Unreadable Garbage

He had kicked the can of the apocalypse down the road for a long time now.  God, feeling both lazy and ambivalent, kept putting off "the inevitable."  Like growing up, the end of the world seemed more bother than it was worth, more mess than solution, an unnecessary disruption to an otherwise lovely day.  He was patient.  Why rush?  The contented farm boy in him let the weather--nature itself--get inside him and bend time to its own purposes.   This day, this hour, this minute was eternal, burning beyond imagination or memory, into something someone might call "real."

(Breathe deeply.)

The thunderhead on the horizon was cotton candy, bright vanilla taffy being pulled out of thin air.  Summer.  God had twine woven through the belt loops of his dungarees, well-worn Converse All Stars on his feet.  He was shirtless for August's afternoon sun and ambled the gravel road without direction.  The familiar rubber tip of his sneakers connected again with the rusted, dented can; a cloud of dust billowed briefly, a miniature storm, God's wrath (and his laughter, musical and filled with the bright light of youth and harvest).

What will come, will come.  In time...

-------

The idea of annihilation is not new to me.  I was a boy once, too.  By the wizened age of five, the weight of anti-matter, the gravity of unbeing, haunted me from the inside, a whirlwind inside a black cavern, all bluster and noise and (unreadable) garbage.

These anxieties, the aching that they caused, ignited in me a curiosity that wanted both facts and spiritual succor.  But the bigger the book, the worse the prognosis.  The material and the magical were both racing to the end (of the page, of the day, of the life).  It is as if the universe in its adherence to certain laws had lost sight of the little man.  The shrinking individual was being devoured by the gang, the mob, by the exploding species.  The significance and influence, that is to say the actual autonomy of the individual was eclipsed by the nearest star.  Small already, we were each dwindling, disappearing slowly.

In this substantial shift in axis and tide, the creation was compassionate in phrasing its answers but largely disinterested (and naive) to the actual battles of being.  For example, the various and seemingly tailor-made maladies and handicaps that describe the human condition are, perhaps sadistically, custom-designed, corroding the body and eroding the mind; each one seems to be a hand-crafted gift created "just for you."

-------

Its personal.  Personalized.  Purloined.  We have stolen this life, this consciousness, out of the jaws of a gnawing jackal pup.  He will sharpen his teeth, his wit, his mind--like us--on anything he can find.  We too are scavengers.  We are satisfied with dead meat.  We are, ourselves, already dying.  Your gut shuts down for a second.  Sinking.  You want to be light, lifted, dancing but there is heaviness that holds onto your feet, your tongue.

Hold your tongue.

There is nothing about your death that will matter.  There is nothing from your life that will retain.  Because we are inconsequential, both urgency and burden are removed.  They are extracted, bad teeth or extradited, bad eggs.  A just balance is found between expectation and obligation.  (I promised you a new brand of freedom.)  With waxed soles and a Wonderbra, we will have to unlearn habits that have settled into us as nostalgia and believe again that we can dance.  When we wish to dance, we must revive.  We can dance away doubt . We can dance down despair.  Orphaned by God, we will dance like a dervish in meditation and prayer.

Again, I am six or seven.  I have--instinctively--fixed my eyes on heaven.  Momentum comes in outstretched arms; I spin.  I spin.

There is rotation,

there is propulsion, 

I am spinning.  I persist at the bottom of a thin and nebulised thread.  I am the good-luck spider that is suspended, at the end.

The velocity of the centrifuge will, inevitably, turn all of us into ourselves, while tea leaves cannot help but tell their tales out of turn.  All the memes that would come to destroy me and all the memes that would try to rescue me were part of childhood's amorphous stew of anxiety and fear.  This was the stuff of bad dreams.  Anticipation is a kinder word for dread. Nostalgia is a kinder word for regret.  But then... 

I was paralyzed by my desires.  (You were too.) They were circulating around me without benefit of vocabulary,  indecipherable, ghosts from the future hosted by my soul, in my body, run by my mind with its over-active imagination.

-------

When the sirens find this road--adrenaline red ignoring the yellow ribbons, the black tar--it turns me, changes me, turns me inside out.  And I run screaming, hands held cupped over the ears, past the house, through the yard beyond the fragrant wall of lilacs into a muddy patch sprouted loud with rhubarb, its broad and honest leaves (and the snakes that they conceal).

I am crying.

These tears are a kind of sweat.  I am enduring something.  I am enduring the idea of loss or threat that the sirens imply.

The Doppler's cry subsides, that strange and  histrionic bird.

Tears dry.

The palms I have been pressing, invested on each ear, slide down to my sides (wiping what embarrassment still stings in salty pools, in alkali rivers that cut something into my four-year-old face.  Tears...).

-------

For fears are nothing more than fantasies of loss and/or annihilation, dark imaginings that might instruct with their obsessions.  Sometimes too obvious, sometimes succinct in disapproval, judgment, the lessons arrive inevitably late and looking like something that you swear you knew all along, something you believed.  You spend your middle years (and later--more desperately--your final years) trying to craft that handful of sand called learning into something you could prettify and pass off as wisdom.  But you know, now, humbly, that this is just a jumble of words.

That is my intention, my obsession, here.  I want to traverse the muddy headlands of meaning, of vocabulary, and "make sense" of something.  Or, if that ambition is too much (for this late hour)--the ephemeral and mutable mots moving with the taunting and slippery grace of butterflies--I will content myself to look for bones and stones and berries to string together.  I will bead the seeds of some new language, laughing.  And I will wear the weary string around my neck.  It is enough to create patterns here.  It is enough--meaning aside--to piece together something pretty with which to decorate my naked, trembling self.

-------

Meanwhile,
God has gone fishing, followed by his faithful hound.  The worm squirming on the hook of this humanity hasn't a prayer at this point, at least one that could be heard.  He can't be bothered, a small town judge in semi-retirement, an 8 year old knowing only these forty acres and (at least for now) satisfied with the path along the river, the whispering sandstone caves, the lower pasture punctuated with wild flowers--white, purple, and yellow--where the horses are like statuary, dappled by the sunlight fractured in the leaves of the oak that first found this spring.

--------

These storms, warmed in that sapphire eye, rose to writhe and boil.  They come as a cataract; the thunder is persistent like the fictitious friction one imagines on the approach to a tumult of falls.  It is just half an  hour now.  The waterfall is waiting round the next bend (or the bend after that).  The cold stream dreams of the basalt walls, and aches for the moss-eaten boulders down below.  When you stand close enough, the mist is more like rain.  And all of that energy is dissolving into the effervescent dare to act.

To be.  

To plunge.  

But I am under a spell.  Hell demon or well-meaning angel,  you caution me:  Don't cross the creek on the slippery log.,  Stay on the farm., and  Run when you hear sirens.  Each day is an agenda crowded with a thousand novel fears; you think of Everything.  Wake up.  What can I worry about this morning?  You devoured my confidence for breakfast and brought limitation into the world.  By lunch the hum of summer was behind everything--the humidity, the heat--like the low pulsing of a fuzz guitar before it possesses the world, flirting, fighting and fucking.     Turn down the volume or you'll go deaf.               

Meanwhile, there is a willful teen in each garage practicing guitar and the art of being popular.  The younger kids, the middle-schoolers, laugh and gabble playing sack in the street.  Their fathers make the mowers go and know (without hesitation) that their children are as high as they were, once, on some Sunday in August two decades ago.    Summer is noisy; it is claustrophobic, even for the sun.  The bikers unzip the main drag; black asphalt is tanned by the vibrating migraine of these machines.  Mix in the cliched song of cicadas,  the sizzling grills and the hissing transistor radios. 

It occurs to me:  Both my nervous breakdowns happened in Summer while those around me were basking in the enforced happiness of the season.  I tried to disguise it; but under the legendary sky--blue, unblinking--I went slowly, confidently, mad.  Today, I lay like a corpse in a hammock, eyes closed, reflecting.  I am motionless.  I am patient.  I can hear the television through the open window, the neighbor's radio, the cluster of wives convening in the cul-de-sac (gossip in equal portion with angst).  You think I am asleep but I am listening intently.  I am waiting to hear a forecast.

Take Care, for Example

I am under a spell.  Hell demon or well-meaning angel,  you caution me:  Don't cross the creek on the slippery log.,  Stay on the farm., and  Run when you hear sirens.  You devoured my confidence for breakfast and brought limitation into the world.  By lunch the hum of summer was behind everything--the humidity, the heat--like the low pulsing of a fuzz guitar before it possesses the world, flirting, fighting and fucking.  Meanwhile, there is a willful teen in each garage practicing guitar and the art of being popular.  Summer is noisy; it is claustrophobic, even for the sun.  The bikers unzip the main drag; black asphault is tanned by the vibrating migraine of these machines, mixed with the song of cicadas,  the sizzling grills and the hissing transistor radios.  I am waiting to hear a forecast.

Three Photographs: 1. The Winter's Gate

This photograph is bleached by the August sun.  When you show it to me, we are drinking lemonade, mid-afternoon on the lawn.  The blue glass is wet with condensation.  The tiny bubbles, the glass, the ice, the liquid itself capture the sunlight, holding it until...  my next drink, your next drink.  

The thermal  reactor's fire is refracted a hundred directions We are pouring retardant on the furnace of the day.  To distract me perhaps, you have pulled the glossy 4 x 6 print from your purse.  Now a couple of years old, this picture was taken during that desolate winter when--blizzard blowing in after blizzard blowing out--all the roads, shoveled and plowed, were turned into trenches cut out of the gratuitous snow for some unplanned campaign on the northern front. 

Familiar, this is a photograph of the gate at the end of the winding quarter mile of road that leads up out of the coulee from the ranch.  But the landscape is inscrutable.  Under the quilted down, the very contours of the land are changed.   This is a new world.  The weight of the snow, the cold like a cast around my left foot and ankle (after my black rubber boot was pulled off and is out there somewhere half buried in a drift anticipating spring), the unnerving arrival of dusk at 4:30 in the afternoon:  it is so easy in summer to forget the little horrors of winter.

And in my fingers, the glossy surface of the print suggests a coolness that fools us easily.  The heat is precarious and savage.  It spits and sizzles and manages to say my name (at least the hissing shhhhh) throughout the afternoon.  In my imagination, I take refuge there where I have cut an elaborate igloo into the drifts.  Tormented by the heat, the sun, the bugs that tug and sting and tickle, I want for nothing save for winter.

Nick of Time

Memory.  A decade on.

Summer felt somehow brighter, lighter.  Ignited by flowers, fireworks, the explosions of color, life on fire.  On fire with life.

There was the warm sun of our promiscuity.  The libertine hours.  The languid days.  The electric nights of Scotch and water.  The embers of endless cigarettes.  The way faces appear, vaguely, when you inhale.  An orange glow to trace your features, to suggest you to me, to draw me deeper.  Follow.

Follow the moon into morning.  The indigo of 3 AM.  The green of 4 AM, the pink of 5 AM.  Orange arrives without trumpets.  There will be no apocalypse, today.  Just the dawn and the devouring engines.  The heat of the day.

I assemble the pictures.  I guess at the people's names.  They have left me to make other lives, large lives lived large.

What has happened?  Time is a fleeting melody.  Recalled in the shower.  For no reason.  Erased by the towel that covers my face.  I lay naked on the bed thinking of nothing.  The summer air comes in the window.  A light wind.  A cautious lover.  I lay naked on the bed.  I slowly dry.  Only five notes retain.  They make no sense.  They are stripped of their context.

Like these pictures.  Like that summer.  The hum of the cicadas says nothing.  The fireflies are submerged in the blue ink of evening.  Like sparklers, they spell something when on wing.  Their mutant calligraphy will make sense, one day.  They are casting spells.  

An old friend.  More likely.  An acquaintance, tainted with a hopeless crush on me, stops me on the street.  This is not the town we lived in, then.  This is not the town I live in now.  I call this a coincidence.  His romantic mind prefers to call it serendipity.  But it is quickly clear that his life then and my life then depend on nothing shared.

At his request, we exchange phone numbers; we will never speak again.

I dare to say:  were you absolved of the expectations of others.  The connections controlled by rhythms and words, well-practiced over years, might be abandoned.  And you discover the limitations.  Yourself.  Your family.  Your spouse.  Your lover.  Your children.  A tired script of acceptable topics.  Predictable phrases.  Familiar lies. 

Take me back to summer.  The undulating forest floor.  The acid filling the pines with breath.  The lessons of your scouting days applied.  Before...

And after, just the photographs, just the names scrambled.  Just the sun.  The long arms of memory.  The long arms of summer. 

Switch

In July, swimming behind the mud dam constructed to retain water for the herd, he nearly drown, the tendrils of green rope growing from the pond's floor wrapping around his thighs and pulling him, down...he nearly drown, and that changed everything.  After coughing up the water he had swallowed, his eyes popped open and there was Milo kneeling over him.  Curious cows were in the vicinity, perhaps secretly cheering for a human's demise.  Market day was last Thursday and the Hereford mob around them well-remembered...   Sons and daughters going off to war.

Coming to, his mind clearing a little, it dawned on him that Milo must have had his lips locked to his.  He was grateful, and he was getting hard.  To hide it, he went back in the water, an intrepid act that Milo applauded as he shooed the cattle off of the narrow little beach.  Standing belly-button deep in the water, Milton's erection bobbed below the surface.  He was watching Milo naked stretched out on the muddy bank.  Dark thoughts...deep water...drowning again..

Summer Comes

In the backseat, center, of her father's silver convertible, Blair's head is leaned back against the red leather upholstery.  Her blue eyes are closed against the winds that have enveloped her.  Her chestnut hair is dancing around her head.  Tangling and untangling, the strands shimmer and flash.  The adolescent's penchant for gold has been caught in the shattered sunlight that arrives without fanfare through leaves and branches to land, oh so briefly, on our ingenue's face.  The shifts from shade to sun and back again, the patterns both in rhythm and representation that play on Blair's beguiling features, pulse on the screens of her lids.  The projections are hypnotizing, as is the rush and hush of passing cars, the buzz of the Lincoln's tires, the radio's broken rendition of World on a String straining to hold together from the front seat where Blair's parents are softly singing along with Sarah Vaughn.  It is 1972 and Summer has come.  Blair knows this because her father has unlocked the back garage and brought this behemoth back into the light, back onto the road, the river of cars...  And when she sits back like this, eyes closed, absorbing the sensations of this premier ride of the season, she can (or so it seems) remember every other year, every other summer coming, every other song on the easy listening channel that she has heard in intermittent waves of sun and wind.  The whole of this ritual is magical to Blair; it has the rare capability of combining a comfortable feeling of security with the exhilaration of being alive. 

The Perfect Sentence

The brambles of hair on my forearms have become
--in the humming summer sun--
like ripened flax
against the good brown earth of my skin.

And in the buzzing,
a July night's insect chorus,
one swears one can hear the engines --
of planes,
of jets,
of flying saucers spinning
yarns from other galaxies,
(yawns from this one)
knitting brows and browsing
possibility
on these antennae. 

The harvest of hairs,
shaved by the wind's warm breath,
stand erect again...

this shiver,
this hunger for the sun, this belief
or better this knowledge 
of the eternal as it burrows
beneath the crops and climbs the tops
of ancient trees
or drops
like waterfalls
down upon his prayerful knees,
wholly absorbed
in the sound,

his own breathing.

July 1974

Summer comes 

again.  She is a  bubble 

of big tits, blonde hair.  

She promises fun, 

dumb fun, simple, 

wet and sticky 

licks of cotton candy,

and the roar of the slip and slide.  

But she's a bitch, 

and she's a liar.

Then summer crumbled under the weight of the news.

Basement Room

The cellar was cool. Even in mid-summer, his room in the corner of the utilitarian basement was the only space in the old house that did not sweat, thin walls suffocating under some gaudy vinyl wallpaper. His walls--rippling concrete poured during prohibition--were moist from the earth not the sun; and the smell of the dirt permeated everything, sweetly, in soothing intoxication. Eleven years old (perhaps twelve), he laid naked in the darkness on top of the covers, his bare back differentiating the textures--firm/soft--of the quilt his grandmother had sewn. He was counting, holding back his breath and counting the seconds he was able to endure the darkness. Vulnerable, exposed, and self-conscious of a budding sensuality, he was confronting his greatest fear. 116,117,118 It was unnerving how tuned his ears would become, every sound amplified by the blackness, an impenetrable cave inhabited by a thousand little mischiefs, some ghoulish army. 142,143 The weight of his parents directly above him on the main floor, in their bed, was crushing, He was too conscious of them. 175,176,177 His hand stretched up to find the swag lamp dangling in the darkness above his head...181...just to make sure it was there. 188, 189 Reassured, his arm crumbled back to his side, his open palm falling on his belly. 200 To distract himself, he touched himself. His prepubescent penis was a torch ordered to keep vigil. In his hand, it expanded. The sounds retreated. His eyes closed, and the darkness withdrew.

There is

nothing

I would like

better
than

to dress-up

in a causal cosmology

to simplify the confusion
and mitigate the fear

a polka dot smock

that reveals constellations

casual

on a summer night

Solstice

Then the storm came,
suddenly: thunder, wind, rain stealing the
last breath of
summer and whispering rumors of fall;
he felt the way his life, the way the world was
changed forever.