Rattles and Thorns

“I’m not ready for this.”

“No one ever is.”

You want to meet in the high desert? Inhale the heady fragrance of sage? Wrangle rattlers with me? Pick cactus spikes from our boots? Hike up the draw then run the scree slopes serenaded by the coyote chorus. Surf those loose stones. Watched by wary stands of ponderosa pine, bark still blackened from the last time. 

Do you think it a kind of charm that porcupines are named thus? That their name means thorn pig?

There are some who wear those thorns on the inside. There are some who warn you first. And some who don’t.

I want to go out like Ignacio. Fierce and doomed and loved and soulful, filled with the citrus-honey surge of vengeance and the final cleanse of loneliness.

“I don’t think I know this Ignacio.” 

“Don’t matter. Keep driving.” 

“Wait. What kind of trouble am I in?”

***

Something big can grow from the saddest seed. A man approaching his autumn reckoning sitting in a coffee shop watching the strange choreography of cars in the parking lot. His eyes are bruises, flinching even at the light. He could sit all day, drink mediocre coffee all day, bottomless yet somehow depthless, watch without a single feeling the interplay of vehicles outside. He could then go home, sit in a small once-neat apartment as the winter sun departs the cold day, as televisions are turned on in other apartments, as voices fall and rise, and he will eat something that tastes to him like parchment. He is a wasp who lost its nest. A firefly whose flame has been doused. Something that flew too far and forgot to bring a map. Or forgot he didn’t need a map. 

And doesn’t even notice he’s unshackled.

***

This world is a heavy burden we have little choice but to shoulder. 

But what if it’s not?

***

“How far still? Will we make Culiacán by nightfall?”

Something went wrong, a bad deal involving bad drugs and worse people. A woman was hurt and fastened to a chair, but someone called it in. An officer arrived and traced the perimeter of the darkling house out by the encroachment of hemlock and cedar, but he never entered and only hand-peeked the pane and somehow missed the woman bleeding out in the kitchen, duct-taped to the chair. When they eventually returned, they found her cold and silent and fused to the plastic and metal with her own congealed fluids, like some lost and lonesome colloidal thing from some other, darker world. 

***

You’re at the park in August. A late-afternoon rainshower scatters families. The trees drip ravenspeak. All is agility and breath. 

You sacrifice yourself to those stones. You open. 

“Ignore this. Make room. Take a seat or take a photograph. Do both. And don’t mind me. Think I’ll have me another breakdown.”

Hello, Death

What is this solemnity?

This is me winding down, with a congruent desert backdrop. Bones and buzzards and busted things.

“Do you believe me now?” 

“I always believed you.”

You were with me until I stumbled, a comment on your loyalty and my klutziness. Yet I’m not even bitter, barely even sad. It’s the way of the sun in its arc and our orbit around its nuclear heart. 

This is it for me. I think I’m okay with that. 

I keep recalling moments like polaroids of the mind, skipping stones on a pebble beach, climbing to some high headland and gasping at the island jewelry strung in the inlet below. 

What bound it together was love. Love was always the tether. 

In the end, we all walk alone before a backdrop of surf and quiet in a shimmer of mist. And we climb a great pile of rocks. Sit in thought before a pond, the light another world entire, insects a maniac alien fleet, no one watching, no one there. Except, well, someone took the photograph. 

It’s all we have. It’s all we have.

Remember the ferry across the inlet? How the cormorants wove their mornings into ours? I know you felt these things as I did. I know they scrawled and daubed themselves upon the canvas spread behind your eyes and ears.

It’s alien, and so familiar. Shanties and favelas strewn like dirty salt across a landspit, arrayed like the cheapest of trinkets in some dusky bay. The world’s forgotten people. More numerous by far than the ones we remember. What inverted, capsized shit is that?

I think I’m leaving. I think you’re almost done. Dream I upended the downturned hull rightside up, set out in the bay with the brightest of suns and a precious muted tailwind. All things breathless and grainy.

Dream me, oh please, and I give you my word, I’ll try to dream you back.

Trash Latitudes

“Come here,” she says, her voice a raw husk, the echoes corvid dreams cast like corn-fed larvae over panoramic fields.

Sullen, you think. 

Bitch, you decide. 

She’s forgotten who she is, but she knows the river churns below, a cascading foam of milk, of frothing milk, of chocolate incursions. How is she able to sit, to let this unfold, while the angry faraway men gather in Armani to strike? 

“Is my presence in your life becoming oppressive?” That’s Roxy. She’s from Dumfries. Her words never err. She once considered escape but now prefers the yanking of chains. 

“It always was. And for that your glimmering skin will fetch top dollar.” 

I can never match her.

“You’re funny.”

Dutifully I nod, but I’m not that funny. 

The sun sets on a season, leaves like brittle cuticles crunched underfoot. Parched unread cataracted pages.

Another turn of the creaking world, another and another. 

The wintry scrape of a dry bow across catgut. The sound of a glacier withdrawing into its own tears. A full-on retreat. A place so cold your eyelashes think they’re weapons. Serious men on a serious stage, you seriously might think. But this isn’t serious. It’s the final laugh of the last good girl stationed on a headland over the last tumescent tide. It’s a hankering. An ache. A flash of loss. A bafflement. 

Roxy knows most things, she thinks. 

But how does she trawl the world? Her mouth must be wider than all the oceans on this overstated earth.

She reads the vast indecipherable room and wonders briefly about tears. 

“You wished I’d gone away?” she asks.

“I wished you’d stayed.”

Reckoning

"All that happened after was predicated on before."

I came upon the group gathered in the blue twilight, silhouetted atop a ridge, the half moon rising behind them. The coming night crept in silently, and the gathering was silent too. A gentle scene, though I knew if they saw me they would kill me. Without words they stayed awhile, lingering in the quiet grain of the air, and I held my place below, hidden by a great stone and a small grove of aspen, whose song was muted by the absence of any wind. This was dry land, and no rains came that night either. 

Why did I linger? That's simple; I needed something from them. But no, truer still—they had something of mine, and I wouldn't be leaving till I could balance that ledger at last.

When they left the bluff, filing down a narrow rocky trail on its flank, I stayed in place until they'd returned to their camp. Then I climbed the trail myself in the vast silence of that star-blessed night. It took less than a minute to find my daughter's footprint in the soft dirt, the extra toe on her right foot a private sigil.

***

"On the nature of daylight."

This world. It's sumptuous. It's freighted. Wherever you can, cook things in the surplus juices of the last ingredient.

***

Once I knew she was there, I closed in the next dusk. Waited a drawn-out moment.

Soon, she wandered near the perimeter and I hissed our reptile code, and she stopped in her tracks and hissed back after a beat and came to me.

"I found you," I said.

"You did," she whispered.

The horizon crackled with something bright and infected.

"Ready to leave?" I asked.

When she didn't reply, my heart skipped two full beats, and something buzzed in my brain pan. I repeated my question, and she still didn't say anything, her foot with the extra toe dug into the sandy dirt. 

I looked at her face and willed her great brown eyes to stay open and gaze at mine, and I give her credit, because she made sure they did. Respect is a strange animal; I felt it steal into the clearing of my heart and force hope into the crowding bush, while love crouched unmolested. I sort of almost got it. I knew that loss and grief were boiling thunderheads amassing in belligerent ranks beyond the next ridge and the next, someplace way ahead, awaiting me nonetheless. 

I didn't even know what sound to make. I brushed her small and bony hand with my own tentative reach, like the soft and flickering wings of a moth, and something happened inside my chest, and I saw tears fall in small beads from those nut brown eyes, and I left, and I never looked back, though I wanted to look back and squeeze her with the entirety of my raw and shrinking heart.

***

Why do we come here? Better yet, why do we stay? For the light and shadow at play on a woman's hands. For the nighttime murmur of a dreaming child. For the boughs laden, the twilight fading. For the huddle of warmth at the eye of the storm. For the room at the end of the couch with all the feverish cousins. For the eloquence of silence in the wake of ferocity. For tender care. For sweet triumphant justice. 

For the enraptured.

We are all poets. Troubadours of love. Now write me yours. Write us ours. And always, always try to go in the unbroken strength of peace. 

Back Story in Green

“The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.” — Claude Lévi-Straus

***

You see me standing in line waiting for a good life? See me there? Yeah, I was in that line once, along with most everyone, waiting for the gods to dole out something good and nice and kind. But they didn't, of course. And I kept going back to that line, even though the gods ignored it or, worse, spit on those who made roll call. But it weren't ever gonna happen, was it? I went on and saw people barely hanging till their fingernails tore and they eventually fell shrieking, or worse, in silence. Eyeballed the ravages of poverty and abuse. Suicide. Addiction. A deep pain that won't be expressed. You can be poor, you know, yet live a decent life. But let in the parasites, the nonces, the punks, the molesters, the goofs, the bloodsuckers, the pimps, all them motherfuckers, and you invite some crawling breed of clammy horror. I bought drinks for killers and took creeps out in the alley and fucked them up royally. 

I know a guy lived one of the good lives we all hear about, even though he was raped by a pederast at age six, one day found out a friend of his was doing something similar to a couple neighbourhood boys, so he took a katana that could bisect a human hair from its pride of place above the mantel, and sliced the guy into quivering, spurting pieces. Called 911 himself and assumed the prison time as his due. He was a good man too. A killer, and a standup guy. Does that make sense to you? If not, you're in a prison of your own. 

Everyone's window's a different window. Every lookout point is balanced on some precarious place. Ain't no lawman free of bias. No lowlife scum incapable of virtue. No saint truly innocent. It's a world that almost rhymes with swirl. It's a swirl of all we aspire to and the depths we may plumb. Some of the gentlest men I've known were killers, while some of the most psychopathic never even had to.

Walk along my path, mi amigo. Follow me into the jungle, its verdant tassels, its dripping peripheries. Do you see the shadow cat? The jaguar? Will you wait for it to leap, or is it enough to catch glimpses of its liquid tectonics, the slick twitches of its skin as it adjudicates murder?

Look. The story hasn't even started yet. Let's start.

Look again. I've been known to shut people out even when I didn't mean to. That's what the Chicken does. It's a flesh-eating disease of the mind. But that burning feeling slowly igniting your sinuses before your eyes fill up, that's a good sign. Means you're alive and might even belong to your rightfully allocated kind. 

The backdrop is a swath of land, thronged with sunflowers and corn. In front, a yellow-green fifties-model Studebaker crosses right to left on a charcoal ribbon of road. Sweet Gene Vincent plays on the radio. John Deere stands as witness. Stop signs and ditches, rail crossings and grain silos. 

Aimed inward but I can't catch up to myself. The round took out a scoop of brain matter and a swatch of skull. Yet I'm alive. Though barely. Shamrock green treachery vies with feline ovens; burned dreams flicker at the crumbling edges of dioramas showing harlequin suicides and child abuse. Play with me. We have nothing left. 

Any idea how long it takes to accept ourselves? Answer: a goddamn lifetime, if we're even granted that luxury. Otherwise we die in myriad ways. Trim that hedge, buzz that eyrie, bedevil those labile hearts. Tiny fierce girl in a short ponytail, capo high on the neck as you pick, your dewy eyes recreate all our failed dramas, your fragile measured voice some once-familiar layer of bedrock. 

Am I hoarse enough? Can you hear me?

These are our relics as they will appear to no one. Scoured by wicked sands, dripping with birdsong, teal as tide pools. Engineless. Replete with our liquid geometry, our rapacious need. 

***

When I first saw you, you were nothing. Walking down a nondescript road far off the beaten path. Your head was weighty, as if you were sad, and you probably were sad, and you scuffed your heels on the uneven tarmac. Every time you scraped a heel on the crumbling asphalt, the birds went quiet, lost their need for recognition, and the topmost leaves shimmered with vestiges of sound. With their own secret memories of life. 

*

Image © Javier DeLaTorre Sebastian