Your innocent violence
goes through me like water.
I watch you in the tidal pools
of sun; it lets me see
the boil of photons
in the simple orange patch,
because your curt eyes do.
You show such patience
with me. I’m stupid to my own
violence, everywhere, which
you see, nakedly. My violent
innocence opening the can
like a funny Eucharist
while you wait before your shadow.
Trees make an anachronistic night.
The children are catching fireflies
for clear jars that wait on picnic tables.
They learn each closed hand is a cage.
The adults sit at the tables and watch
the jars fill up with bioluminescence.
It will add such a small light to their faces.
Some of them anachronistically smoke,
anachronistically talk. The silence between
the children moving off into shadows
and leaves lengthens. The silence grows
in the closed fists which glow
as the children race barefoot to deposit
more light in the glass banks of jars.
Their parents feel their faces disappearing
until they pick up the collected light
of the jars and hold them close to their lips.
The woman married to a gambler
watches her house turn to moonlight.
Her children start to levitate on the way to school
like helium balloons. She must grab them
by the feet and pull them down from the sky.
Her husband is turning into a horse,
betting on himself. She must somehow ride him
back into the house but he gallops wildly away
across fields of moonlight and wildflowers
while she screams. The time has come
to ride him off the cliff. She leaps off him
just in time as he enters the phosphorus waves
hissing below. She is left with only a postage stamp
and silence. She writes her mother who lets the silence
rest on her kitchen table for seven years.
“Help, somebody for the love of God, help me! Help us! Help me and my babies!”
It was a familiar scream from the backyard of my next door neighbor. A few of her children were just running around in that backyard playing tag, obliviously having fun. But certain of their siblings had climbed high in the backyard’s trees and had expressions of sheer terror as they gesticulated wildly with their scrawny arms, occasionally pointing downward at invisible terrors on the ground. An eight-year-old had just barricaded himself inside the shed too. We could call still hear his wails through the plywood walls as the poor kid probably pissed himself in fear. Damn credit card companies.
“They’re not real, Mrs. Morrow,” I intoned blandly…and I’m afraid without much empathy. I was just taking the trash out to the cans in the alley and didn’t really want to partake of the drama again today. She had velociraptors. Everybody in the neighborhood knew. We all knew her story. She had defaulted on a major credit card.
She should have read the small print about the new debt collection tactics. This latest generation of holographs employed by debt collection agencies could be incredibly convincing. And the drones that projected them were so small now, it was about impossible to find them and shoot them down. Anyway, if you did, that would no doubt be another charge, financial as well as criminal. That was somebody’s company’s property.
I could just make out the silhouettes of the agile predatory dinosaurs hunting in a pack as I looked over at her yard. But they looked ghostly from here. Not so scary. I guess it was the angle. I suppose they were convincing enough to some of the children. And even to their mother, apparently, as she was still screaming and shedding the usual tears now at her back door. The third party vendors could make these things quite terrifying. I wondered for a moment how they could sleep at night, the creatives who lent their talents to this horrible form of dunning. And we used to think annoying phone calls from debt collectors during our dinner hour were hell.
“You’re just making the children believe they’re real with your behavior, Lucy. Don’t give VISA the satisfaction.” I tried to remonstrate. But Lucy wasn’t having it. She was in full meltdown mode.
“Sarah and Andrew have the right idea.” The children looked up when I mentioned their names. “Just go on about your day. I saw your roses in the front yard are looking prizeworthy. Why not go feed them some bone meal?”
But apparently Lucy was too busy worrying her children were going to end up bone meal to think of her roses and their appetites. That poor superstitious woman.
Truth be told, I was just doing the obligatory thirty seconds or so of facile neighborliness to make it back out of her eyeshot and earshot. I mean, what a pill. Of course, the raptors would be waiting in her front yard too. I knew that. Until she paid the bill in full. Or at least arranged a payment plan. But I had to say something to not appear as insensitive as I actually was.
Trust me, I know all about these things. As I hurried back from my mission to the trash cans, I saw them staring out at me from within my hedgerow. No, not velociraptors. Mine were these sorts of humanoid bee creatures. They stood on two legs and actually wore clothing. They buzzed a language that was almost human at me. They did their job and totally creeped me out. I had been derelict on paying my school taxes the past two years.
I noticed faces of dead family members had started to appear on my bee stalkers recently as they stood in the bushes on my property or suddenly lurched out at me from a corner of my house. I had actually filed a complaint over that. But the collection agencies insisted that was a coincidence and that all faces are randomly generated. Yeah, right. I’m sure these dirtballs do their research to really maximize the nastiness.
They weren’t allowed to operate within your domicile, thank Zeus, and anyway that would require a drone incursion. But the Republicans had put through just absolutely draconian leglislation favoring these shitbag bill collectors. They’re clearly using terrorist tactics and should be charged, but good luck with that. So many kids and even adults are in therapy now over these walking nightmares. Talk about predatory capitalism.
As I reached my front porch I waved to Jim, poor deadbeat Jim, walking down the steep hill he would have to climb in a half hour with his smoker’s lungs. He was on the way to get his two packs of Newports.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down!” he rasped at me. He must have seen me staring with horror into my bushes as I came up the side of my house. I felt a little embarrassed that he had probably seen my freakout.
“I won’t. You either,” I laughed as I headed into my house.
I watched the old man continue down the hill, stubbornly not looking down at the asphalt he walked on, where a giant hole into hell yawned open and countless burning souls screamed up at Jim, I guess reminding him that the I.R.S. never forgets. And to pay his damn bill.
The fingernails on a stone windowsill,
the things we say to each other in dreams.
Not you, not me. The stone sill is slate-.still,
facing the city not a city now.
Slate dreams in a one room schoolhouse
where no one will return but moonlight
and the things moonlight says
in its voice of buried chalk.
Maybe I was a pillar of salt
that got up and walked that night
after you said those things to me
in a dream, not really you,
not really me, just gelid forms of light
under my eyelids. But it hurt
enough to believe that conversation
in a dream. Dreams are recipes.
So I traipsed across the moonlight
on the sidewalk in real shoes.
I was like a suit that left a closet
on its own. A dark parade of one into town
that is no town then, but a park bench
and some mail boxes nobody touches
anymore. Night birds watched me
go home just before they did.
Doubtless, they talk to themselves too,
and dream, and fly in the aftermath
of dreams. They go home and grow
more solitary before they disappear.
Ginny was so excited to be visiting her country cousins that summer. Even better, she would be doing it unsupervised for the first time. Her parents agreed she had reached that magical age to be trusted, thirteen years old, so a two week visit was set up through the family’s electronic grapevine.
The child looked forward to the simple country pleasures like fishing in the small stream that bisected her uncle’s property, chasing rabbits and gathering a bouquet of wildflowers to be arranged in a styrofoam cup she would place on her nightstand in the guest room.
On the day of her arrival, her parents spent only a few minutes visiting with uncle and auntie. There was, allegedly, a doctor’s office to be visited within a narrow window of time. Ginny had her doubts, since she had known for quite some time that both her parents had mastered the easily-learned art of lying for convenience. “Doctor’s office” would often mean “fine restaurant.” But she didn’t really care if her parents dropped her off with the alacrity of a delivery man depositing the sacks of a grocery order on the front stoop of a house. Quite frankly, her parents bored her terribly. Soon she saw her mother’s delicate hand floating outside the passenger side window of the car, waving goodbye as the shiny green vehicle headed back down the country road in search of the highway. She was perfectly fine with that. In fact, she was exhilarated with the promise of country freedom.
Ginny remembered then the queerness of uncle and auntie. They would doubtless tell her NEVER to go “over the blue hill.” In the past, she had always listened to them and avoided that pretty hill in the distance that was always the first thing you saw when you looked towards the nearby mountain. It was indeed very, very blue. And anyway, Suzie and Russell would doubtless not let her head that direction. She found the near-terror that would bubble up to the surface of her younger cousins anytime she would suggest a conspiracy to investigate what was actually on the other side of that hill to be rather funny. It was somewhat bumpkin-ish to her mind. When she was younger, she had shared in their fear simply through the superstition to which her child-mind was naturally given (as most children’s minds are). Now, a budding rationalist, she thought the whole warning ridiculous. What could it possibly be, anyway, that was so threatening? An old well that hadn’t been sealed? A few scrawny coyotes that would run away if she clapped her hands together hard? Perhaps auntie had once seen a venomous snake there half a lifetime ago?
It was on a Thursday morning when she had risen before her cousins that she decided to see for herself. Looking back at uncle’s and auntie’s dark house, she figured she could reach the thing in under ten minutes, take a quick peek around and then make it back before anyone even knew of her terrible trespassing (if that’s what it even was).
As she got closer to the blue hill, she saw it was covered in bluebells. “How pretty,” she thought blandly. And certainly auspicious. As she climbed the rather large mound, she wondered if perhaps some native tribe had erected the thing. It did feel ancient, different….
She drew up close to the top of the blue hill after a short climb in which she never really lost her footing or even had to grab onto the earth to study herself. She took a deep breath as she approached the summit and could barely wait to see what she had wondered about for several years now. And there it was…The Other Side…absolutely nothing. Empty fields continued on the other side of the mound, just as boring as the one she had just crossed to reach the blue hill. But, for good measure, she descended the other side of the hill, which was not covered in flowers but simply reddish rocks.
“Well, so much for dragons or restless natives,” Ginny chuckled to herself. And then she went running with her rather long legs back up the large hill to reach the blue side again. Down she went through the bluebells and racing she went back to her uncle’s house which stood in such solitude, she realized now, seeing it from this distance.
As the girl approached the house, she felt something was different. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. And then she noticed where the sun was in the sky. It was to the west now, far to the west and descending. How could it be evening, when she had just awakened early in the morning? But she could hear the chatter of her aunt and her uncle, and her cousins, around the dinner table. And it was comforting. She reached the screen door in a tizzy and pulled it open to see everyone look up at her from their seats around the dinner table. They all looked up at her in horror.
Then Ginny saw there was actually a fifth person seated at the dinner table looking up at her in horror. And that was herself.
She screamed, “I’m sorry!” She wasn’t quite sure why she was apologizing. But their faces…that fear. They were all scattering now and her younger cousins were both crying. Suzie was actually hanging onto the skirt of Aunt Rae. Russell kept pointing at her in the doorway and trying to say something, but it was clear he needed his inhaler as he was hyperventilating something terrible now.
Then she saw why her uncle had disappeared. He was back from his bedroom in under a minute and aiming a shotgun at her from across the dining room. She screamed again as she jumped off the porch and ran back to the field behind her. Ginny heard the shotgun blast behind her, but she had the impression her uncle had shot it into the sky as a warning. She didn’t want to risk turning around to see if he was aiming at her. The survival instinct in her knew to keep running. She ran back towards the blue hill.
When she finally reached it in half the time it had taken her that very morning, she began her scrambling ascent through the bluebells. When she reached the summit, she turned to look back at the house. They were all there, the entire family that had been there last night, minus her, plus her, looking towards the blue hill. And then she went over the blue hill and down the other side. And she knew not to go back there, never to go back again.
I stay away from light.
I stay away from meaning.
I is not the I.
I am like the rain to the rain, or like language
to language, when we are not there.
The problem is the lighthouse.
The lighthouse is not lit, most of the time.
I want to be those waves crashing in the postcard
where the lighthouse itself is threatened, the card
which is so very old everyone who ever touched it,
except for me, is dead.
The writing on the back of the card is another language
and I decipher it slowly when I read it,
then I rest like ashes.
The waves in the postcard are frozen at the moment
humans believe in most, because
it is the most obviously threatening.
But look at the grass blowing at your feet.
The soft green hunger of that.
I stay until you are an ocean again.
Sometimes my heart is a sun
Sometimes it is a rock
I go into a room and find the sun opening
It exists to see the drawings of children hung in school windows
They are not there long enough for their colors to fade
And then I read about the death of Max Jacob
How he reached out to all his friends with the fingers of his heart
Trying to save his sister from Auschwitz
And he was told by his important friends
We cannot save an unimportant person; however, if it was you…
And then the police come for him
He reaches out to all his important friends with the fingers of his heart
Writing a letter with the fingers of his heart reaching
And they tell him reality is closing about them like a nun
Their hearts are not stones not suns but parcels of reality
The strong young arms take him to Drancy where he tries to amuse others
on the way to the gas chamber where his sister has gone before
Only he never knows. knowing is not a sun
Knowing is a moon
It changes shape in your hearts
It rises and sets
And he dies in the penultimate place
Telling horoscopes and raving about Jesus
And his ask lingers in the minds of his friends
When he is ashes that hold the shape of whatever vessel
Cares to hold them
And they say “poor Max” but hold a form of pity
That is not him and not them and not a sun
Oh, all the wild trees
that grow the most ridiculous branches
and serve no birds
and serve no fruit,
Sorry is one of these.
FICTIONESE