Mountain and Midge

“I’m doing what seems the best thing to do.” — Virginia Woolf

My life is nothing, and also it’s all things. I talk to my screen, commiserate with standups suffering from stage fright, laugh meanly at commercials for adult diapers, fill my pockets with rocks, wish with renewed fervency that I owned a jukebox, cook a spicy fish stew, wrestle with pronouns, wonder if I can make anything funny from whispered tales of genocide.

From the Heights of Abraham in the nineteen seventies rises a small tubercular biker named Midge. He says this:

“Never meant this. When I cough, it’s the finest crimson spray, a warm mist from my extended throat. For ten years, I sat pillion on my best mate’s Honda 400, hacking my sickness to be caught by the tailwind and spread like a septic fan behind us. His name was Mountain, and I loved him, I now think. He walked into crowds—partiers, dreamers, backpackers, hikers, utter fucking wankers—and because he always greeted the headwind, he never saw it coming. His death, I mean. The one I let in.”

But that isn’t why I’m here tonight in this diaphanous swirl of peach mesh, this warm apricot skein. I could equally have reanimated the hippie I merged with in Windermere, the one who stared as if in a lake’s mirror and instead of herself saw me. Or the goth in Nottingham, stenciling furious anarchist missives in charcoal spray to a sleeping indifferent city. Or Lana from the Bronx, dancing, always dancing, by herself or with anyone adjacent, before she danced her last dance alone from a smoldering gash in the North Tower. 

(“Today, without notice, my time on this bittersweet earth is done.”)

Suicide in Avalon

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” — Patti Smith

Two nights ago I dreamed I was Hope Sandoval. Can you believe that? What a dream it was moments before it faded.

“Make your way to Glastonbury, and I’ll see you there, okay?”

The thing is, we’re drops of water vapour. I’m a drop of water vapour. You’re a drop of water vapour. And you and you and you. Until we have thousands of drops and then millions and we have ourselves a cloud. And even a cloud seems like nothing, floating ghostlike in a bluish bubble, impossibly close to the nihilist howl of space, until those clouds become bruised purple thunderheads and one day, one moment really, they unleash their collective deluge on the thirsting flanks of a mountain, whose altitude turns them to snow, and they gather and layer for weeks and then months, and one spring day they melt and begin to cascade down channels we call rivers and then hit their limit and flood millions of hectares of land, ruining human lives and drowning livestock, all from vapour. Vapour.

Rain is a killer.

Rain is a cloud suiciding. 

Disappointment at the end, written into the world’s DNA. 

“I waited and waited for you, beyond the horizon, within the protected perimeter, and though I believed in you, you never came.”

The terraced mound a carved breast, its nipple erect, caressed by scarves of mist. Oh Guinevere, oh Avalon, oh holy stonemasons.

“Where were you? Why won’t you answer?”

We are generational, interstitial, living in the spaces between. Good, bad: meaningless. Spillage is unavoidable, though all of us ticks swell fat with the boiling unspilled blood of rank injustice.

The gin-soaked priest and the holy fool and the painted jezebel find their way out of the maze of alleys and enter the rain forest. New stories spin and branch from that great trunk. This is how epics begin. It’s really not much, at least not at first. 

Lamb of Iowa

This patch of land; this is where we are. Under a smoky orb of light we once called the sun.

Our elders haunt us with stories about how it shone like a gold ingot swathed in a shawl of blue. Now it’s tarnished brass in a pale rust bowl.

Iowa, it was called. A word already brimming with loss.

They tell us of a thousand suns in a season they called summer, vast rows of them, their flaxen heads dipping and rising with the breezes. Not the gales we now have, but something gentle like the breath of lambs.

Even I remember lambs.

***

“You’re a good girl. You’re a sport.”

What is there to say to this?

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” 

No, you did.

“Ahem. You know we both had fun.”

We actually didn’t.

“You gonna answer me, sweetheart?”

If I did it would heal and ruin everything.

“Aw, let’s go get a drink.”

Where numbness can reassemble.

“That’s the spirit. I love a spirited girl!”

Which is why you pilfered it. 

“What’ll it be?”

Most of yesterday and earlier.

***

My daddy was a farmer. I know. Sounds like some old song. He farmed American Suffolks and irrigated his pastures with great wheels of pipe, stood guard with a .22 long gun against the tireless coyotes. Before the thing happened, back when such things mattered, he was happy, and we were too. 

Little sister, my oldest most precious memory was holding your tiny hand one cold April dawn and breaching the hushed swirl of the barn and gathering the new lamb whose mother had scorned it and cradling the fragile bellows of its ribcage, feeling it weaken yet, handing it to you, cooling and lost, so we could both learn a thing our schooling had neglected: nothing should ever die alone. 

***

If you knew the tenor of my thoughts, you’d flee. I will murder your complacent ass. And I will do it slowly, extract each drop of suffering like an alchemist panning liquid gold. I will scour and scald you, long before I call the authorities. 

“So what do you do?”

Even if I told you, you wouldn’t care. You already don’t care.

“Aw, come on. I thought you were a sport.”

I’m not. I never claimed to be.

“I can see the mischief in your eyes.”

Camouflage for oaths of vengeance. 

“We should play again.”

You are extraordinarily, horrendously dense.

“Let’s go outside?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“It speaks!”

Indeed. I’ll have my say, and you will finally hear it.

***

My precious sister gone now. You told me of a book and a film called Silence of the Lambs. You said the tale they told was worthy, though it hurt. My memory of lambs is tangled with your story, soiled fleece snagged on barbwire, about men and all the ways they wrecked us women, but I know there was a Clarice who was fierce, and I wish she’d made it to now, here where the forests have receded, here where the light has declined, here where the dead tides ebb and leave no trace. Here in the lost unnumbered fields of Iowa.

_____

Photo credit: © Cameron Stotz

High Times

It’s high time we talked about the High Times.

“Closed mouth ain’t gonna get fed.” 

She was a mother and she knew some shit.

We experience all these intense things, second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, all of them brimming with astonishment, wide-eyed and hoarse with love, yet we die with almost nothing, all these accumulations, dripped as stalactites, dropped like an old backpack, amounting to fucking what exactly?

The neighbors fit all of Eden into their front yard. Green tendrils spilled. Leaves of tubular red. I was with someone before the rainstorm, starting to make out, but she got spooked and left. After which I stood on the porch and thought long and hard about her, and Tom Waits growled a lament from crackling speakers wedged on some nearby sill. Jersey girl, my first and last, how much I cherished you. After the rainstorm, the waters braided like lovers, spiralling and twining, dreaming sclerotic dreams about how they might become partway manifest. A person got murdered that night, after the sun broke past the rainclouds and we gathered in the evening, but I never knew who. Someone played the opening bars of Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” on an electric organ, and we all chilled in the coming night, and someone got themselves slaughtered but we never knew who.

Wait. Let’s do this again, take another run at it. 

She was vehement. She told me she was prejudiced toward people whose shoulders aren’t horizontal. You get that, right? Weakling frames that slope downward, defeated before they start. Feeble half-assed primates, chinless and feckless, like the Trump spawn. And to a lesser degree, those whose earlobes don’t exist. That just join without a proper lobe. “Fuck those people too,” she said. I never could argue with that. She damn near had me on board.

“D’you put the seat down?” 

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said.

Truth? She was terrifying. 

I heard the countervailing cries: “She ain’t the same as you are.”

All such things are relative. Offering a cold beer after an apocalypse is like delivering a truckload of gold in the High Times. To think we cared about politics, about football, about butterflies, about pronouns, about someone able-bodied parking in the handicapped space. About spades and hearts. Before the Great Loss, I drove south through Wisconsin one early fall, got caught up in some biker thing, some end-times rally of aged outlaws, checked into a Travelodge outside Madison along with two hundred slow-moving leather-clad seniors. They were blunt and loud and likeable and no longer capable of violence.

“Bear with us, sir. We have a room that overlooks a field of corn. Or are those sunflowers?”

The High Times were adorable: Opera and spice and guts. Opulence and idle spite and us. 

This night, tonight, the other side of that sliding light, is our night. 

Mercy

“We had a mind to party, but not no Donner party.” — Unknown 

I never scrubbed that sound from inside my head. That muted eternal shriek. It weren’t anything, really, just a noise that followed us 'cross the salt flats and then the desert into the Cascades, though we heard it every goddamned revolution, each time the axle turned. We tried to plane the wood at night, slice away them nicks and burrs. Nothing worked. Felt like the admonishment of the land itself, crying, wheedling, greeting, long before it had a mind for uprise or defeat. It hollered its plea in earth time not man time. 

Oh woman, you barely have a voice. You cook and you mend our boots and you lie awake nights wishing the very stars would align, like pragmatists. You urge the world to settlements, you mediate. Within this burning valley, and most places yet, you are the best of us.

Dry bone shacks and half collected cairns. Sterile cries across such barren miles. These lands are jawbones aching with carious teeth, sung to by ragtag coyote choirs. Ridgetops bristling. Stout moon rising yellow as infection.

The West, the offhand West, its fragile trickles covert, generous of light though skinflint with drink. No pass unimpeded, no voice left to speak, no dry throat slaked. 

***

“Our house is on fire,” the air whispers.

Chafed and stunned to deadpan, I walked for a day or so and only two vehicles passed. What is this?

The sky is brown umber, the sparsity of trees silhouetted conifers. 

I walk so I can get away from the thing that happened. It was abhorrent. I am only one small girl with a queerly knotted gut in a wheeling galaxy. 

One of the vehicles was a worker bee, some kid on a scooter. He slowed and almost stopped and when I yelled for him to talk to me he spooked like a deer electric and whined his way past. The other was a pickup with a bed full of women and men. The faces of the women in particular told me stories. The men could barely manage a glance. I turned my back.

But where did the world go? Did I flinch and miss it? Feels like just yesterday I was listening to Lana sing about the perils of hope and about Kanye and Plath and how we had it all.

What happened to jasmine and juniper? To the heady riot of spring? To the dance of honeybees and butterflies and the twilit helix gyre of bats? Fireflies and the backdrop trill of cicadas?

How do we measure from span to everloving span, the unutterable link between worlds?

The sky is old blood and stinks the same. 

Our house is on fire. 

I’m here at the cool rusted railing of the bridge. No idea what waits unflappable below, but tell me exactly why I shouldn’t climb over.