Song of Blake

“And their sun does never shine,

And their fields are bleak and bare,

And their ways are filled with thorns:

It is eternal winter there.” 

— “Holy Thursday,” William Blake

All dogs know secrets like the bones they’re said to bury, and Blake knew from the change in the air that the bad thing was coming and was inescapable. It was an ozone tang fused with something other that yes made his snout quiver but also his heart. Something necrotic. Not the strain of decay you’d want to roll in, a thing much worse. Putrefaction. Blake felt his tail curl like a sneer between his legs when he first untangled the smell from all the rest on the early summer air and he knew his world and all worlds were about to change but he could not warn his two-leg people with words. 

Piney, of course, sensed it too, and even when Blake lay quiet in the unlit corners of the barn he’d catch her anxious night whistles hying from the house when she dreamed. They each would comfort the other in daytime, nuzzling and licking, eyes heavy and freighted with dread.

Blake knew he owed his very name to his two-legs and their love of a long-dead wordsmith and dreamer (and my dog, did they privilege words and dreams, speaking them over for the joy itself), so he waited and shied from overt alarm, mindful of antiquity and the inscrutable ways of his adopted clan.

Came first the blight that blackened the green things. Hunger bided its moment and stole in behind, and Blake’s two-legs soon cried and made of themselves lightning trees, black and rigid and implacable, and began to slaughter Blake’s playmates in the barn, whom he loved: the small, horned, surefooted ones; their gentlefolk kin clad in cumulus coats of softness; the pink ones who were bright and avid with tender mischief.

After which they believed in nothing. The rain of dark birds. Creeks pulsing black with the stink of rot. Dry thunder amid teethlike rock.

Times the wrongness didn’t equate with anything Blake knew or loved.

“Sweet Blake,” whispered the mother. “We fear things will get worse for us all. I wish we could save you.”

I know this, thought Blake. I knew this before you.

The father was silent. But he too then whispered, “‘Some are born to endless night.’” 

So it was that after the bad air came worse men.

Blake remembered his people, recalled his efforts to save them, but he was shabby and not ferocious, and his two-legs fell one after the other, the father and the mother fighting valiantly, and their boy child, Eric, and the marauders absconded with his favourite, the girl child who was kind beyond measure, sweet Eleanor who he’d played with in the hills. 

Slat ribs and mourned kin united him with Piney, until even she was slain one day on the roadside by a single clade of an endless stream of two-legs ruined and set loose by this new world’s dictates.

Here he was now, nowhere to go, eviscerate of purpose, bereft of plans.

Maybe the mountain wolves, emboldened or desperate, would decide for him. He even made it into the foothills until a heart change breathed on the embers of his resolve. 

He turned from the hills where the howling of wolves caught the desiccate wind and shambled toward home or where he believed home still to be and he stopped for a moment at the place on the road where Piney’s blood still marked her departure from this world and he let out a broken howl of his own, hoarse and plaintive, and hoped the wolves would leave him alone because alone he was. 

Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer hands.” 

“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”

The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”

“I prefer things that way.”

“Mayhap a poet too?”

“I didn’t mean for me.”

A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.

***

She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.

He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.

Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.

Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.

Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.

***

After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge. 

Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.

Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.

We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now. 

__________

Image © Thomas Holmes

Overdue

Harlan sat on his porch of worn uneven planks that, like our world and Harlan himself, had seen better days. We faced west, the direction that once meant hope. The last glint of sun had slid below the rim of the land and only a narrow yellowish strip gleamed through the dead and silhouetted trees, the darkened plain and the starless sky crushing it like a seam of gold in the ground.

We sat in silence awhile. Until we both seemed to realize something at once.

He was the first to say it. "Well, I'll be damned."

"Yeah."

Cicadas. The Collapse had brought such ornate miseries it seemed almost impudent to include among them the silencing of the insect world, but even on a subliminal level we'd felt their loss keenly. Ghosts come in many forms. Yet here they were. Tentative and hushed, but back in some facsimile of numbers.

"Thought surprise was a thing of the past," said Harlan, and I smiled. 

The scattering of bug sounds stabbed at the silence under gathering clouds we could sense more than see.

A breeze was testing the air, thinking about becoming a gust or two.

"Mr. Cutler… Harlan, I mean?" Dammit. How many times over the years had the old man corrected me?

"Son?"

"I want you to know you've kept me sane all these years since the Collapse."

"I know that, son."

"I know you know it. I just wanted to say it."

"Alright. Good to know. Let's drink to that—"

"Sir, I'll get it—"

"The hell you will. And the name's Harlan. How many times…?"

I lost his words on the gathering breeze as he made his slow hunched way into the cabin to fetch a jar or two of the crude cider he fermented from some unknown organic thing. Roots. Fungus. Squash, maybe. It always tasted about the same as it sounded.

I knew what he was gonna say before he said it.

"Bourbon, young fella?"

I laughed. We sat and drank, pretending it was Wild Turkey 101. Imagination ain't exactly perfect, but it can get you halfway there sometimes.

"They quieted down again," I said. 

"Huh. Mayhap the orchestra's done tuning and the symphony's comin'."

We wouldn't get to find out. Those gusts had turned to squalls and soon great hollerings, and the sky dropped its pent-up grief on everything. I scrambled to join him on the porch, and we waited it out, drinking slow and steady, hearing the mayhem of trees crack and splinter and jettison their bones in the dark.

Felt like wicked black wolves now governed the night.

When it was done, a sadness came over me and I no longer felt like pretending Harlan's concoction was even drinkable and I told him I didn't feel too good and took myself home, a ruder shack about a mile south of his place.

Next afternoon, a mite rueful, I hiked my sleepless and hungover ass back over to the old man's cabin. 

Harlan was gone. Debris covered his porch, but so much of it; dirt and bits of tree and even what looked like old coyote shit. From the storm, I figured. Some of it, at least. But after calling his name awhile and knocking on his door like a fool, I went inside. A layer of dust covered everything, the only places clear of dirt my bootprints behind me. What in the hell? I grabbed a jar of his moonjuice, a sandy film on the outside, a dark layer of silt inside, and sat in his creaky old chair on the porch sipping my friend's godawful liquor, hair of the mangiest of dogs. 

Things in my head didn't feel right. The silence in everything was too loud.

I listened for the bugs again, but nothing. Thought maybe it hadn't been a chorus but a coda after all. 

Crime Watch

It's always windy now; there's never any peace. They tell me the local wolves are returning. I say good. That's good. Find the dens. Go ahead with your goddamned crimes.

Since words are such distant cousins and not the only language we know, I doubt that words themselves will suffice for the telling of this tale, but let's try.

Where did I come from? I cannot even know. I woke on a trail favoured by green. Why do we highlight the fox, the bat, the buffalo? I feel her palm settle over my wrist, and we bow beneath the wax-green arbor. We are stitched into the tapestry absent our consent.

In case you missed it, I repeat: our assent means nothing to the world.

An old woman watching the haze coughed up by the eventide. I used to sit here and watch whales. I haven't seen a whale in twenty years. The ocean itself is a heaving grey behemoth with cloudy eyes, redolent of slate. Imagine wet dust.

My name is Millie Trench. This was my home for three score years. You think your avarice enables you to up and lay a hand on it? Let's talk about that greed. We've grown accustomed to it, and you've grown used to exercising it in the service of politics that sound more like faith.

You overreached. We all did.

We pranked our friends but never copped to it. We ran through evening streets convincing ourselves we'd seen a visitation. A spindly future in a window. A light in the deepening dark above the rooftops. And we ran, alive in our fabricated terror, lungs swelling our ribcage nobility, skinny thighs pistoning the liquid cylinders of our adolescent hips. We were mercury, platinum, and we ran until our terror became real. 

Entire lifetimes have gone by since then.

We never imagined the coming brittleness, the years of compromised ligaments, of tendons stretched beyond their elastic bounds, of creaking bones or the quiet unearthly skies.

***

I know you'll come and cry with me if I ask. I don't like to impose. My heart purrs inside a hummingbird, fluttering as my host drinks crimson nectar from a feeder. My genitals are something else. You really need to witness them, but I won't insist. (I might no longer be human.) We slip inside and rest against the ink-black geometry of panels. Pen and ink on rough-scratch sketchpad partial to yellowing. Let me draw you. Your lines inspire me. Your fervent mortal heft. Pull off the interstate, Bridie, let's take stock of this and make some visual music if we have an hour or so to try.

A raven lives in the tower and laughs. She is the plainclothes inquisitor dripping warm song on all of us. When we forge such camouflaged tunes and try to hide our hungry robes, it's like listening to the thirst of birds.

Open the door. It's a rundown bar not far from the coast where few now bother to attend. Maybe it's a gentle church of liquor and gambling losses, where a thinning congregation no longer dreams of anything like redemption. Their prayers are holes and loss. They hope only to escape cruelty.

I found my way this night to Millie Trench, and she gives me that nod old people know is better than some document or paper. (Old folk are the only whites conversant with that nod.)

We sit silent before the silent sea. Now and again, a man up the beach laughs amicably, a sugar grain cascade. 

Where are all the gulls?

All she needs, my dusty compatriot, is her one last friend to reaffirm some normal standard of American life. Even fake it if I have to. Barbecues, beaches, campfires, places we watch out for bears. Lights streaking in solstice skies. A dream of an eternal park in eternal dusk starlit by fireflies, and the laughter of children singing like a secret creek.

A horse fly, solid and glinting blackish and distracted by its mission creep, bothers the shore lurkers, hoping to drive them into panicked mea culpas, circling their dim crimeheads like a winged and sable pecan as they rear and flap, preening and twitching without hope of exoneration. There's Jodi in Walmart with her gas cans, the hurtling bespattered basement steps, the gunshots into the crowded van, sex zombies, plaster casts, child pageants, lies, race, sex, even hope. 

My mind uncouples, forgets itself. Bring them through the prize draw routes, lottery types and winning hands, clear passages now suited to the epic ruins of the day. I would like to find the corpse of a champion and unearth a feeble decoder, witness the death throes of loyalty. Spinning it all circular. 

Are we enthralled? From which side of the bay do we look? I live to suck out every thread, each loose end, and give it if not its name at least some character, a man who polishes combat boots using only green and now this lightest brown. It's a start, pale though it is. 

I wanted to have the last word with all of them and gesture as they approached, as he and his friends whooped and hollered, yelling and high-fiving my people, promising to haul each other up and out. I never knew his name. Was he the man who laughed? Could he have been the wolf? Things will be elided here, redacted and stashed away, quite possibly forever.