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. 

_____________

Image © Todd Hido

Unslept

In a fallow field is a woman walking away from us, her slaughterhouse hips ticktocking, her heels struggling in the soft dirt, her forties glamour waves corvid-black and swaying. We cannot see her face, although she tantalizingly turns to the right for a few seconds and we glimpse a profile: handsome nose, a strong chin, full lips. We yearn to see more, but she faces forward again and continues to make her way toward the edge of a wood. What did she see? Should we follow? Yes, we should, we decide. 

Something tasting of regret already hints at itself in our mouth.

“Wait for us.”

The last days are coming. Until now we don’t know if we’ve ever absorbed the horror of negation, what a loss to the world each of us is, each thing is, each iota. Accumulated love, awkward dreams, remurmured words, a single twilight cough outside a bar, the iridescent wing of some undreamed-of butterfly shining in a psilocybin trance.

“Sit with us.”

See this brasslike glow of morningtide daub the low hills, an artist playing with her paints. With hoar and rime. The dirt still grasped by nighttime’s ice, shocked alive into stasis.

Is she a painter, this woman? Does her palette hold emotions instead of paint? Will her brush be filled with the gluey tone of our burgeoning fear? The slyest tincture of our dread?

“Remake us.”

We follow her into the wood. Each pulsing cell sings its own disquiet.

If we were dogs, would we smell her sickness? Her grandeur?

We can’t ever know how things will end. Could be the earth’s clenched jaw beneath the hushed and gentle forests grinds its teeth and lets loose its stockpiled ire. The end of things a backdrop or the main event. Grasp our arm, help us lead you to some other place, a skip and a stumble from this now land, this here site. If we’re fortunate, your slow and solemn gaze won’t so much recall our history as our dignity. 

If not, then our ample debasement.

“And then dream of us.”

_____________________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Elk Dreams

Faraway from home in some past decade, he found himself in a hotel on Main Street on the Canadian stretch of the Rocky Mountains. Elk like sacred ungulates wandered into town unmolested. Icesprays broke from nearby glaciers, cold unheeded squibs. He alighted from a Greyhound, someone else, some long-gone September afternoon. Bright skies, clean rivers, a cold stealing in behind.

He accepted a viewless room and closed his eyes, slept an hour. Dreamed:

The night is urging silence, the shush shush shush of lawn sprinklers a giveaway. Only the occasional dog defies it, a sudden inexplicable bark against the hum of warmth from lawns and gardens rising into the cooling air. Your intaken breath a parody of weather. The offshore eventide breeze sucks westward from the hills, more heat extinguished like stealth. 

When he woke, he came down to a hotel bar that was quiet, a group of young men his own age clustered at one end, a cowboy at the other, and a young woman tending it.

***

Trembling at the tip of a leaf, a jewel of dew quivers with infinity. 

***

Then stories happen.

***

An outdoor teagarden with elderly women in floral dresses. A man is to their left. Although he’s not a man; he has a man’s face, stretched over various mechanical contraptions, and his entire body is a riot of steampunk gadgetry, all whirring and moving while the man’s mouth moves. I can read his lips: “Can you hear me?” But we can’t, especially the dainty women to whom he addresses this. After a while, you see his face contort with rage and what looks like agony as he screams, silently, “Please listen to me! Please help me! Please help me!” over and over, his neck skin flapping and stretched between levers and pistons and oiled joints. He thinks they’re ignoring him, but they can’t hear him.

***

So here’s the release, the literal release, and I don’t know what to feel. The clang and clangour of the past, its grime and grimaces, dolour and doom, have coughed me into some future that has hidden in wait all my life for a moment when I’m least robust, least able to shoulder its new weight and keen tangle of angles, drag its ass and its drastic unfathomable mass.

Where do I go now? I want to buy a newspaper but where? A coffee, perhaps?

Come find me at the riverbank, activate your turbine scream, your Rickenbacker growl. Is this tide ebbing at last?

***

The road is the night. The yellow lines like grooves under the needle of your car wheels, and the song they make. When as a doe I stepped out entranced by the eyes of your car and was hit a glancing blow, I heard the most melancholy of odes playing in the shimmer of night, in the exhaled breath of a thing we might name “accident,” but is only one small part of the symphony. I staggered, hurt, buckling on stilt legs, and all semblance of story was smeared against the subdued street-lit facades and the glow of neon, stabs of faraway sirens, until I came to you in the sandstone courtyard and you had waited all your unrewarded life for this part of your own keen story where you were avid to help me so you could also be helped.

You think we’re ignoring you, but we can’t hear you.

***

(I think they’re ignoring me, but they can’t hear me.)

_______________________________

Image © Asa Rodger