Ten Sixty Six

The land’s all gone, the bears are out, and a campfire builds itself. This land. Stragglers gather and reminisce about raisins and avocados. Some of our kind went down to Geneva but were never heard from again. Bless all of you, says the man on the hill, under an ominous sky that looks like a victim. You will be saved, he says. You will love each other. 

Those in the caravan to Helsinki laugh quietly and chew on their nails to the rhythm of the wheels on a belligerent road.

“Was that Jesus?” someone asks in Swedish. 

A quiet voice answers in English. “Makes sense Jesus would be a hitchhiker.” 

“I got a whole story about that.” No one recalls who said that or in what language they said it (but I know, and they weren’t from Scandinavia).

How is it no one warned us, no one told us a guitar is not a penis but a womb? How born are we if we yet don’t know what bore us? How dark are our dreams, how cherished, and how black is our metal?

That honeywoman struts her asymmetric gait, and we all wait, in case her flavour’s bleeding over the tops of everyone’s shoes. Normandy, you think. Alright. These pebble beaches under weighty skies, stale remnants of baguettes, jettisoned recyclables, and cooled moist condoms pushed forgotten into clefts. From here a fleet launched once and changed the world. Tapestries and arrows; the uneasy gyre of tongues. A millennium since, I still can’t let that Gallic swagger eclipse my Saxon stance. I can’t tell the stubble in the field from the stubble you sometimes grow in the sultry valley of your love. You are widespread. And you know, while your grace may be saintlike, the spark of your ardor remains ghostlike. 

“Quick! There’s no line for the Ferris wheel.” 

Our time is now, it’s only now. Soon these frames will sway, broken and rusted, like limbs once bled by ancient butchers. The boardwalk will splinter and rot, foamy spumes reclaiming each kindled plank. A candy apple stick sucked dry and thrust in the eye of a life-size molded Elvis.

The last gull wheeling on a gust, sent by a waning sky over a lifeless swell.

“You totally should.”

“What if I half did instead?”

“Yeah, one of these days you might even manage funny.”

“Ha ha!”

The kindest we can ever do is tell someone we see their pain. Represent. I’ve never seen anyone not break down when someone speaks their suffering aloud. Tells them they are heard. 

Here, though, the last things to leave are deaf. Silent. Empty of applause. No one to remember or proclaim, the unheard flap and ache of a ragged banner the brief and only actual accolade.

God's Honest Truth

It isn't the first time I've listened to the ranting of a dying man. I've heard rage. I've heard regret. I've heard terror. I have to say, this time feels like something different.

A neon urban orange sodium night, tailing off into indigo then black. Like a deep sea coral reef right before the squid attack.

Back then, when I told her the big ferry was in town she thought I'd said the big fairy was in town. And she laughed. I laughed too, but I meant the ferry. Someone said there were orcas in the water as it drifted into dock. White and kinda white and black, and rounded, like weird soap. I wanted, still want, to believe in them.

A clownish man approached me and began to punch me hard in the face, over and over, and I staggered back behind my own face, blood like a full-on tap. For some reason I remembered the carved Sasquatch sculpture to your left when you enter the town of Harrison, a hirsute giant ready to hurl a rock. And I wanted to inhabit that thing, feel it come alive, wear its flyblown skin and fur and deep wood stench, and tear my assailant's face into dripping ribbons.

Yet the silent empty ferry. Monolithic. Strange. I tried to ignore your homophobia, but the ferry had docked.

Dissociative dreams of how we are. Castoffs and cormorants and catatonia. Analog orcas and burned corneas.

What is this? You shrug. This might not even be happening. 

Will you come with me to buy a breakfast, a bagel, with lox, with cream cheese, with capers? Prettiest damn server ever. Engineered. Abutted hips and cantilever eyebrows. A living boast. You, hypervigilant. Let her fill your cup, one eye on the clock, with the darkest of roasts.

"More coffee?"

"Yeah."

"New in town?"

"How'd you tell?"

"Your pointless fucking tears."

Get help. Sympathy? Dying is now only one tendril. Pain is pain is pain. Is pain. We can bury it and exhume its dry crust, its sticklike legs, its sheer wings, all desiccated. A dusty attic of mostly nothing.

Dreary gossamer. Benadryl. Wormwood. Go deep into the green. Drive for eight hours and park beside a wild creek, step out, listen to the waters, the breeze stirring the tops of the conifers, the ravens collaring their own echoes, the complete absorption of our tale, our blunted, airless psychodrama.

Back in the ambulance, the man snags my gaze. I don't want him to. He speaks in some other tongue, gags like an accidental witness to history, offers his throat to some alien wolf, spits poisoned absinthe at our door.

"I came back with a skin yet more dark. You still didn't get it. Last time you drove nails through my wrists and suspended me on two great pieces of wood. It took me hours, days, to die. In unspeakable pain. I believed my own tale and thought that would end it. Not true. Centuries earlier and later, millennia even, I've continued to return. My skin has been brown, olive, tawny, like tea, like coffee, like cola. None of which matters. Here I am, dark as a walnut and dying in the back of this medical wagon. Why is that? Well, new and completely beguiled by this bright embryonic world, I smiled and said hello to a white man dressed in blue. He told me to back away and hold my hands in the air, which I did. But he saw something in my hand that frightened him. A leather-bound book. Just a story, one more tale. Panicked, he sent his hot zygotes of death my way and now, instead of air, pink foam bubbles from my chest and my head grows light and lost, like melting taffy, and I don't know what more I can do … Will you hear me, my ambulance girl? Pass this on? This hurts, but you are a good woman. Attentive. My sweat is like wishful sacs filled with acid, or hope. You are nobody. But neither was Mary or Judas or Peter once. I'm only one of many, and yet you listened to none. If I come back at all, should I come as a rat, a gator, or a whore? A tumour or a field of stalks? Will you even notice? To tell you the god's honest truth, you haven't yet."

Wyoming

Those arroyos outside town, so precious. Their red dirt. The way they breathe so slow, ignoring roads, evoking shadows like the last wispy creeds of dying cults.

"You got a better story?" she asks me.

She ain't never satisfied. I could tell her about Jesus, Beyoncé, and Saddam motherfucking Hussein pooling their resources to solve the murder of a sexually ambiguous alien-dwarf hybrid by a vengeful sixteenth-century teenage Moorish prince in some English stately home, and she'd still ask, "You got a better story?"

Sometimes feels like my life's a constant struggle to tell a better story. It surely can't be, but it might be, after all's said.

So a man was found dead 'neath the cliffs, but there were signs he'd tried to climb them before whatever killed him came along, and he'd gotten two-thirds the way up according to the gouges in the red clay many people attributed to the toes of his boots, which also had remnants of the same red clay stuck to them. Maybe not open and shut, but hardly fucking unfathomable neither.

Braless, she unpeels her shirt and flexes her dorsals, a cetacean back like something lithe and fluid and strenuous you'd only see once in a lifetime of diving in a world of deep. The pendulous hint of her breasts sidelines me, makes me salivate through my answer.

"Yeah, I got a better story." I taste salt, like blood, like tears.

"Tell me."

"You sure you're ready?"

"Yeah, go ahead."

"A'right. This. Fuck you is a better story. How's that, goddamnit? Stop breaking my balls, will ya? Something's wrong here, and even if I only felt a surface ripple when there's maybe some kinda vortex, wait it out, let it fucking breathe, for chrissakes."

She won't challenge that. It's beneath her. I can't ordinarily find the words, but I pitch this just right. Like when you get absinthe just perfect, the thick green, the flame, the melted sugar, the voodoo, everything in its right place. Her name is every state we ever lived in, however brief. Right now, her name is Wyoming. Part of me wants her to stop changing her name and stay Wyoming. It suits her. It sounds like a query asked of a journey, which is everything we ever did.

She's a tall female with wide shoulders. Rangy, I suppose. Like her mount. She looks like someone can only be happy astride that wide-eyed stallion galloping on a spit of glimmering sand; her golden silt hair streaming like a raging creek; its nostrils gaping like cave mouths; her haunches splayed and fulcrumed western style; its shimmering, filmy, velvet skin a platonic dream of musculature; her sweet hive eyelids tight as honeytraps; its citrus-leaf ears backstraining; her lone wild heart one violent stormshadow. 

Wyoming knows more than twice what she lets on, and maybe half of what she don't.

But we're here now. Devils Tower looming like a sly insult from a quiet ground. Striated and dreamlike. Look but keep going. Big Timber. The Crazy Mountains stark and barroom blue against a lemon-apricot sky, cheap real estate, torn pleather booths, the interstate, power cables, smokestacks, the bright rails straight like arrows pointing someplace, some other place.

So, the dead man, right? I truly want to honor his memory, find his killer, but my girl Montana insists we keep moving west.

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy

We stepped out upon the frozen water, we walked upon the dirty snow. Me and my daughter, Rosa. We fell by the wayside, pitched into oily ditches, climbed again to the roadside. Clocked unlikely wrecks with steaming grills. Refugees passed us and we pushed against the flow, our sopping icy toques drawn low on our complex brows, our boots stirring rainbow swirls in the slush, each hour another day older as we left our dirty wakes by the highway shoulder, passing pitiless chains of mute and blameless busted chassis.

What is it we expect? The ultimate horror is the ultimate sorrow. This we know. We shot at and wrote on off-kilter roadsigns to those who followed, sometimes lying, sometimes truthing, sometimes somewheres inbetween, dreaming of red things, equally of blue things, anything other than dirt-stained ice and the drainage swirl of oil and so many ills, such aimless shills, such hushed and Christ-abandoned lies and septic leaks and senseless backroad bloodloss…

It won't ever scare us unless it scares the ape in us. Lifts the caul. Peers beneath the smooth veneer right into the queasy hollow.

Weesht, girl, hush your mouth. I will avenge your exemplary death. This I vow.

We are tricksters, all. Impossible. We once brandished tools and brought them swinging to bear on exposed skulls, winced as the blood and the bone and the hair flew in patterns, paintings and sculptures, a dark dripping collage of found things, foulness, moisture, and oil.

Rosa is with me still, named after a sea rose: Rosa Rugosa. My sweetest girl. Bella Rugosa's dead. She sleeps with her eyes open, a shoreline demon. She lets you trace your fingers over her kelp fronds, demands you pay upfront even for a haircut. She drifts like flags of mist, catching on cedars, losing her grip, crying while the future silently offloads the past.

Letters on a window finger-spelled in blood. Escapee emblems and refugee imprints. Displacement creoles and back alley squalls. Some bad things go forever unnoticed.

Recall. She can raise her south paw and—due to some arcane configuration of digits and lips—conjure the most lascivious whistle, a single brow arched, eyes blazing like Dachau ovens. More and more, she compels my love, a furtive, wolfish, delphic, entirely frowned-upon tryst. Rhymes with Christ.

Bad man helpless loving bad woman shamed, violently so. Wrapped in smoldering tarpaper shrieking pure hellacious profanities, a dreamworld headland Punchinello shitshow.

Photo booths, voters, my willing coy hostess, and sweet, loving Otis. Bad things sure seem to go oddly unnoticed.

Because I can never trust the cops, this is a true detective tale. Talk at length to anyone peripheral and gather the strands of truth. Arrange from sun-bleached driftwood a new kind of forest, fashioned from betrayals and ardor, from reckless surly bonds and rueful, shamefaced bloodlettings.

Swipe your touchscreen like a blind communion. Tinder by definition is dry.

Lately the orange tree started to flower, delicate starbursts all in a day or two, while tiny wizened oranges still dangle from its sticklike branches, minuscule jack'o'lanterns, and the aroma is pungent, not like the citrus-sweet of oranges, more like old sixties barbershop hair tonic, clean and human and cloying and quietly disreputable.

Whatever happened?

Inexplicably, the world erased Arvo Pärt. Who knew? Brothers, we are brothers. Sisters too. And we somehow forgot.

A young man strides with the youthful gait of a vigorous America along a fog-softened street—signs on the sidewalk looming and fading, the chalky dreamlike colors of the nineteen fifties, all solid yet perplexing—and looks up at a sky whose exact blue will never be seen again by anyone, hops into the driver's seat of a 1954 Corvette convertible and swings it through a procession of likeminded chariots to go pick up his girl and go dancing, at the very dawn of the age of cars.

While Midwestern rain drips like tears from the nose of a lonely child, guttering into a rain barrel.

Now, her wineglass is a lucid tulip, her redgloss mouth a trap.

A young bear embraces the bole of a tree. We send essential signals to the satellites, tap out rhythmic code to a maiden ship on a glassy northern sea, all our warnings, squawks, all our bleak entreaties. Could our cynicism drop a notch? Perhaps. Release our stale breath and watch the flocks stream in slow processional rows of multiple V's, these great suspicious beauties, exotics, these, our choice exemplars.

My Rosa flees from the black seeds, wraps her fingers around the railings of a caboose, hauls her urchin body on board, writhes within corridors of spittle and cigarette ash, feels filthy, stubby, furtive digits mining her seams, yet regales her fellow passengers with grave clandestine tales inscrutable with haunt.

(Better get used to it, pedants, haunt is now a noun.)

Imagine all our dimwit, heartfelt nations questing as ships in a proximate cluster, unblinking through the galaxy, trying to both dominate and keep up. China's vast, India too, and America's somewhat smaller, yet furious and bristling with turrets. Canada floats close by and feigns insouciance, knowing it all ends in heat-death silence while fervently wishing it didn't. France records the backdrop, smiles. Colombia awaits the onslaught. Chile decorates its space poets, while Malian koras unscramble sonnets. And England cuts its own ancient umbilical and tumbles behind all the unholy vessels of Europe, and I cry, because I lived a good half of my life on that star-crossed ship, and some of my friends are still on it.

All ghost ships now. Somehow still going, eyeballing, outward from the center forever.

Time to clue in the newcomers: 

This is not a finished thing, it's a project. If you squat in the forest and suck the water from the mosses you might live. But know your piss is fair game. It's cyclical, wide-eyed, recondite, droll. Go talk to your others about dragonflies. The bears sit neck-deep in the creek, patient as fuck. We endure the stark mockery of ravens. We can't even claim to have tried, but some of us have great vast kick-drum hearts regardless. A small boat crossing the sound, eagles drifting in thermals, worlds of indolence and wonderment, pure cryptic love, luck, and those alien erratic guitar tunings. 

New evidence hints at her killer. I reposition myself. It's true she kept running, hoping for a soft place to fall. Kept loving all the underdogs shifting beneath the ceiling fans and easily in earshot of the authorities, while scrawling protest signs.

Unheeded, unanticipated, some dark parochial thing looms peripheral. Like a parliament or research lab. Or a genocide.

Rosa says sorry. Solarplex it. Knowingly oversex it while looking for the exit. Oversells her dance on the oceanside porch and laments what can go so unspeakably wrong in a life. It ain't always a choice.

Asks again what happened to the ape in us. What an answer: silence.

Listen: when the bad dreams come, as with the terrible winds, there will be no shelter. Not sure you're ever prepared. Will the howling shoals and shores of murder make of anything a palpable tale? Does bloodlust ever resonate? Will the strangeness of our star fields render you indifferent? What are your names? Are we cold? Your own unearthly selves? Do we mourn? Love? Walk the flickering line of frigid northern light? Could, might, will you ever know us?

Discount Noah

He knew a time approached when it might behoove a man to make good his escape from this tarnished jewel of a world. And for this, he began to build his pod from molded plastics and bright chrome, bringing to bear skills he'd learned in his youth. Granted, he favored natural materials, but he was a carpenter in a world bereft of wood.

"Never did Jesus much good, either," he said to Maisie Ellen, who stopped by now and again to chat.

"What's that now?"

"His trade, I mean."

"Stuff and nonsense."

He loved this part. Fastening and honing and sanding. Making things fit. Smoothing and fashioning. The backs of his hands were dry and creased as Martian valleys, all tawny cliffs and canyons fanned with deep rubicund gulches. Life, he thought, is mostly about elaborating.

So he elaborated.

"Jesus hisself, I'm sayin'. A carpenter who ended up nailed to two hunks of wood. Should probably have stuck to fishing. Though even then they probably woulda poked a hook through his damn lip and hoisted him over all them rubberneckers."

"He was a fisher of men, not a fisherman. Different thing entirely, you old heathen."

"Yeah, well."

She regarded him as he worked. He noticed.

"What? Woman, you look like you've been chewin' a lemon soaked in vinegar."

"You really think you can save your scrawny heretic posterior while billions pass from this tired old world?"

"Sure, maybe. Why not? Someone's gotta. Happened once before."

"You heard the saying about the only two things certain in life, right?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

He put down his tools and gave her eye contact. "Death and taxes."

"Uh-huh."

The faded charcoal arch of her brow forced him to elaborate again.

"Figure if I cheat the first, the other ain't gonna count for all that much. Kind of a twofer."

"Well, good luck with that, Major Tom. Me, I'm happy to keep canning fruit and sweeping away cobwebs until the good lord calls his sheep home."

"Always been more partial to goats myself. More gumption. And I prefer to take my chances up there." He peered into a dark void scattered with bright rainfall diamonds on some vast invisible dome. 

Had a lifetime of such mysteries. Getting tired now.

"You old fool. Up there's where I'm fixin' to go too. Only not in some contraption built outta duct tape, binder twine, and dollar-store gimcrackery, neither."

At this he laughed long into the night, while the two men observing through one-way glass glanced at each other; one shrugged and the other shook his head so briefly it might have been a tic.

"So convincing I could almost hear the other party's words."

"Yeah. He's in deep, poor old fella. We need to up his dose, I'm afraid."

Back in the room, the old man paced and chuckled to himself, rubbing his rough hands together and imagining to what glittering enchantments, what unspeakable radiance, the arc of his ark might soon transport him.