Bordertown

Bonus post. Another especially short flash piece. Harder. Louder. Silent as a haiku. See what you think.

_____________________________

The gentle wind, like a bow over catgut, shimmers the leaves. The forest is an orchestra tuning itself.

You step into the clearing and I take aim.

The wind dies, of a sudden. First there is no sound. Then there is terrible sound.

It's not a clean shot. On your knees, eyes dismal with pain, you beg me. "Please. Please." I should finish you off. But I am weak, and I run. Keep on running.

The wind picks up and has yet to abate. It's become a howl, and there is no peace or respite, even here in this chilly, inebriated bordertown, where so many gather to forget pasts that outright refuse to be cut adrift and only seem to blow harder, gust louder.

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.

***

My Own Private Cannery Row

© Tracy Prescott MacGregor

Rarely do I write poetry. Even more rarely do I allow it exposure. Not entirely sure why. I revere great poetry, but I find it to be a rare species: elusive and golden, hiding in shadows or, occasionally, in plain sight.

So here's a poem, no more fanfare than that.

My Own Private Cannery Row

"Accept loss forever." — Jack Kerouac

Here I endure my own private cannery row.

It crackles and breeds in

the dark parts of

an unruly heart—corrugated sheets layered over 

smoky post-afternoons, 

heavy enough with loss

and the memory of loss

and the fear of its return

and traffic

and iron

dragging gull

flocks in slick patterns against a volcano sun.

Twenty-first century. Under a bridge,

five slow crawdaddies move

in murky shallows 

sluggishly annihilating an 

immense fish head, 

while Steinbeck sleeps

and, worse, will never again wake.

Makeshift guido, cursed on a contrary shore, 

adrift off a refugee coast, face

boasting reflected orange 

yet

this smudged collar's powder-blue and new-sewn

with my fugitive name (upset) in gold below it:

Beloved. 

Strong. 

Among.

The Woods.

Say it. Woods await those

who fear themselves

lost, and lost 

indeed

is my new locale.

I might even call it

sorrowhood.

Plus this:

Names are potent, yet

the cogent grain of twilight welcomes smut,

refracting it for such long

drawn-out breathless

prayer flag horizons.

Music, too.

Blue jazz in a wineglass, Hendrix, bluegrass,

pure smartass, rhythmic

tantric belligerence.

Hopper beckons, eyes downcast. Lonely as hell—

old, weird America, less 

permanent than it believes and now

utterly unnerved.

Primary. Planar. Endless

sunflower acres.

We've come so far.

A thick-framed window, sunlight

ambergold, pouring like

fresh-squeezed motor oil, dripping from a citrus sky, 

easing us toward some

inarticulate lie: Desolation row, go, desperation

ground, loud, discovery known, flown,

deception pass, past, passed

below, ago, just so...

We cutouts tacked as

silhouettes. Transfixed somehow

with the mundane interplay of 

pristine fonts on 

the Grocery Outlet sign, where

we value our view; our warm, fawn 

thriftstore pact.

But come, listen, lookit.

Gather the lambkins, reel in the nets,

trawl the depths and count up the lost, 

bake the bricks, haul away the lumber,

give your day the ending it awaits,

its fitting close. Stumble past those who

would erode you, layer by

sheet, skin by cover, yet

keep on walking,

stumbling aloud, 

humbled,

cowed.

Agog. Gaga.

And keep your finger on

the fuck you trigger.

Especially that. Especially that.

Let the soft burr of a charcoal evening

smear the essence of your face like an artist

learning shading, blurring, obscuring.

Rendering.

Recurring.

Sudden evening quiet. The warm preemptive air. Sacred. 

Birds play then mute and the colours pulse dark, anticipatory,

so loaded, and indeed so

goddamned holy.

Abandoned flea markets,

green shoots and street scene clarity,

murmurs, a caress of freaks,

waterfowl feeding.

Someone in a waterfront townhouse,

on some higher balcony, 

is picking a banjo; pure

vibrations in the wires

aching with backyard echoes, 

the sound a trojan horse for a

renewed assault of grief, 

while your final drama speaks 

of absent fathers, trembling hands, 

half-gleaned urges, mother throes, 

white-hot and contradictory and 

wholly lonely: these

secret 

desert

fires.

Devil's Tower May Have Caused My Lover's Furrowed Brow

It was for you. All of it. Every mile of every road. Every beach combed, whether by boardwalk or by driftwood trails. For you. And it will never truly be enough, each tousled feral cat, each dripping cedar bough, each hardy tadpole in a mountain creek, each fake surfer, each dry phantom tree inundated by wetland, each misspelled signpost, each prairie dog gone tame by tourist handouts, each sidewalk busker, each sheer crag imposing, perched above a plain, a precarious god surveying the gathered armies of a vast but gentle beast.

Sunflower miles and clock-face windfarm dials. John Deere greens gold-misted by evening's haze. The mockery of crows.

Screaming eighteen wheeler mayhem on a submerged interstate, Akron or Toledo-dreams of West Texas or Florida sunbelt vanquished by the hammering of an eternal deluge.

You and I. The dew still glistening as we ride glorious into morning, the freshness of the world threatening a heartbreak toll for its sheer clarity. A purity tax. The world is not going to go away. Only we will go away. One day. But not run away, no. As someone said once, "I won't be no runaway, because I… won't… run," and yes, I can still smell our commingled scent from the night before, as we move forward once again. We will go away as one, joined, in the manner we wished to move in this world. Touching and touched; hard, warm, wet. Animal. Trembling with need.

You become me and I you. We enter a lobby, you talk to a concierge, we smile at the decor, whether through joy or familiarity, alarmed at a rickety elevator, charmed by someone's dog. Hands held on dusty trails, picking berries, chalking our names in yellow on railings. Delight at the very air each other breathes.

And breathe. Take in the possibility we could have it all, do it right, win the prize, earn the reward, achieve the accolades, grab the spoils, hand in hand still and laughing like fugitives high on the very threat of their freedom's fragility.

And yeah: we cross the giant beast of America, marvelling at a sky so large it might belong to another world entire. A sky world with lands of cloud, grey-white accumulations tumbled between expanses of blue, an ocean made of air exhaled by a freedom god. A vision. This world, though, is both tawdry and noble, glowing and tarnished at once. It is our world, the one we were marked to move within together, bonded as two humans could ever be, hungry for more miles, more moments within the finite lifetime of a world as ugly-beautiful as we could hope for, raw with the love and pain of it all.

Unraveled cattle ranch cloth strips, freight cars like beads strung across the world's largest rug, a mildewed rug dotted with apple seeds, black cattle, Canadian trains like prayer flags flapping over a Tibetan meadow, all perspective and reference points gone, the impossible horizon a few feet distant yet a thousand miles away.

My love for you is fierce. My woman.

Fierce and stubborn as the clapboard walls of nondescript motels bracing for the raging gales of prairie winters, unprotected, abandoned. Stubborn as beauty in a world that seeks its own annihilation. Stubborn as life clinging to a tiny rock while nebulae swirl and supernovae detonate in cataclysms of lambent violence.

I had a dream of you, long before you coalesced from the woods and beaches of your own dreams: I was alone in a cabin, fixing kindling for the stove, my fingers numb in January's vice, a body of water rushing away nearby, towering conifers bowing their laden heads in sorrow at the elegiac loss I had just encountered, stricken and arrested in my tracks. And you beckoned, from the future, called me through Dostoevsky fever-shades and Radiohead desolation, Russians and Englishmen, whispered of a time to come, of joy and discovery, of warmth and hope. And my insect mind began to follow the breadcrumb trail you set, one day catching up to the future as my brittle present fell away in chitinous strips like the shedding of a needless carapace.

Seagull sounds. Little wing. Gratitude. A river gorge, its waters the strangest and most exquisite shade I've ever seen, not jade, not turquoise, simply an indescribable blue.

You are my little wing, you help me fly. My pigeon camera, circus mind.

Brick shorelines, purple starfish. Cormorants and detritus. Shallow water crayfish rendering a giant fish head to nothing.

Jazz chords, Coltrane. Irish bars, Guinness. Blood Alley, history.

Spanakopita, souvlaki, classic rock, the world's most endearing waitress. Outside, a sunset, and a grey cat on warm cobblestone, diffident and wary.

I step outside the featureless motel, a bruised and dying sky darkening, air so breathable it almost induces panic. My woman is inside, drinking something sweet and potent, laptop typing, perhaps contemplating the dubious shower. It's as if the landscape is darkening while it quietens down, sound and light linked, the hush itself a dim new world hugging the hunched shoulder of a familiar one. Someone might even be dying out there. A farmhouse tragedy, a grim domestic tableau. Here, I can discern a day shrunk to a dog bark and the subsonic growl of the I-90 night shift. Somewhere a life ends in horror. Elsewhere, one begins. We fret too much.

We will drive and become temporarily lost on grey-mist Wyoming county roads tomorrow, until late afternoon the clouds begin to break and red earth arroyos emerge, all mere precursors as we head into something astonishing: an abrupt wedge of land, vertically striated rock, a truncated peak scored and topped from above, rising above sleepy stands of trees and untroubled fields, a land that has closed its eyes and forgotten its ancient ones though this one still looms. I can't breathe. I'm reliant on the world breathing for me. And my woman breathing for me, but she does that already, has done many times over. And we stand, rapt. This is something worth standing rapt over. Not because of mother ships—or not necessarily—but because we have moved far beyond that in such a short sliver of time, beyond the mashed potato modeling, beyond the earnest search for something that might prove we're not the lonely hearts we always suspected… our new knowledge far deeper and more forlorn.

And we do leave. And the sky rewards us with burnished gold and amassed cloud bunched like the awful fists of heaven, a land so utterly given over to its fantasy of beauty that it actually achieves it. And we drive. Rediscover the interstate. Factory-silhouetted refugees, passing asthmatic through an impassive land. And we keep on driving. And we cry. And laugh. And we love each other yet more, while each mile we consign to an awkward history behind our rubber aluminum revolutions.

But don't forget the boardwalk. We can always go back to the boardwalk. Even if it has to be rebuilt and is not the same boardwalk. No matter. It will always need to be rebuilt. Giant slices of pizza dripping scalding cheese, foamy mugs of amber beer, SALAD, WRAPS, in neon, and Julia from right here on the Jersey Shore with her raw glint of an English future urging us to commit, too. Real as this Elvis-haunted land, this vast and vulgar mystery. The great circle of life is revealed as a night time ferris wheel leaning over the Atlantic, metal on metal squeals, the pause at the apex all the more precious for that.

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed…

Drive till the rain stops, keep driving...

All those songs, drifting over twilit fields, their words torn to orphan strips and rags by the world's indifferent winds and scattered to the lonely horizons.

Death may come, invisible...

Well I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again…

This is now. Do it now, all of it, again, again; before we all become phantoms wandering dusty yellow backroads in search of the appalling beauty we let slip when time was young and hope dared to be born and we recklessly believed that was how it would always be.

This is the place all our hungers will meet, where needs go to be quenched, where we find each other again and stop time in order for it to be forever. Brand it with our need. Here, on some lost highway, in some dim motel room, the grey-blue glow of predawn painting us with spectral planetary light, your finger raised to touch my lips and trace them, like an artist, before another tentative question can emerge, saying shhhhh… shhhhh…

Outside, angled, the car waits quiet beneath a single bare bulb.