All One Song

In this valley, thronged, the crack of ice as bluest shards implode and drop, crystal tails and powder—oh my dreamland castaway lady and lord—trailing. When at last we emerge from this frozen northern twilit place, a dark hut squats in our path, weak smoke tendriling from a busted chimney, the faintest muddy orange dim and low in its pitiful windows playacting muted glances.

Inside is a place of men. Large and bruised men, nursing their watery beers and their cryptic histories.

Bradford finds a small table and we sit opposite, like chess rivals. A man brings us beer in bottles.

“Tab?” he asks like he knows.

We both nod and he leaves.

I point to my head and point with my other finger at another part of my head. “Look at this. Look.”

“What?” Bradford is somewhere between bored and on board.

“I don’t know how to make this part work with this part.”

“Huh?”

“I got an intellectual and a lowlife creep at war in here. I don’t know how to reconcile these parts. I’m a goddamn high-rolling sweet-ass motherfucker with negative aspirations. One foot in the gutter while the other strolls the shining city on the hill. No sooner do I sink a Bud Lite than I dream of Freda Kahlo. I sue for peace while spoiling for a brawl. I don’t know what the fuck I am.”

“You a whole circus without the ringmaster.”

“I guess. And no taste-master either. I got no taste ’cause I want to taste all the tastes.”

“Not sure I can help you with that, brother.”

“Place needs music,” I say loudly, which only makes the barroom quieter.

These hard-drinking men might be men at a stream, casting lines. Steady. Stoic. No one really knows. The night outside might darken or not, the songs of birds stretching out some elongated moment. Might could drop a quarter in the slot and hit a letter and a number, hoping for Neil or Drake or Lana or RiRi.

Men like these don’t compromise—a weakness, not the strength they proclaim. Look. A tree connects the sky to the earth. And it reminds us to also grasp limbs. Put it this way: even the guys who ridicule “tree huggers” still knock on wood, I’ll wager.

A song selects, and y’all know its effect, and its dress rehearsal respect blares external. 

Neil. Old now. Grey. Still shredding those one-note solos. What something was and what it no longer ain’t.

The stymied wolverine wince and ruined caribou rasp of Old Black. A dark northern lament under slow-turning star wheels, the nighttime snow wide-as-fuck open blue under a half moon. Or under the aurora. And yes, as the man said, the old man now, go look at his life, it’s all one song.

He enunciates the word borealis like Elton sings auditorium.

Whatever the grisly outcome tonight, this is all and fine and damn near everything. 

___________________

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 

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.