The Green Unruly

La tristesse

How this all came together, no idea, but I arrive at the place my love once lived, crossing the tracks that divide two parallel roads, into the heart of this small Pennsylvania town, while my ailing car radio works to stifle “Oh My Heart” by R.E.M.

So little time to hunker down and wait till washed-out roads are cleared of floodwater and if necessary fixed. Waiting unaccompanied amid drear fall memories. The doom-tolling railroad crossings. A boxcar barroom in matte black punctuated by neon, and windowless. Standing water in stubbled fields reflecting only grays. The chrome yellow of a receding school bus the only daub of true color anywhere.

Rubber and diesel, tires and fuel. Caught amid a squall of semi-trucks and the crawl of a combine. The green unruly. Belligerent. 

I pull onto the shoulder and tell you of the whispered voices in the twilit woods. You are silent, doubtful, which stings. I might not be hiding something; maybe you just aren’t looking.

durera 

We pivot on an island, gasoline spraying, how green is my valley, the kneeling martyr flinching for the axe.

Thinking we might go start a bar fight just to recall what it was like to feel something. 

We’re ocean-dwellers clinging to a washed-up buoy of apparent certainty—the sands shifting around us—while pretending the sea hasn’t sucked itself backward.

The wide horizon. Anticipatory. A quivering knife edge.

Phantoms of the forest scaling shredded trunks under the quarrels of ravens. Under yet darker things.

toujours

Could there have been a moment of reconciliation? Was there a frail song on the wind, obscured by the flapping of laundry as the gusts arrived? Lost to the ravenous monster we call the past. Lost to the hungry, decadent ghosts.

Long dark blues. We were here once—is that even enough?—and we think this is how it felt to be us.

___________________

Image © Monica Lunn 

Calliope

Winter

Where we began was when so much ended. Luck played its part for us, such a scatterment up north when the bad thing happened most everyplace else. Three of us first, another boy and a girl, both gone now, so no need to return names the world took from them for good. 

We met the bard John Hefford, and he would chant, “This is airless, and we are careless, adrift upon a tundra. Mountains loom then soon recede. Sieveloads of snow sift and settle on everything.” Like he saw how words could magic the world into being. Or out of it.

Spring

When it felt right, we made our way south to meet the approaching spring, neither of us in any special hurry. Turned out it was one of them seasons; the greens furtive and greyish, skies hiding their shame in anonymity.

I was a mere boy, wide of eye and stupid. But lucky is all. 

Summer

Lucky in all the ways. Meghan was my first and last. We met without an iota of suspicion and laughed because of it. She smelled naturally of nutmeg, a “fortuitous confluence of terminology” that always made John Hefford laugh. That was how he talked: “fortuitous confluence of terminology.” I coulda listened to him say such things till the sun burned itself out. Which I half believed would happen tomorrow or at least real soon.

When John slept, Meghan and I would dance like colts under the warm and endless blue, breathing each other and the wild honeyed-tea fragrance of sweetgrass, breath of the prairie, breath of the quiet, quiet world.

Fall

John shaped me with poetry, teaching me the melodies and the chords of life, relating harmony and rhythm alongside the rhyme of a river with a stand of golden aspen, the late glissando wisps of mare’s tails sweeping the last light of a tired sun.

The day we met the buffalo, a hunched and half benign monster from an old picture book, we knew we might be saved. For another turn of the world, anyway.

Meghan laughed with joy while I practiced my indulgent balladry under the beast’s guarded stare. Front-loaded fist of gristle and bone, appleseed eyes, bunched ursine shoulders, its back an atlas, tectonic patchwork in relief. Great head hung low and heavy as a dull bell swung from a busted chapel. Horns like crescent moons. Baritone snorts blowing sandspouts in the dust. Only a mite less ready for his sacrifice than us, his sacred and shivering executioners.

Now and then. Echo and rhyme. 

Under cold starlight, fed and slaked, we praised his unknown name. 

Tatanka.

Winter

Clad in furs, we wandered west to the sea, cyclic in our itinerancy, and lost on the way a kindly and maddened John Hefford to the high and frozen crags. First time I saw Meghan cry. First time I cried since the bad thing. Maybe even since I was small.

Started to see dead settlements and dry old bodies, but the far surf called us westward beyond the places men and women once gathered, beyond the crumbling highways and rusting railroads and once-fertile valleys. Beyond mineshafts and quarries and clearcut hillsides. Beyond the scarification of the land. Out to the western seas and coastlines smudged by mist.

Others were there first—Athena, Blaise, Billy T, Klootch—but they were goodhearted and took us in while the seasons returned at least three more times, we soon lost track.

Another Spring

We were improbable, Meghan and I, entwined with languid ease beside hot spark beachfires, under the spilled milk of impossible stars. A low distant report, more feel in the shift of the sand than sound, might have alerted us, but we were happy in ways not even wordsmiths can express. Only when the hiss of the surf drew back like an intook breath did we get to our feet. And the world blinked. And echoed the tale of its past, the long cascading narrative of gentle lands atop dark clandestine fury.

John Hefford had taught me another word, I recalled then. Tsunami.

The world’s music ain’t always melodic—it can be sly and harsh and artless with dissonance—but it does know its rhythms by heart. 

I clasped Meghan’s spidery hands, painful in their pulse of warmth, and we watched the dark regrouping ocean. Beside ourselves in every sense.

Like all things that must die when life is at its unexpected best, we’d been tricked. 

Like words, luck lasts till it don’t. 

The waves came in quietly and everywhere like a wolfpack. 

Song of Songs

“Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside?” — Song of Solomon 6:1

Behind the motel, to the west, the night still held loosely to the nacreous ghost of its yesterday. Irresolute. Semitrucks on the interstate growled through their gears on the slight incline, oscillate tires amphibious to the ear. Weak lights of the towns behind the eastern hills like the nests of hallucinated spiders. He stood silhouetted by a wan yellowish overhead light in the motel’s breezeway, a small red coal bespeaking his cigarette. Stillness. Dark coming, uncoupled from the day, emboldened, the unfathomable night. 

He stood like that for much of the night. When the spiderlights dimmed beneath the roseate onset of morning, he climbed in his truck and headed north, the western plains to his left still enscowled by night. Rain then came sporadic to congeal the road dust, which he smeared with his wipers. But soon it was a torrent and fell for hours, mercury worms writhing on his windshield between frenzied blades. Sometimes a gale drove the rain like handfuls of gravel hurled against the glass. Great cretaceous rigs loomed and lurched from the deluge.

He drove out of the rainstorm and he pulled in when he saw an old payphone by a two-pump filling station and lifted the handset and dug for coins in the pocket of his jeans. He found two scuffed quarters—in god we trust—and dropped them in the slot and listened when she answered.

“Hello?”

He tried not to breathe.

“Hello? Who is this?” Her voice like that gentle braid of freshwater uncoiling under loose shale you happened upon after a parched trek through high sierras.

Soon she hung up and he listened to that unwarranted air and wondered, Are you still there? Who have you just spoken to?

When that evening came, the third or fourth since he’d left his past like a dark snakeskin, he thought to drink in a bar in the next town, but he only stood in the street outside and listened to the wind in the treetops of a nearby park and the raucous walled-in sounds of men and the clash of beerglass and some country lament glowering on a jukebox. What song he couldn’t rightly construe. Snatches of words from the air of your life on the staves of the wind. Just gusts. Songs and tales no other will sing or tell. Stop singing. Don’t. Don’t say my name.

Annihilation Pool

During and after the ice storm, like new recruits innocent of war, each cryosheathed thing with its precise weakness snapped under the weight of it.

Soon Riordan found and moved into the valley, beneath summits like the tines of some arcane crown bestowed upon long-storied ones. Cassie, he believed, resided here, and it was his time to find her once more.

Villagers milled and chinwagged and shaped a tale.

“Let me stay here among you,” said Cassandra, long grateful. “I will give my all to do justice to your endless hospitality.”

Their furtive eyes sought one another like stormclouds.

Riordan was from elsewhere, faraway as abandoned dreams, and when times grow fraught, such doubtful heritage is received less charitably, and accidents are not so much encouraged as accepted. His heart could parody no other, and he welcomed eventide amid the shadows, below the towering range: alpenglow, aureate and rose, the sculpted peaks so astounded in their caul of rarefied air they arrest your breath and incarcerate your heart. 

Pure blare blueshine and incandescent white. Ghost-world phosphorescence.

“Where is my Cassandra?” he asked of the villagers. “I’ve walked in dire lands and met so many foes I’m weary of it all. Please make this my journey’s end.”

But the villagers were narrow-eyed; thin of lip and crossed of arms.

Down in the valley, silent by the well, his own arms outstretched, Riordan tried to greet the paradoxes; the slow dead and the renewed urgency of a reconstituted dread.

But the village knew. And secrets rarely blink. 

“Riordan!” cried Cassandra, lodged and duped across town, somewhere safely away. “Where are you, my love?”

He even fancied he heard her, though he could summon no tenable answer.

They led his scrawny frame to a hidden hotspring, steaming under waxy leaves. Elders made him walk and he did so without rancour, his doomed eyes perfectly even and dry as pages in an obsolete book.

In the end, he walked willingly into the annihilation pool, the matrix of his skin slow to dissolve, a caul of blood soon belching surfaceward, releasing its charnel reek in the anticipant air.

Above the surface, a pinkish aerosol mist, his emergent ghost, his blood a vapour, a spurned arraignment, an overlooked indictment in some demented and unremembered court.

Cassandra, alone both here and also everywhere, waited while days like thunderheads heaped upon themselves along the world’s edge until even she endorsed and abided by her inamorato’s demise.

Storage

Driving my car up to Wichita, one of those blue-gold perfect days out on the edge of a faraway time. 

Waylaid by beauty, breath driven out, hearing all the slow parts. Memories. Scrawled on a stoop with my legs pulled in. Day drunk on a street of brass and gauze and floating motes, amazed. Defang me and nobody knows we’re here. 

You, telling me again about that time you met Angelina.

Me, feverheaded, recalling a dirty tile floor, pale sickly green and up close and impersonal like a blindside gut punch.

We can barely get out of our heads. When we say the sun came out, we actually mean the clouds parted. We’re lake trout puzzled by air.

Here on the side of a road listening to residual wisps of tent revival songcraft hovering over the fields. Ready for this? The sweep of traffic brushing our calves. The quiet then the full throat. Your raw voice, its every rasp, meant as an escape hatch but like Amy’s becomes a trap. 

Maybe don’t sing for now.

Padlock in hand, ever think about how sorrowful a place this is? Featureless rows housing unremembered stuff, abandonments? Long unseen. Yet somehow paid for? If I were God, the first things I’d eliminate from this earth would be storage units. Pallid grey worlds lost beside land borders, anemic and interstitial.

Placeholders for better times that don’t ever come.

We ought not mortgage hope.

Pray for us, my sour candy atheist. My heathen henchwoman. May we scour the margins for sufficient grains of beauty or joy to help balance the psychocosmic scales against the cold adamantine indifference and harrowing cruelties that beset and burden the opposing plate.

There is no storing such things. 

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Image © Todd Hido