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

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. 

My Heart

This adventure, ready to be told. 

Upstream must be a falls since we hear it, but here on the silty bank it’s quiet and gentle while we watch a woman hold a young boy’s head under the surface of the cleanest stream, pebbles bright and colorful below, resolute while he kicks and bucks and attempts to rear against her grip then slows until his body brooks her assault and his dark hair waves like tendrils of so long.

Between the dog and the wolf lies the fleeting butterfly of youth.

Eventide. Sicily. Zimbabwe.

“Give me your hand. I will hold it now and beyond.”

This cocoon we arrived in, snared between a train’s blare and the stutter-step of the land. Someone told me there were mushroom clouds over New York City and maybe Palermo too. I was two-thirds into my trip, urgent to curl inward, blessed by topography and the sky’s corvid plaint. Mercy me. Lucky me. I never saw the land itself upend.

That whole wood—those quaking dreamland treetops—flinches in the glare of our stopgap moment.

Ain’t no one can bring the news like… Shine Billy Until… Swine Hilly Unwell… Spine Silly Upswell… Crime Filly Upscale.

It’s a silvery muscle caught in a creek and released, a quick last shiver in the treetops.

It’s drama and glamor and the scarlet clamor of a cardinal; admit you never understood Manc swagger.

Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu.

Claudia is a woman playing an accordion in the barroom on the headland. She must endure jokes from the regulars, all men, about catching her tits in it. But she isn’t playing for them. A man who might have passed on by is snagged by the wheeze of her songs and changes course to enter the small room. Claudia only thinks of blood in a river. Of a bloodred heart.

“I miss you, my singular boy.”

Slung amid the clatter, clenched like knotted ganglia, the night is mostly silent till a siren blurts, greyed beneath this brickwork, cursing such rodent luck this far underneath the aqueduct. 

Cry, my blackcurrant eyes, my sly rat face.

“Did Anna fall, or was she claimed?”

When did you arrive? How have I missed you? I meant to write a poem or even a song, awaiting your approval, but my aim failed, all these sounds imploding like elastic chatter, some cleansing, cumulative, noteworthy collapse.

Not everything succumbs to appraisal, and much exceeds our grasp.

"Entre chien et loup." 

If you are here, please love it all, most everything, the faraway horizons, the clotheared, ruined, spangled things that mattered. 

________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

All One Song

In this valley, thronged, the crack of ice as bluest shards implode and drop, crystal tails and powder—oh my dreamland castaway lady and lord—trailing. When at last we emerge from this frozen northern twilit place, a dark hut squats in our path, weak smoke tendriling from a busted chimney, the faintest muddy orange dim and low in its pitiful windows playacting muted glances.

Inside is a place of men. Large and bruised men, nursing their watery beers and their cryptic histories.

Bradford finds a small table and we sit opposite, like chess rivals. A man brings us beer in bottles.

“Tab?” he asks like he knows.

We both nod and he leaves.

I point to my head and point with my other finger at another part of my head. “Look at this. Look.”

“What?” Bradford is somewhere between bored and on board.

“I don’t know how to make this part work with this part.”

“Huh?”

“I got an intellectual and a lowlife creep at war in here. I don’t know how to reconcile these parts. I’m a goddamn high-rolling sweet-ass motherfucker with negative aspirations. One foot in the gutter while the other strolls the shining city on the hill. No sooner do I sink a Bud Lite than I dream of Freda Kahlo. I sue for peace while spoiling for a brawl. I don’t know what the fuck I am.”

“You a whole circus without the ringmaster.”

“I guess. And no taste-master either. I got no taste ’cause I want to taste all the tastes.”

“Not sure I can help you with that, brother.”

“Place needs music,” I say loudly, which only makes the barroom quieter.

These hard-drinking men might be men at a stream, casting lines. Steady. Stoic. No one really knows. The night outside might darken or not, the songs of birds stretching out some elongated moment. Might could drop a quarter in the slot and hit a letter and a number, hoping for Neil or Drake or Lana or RiRi.

Men like these don’t compromise—a weakness, not the strength they proclaim. Look. A tree connects the sky to the earth. And it reminds us to also grasp limbs. Put it this way: even the guys who ridicule “tree huggers” still knock on wood, I’ll wager.

A song selects, and y’all know its effect, and its dress rehearsal respect blares external. 

Neil. Old now. Grey. Still shredding those one-note solos. What something was and what it no longer ain’t.

The stymied wolverine wince and ruined caribou rasp of Old Black. A dark northern lament under slow-turning star wheels, the nighttime snow wide-as-fuck open blue under a half moon. Or under the aurora. And yes, as the man said, the old man now, go look at his life, it’s all one song.

He enunciates the word borealis like Elton sings auditorium.

Whatever the grisly outcome tonight, this is all and fine and damn near everything. 

___________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger