Home, My Love

Somewhere, the sun is still fierce, a fireball out there beyond the yellow-grey slab of clouds. The clouds are a vast, damp, infected washcloth spread over the world.

When I left the apartment this morning, I left it unlocked. Something I’ve never done.

Please. Be my home.

Needing to walk, I head toward town. It’s morning, so I think of birdsong, which makes me a sorry fool.

Three people are all I see: an elderly man and woman who cross the street at my approach and flinch from eye contact; and a wiry, feral-looking man of indeterminate age, who glares at me with naked hunger through coyote eyes and hesitates in a way that makes all the hair stand up on my arms. I let him see the hunting knife I carry on my hip, and he reconsiders. 

You are all I have.

This place only a year ago was a noisy, shabby hub of neon gas prices and clustered signs for pizza, subways, fried chicken, and burgers. The red-blue Open signs on liquor stores and pharmacies and laundromats and dollar stores. The wide carious mouths of automotive repair shops: mufflers, tires, oil changes, brakes, shocks (strangely mirroring the human narrative that got us here: muffled, tired, changed by oil, broken, shocked). It’s a place built for the automobile, and here I pass its one-time temple, a motel already gone to seed even then and here entombed in dismal slabs of graffitied particle board, like a thing bygone with shame now blinded and silenced.

For a moment, my heart leaps when I notice a nest tucked beneath its mossy roof, and I stand and wait awhile, dreaming of swallows. When after many minutes no birds appear, my heart returns to its dolorous sway, leaden within me.

Gas stations arid watering holes withered by drought in a concrete savanna, vehicles downed like the corpses of wildebeest thwarted by their maddening thirst. 

The McDonald’s is a ruin, its iconic sign an outline with much of its golden plastic gone. Golden? It always looked piss-yellow to me, even when times were okay. An empty produce stand has somehow retained its cruel sign proclaiming ambrosia apples for $1.79 a pound, Okanagan cherries at $4.99. Charred pieces of abandoned palettes spiked like warnings encircle it.

In a better world I would bring you home cherries.

A busy east-west road used to bisect these two strip malls. I don’t know why they called them strip malls; I never saw a naked person once. That road used to be the hunting ground of great screaming, hissing semitrailers that helter-skeltered along its length, eager to see our unremarkable town in their rearviews, perhaps take out a few locals as they passed. Only the buses were doomed to stay, but they don’t come now either.

There’s no right side of the tracks here, those too now rusted and quiet. Where once it writhed with sockeye, the wide and filthy river still heaves and disgorges the occasional corpse to the south.

In the parking lots, a few stripped and rusting cars sit in eternal hiatus, awaiting drivers who won’t ever be claiming them. The loneliness and the silence are uneasy allies in this war we lost long before the devastation loomed clear. Once it became undeniable, it was too late.

I’m heading home now, my love. 

Before I round the corner of our street, I hear someone humming quietly. I stop and listen. It’s a shaky voice, raspy with senescence, and it sounds like it’s coming from a backyard shed. I recognize the melody. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. I bark a corvid laugh and the old man quiets his song. Guilty, I call out, “Don’t stop!” but he stays silent and I continue on home.

I think about laughter, its strange harshness cutting the stillness of the world like an angry trickster god. Robert Plant was wrong; we did remember laughter, or at least its humourless kin, but in the end it was love we forgot.

What else did we forget? Will you not answer me?

The door is still unlocked as I left it, and I wonder if anyone came in, though I doubt it. Home. I stagger; I call your name. The smell of your corpse is worse, and I don’t know what I’ll do with you. Or with myself now you’re gone. 

________________

Image © Esther Voisin

High Times

It’s high time we talked about the High Times.

“Closed mouth ain’t gonna get fed.” 

She was a mother and she knew some shit.

We experience all these intense things, second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, all of them brimming with astonishment, wide-eyed and hoarse with love, yet we die with almost nothing, all these accumulations, dripped as stalactites, dropped like an old backpack, amounting to fucking what exactly?

The neighbors fit all of Eden into their front yard. Green tendrils spilled. Leaves of tubular red. I was with someone before the rainstorm, starting to make out, but she got spooked and left. After which I stood on the porch and thought long and hard about her, and Tom Waits growled a lament from crackling speakers wedged on some nearby sill. Jersey girl, my first and last, how much I cherished you. After the rainstorm, the waters braided like lovers, spiralling and twining, dreaming sclerotic dreams about how they might become partway manifest. A person got murdered that night, after the sun broke past the rainclouds and we gathered in the evening, but I never knew who. Someone played the opening bars of Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” on an electric organ, and we all chilled in the coming night, and someone got themselves slaughtered but we never knew who.

Wait. Let’s do this again, take another run at it. 

She was vehement. She told me she was prejudiced toward people whose shoulders aren’t horizontal. You get that, right? Weakling frames that slope downward, defeated before they start. Feeble half-assed primates, chinless and feckless, like the Trump spawn. And to a lesser degree, those whose earlobes don’t exist. That just join without a proper lobe. “Fuck those people too,” she said. I never could argue with that. She damn near had me on board.

“D’you put the seat down?” 

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said.

Truth? She was terrifying. 

I heard the countervailing cries: “She ain’t the same as you are.”

All such things are relative. Offering a cold beer after an apocalypse is like delivering a truckload of gold in the High Times. To think we cared about politics, about football, about butterflies, about pronouns, about someone able-bodied parking in the handicapped space. About spades and hearts. Before the Great Loss, I drove south through Wisconsin one early fall, got caught up in some biker thing, some end-times rally of aged outlaws, checked into a Travelodge outside Madison along with two hundred slow-moving leather-clad seniors. They were blunt and loud and likeable and no longer capable of violence.

“Bear with us, sir. We have a room that overlooks a field of corn. Or are those sunflowers?”

The High Times were adorable: Opera and spice and guts. Opulence and idle spite and us. 

This night, tonight, the other side of that sliding light, is our night. 

Unknowable

A brand new poem. For what it's worth.

Unknowable

Here's me with my basalt ruin, my

lost tundra neediness, cast amid

muttered notes fragmenting with love,

urgent with greed, fleeting

with want, curled fetal beneath

one solid theatre tower.

Where are you? Where?

Stopped off at the Sylvia? The Bellwether?

(Ladybugs, ivy, Errol, and heraldry?) 

I went and bought a small guitar,

a tiny Ibanez, 

to shore myself against the

grief tsunamis to come, 

while you, drunk only on the now, 

scoured concupiscent inventories 

for dildos, perfect condiments for soup, 

rodents, antlers, dripping cormorants.

Dark winglike music, malbec, sushi, tarot, love. 

Me prone and spent amid

the prunelike slime 

of sopping leaves pressed like

massed eons of sediment.

Got home, tuned it, strummed a lament,

got the Led out, caterwauled,

hummed an Appalachian dirge, a rant,

a moonshiner sonata and a desert screed,

squalled some secret boy and girl tune,

fireflies, calls, maple leaves, blues, 

ancora qui,

ancora tu.

It's work to watch hands build and furl

then come undone and go unfurl,

while roof hymns spatter bitumen eaves

and Jersey shores recede, zeal stutters, 

and all of it, everything, 

bleeds.

My idling car is northern Canada, 

immune and snowbanked, yearning south.

Get in and twist the dial

so radio broadcasts

hiss awhile, gaping

unbreakable as bridge cable,

conjuring rainforests,

stupefied like forecasts of something

unnamable, lowing scattered as prairie cattle, yet so

utterly, alarmingly unknowable.

***