Promise
that you’ll make wishes on the grain elevators that blow by off the highway as
it screams along with me. Give the pan to a caboose or two, and the faces of
geniuses camel up the worst of it, then the splatter bugs get their fate
decided for them by wind and glass. Gone by in the giving that graces the
presented gallop of information, like the way a horse gets when it whips full
of beans, and you’ve got those catalpa tress of course, maybe lining a wide
boulevard, or it could be just sand on the dashboard, and the cold shivering
foetus of it all making irreverent speeches in platform shoes tooling alongside
burnished triumphs of amphibian-breathed holiness, and all of this rudimentary
gall-giving crater-happy silent treatment doesn’t do a burp of good among
wardens and stalled vehicles. But getting the side view is necessary. In fact,
speaking to Luddites with pin-tail souls is pergola-watching at its finest.
After you retreat. The gaping Sunday-faced marrying along bloodlines, and the
shoulders sag and the armpits drip and the lint sticks to chewed gum in breast
pockets and flints and is flicked away, those who do such things, we make the
dandiest little greeting cards, well, those who worrying are we-ing and
whoopee-ing under the hard-packed dirt of another day to have to suffer
through, those are plenty and they are left to themselves in keeping pennies
and playing keep away with a box of doughnuts. “Come on over and get your
reward,” sing the chariot racers, but there’s nobody to listen. Cascading past
the ruins of the highway’s scarry past, sucking up all the sugar cubes, making
speeches, getting tired of window-looking, fiddling around with a pocket book
and scotching a few canceled checks, and the wind plays tricks on the stereo
while a passel of july-bugs shadows by. Cordial, and willing at any cost, to
bemoan the youthier currents of any suitable event, the boss stays put and
paints murals on the ceilings of outhouses. He trims the gristle from the
marrow of what you used to be, and then tells you to put a lid on it. Keeping
the bulge and the glitter alive, manila-envelope skin and telegrams from outer
space, knowing that the end of man is to know, or just passing the afternoon
going north-east out of the city. People pray for their own demise at certain
times of the year, when the weather won’t stop playing games with their
god-fearing spirits, and that great big eye slowing them down from upstairs
somewhere. Tilling the backrooms for spare gold coins, we sift through what’s
left and bag the rest. Love’s tablecloth stays stained with who you are in my
dreams, nothing too dramatic, not like weaving in traffic, not like tossing
peanuts in a panhandler’s palm. More like getting in on the joke, swanky and
loose in the tongue, sporting a boiled shirt, cussing high and low and not
upset at all. And the commissaries are streaking down the line, holding off
colds, playing spoons with a few shirtless dweebs, and patches of chokeberry
and meadowsweets and photinia rub the hillsides with splotchy dashed color
while you run errands and play fetch with ballots and cure your own shyness
with watery ebullient cheers like hey-ho-let’s-go stuff. Sure. Run a hay-wagon
through it and take off all your clothes. Go pantomiming the great potato,
tousled hair crinkled and matted down with perspiration over his forehead, the
pudgy face, cagey, the trenches in his eyes, the seven-fifty seersucker that’s
long in the pants with the cuffs crumpling down over high black shoes, the
tissue-papered tie, imbibing orange soda with two straws at once. But assuming
the nicest of things about all involved you can lead a cemetery tour group to
flat-out indecent or just drowned decisions, and you with your taffy hair,
you’ve got to lead a duck, even with famished cheeks and an unfinished smile
treading water on your swimming-pool face. So, please do not rest in peace or
chaos, like when you’re reaping profound things from a private conversation,
and then somebody else walks in the room and it’s like everything is dead and
you can’t talk anymore. Wonder comes in bunches and blooms like crepe myrtle.
You leave it at smokestacks. You leave it at love-vine clambering up out of the
weeds, to those of the wool-hat and cockle-burr variety casting their lot with
the jumping-jack-flashers. You leave it at b-b-b-b-as-tuds with spit flying and
screechy tires rubbering the dirt shoulder off the high shining bright slab. A
gun holstered like a tumor under an arm. Tamarisk and hobo décor strangling the
gaps between here and way way way way over there. Nothing more to keep you brightly
lit. Make sure you count the telephones poles as they spool by fishing for
compliments, stringing along the race of the wires, as your eyes dance bumpy
and troubled, a shade pulled down over your features by an unknown hand that no
matter what you’ll never get to know, not the way you could’ve, once, long ago,
before the cold-glove grip of the past caught up and strangled the guts from
you. As you were. Taps plays. Quiet prevails. Your heart breaks over and over
again. Blaming the deviant nature of one on the whole’s nurturing. And you run
like a cat escaped from a sack, and you part ways with mahogany wainscoting and
the massive stonework of the cellarage, and you crowbar your way back into the
wreck of your past. Don’t answer the phone for a stretch. Guess what’s for
dessert. Leave your name and number on a velvet jacket’s cuff. Let’s shake the
dust off our inner-selves and gussy up the fraternities of now for mud-shack
parties that just might never end. Hopelessly redeemed. You get weary making
plans. Divorced from the higher things in life, handling it all too well, after
the well’s dry and the moon’s gone, and we’re waking up in different beds. The
coffee’s taking too long to work, and nothing’s resolving on its own. Sundown’s
got its own mess to clean up, or what’ll do until the mess arrives, but then
we’ve still got the awful responsibility of time, on our side and against us
too, with the highway lowing off scrubbed and matted, sounding out distance
into more distance.
And
in the slow muscle of the evening foaming with a greasy, slush-like moan there
would be the cries of strays and the hee-haw squawk of seagulls, and near the
church-bell melody of stoops cluttered with posy and feline purrs and
mechanical trinkets that hum and bump and rattle, and the swinging of doors;
and now, because you’ve kidded the hotel chippies long enough, you take the
charm of hand-holding clowns, you set the saucepan away for good, you toss
aside filmy gowns and the punched-through spackle of deteriorating drywall. A purpling
mass of sky descends, or seems to, as everything is close and all around. The
marsh sings, half repulsed by the flash of car headlights, half unaware of even
itself. People drive on and over things--the thin, crackly crust of the
present--with vowels that clack like spoons.
He
was a flypaper-souled guy, and his ambitions lent towards card tricks and
needle beer. Nothing made sense about him. He’s the kind of guy who’d instantly
make comradely raillery turn to dour subjectivity. Skin rough and worn on his
tooled and tan face, fresh bloody crust in nick-cuts from shaving peppered here
and there on the sag of his cheeks, gumball-blue eyes always squinting, peering
circumspectly at whatever happened to be passing their way. A huff and a
spleenish groan. A self-serving public servant. Nothing but poly-ticks.
The backyards with their patchwork
fences of chicken wire, mesh hexagons rusty and sagging in places, the grass
sopped with rain, muddy puddles pocking humps and clumped weed-flowers, and
their chimneys so lonely, cobbley, smoking above tin or sheet-metal roofs where
the rain patters and thumps and makes those below sink into a somnolence, an
almost-trance that keeps the yawns coming and the coffee brewing all day, and
then there’s time for to listen to the train whistles as those hunkering gray
beasts smoke and screech into the station to remind all that life is motion,
even when it’s being still, even on a late rainy afternoon while the moths are
still toying with the idea of playing hover over the flicker of yellow bulb
light, even when this here train is grumbling and grinding to a halt, the
people inside just shadows, just figurines, just chattel awaiting another
destination in an endless line of destinations, none of which will, as they
never should be, the end. A rumble stirs through the dining car, dishes and
wine glasses awkwardly cavorting on tremored tops of tables. Windows frame
rectangles of the forlorn landscape. A water tower leans gawky over rows of
corn. Klee-klee-klee whines from a tidings of American Kestrels. Squares of
fallow farmland checker the flat stark terrain, the bland similarity of
monotonous pastures, a place where nothing can hide, where nothing can be
obscure, and the sun sets fire, and the sky’s so big it’s like it just wraps
around everything and makes you dizzy and lost in it. The porches are warped
and creaky and covered with wind-blown dirt. A man chewing on a pipe pauses for
a moment, sets down his newspaper, sits up in his rocker, and stares at the
ruddy and scaly flesh of the world, his drifting mind now settling on
something, something that curtains his sight’s movie screen, something that
bread-and-roses his instincts, and he might even chance to catch wind of
dogwood and redbud, or part ways with dreaming Chickamaugas and Chattanoogas in
an attempt at expiation, short-lived as it may be, for the horded company of
his past. The skyline trembles.
In
a wild, electric way her hair, cut off at that crazy length, very black and
choppy, by itself could make you fall in love with her at a glance. Something
disinterested strolled around in her eyes, which were glassy and moon-like, and
which would sparkle at you but only if it was necessary. Being close to her was
an occupational hazard, though one you’d risk every time, as the summer
dwindled and the lawns faded to a burnt sienna and cow smell crept in to chase
away the cedar and pine. There were certain times when that graceful turn of
her hips, her luxuriant and languorous stride, the way she stood on tiptoe to
spoon sugar into the coffee or playfully shadowboxed with your palms, were
enough to make you stick around. So, then you step off the train and it’s cold,
a biting cold that pinches and slaps at your face. You weren’t made for weather
like this. The gravel scrunches like dry Quaker Oats as you step away from the
platform. The houses clap and board up your dreams. A shiver warms beneath the
pavement, and you carry your bags to the terminal bar where you’ll sit and
smoke cigarette after cigarette and drink beer after beer until they
oh-so-politely ask you to leave with the utmost brevity and class, and you’ll
go, quietly, without causing a ruckus, lugging along ghosts in gray suits with
plastic daffodils sleeping in their lapels, dragging your feet, on your way home.
The
road sweeps, tilted and crumbling, and mulls in a wash of moonlight. Rabbits
and prairie dogs mingle and dart and artfully dodge drool-hungry wolves out in
the chaparral’s dark. Rounding bends is a serious high-risk situation, but it’s
got to be done, without the aid of streetlights, so you do it, matching wits
with the Doghobble and Barberries and Corkwood and Hollyleaf Buckthorn and
Smoketree invading your mind’s garden. For a minute there, as the horizon
marbles and the guardrail corkscrews and culverts clunk underneath making your
head rattle like a clogged Hoover, you start to think you’re drowning, but then
you realize it’s just the hogwash of terrible gutless remorse suffocating and
botching up your reason from clear-headed to sappy wilted-lettuce numb. There’s
a sneeze’s moment where you know just what needs doing and just how it will be
done. You walk along the side, mud clinging to your boots, scratched by thorns
and wiry branches, socks brambled, eyes peeled for headlights, ears wary of engine
sounds, treading along careful and hurried, carrying yourself like a carton of
eggs, awe-struck, an iota of kindness still hell-or-highwatering down your
swallows, slicing at the mean-stitched blimp of what it currently means for you
at this moment to be alive.
You’re
the rattletrap scream slapped on the smudge-slick walls, like murals murked
with a copper glaze, as the horizon’s brushed with a mirage of distant painted
mountains, some flat-topped and rubbed raw, the clay and creosote terrain like
a valley on mars, bent crosses of ancient telephone-pole shadows on it and the
scrub bush patchy in places on the streaks of flatland punctuated by these tiny
hillocks of grassy yellows and burnt red, faces in the rubble of a thousand
jagged rocks jutting out like rusty scars, and above giant stationary swaths of
cloud hanging like discarded moth-eaten sheets, lonely semis plugging along on
invisible roads in the midst of nothing, and the telephone wires racing along,
and the sudden blur of a passing train in the shadow of yours, and then that
slight slam and whisk and swoosh of it as you charge through the desert on a
track in the middle of nothing.
Through
the dry-raindrop stained glass the squatting mounds of tree-laden hills roll,
and the low-lying wiry stems of future tumbleweeds flail in the hunch of a
light breeze. Mustard blurs and blowsy greens scuffle for breath in an
instant’s spotty sea of blue-green. The Colorado river, lazy and sparkling, meanders
away through the ghosts of boxcars and rocky debris. Windswept gullies striped
from blood-red to roseate. The hitched pull of a turn. The gentle rocking gone
to a thrust and yawing rumble of a switchback, and the tracks screech and whine
as the whistle howls all’s well through a rain-splashed night.
A thrashing well past midnight as the
bunk slips and lunges, as you’re bumped and shook out of dreams to a coffin-low
ceiling and gurney-like straps hemming you in. Spun and dazedly muddied into fits
of half-turns and pillow-squashed horror, you balance your sanity on a
burnt-out match tip. A constant turn that beckons your body close to the
plastic cabin partition, and then a sweeping roar buried deep within the
confines of night’s massive black curls. A crunched tilt, weary and dolorous,
squints on borrowed sightlines, and you are sweaty and lost in a whirl’s list
and bob. Staring tiredly into a blankness that borrows stars from your eyes and
makes everything spin, you wind and unwind at once that spool of your life’s
thread, and somewhere behind the thick pulled curtains the moon’s out there
harvesting the sky’s leftovers, and you wish for rest and roll over, head still
hung with bluebells and cedars and the golden sparkles of aspen leaves on the river.
Rushing
through forests on a dining car. Coffee cups jackhammering their saucers,
silverware jostled from napkin to tablecloth, the puttering whine of it all:
that high-pitched howling train whistle, the tracks’ metallic silver screech
and bumpy plaints, and the discordant smattering of about two dozen
getting-to-know-you conversations. A tacky glint of a seriousness that welds
smiles into place, and you’re off and on to a lush sprint through treetops and
gaping boulders in the hillside: a verdurous landscape littered with crackled
red-yellow-orange leaves and the thick webs of a thousand cypress and cedar
branches huddled and spread in massive bunches all the way up and down
impossible-to-believe valleys and river-cut gorges. Moods waning gibbous in a
felled tree’s former shade, and you’re chalking it all up to misery’s biding
time in the duality of perspective’s constant flash and flurry, passing, always
passing, always just ahead and a tad behind. Wider strains of being wise smile
backwards while a protective coat of idiocy covers what’s left of the surface.
The snack bar’s open late. Somewhere kindly beyond any cocktail you’ve ever
known lies the path of most likely resistance. You are under a table. Hot dogs
are served with mayonnaise and avocado. A few passengers have been thrown out
an emergency exit marked For Conductor’s Use Only. There are kites tangled in
the ceiling lights. You have become rather obsolete.
Vast
farmland stretches skimming by, tracts of light trapped and warped in sloped
distance pull me into some very serious contemplation over my life, where it’s
going, and to whom I am going to attach it. My jokes on loan for the night to
an upstart ribbon salesman, reappearing loyal and jumpy to the rest of the
at-hand mourners. To just say things to fall out of love over and over, to just
hold rust-steady for making a jerky start at wildness. Hankering on to other
Wyomings, I’m sold long, insufficiently interested in what others have got to
say. Appended and lunky, very lorded over and sometimes serious. A honked horn
of guilt stabbed blind in a rather ornery hurry that, let’s say, is making do.
Let’s just say.
Last
time around everything was sloped. Vanishing acted its part. The men were less
wise than they should’ve been. The yard sales lost their feathers. If the
thread of steamed passiveness let on anything but the parts it never played, if
the yearn of doubt overstayed its wellness, then a shallower cup might follow
what’s left of now’s substance. Around this time or next I’ll be shoveling
loose gravel from my smile onto somebody else’s road.
Cramped
quarters, narrow halls, stooped shoulders and a sailor’s mouth, fingerprint
smudges on the window. Stirred and settled. The lights flicker. Nobody’s
comfortable. A staticky voice crackles over the ceiling speakers: “Is it afar?
Bought slowly. In chance per the leaving rate. You had us. It was wrapped in
clover and bacon. There’s a cuss word I can’t guess. It’s putting up with. It’s
jotting up too. We don’t dump coffee all over anything, except ourselves.
Stronger still. Oil slicks what remains. Try to pass the rolls. We’ve got all
the jelly in the world at our disposal. Bumped and brambled to stink alone. It
is not beautiful.”
Posts
