***

I climb out of the back seat, and they are momentarily awkward, as if searching for the right words for a farewell. In the end they find them.

“Get the fuck out of here, Geronimo. We see you again and it’s over for you.”

“It’s already over, and you don’t know my name, wašíču.”

They stare, both of them, eyes near icy as the lung-scouring air, then get back in and punctuate the conversation with the acrid screech of rubber. 

I’m alone and relieved and instantly frozen. 

I see a white buffalo hidden in the spill of stars on night’s great canvas, but I might be delirious. The red and blue of the only other lights blink off as they recede the way we came, freight delivered and already forgot, back toward a mirage of warmth amid vast dormant sheets of wheat. 

There is no loneliness greater than this. Discarded on a border no one can see, either with eyes or the spotlight of the past, under cold that makes the hairs crackle inside your nose and can fuse your eyelids shut with your frozen tears.

My home to the east is forbidden to me now, so I turn and gaze west, at cognate stretches of dim grassland under a black felt dome sprayed by diamonds. The pewter grey of the highway an arrow shaft pointing to an unknown country.

In my dreams, vivid as you could wish, I stumble on a remote home and the people take me in. They are Cree, Ojibwe, my own people, and they cleanse me with sage and sweetgrass and as we talk softly around a hearth fire a great warrior appears in the flames like a bird or some mythic half beast and tells me of low-built homes and carved trees and how I might find peace if I can continue west and make it there beyond the scoliotic spine of Turtle Island. Like I said, a dream. 

Whichever way I go, whether I live or die, I am but a single doomed spirit among many, like those stars I crane my neck to revere, and it matters little; a great sorrow has swept this land and continues to arrive in unheard waves and will return with boundless reinforcements someday hence, like a ghost herd of tatanka (to borrow from my Lakota brethren), agitated and restless, vengeance deferred.

At least they left me my shoes, threadbare as they are. I must get off the highway and walk to the next on-ramp, or more faceless uniforms will bring further animosity. 

It’s quiet and late and my odds are slight, but before the cold can fully wrap me in its caul I look east at approaching headlights, hoping for a gentler soul free in their heart of the rot of bigotry. Though cold assaults my bones, I am still. I hope beyond hope. My only weapon now.

What matters in the end and also matters not are the details. The pattern on a woman’s shirt that reminds you of a candy store. A girl from São Paolo whose eyes can’t hide a thing. The call of a loon at daybreak stirring tiny spirals in the mist that hovers like the breath of our ancestors over the waters. The proximate eyewatering stink of bear. A signal from deep space. Walking home alone. Walking. Alone.

When the thing comes it comes and it won’t be rescinded.

*** 

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” — Black Elk, Oglala

________________

Image © Alyssa Best

“No one ever is.”

You want to meet in the high desert? Inhale the heady fragrance of sage? Wrangle rattlers with me? Pick cactus spikes from our boots? Hike up the draw then run the scree slopes serenaded by the coyote chorus. Surf those loose stones. Watched by wary stands of ponderosa pine, bark still blackened from the last time. 

Do you think it a kind of charm that porcupines are named thus? That their name means thorn pig?

There are some who wear those thorns on the inside. There are some who warn you first. And some who don’t.

I want to go out like Ignacio. Fierce and doomed and loved and soulful, filled with the citrus-honey surge of vengeance and the final cleanse of loneliness.

“I don’t think I know this Ignacio.” 

“Don’t matter. Keep driving.” 

“Wait. What kind of trouble am I in?”

***

Something big can grow from the saddest seed. A man approaching his autumn reckoning sitting in a coffee shop watching the strange choreography of cars in the parking lot. His eyes are bruises, flinching even at the light. He could sit all day, drink mediocre coffee all day, bottomless yet somehow depthless, watch without a single feeling the interplay of vehicles outside. He could then go home, sit in a small once-neat apartment as the winter sun departs the cold day, as televisions are turned on in other apartments, as voices fall and rise, and he will eat something that tastes to him like parchment. He is a wasp who lost its nest. A firefly whose flame has been doused. Something that flew too far and forgot to bring a map. Or forgot he didn’t need a map. 

And doesn’t even notice he’s unshackled.

***

This world is a heavy burden we have little choice but to shoulder. 

But what if it’s not?

***

“How far still? Will we make Culiacán by nightfall?”

Something went wrong, a bad deal involving bad drugs and worse people. A woman was hurt and fastened to a chair, but someone called it in. An officer arrived and traced the perimeter of the darkling house out by the encroachment of hemlock and cedar, but he never entered and only hand-peeked the pane and somehow missed the woman bleeding out in the kitchen, duct-taped to the chair. When they eventually returned, they found her cold and silent and fused to the plastic and metal with her own congealed fluids, like some lost and lonesome colloidal thing from some other, darker world. 

***

You’re at the park in August. A late-afternoon rainshower scatters families. The trees drip ravenspeak. All is agility and breath. 

You sacrifice yourself to those stones. You open. 

“Ignore this. Make room. Take a seat or take a photograph. Do both. And don’t mind me. Think I’ll have me another breakdown.”

Something dark and skeletal clinging to a whitewash wall ripples your skin with sudden cold.

We live somewhere between no place and so long, but we’ll go for answers anyway.

“Are you coming home?”

“What do you think?”

“You’ll be here.”

“In spirit, at least.”

We heard each other and we hurt each other and we can barely hear the difference. 

What is us? Most don’t have to enact this, but I’m moving across the plains this dusk and whispering to the team-huddled buffalo while bats like commas punctuate the clauses of tonight. A whole life sentence. An abundance of talent with no sure way to sell it.

You walk up onto the foreland, the ocean fronds astir below, like salt and lace, boom and hiss, and nothing happens or will ever happen even through the grim unwitnessed ruin of your ancestry.

Let me grip you and hold your switchskin body with my arms, oh precious one.

It takes so many increments to walk this road, the hedgerows and the cornbrakes slowly passing, sparse passersby, time a-waiting, hanging from a noonborn cry. A car comes by oh once in awhile, and the sun unfurls its blister arc above our heads and westbound, or northwestish, halfway hung upon a song, some hot and black diagonal thing. Hear it, hear the coyotes flinch then find each other days or weeks long since they split, and how their feral joy is tracings of contagion, chiming like fractured bells of wonder tolling their antic crimes in the piss-holy steam of this inferno canyon. The coming night. Things much dimmed. Yeah. Christ. The entirety of this.

You told me once you dreamed two worlds, two streams, two incomprehensibilities.

Riddle this: Why is all the world so red? This ultraviolence? 

“It’s not. It was with get that life begot. With dust that listen lost,” was all you said.

You want those words to mean a thing. Something dreamed and something proud. Make our motherloving life profound. 

The hardest thing to write about is silence.

_________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

________________________

“[call] Well who's that writin'? 

[response] John the Revelator” — Blind Willie Johnson

Latrant, a man from the north, knew that fear makes men cruel. And that beauty and cruelty, valves both arterial and veinic, vie at the ventricular core of the world.

And though he was lean as a wolverine starved and shaped by austerity and weathered like a twisted tamarack lone upon a tundra, and though he had brought down many animals for food and skins, cruelty was not an indulgence to ever tempt him.

On the road behind, he’d ditched his ride, an eighties Mercury passed down from his long-dead father and driven into oblivion. Transmission now gutted like a rattler shedding its spine. Last song fading on his halfbusted radio Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel and ice “John the Revelator.” He’d walked a good fifteen highway miles since, that old blues song conferring inside him like a memory of dread, until this inconvenience store hove into view above the prairie buffalograss and patched asphalt.

He nodded at the clerk behind the counter, a brown-skinned young woman who had barely cleared her teens. The bell like a harbinger still echoed in the otherwise empty store. Her return nod was almost imperceptible, but he perceived it all the same. Along with some inkling of distant kinship.

Three men came in like envoys of chaos while Latrant stood contemplating snacks. He knew immediately their number by their disparate voices—the touchpaper toll of one used to deference, the flinty cringe of his sidekick, and the wavering, sexless pitch of a witless powder keg—and that they would need to be defused. 

Cold electricity ran in quick pulses along his skin, and he slowed his heart and breathing, let his knees sag, and enshadowed himself in the narrow aisle, eyes fixed on the convex mirror up front in the corner.

One of the men, the leader, said, “Check the aisles.” 

The sidekicks wouldn’t see Latrant; practice and blood ties had bestowed upon him uncanny stealth.

In the terrain map of his head, he assigned names to their voices, to their essences. Groan: the short bald leader whose cockiness belied his meager talents. Muskrat: needy watery-eyed enabler. Deejay: soft of mind and body but endlessly cruel.

“Well, fellas, seems we lucked out,” the one named Muskrat said upon spotting the clerk. “So which are you, honey, a dirty illegal or a filthy squaw?”

The woman didn’t make eye contact or reply and stared only at the counter. Latrant watched the mirror in silence.

Deejay’s interest was piqued. “Answer my friend, cunt.”

“Hey, hey, come now, my brothers,” said Groan, all false bonhomie. “We come in good faith and only wanna rob the place and not cause unnecessary pain. But first, would you be so kind as to indulge my rude but curious friends and divulge your ancestry, princess?”

She whispered a word—“Nuwuvi”—that Latrant knew meant Southern Paiute.

“Speak up. And speak American,” said Deejay, the pale rindlike orifice on his dusty ocher face tightening in a strange moue. 

Muskrat laughed but Groan didn’t.

“Paiute,” she said more clearly.

“Don’t sound too American to me,” said Muskrat.

“Shut up,” said Groan. “Pocahontas ain’t American either, but at least we know she ain’t no beaner. Might even earn her a stay. Up to a point, anyways.”

Deejay perked up at this. “So once we git the cash, we git to have some fun?”

“Sure. Violate but don’t mutilate. Not this one. I almost like her.” He stared at her, not blinking. She didn’t look away. “Hand over the contents of that cash drawer, missy. Then come around this side of the counter. Hands where I can see ’em.”

Latrant knew the men had to be armed, yet they hadn’t so much as given her a glimpse of barrel or blade, such was their hubris, for which they’d pay.

“It’s your lucky day, girl.” Groan’s genial demeanor dropped away. “Gonna taste you some white meat at last. And since we’re probably gonna let you live, you can tell your fellow savages how you done fucked some real men on this blessed day of our good lord.”

Listening and watching, Latrant thought how each of these men had a void in his head that clashed and clamored like a ceaseless howl. Each an echoing vacancy, self-loathing disguised as righteous entitlement. Mediocrity cosplaying masculinity. He wondered how such creatures were made. What dark unruly compensations vied inside their quaking substrata.

The woman did as she was told, passing a wad of bills and moving slowly, hands raised. Latrant was not often impressed by people, but he was impressed by her; she knew beyond a shadow he was here in the store, but not once had she flicked her glance in his direction or otherwise risked his detection. 

Any exchange of words would give them the advantage, so he decided on action only. And once he’d decided on action, it would happen with swift brutality.

Groan had his back to him, and Latrant would have taken him first regardless. Stepping from the shadows, he grabbed the man’s slippery forehead and pulled back while simultaneously using great force to draw his nine-inch Bowie knife across and deep into his neck, feeling the tendons and vessels part, the trachea and esophagus rupture, the volcanic heat of the blood spout. All this before the other two had barely registered it. The woman noticed, though, and reached behind the counter and produced a classic wooden Louisville Slugger and cracked Deejay across the temple while Latrant let his victim fall and first circled then stutter-stabbed the wide-eyed, slackjawed Muskrat in a quick frenzy of kidney punctures, pirouetting him for the coup de grâce, a merciful upthrust below his sternum and into his tiny shriveled heart. Latrant stood back and let the woman finish her work on Deejay, the bat scoring home run after home run on his uncomprehending boxlike head until it lay in globs of quivering viscera, bone, and the negligible cupful of brains it had once contained.

Latrant grabbed a set of keys from one of the men’s belt loops and turned to the woman, his hand outstretched.

“The bat. Call the authorities in fifteen minutes. Come up with a plausible story that won’t implicate you. I know it was self-defense, but they were white and… well, you know the rest. Invent a description for me and the truck I’m taking. Put it all on them. And me. I was never here, but a ghost was.” He paused and they kept eye contact. “You did good.”

“You did too. Uh, snacks are on the house.” 

He blinked then let out a short bark of laughter and collected what was his. 

Nonetheless, he was sorry for the necessity of his actions and he left the store bloodsoaked and ashenfaced with the food and the set of keys and recognized that the old Ford pickup resting forlorn in the dust of the parking lot like an old man awaiting gentle death would be his home now indefinitely and he drove onto the highway unremarked and diminutive, centered within the immense and shifting wheel of the encompassing horizon.

The many unnumbered, those who seem to matter not, might prove to be our ransom, the price paid to balance the ledger.

“[call] Tell me what's John writin'? 

[response] Ask the Revelator.”

 ______________________

 Image © Krystle Wright

She sat silent in a rocker, not rocking, and watched him warm his hands. She tried but she could no longer read him, and he no longer looked at her. Silent fury and indifference and even shamed assent can seem like kin on some men’s faces.

They stayed that way until the snow ceased falling and the clouds cleared like a true sign of some brighter yet short-lived day. Like a tide withdrawing before the towering wave. Like a dying man briefly lucid before the warrant of a promised end.

If an inanimate thing can be literal, the hourglass she cradled and prepared to upend was that.

“Give me an hour?” she said.

“Till?”

“Until you come after me.”

He finally squinted at her in the cold gloom of the cabin. She saw something behind his eyes, but it was fleeting. His quick glance at the corner where a double shotgun was propped betrayed one route of his thinking, but only one. 

She knew she could try to blame the rotgut whiskey for her transgression the other night, but she also knew that was a falsehood. She’d wanted to lie with John Joe Grady, her good man’s only good friend. Her predation had been both hot and calculated, an urgent necessity. She knew if the circumstances could ever be rerun, she would not hesitate to do the same. It was something must have been waiting in their stars, their bones. Their blood.

Outside, an ice-blue day was dying, the far white mountains golden-tipped and draped like pale giants by a work shirt sky. A robin’s egg dome.

“I don’t rightly know what you are,” he said to her.

“Who or what?”

“What. Deer or wolf. I caint tell.”

“You surely can. One don’t exist without the other.”

With that she tipped the heavy hourglass and placed it on the table and unlatched the cabin door. She wouldn’t append the insult of sentiment.

All was silent as she stood for only a moment, breathing the clarity of the heartbreak air into shifting lungs, learning a new truth: this was no longer home and she was no longer beholden. The static blue of evening was slowly fragmenting and softening with sundown, a solo wolf in the hills shaming for downright solitude the locomotive yowl of freight trains in the dimming valley.

He might be foolish enough to follow, but she didn’t think so, and it didn’t matter. 

She stepped fluently into the emerging dark and at long last resumed her unfeigned form.

______________________

Image © Sam Williams

Give me some sp… 

She’s… 

Wait.

She’s… what? Dead?

Right. Yeah… got it, thanks for that, can’t wait to return the favour. 

No, no, I don’t need any—

Water? Sure. 

Hold on, wait. She’s dead? I must not’ve heard you right.

Uh-huh. Okay. I’m all ears.

You already told me, I get it. You’re just saying the same words over. I’m…

What the fuck. What’s happening here? 

Are you for real? Are you for fucking real?

What? What? 

Seriously, what?

Of course, yes, I’m sorry, yes. I’ll calm down. 

This is our home. You know that. Behind all this yellow tape and drama. 

Where is my wife?

No, no, no, no, no…

Why do you keep telling me this? Are you lying to me?

Let me go inside. I’ll find Emily. She’s in bed. Asleep. It’s late.

All these lights and all this shit outside my home is starting to—

Okay, everyone leave now. Now, I said. Get the fuck away from my house.

No, I won’t calm down. I won’t turn around. This is invasive, and you should be asham—

What the actual fuck is this? Not sure why you’re up in my face. I said no, I won’t turn around. 

Wait. Are you trying to cuff me? 

Not funny, dude. Not subtle. Is this a bad movie?

Okay, I’m chill. Don’t freak out. Give me a sec.

I’m freaked out. We’re the victims here. Me and Emily and baby Grace. What about that don’t you get? 

There’s a whole life happening inside that home if you’d just leave me alone and let me go inside and pretend this night never happened. 

None of it happened. That’s it. Never. I goddamned pinky swear.

You might not even be real. I might not even be real. A woman’s bad dream about her husband and her daughter.

If not, please tell me what I left for her still dripping on the kitchen counter.

D’you have any idea? Know the things we shared? Made together? Fought over?

Anyone here felt what it is to be clutched by a passing nebula with madness in its blackhole core? To be ripped from bliss and blasted into nothingness?

Thought not.

Do any of you even know how hard all this is?

Huh. Surprise me, bro. Asswipe. Come at me, dipshit. 

If I grabbed your gun right now, I’d fucking show you, fucking show everyone.

No, that’s absolutely not a threat. You’re hurting me, stop, don’t make me do this, just let—

________

Image of Smimm's infinite eye © Rebecca Loranger

He knew there was a chamber beyond the second bulb of a tumescent tract, and in that chamber were sparkling and luminous stalactites. Viridescent claws of underworld gods. Who wouldn’t want to pass through a monster’s caliginous guts to see such rarities? 

He hesitated at the entrance, which was small, but he’d made his way through smaller. His momentary uncertainty perhaps an echo of a future alarm, a faint warning broadcast. No equipment, no gear. He only had the flashlight on his phone, but that ought to be enough. He wasn’t going far. 

Inside, he had an immediate choice of two tunnels and halfway assuredly picked the one on the right, as if it weren’t a coin toss, then made good headway perfectly horizontal until he found another narrow gap, which dropped through a sharp turn into a near vertical eight-inch squeeze he thought would open out and flatten again soon but he was already in it not feet but headfirst when it deadended ahead of him and too late—a chill puckering his entire skin—he knew he was in a different tunnel from the one his memory had confidently drawn up and there was no way he was scrabbling backward over the lip he’d just traversed, upon which his body hinged awkwardly, and no one knew he was here, though he cried out regardless.

This silent place held him tight, though he tried, of course he tried, sporadically calling into the far reaches of the dark beyond his feet until his yells grew into shrieks. His voice a dry rasp, he cried for his mother and the pity made him cry more. 

Soon his human sounds gave way to the sonar ping of liquids dripping somewhere and the plangent echoes of all the turns he had not taken.

His occasional struggles wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched.

The pain in his skull built like a fireside bellows, pulmonary and hollow and vast, until he wished at last for the bliss of the void, the true void not this fraudulent limbo.

This death unmatched in abashment. Woe and heartshame to succumb so easily. Without a fight. Without even an adversary, unless you count cold granite his foe. Knowing he was led by a fleeting urge to a vainfoolish death, to an unjust calculus—something had possessed him and now he possessed nothing—gripped by malachite seams and the innermost slime of the moist, impassive earth. Ignominy and anguish. Nothing beyond desolation. No worse egress. 

His last vision behind eyes dimmed and irrelevant was of times long past, a slow pan of a prairie with a crude wire fence limping kinked and halfstrung to a horizon like an edgewise portent of the iron tracks to come. A child’s sketch ahead of a film crew. Symbolic. Insouciant. Push in and there’s the tiny dried remnant of a prairie dog long since death snatched and taunted it now peaceable and paltry, no longer disconsolate. Perhaps even laughing a little on the inside. At the foolishness of it all. The vanity. All things under and upon the heedless earth.

_____________________

Image © David Thielen

Days we can say that are okay days. Days like today when the worst that happened was the squabbling of ravens in the treetops. Unlike yesterday when a sound from behind Wolf Mountain momentarily quickened your heart beat. The sensation of something staggering to its feet… and selecting. Targeting. Glitching.

Your mother, boarding, grips your hand, like she knows.

You recall all this, the world’s contrasts:

Fruit stands in a scorched land where even the wasps curl up in defeat.

Cold malnourished things outside colder walls. Wanting in. 

A sound, a shear, a lurch, the sudden change in pitch.

A hundred people breathe in, shakily. Oddly, no one screams. One small child cries out, in a dream. But for the hundred or so clutching their armrests, lawyers and loggers and lovers, this is no dream. Through windows like portholes, the world yaws and rolls and comes blistering to greet them. To greet you. 

Your mother, in a pale and godless voice, says, “Now it’s all over.” 

***

So sing for me.

***

Play songs of road trips, don’t let me

Take only sips, but yeah let me

Grasp your snake hips, you can’t fault me,

Lick your full lips, uh, they’re salty.

Dreaming of this, almost telling me,

Belief in two slips ain’t no felony.

***

Hey, hey, stop. Enough. You knew this day was coming. Shhh. Don’t fret. Isn’t it better to lose the cowl of anxiety and know your fate is no longer conjecture?

The man with the haircut and cattle bolt, the cannibal shrink, the dancing albino giant with the tiny hands, these and more were not me but my emissaries. Oh, how they wished.

But I’m here now.

You have the look of spit smeared on a sidewalk. Once shiny, now drying, like a life begun yet still unlived. Take this chance, your very last. Take it.

Your scars are relief maps of your past. Retrace them.

Make of the world’s tender fury your art; capture it, let it breathe.

***

Once we gathered in the city, and we attended the opening of the gallery, the book in my jacket pocket heavier than heaven. Kurt would have laughed his scrawny ass off. I tried to explain myself, but alcohol had lashed my lips to my teeth. I don’t remember how we lost each other, but I do recall wandering the early hours in arterial rows and faking my own death. When the sun began to tease its rebirth, dim grey peach over the mainland, I could hear children in boxlike homes chewing on Frosted Flakes and wishing they had wings.

La tristesse

How this all came together, no idea, but I arrive at the place my love once lived, crossing the tracks that divide two parallel roads, into the heart of this small Pennsylvania town, while my ailing car radio works to stifle “Oh My Heart” by R.E.M.

So little time to hunker down and wait till washed-out roads are cleared of floodwater and if necessary fixed. Waiting unaccompanied amid drear fall memories. The doom-tolling railroad crossings. A boxcar barroom in matte black punctuated by neon, and windowless. Standing water in stubbled fields reflecting only grays. The chrome yellow of a receding school bus the only daub of true color anywhere.

Rubber and diesel, tires and fuel. Caught amid a squall of semi-trucks and the crawl of a combine. The green unruly. Belligerent. 

I pull onto the shoulder and tell you of the whispered voices in the twilit woods. You are silent, doubtful, which stings. I might not be hiding something; maybe you just aren’t looking.

durera 

We pivot on an island, gasoline spraying, how green is my valley, the kneeling martyr flinching for the axe.

Thinking we might go start a bar fight just to recall what it was like to feel something. 

We’re ocean-dwellers clinging to a washed-up buoy of apparent certainty—the sands shifting around us—while pretending the sea hasn’t sucked itself backward.

The wide horizon. Anticipatory. A quivering knife edge.

Phantoms of the forest scaling shredded trunks under the quarrels of ravens. Under yet darker things.

toujours

Could there have been a moment of reconciliation? Was there a frail song on the wind, obscured by the flapping of laundry as the gusts arrived? Lost to the ravenous monster we call the past. Lost to the hungry, decadent ghosts.

Long dark blues. We were here once—is that even enough?—and we think this is how it felt to be us.

___________________

Image © Monica Lunn 

Winter

Where we began was when so much ended. Luck played its part for us, such a scatterment up north when the bad thing happened most everyplace else. Three of us first, another boy and a girl, both gone now, so no need to return names the world took from them for good. 

We met the bard John Hefford, and he would chant, “This is airless, and we are careless, adrift upon a tundra. Mountains loom then soon recede. Sieveloads of snow sift and settle on everything.” Like he saw how words could magic the world into being. Or out of it.

Spring

When it felt right, we made our way south to meet the approaching spring, neither of us in any special hurry. Turned out it was one of them seasons; the greens furtive and greyish, skies hiding their shame in anonymity.

I was a mere boy, wide of eye and stupid. But lucky is all. 

Summer

Lucky in all the ways. Meghan was my first and last. We met without an iota of suspicion and laughed because of it. She smelled naturally of nutmeg, a “fortuitous confluence of terminology” that always made John Hefford laugh. That was how he talked: “fortuitous confluence of terminology.” I coulda listened to him say such things till the sun burned itself out. Which I half believed would happen tomorrow or at least real soon.

When John slept, Meghan and I would dance like colts under the warm and endless blue, breathing each other and the wild honeyed-tea fragrance of sweetgrass, breath of the prairie, breath of the quiet, quiet world.

Fall

John shaped me with poetry, teaching me the melodies and the chords of life, relating harmony and rhythm alongside the rhyme of a river with a stand of golden aspen, the late glissando wisps of mare’s tails sweeping the last light of a tired sun.

The day we met the buffalo, a hunched and half benign monster from an old picture book, we knew we might be saved. For another turn of the world, anyway.

Meghan laughed with joy while I practiced my indulgent balladry under the beast’s guarded stare. Front-loaded fist of gristle and bone, appleseed eyes, bunched ursine shoulders, its back an atlas, tectonic patchwork in relief. Great head hung low and heavy as a dull bell swung from a busted chapel. Horns like crescent moons. Baritone snorts blowing sandspouts in the dust. Only a mite less ready for his sacrifice than us, his sacred and shivering executioners.

Now and then. Echo and rhyme. 

Under cold starlight, fed and slaked, we praised his unknown name. 

Tatanka.

Winter

Clad in furs, we wandered west to the sea, cyclic in our itinerancy, and lost on the way a kindly and maddened John Hefford to the high and frozen crags. First time I saw Meghan cry. First time I cried since the bad thing. Maybe even since I was small.

Started to see dead settlements and dry old bodies, but the far surf called us westward beyond the places men and women once gathered, beyond the crumbling highways and rusting railroads and once-fertile valleys. Beyond mineshafts and quarries and clearcut hillsides. Beyond the scarification of the land. Out to the western seas and coastlines smudged by mist.

Others were there first—Athena, Blaise, Billy T, Klootch—but they were goodhearted and took us in while the seasons returned at least three more times, we soon lost track.

Another Spring

We were improbable, Meghan and I, entwined with languid ease beside hot spark beachfires, under the spilled milk of impossible stars. A low distant report, more feel in the shift of the sand than sound, might have alerted us, but we were happy in ways not even wordsmiths can express. Only when the hiss of the surf drew back like an intook breath did we get to our feet. And the world blinked. And echoed the tale of its past, the long cascading narrative of gentle lands atop dark clandestine fury.

John Hefford had taught me another word, I recalled then. Tsunami.

The world’s music ain’t always melodic—it can be sly and harsh and artless with dissonance—but it does know its rhythms by heart. 

I clasped Meghan’s spidery hands, painful in their pulse of warmth, and we watched the dark regrouping ocean. Beside ourselves in every sense.

Like all things that must die when life is at its unexpected best, we’d been tricked. 

Like words, luck lasts till it don’t. 

The waves came in quietly and everywhere like a wolfpack.