen, some other thing.

"We should hang more nectar."

I can't recall later which of us said that. Since kindness was its source, I like to think it was me, but I'm likely wrong in my usual random way. I don’t know about yours, but in my universe God indeed plays dice.

Someone knocks at our door, and I'm startled out of something beyond the mere moment; it's as if I'm flipped from one dark tale into another, if not darker then less knowable. 

A tight voice from outside, a sexless shadow beyond the sheer curtain and frosted glass. "I know you're home."

Unbreathing, we out-wait the interloper, and after a while I go out back and drowned in the bloody dripping yolk of a sunset kick a deflated soccer ball against the darkening house, over and over, again and again, volleys and half-volleys, inside of the foot unswerving passes, outside skewed bananas, until I'm filled with hubris and start to juggle it unselfconsciously, a possessed marionette, soon surpassing my own record of fifty and finally overdoing it around seventy-five and dropping it in the talcum-fine dirt at eighty-one. Incensed I didn't make a hundred. While the cowl of night drapes all, scowling, indifferent.

"Come inside. I made dinner," she calls. "The eagle has left."

This wasn't supposed to happen. Not like this. The hummingbirds are absent, and I go inside to eat. 

Her tender care is like a razor, and I am her strop.

"The neighbours have gone, I think," Annalise says over dinner. She has made a perfect pho with nut-rich fungus and something dark as green can be.

"I only want to eat," I say ungratefully, and think for a moment I might be a bad man.

"Then eat," she says. 

Silence should follow, but it doesn't. Slurping and sighing follow.

Then, as if on cue, breaking news on CNN violates our intimacy to inform us of possible terror attacks in a scattering of cities. Confusion and mayhem, panicked crowds, global howls.

We look across a clean marble surface into each other's eyes. I think I reach for her hands first, but it honestly doesn't matter.

Fingers knitted, we talk. About what we'd ask for if granted three wishes (I insist we should ask for infinite wishes; she thinks that's finagling). About the long chalk ghostlike faces near Dover, England. About the skeletal grip of someone dying. About the faultless imploring eyes of children fighting cancer. About this amazing thing: do we love our pets in ways we don't love each other? Is that question even framed right? How honest can we be? Do we privilege our antic species at every juncture? Even when we're genociding? Is MAGAlomaniac a word? If not, should it be? Can dreams come literally true? Even if they feature Nazi dryads giving blissful head to supine unicorns? Even if they narrate our appalling triumphs? Even if they highlight our equally shabby fiascos?

What gears have slipped so badly in the machinery of the world that all this is the upshot?

I say to her, "We should head inland."

"I'll go pack some stuff," she says. Her brimful ass, swaying as she climbs the staircase, is the best thing I've ever seen.

While I wait, a shadow returns and looms at the door. It hefts something heavy in its hand. It weighs at least fifty hummingbirds, probably more, and part of me knows we almost made it.

(The thing in the trees parts the curtains. It's like unspeakable sex.)

And almost is another word for heartbreak.