As
the bus turns I find I am not writing it down. Something akin to, “The
unimportance of this phone call is tremendous. We had a cabin, perhaps,
somewhere in the mountains. The terrain bubbly with grief and joy. The fairness
of it all, what happiness happened, it all jumps beyond me still. There it is if it
is we who should shoulder a bench to sit on and watch the rain, the scent of
which I can’t quite remember properly. Rock walls. Or was it logs? Just as all
things could be cabined, here there goes another vanishing hold on what only
live violets know-- or knew, as it were. My computer no longer knows what
time it is. My head deals in rock salt and vinegar, peppermint, and what names will come for my
firstborn. The weather is now under us.”
You
can blame me for the construction of unknowns. I build them out of bastard
parts. A sparse willingness curbs the bus, and we nod onward without moving. It
isn’t daylight that strips me of the power to care. I don’t know what it is. A
cause on loan from the bishop factory. Something cussed with a briny flavor.
Something clarified in the butter of justice. A weeping that isn’t slight.
A
skim of wheels, brought into the world blighted and sizzling, sings Glory Be
Thy Name, Tupperware. It is selfish to be flighty in stucco claims to infamy.
We are all holders of our own spirit, vessels of suspect carapace. A cheek to
turn. Over worn and grown thin. Here are my worst habits. Take them from me and
drown them with the rats. Foreign cucumbers grow their own tongues, you know,
and then they speak something almost like this: “V! Crack a LMNO for all the
peas everywhere. Don’t gush, tubas! I am braver than a whisk. Egg me and I’ll
scramble. Loot the weathervanes from all the rooftops. We can have nakedness
while we can’t have peace. Star-rock sea dragons sleep in the sidewalk. I called! I swear it! Don’t mope through my wailing. I’ve got it almost
all, and I would put it all almost everywhere. Equal equals we are in the rinse
of streetlamp light. Make my water with dirt-flavored lemonade. I don’t grow
like that anymore. See to it, then. See to it! Blasé!”
A
microbe picker stopped in on the way to Jerusalem and hitched a halo ride from
a bell-tower watcher. He owned up to wondering aloud, “Is there nothing really
left to misuse?” It briefly figured. Then it didn’t.
What
is love?
So,
this shorty pants guy comes into The Store. He’s bought off. I can tell. So,
he’s sailed too far in his gaseous explorations of what was happening on his
ceiling, or in it. He says to or with me, “It is pincers, man. Justification of
a grand for a dollar’s worth. I’m up to it in shrill mistakes. I’m down for it
all, anyway. Take my hat, please. Get it? Party pooping is the way. We all just
walk along with it, or on it, or in it. I got this brother-in-law, hell, he
deals in stamps and pork-and-beans logic. That’s a fucking shored milieu of
crap, if you get me on one of my sunnier days. He’s a horse shooter, really.
Puts it all out to pasture. Creeps most folks out. Shit. I stay close to
cordoned off about that stuff. And here I am blabbing on about it. Shit. I get
tired, and, well, the weather round here gets to me. The crust of the afternoon
sinking in. The blown smoke of it all. I’m dusty with rearranging my own deeds,
and deed-nots, really. Groggy and slow to rise, I get what’s cooking for the
most. Take what’s what and fall right up the stairs with it. Shit. That’s a
meddling that I’d rather go on without. And then I got me a nephew. Kid named
Linus, for Christ’s sake. And he bowls you over with his schemes. Hatching
stuff on a daily basis, that kid. Venus flytraps in his room and shit. He’s a
nut, that one. Hoping the flying saucers lift him out into his true home out
there in space, you know? That kind of shit. Well, I do what I can. Here’s
another truth for you.”
Slammed
with crowds. Everyone gets up at some point. Everyone leaves. The driver’s
reading yesterday’s paper. We are all coiling for one last bar-happy day.
Passengers don’t get breaks. It’s all spilled together and running away. A
music-box tilt of joy creaks through. We learn to stay awake by standing up
sometimes.
“The
garter snakes are loose in a battle for your legs. Pressure’s off. The keys are
snuck. Things are mostly what they seem. Coffee and sandwiches. Cold ham and
warm pickles. It’s what it ain’t, just pools and swings, and holidays in
Plymouth testing out a supersonic parachute.”
She
smiled at him and licked her lips, roving eyes concealed behind dark
sunglasses, lizard-skin purse lazily strung over a shoulder, while tilting her
head to the side and sticking out her chin.
“I
wouldn’t know.”
“I
know.”
A
twitchy scrunch to her zygomata, a tell of a sort, that gave credence to his
belief that she was just in it for kicks, just for a light thrill and then it’d
be done for good. She’d move on and away, not even a postcard between them
again. And it was something he knew but couldn’t admit, or wouldn’t, if there
were a difference. For now it was just holding onto what he could before it all
went and slipped away on him. Life was just a stupid routine to mold yourself
into. It was just a drag, something to be pulled along, and he’d had enough of
futilely struggling against it. Instead he messed around with her hair and ran
his hands through her clothes, tangling himself up in what he could of what
still remained his to hold.
(insert
happy beginning here, along with the hint of a sadder end)
Words
lumped together, oatmeal on the breath, and it’s trying not to rain. Nobody
believes in going outside anymore. It’s all beached. Stay in. Watch the weather
work itself out. You’ve got your own solar system, and it’s over there, too far
to get to know. Throw a tarp over it. Leave the rest to dreamy afternoons, and
let the planets go their own way. Fast, staying tuned to scoop selfless helpings,
turn it over and let the twine unravel all across the floor.
On
the stop, blur train travel into a broom-swept dust. Vacate the bus station bar
where the dropouts lounge around and stare at strangers. Given to orders, and
what we’ll never let on about. Just the sip that goes down sour, that quench
that never is. Only a costly wish-you-were-here-or-there, and then it is a
done’s last deal.
“I
remember you alright at the Fairmont Hotel. Your drinking of Scorpion Bowls was
a legend.”
“This
cross, well, it just ain’t doing the job no more. Not like it used to could.”
“We
had none of it, and were having it all.”
“My
love, I leave it hanging from the window for all the world to see.”
“It’s
all dirty dishes to me.”
The
poof of gray above those pinball eyes staring through the bars of her
living-room window as if she were in jail. The TV’s blaring behind her. A
skuzzy lilt to her features. A roach-like ambivalence. A tender touch of woe
escaping between the bars of her self-made jail. The children going by are
unmistakably happier than any luck she’s ever known. She stares and stares as
day folds into night. There is nothing else to do.
The
fog’s thick teeth in all this, gnawing on the world’s woodwork, hiding the
degenerates and the bums who stalk the night with ragged ideals and a hankering
for trouble. Increasingly on the dole, checking out all the cashiers sashaying
through it with a few after-work drinks in their step, hanging their hat on a
tree branch, getting decorous with their dreams and lost-cause ambition. It
sparks a light from a not so steady retreat, and the heavy wet slops through
everybody’s hair.
The
sound of tires skimming over a wet spot in the road is bacon’s frying-pan
sizzle. I am not writing this down. The bus loses its trolley poles. There is a
collective groan from within. The driver swings open the clear plastic door
that separates him from the passengers, puts on a yellow safety vest and thick
gloves, and climbs down the front steps to go out and put the poles back on.
There is nothing to do but wait. Behind us the other bus comes up, and then
passes us, streaking by with a buzz and a whirr, rattling away on up ahead.
Much clanging and clattering and banging around can be heard, as the driver
pulls on heavy ropes attached to the poles, trying to realign the slots in the
ends with the cords above. He seems a bit like a puppeteer, artfully toying
with the slackened bight of rope in his hands, making the poles dance and swing
back to the lines. Finally, the lights in the bus come back on and the engine
springs back to life, and a slight sigh of relief comes whispering out of the
passengers as the driver hops back on board. Motion comes again, and we are
off. I write nothing.
There
is no blunder that’s blurring what’s wrong with hellos. Batter down. It’ll
prove little or insistent in the description of two human beings scurrying
towards distance. All that not said, get loose or stay put.
A
little welt of euphoria swelling up in a carved-out nook in the back of your
brain. “Tell the neighbors we’re rigging our house for a flying prize. I have
acquired a book of knots, maybe.” Something of that nature. Or when the cage of
your emotional makeup is no longer enough to contain the looks she’s giving. A
punch to her eyes that swipes chicory notes from tame decisions. It yaps its
own yelling. If you can imagine it then it won’t ever happen. Such is the stuff
of negating positive effects in dream logic, or the vices of diversion, or
unwilling hallucinatory madcaps of painting the dullest of pictures bright. It
is contrary to every indication of real-time wakefulness to be drawn ineptly
into the mushy confines of imaginings. At least that’s what the footsloggers
are spelling out with their shore-leave spending.
The
morning’s rushed with blame. She takes her time with sugaring. She winks when
it is necessary, softer and sipped out of coffee. Rising where it is not
funneled to worse or better off things. She’d sweep a kiss to the stars and
sponge dry a licked stamp if that’d matter to you. A certain crooked tilt to
her closed mouth, her lips swim synchronized. The blowsy trees can’t give away
her shape. Only the matters that matter form the frieze of her gestures. She’d
hint, “A lanyard for your fishhooks,” but never put it aloud.
“If
we had kids.”
“Then.”
“No.
If.”
“Then
we’d pray for something. Then what? Love?”
“Somewhere.
Then. Maybe.”
The
spark and wheeze of hydraulics, the spinning chortle of thrust, and then
there is the silence of stoplights. There is nothing so quiet as being on an
idling electric bus. If nobody on the bus is making any noise, there is no
sound, and the moment can be almost beatific in its purity.
And
then comes trouble? Maybe just a Great Curassow greeting newcomers into old
haunts, divvying up the feed best it can. A sea dragon carved into a shedding
eucalyptus trunk with a butcher knife. It is awful to be constantly aware of
the presence of mosquitoes. Keep you up until morning’s first. Generic rights
to triviality lie mortified in suspense for the duration of time-lapse
lives.
Put
a photograph of the moon in your back pocket. Keep a hydrangea in your
buttonhole. Make flour go sooty with cocoa powder. Peel a tomato. Seek honor in
the beaks of giant crows gliding close to the beach sand. Be hostile and happy.
Love will smuggle itself beneath the doormat.
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