Attend to All the Tales

© Jame T. McArdleBright. So many thoughts and moments gusted like wrappings on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a thousand passing trucks. 

(Those boxes of books, like steps. Like buildings.)

This was the time when he fell partway down an embankment and came to rest within a meter of a passing freight whose sparks on the tight steel curve burned new tattoos into his arms, and he crawled back to a semblance of a man and climbed his way up into a bright morning in some western city and started to walk. 

(Cascading guts, some kind of release.)

Girlfriend sported metal in her septum, navel, and clitoris; she raged about as much as she laughed, which made her more than tolerable. She left her nipples unmolested thanks to unexpected motherhood. Answer this. Is rank, dire poverty ever fine? It's awkward and wrong and it hurts. We lived a good half-lifetime raising kids inside a house that seemed like kids themselves had drawn it. Some rooms were sketched in plaster and lath. We could break them open and let our yearnings out, considered that sustainable.

(Staircase built from words. Librarian meets architect.)

She was a target of my new approach, my sense that facts rode shotgun to the rest of things. Slunk fast and slick beyond the fury boiled in femininity. Distilled. Clean water from myriad shed tears.

Which makes rage.

We clashed impossibly within the town she called her temporary home, me having drove (I having driven) a weeklong trail, blessed and uninformed, oblivious to the sirens, the insect scratch and clamber of pursuit, the unspooling horizon behind.

(Language itself will abandon us.)

Our unique wine released by spigots, dark oak barrels creaking in dusty dim cellars while bloodred gouts spooled into buckets made from human skin.

It's emerald. Agate. Hematite. Some geode. Maybe let's meet at noon, after the shaded herds are teased, before we climb the brightest trail again, orient ourselves to up again. The woman I know, the woman I knew, would never kowtow to any of this. She lifted herself in segments above the fray, arched her aggregated vertebrae, a silent arc assemblage like a dim makeshift rainbow made of female.

(Friendship. Why so hard to get right?)

In secret, against a desert wind that pushed her words back down her throat, she said this: "Pass me a margarita, Papi. I lust for and loathe Mexicana. My bleached American guts see nothing but banalities. Cholos, cholas. Stupid boys and girls. Stupid drama. Estúpida. That scar? That's where they cut the baby out of me. Tráfico? Sí. Please yourself and crave the Caribbean sprinter, that liquid effortless longshanks, my forgotten hope, mi esperanza."

(Climb and reach the top. And gasp.) 

Accept my sculpted facial hair and gray skull toques. This impotent clench. Where is death? She leered at me the best part of a decade ago, but nowhere since have I glimpsed her foolproof perversity. No doubt she waits. Tawny grasses shimmer, silos dance, a shifting flutter of fata morganas. Broad daylight. Hawk tails, catamounts, latrans, ragged busted fence lines. Shadow things lope and glimmer. Ranks of afternoon sunflowers wagging dreamlike faces hour upon hour. Time to branch out. Maggie runs the place up on the hill; please, let's join her. Tiny black flies. A donkey brays. Sunrays spread between the slats.

(Look. Listen. Attend to all the tales.) 

May you never misplace the romance of the world. The glorious weight of its glamour. The sheer ferocity of its ardor. May its plucked strings accompany your heart's arpeggio forever. 

Astride a Pale Horse

I see it coming, mostly peripheral, but not always. Sometimes it looms upfront and winks and laughs. Heartily, even. Yet more and more I clock it as it struts along an urban street or lurks at the lip of a wood. It's a tendril, a blur, a shimmer. Often a goodbye. But I know it's real; I'm no longer dreaming it. Last week I saw it fall from a branch and shower golden green as pollen, slide off a wing as bright clear drops onto dry gravel and be absorbed. Heard it late in the gathered dark as the scream of a bobcat. Fucking? Fighting? Is there a difference? 

It doesn't always win, although it usually does. It's coming, though, however slowly. 

See the gluey trail, the fallen tree, the intaken breath at the passing of a hawk. The blinking slicked-back head of the harbour seal. Spawning sockeye stymied by falls. Raven calls, airless, sacerdotal. "Rain falls in real time." A wild pony drumming the land frantic. Stories of injustice, desperate killers exonerated by science, by reason. The mining disaster. That last travesty. The next. 

In the glare of a burnt orange sundown, we might even run out of steam, of breath.

A slag heap slipped and dropped on a school. Friendship ruined by envy. Abandoned lovers gathering at the wharf, circled by urban coyotes (two syllables), the blare of the darkened barge gliding oleaginous in the thick contrarian ink of the river. Congealed fluids of everyone ever murdered. Molars claggy with rancid meat. Butterfly migrations. Stars astonished by their own birth. Mosquito nets. Craft slingshotted past so many lens flares for alien readings. The trafficked. The raped. The genocided. The blazoned sins tattooed by monsters on the conveyor-belt corpses of women. The lost. The compromised. Those who jumped so they wouldn't burn. Challengers. I swear. Dreamers obliterated by the shortcuts of others. I swear. There is nothing more terrible than imagination. I swear. Nothing. None of this. No matter. Swear. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Horse Latitudes

For nearly three hours, Cait sits in the chair in the silent room.

Once, she was the tiniest girl and no one even noticed her. And this is now not then, and she's still small, still quiet, and she is still mostly overlooked. 

Traffic on the highway hums its deadpan melody. A yellow warbler sings counterpoint.

I no longer love the wineglass, just its stem, Cait thinks, while the brassy chime of an antique clock peals someplace behind her. Like sound will overcome her reticence. Like love won't ever apply to her.

Cait in a dirty white dress with a faded flower print. Cait with hair lank as ditch weed.

Aunt Trinity left a good four hours ago, let Cait know of ways to break right through, killed two mosquitos in her room and said, "That's two less bloodsucking bitches y'all need to mind." 

Cait wonders if she sat like this before, so still, so quiet, so decorous and factual. Wonders if anyone ever sat so true.

For now, it's hard to think of someone other than Mr. Kosiński, his kindly face all gathered in the doorway, his Polish husk so sweet across the room, like storied hazelnut. He thought today was his day, when he would teach Cait how to be French, but he got it wrong, and who knows now what so many crisscrossed schedules bode?

These are her doldrums. Something meteorological. Won't anyone come help?

No. Of course not. How we—stripped, abandoned, supplementary—extricate ourselves from smudged insipid traps determines all the rest of this.

Cait sits in the astonished eye of a teacup storm on a silent chair, past noon. Her lashes curl and drip. Her lips purse and pale. She tries to frown, a pint-sized girl under a crushed daisy crown. 

Will any of this coalesce? What is this ache? Squall or squib? Does she wait for something in the sky to break?

A knock on her door. She never wants to answer. Blam. Blam. A second and a third. Cait sighs, then sighs again.

"Okay," she whispers, like she's lamenting a version of her own name. "Coming, I guess."

Beyond the screen a haloed queen, some gypsy harlequin badass goddess. A Bolan lyric layered onto robust bones. 

"Time to be alive again, pretty lady," the apparition says in a voice soft with dark confectionary. "Come."

The antique clock chimes every quarter hour and does so now, and will chime unheard one million, four hundred and one thousand, six hundred times more while quiet, overlooked Cait rides rails and road righting the myriad wrongs done to her, accompanied by a grinning ghost.