Song of Blake

“And their sun does never shine,

And their fields are bleak and bare,

And their ways are filled with thorns:

It is eternal winter there.” 

— “Holy Thursday,” William Blake

All dogs know secrets like the bones they’re said to bury, and Blake knew from the change in the air that the bad thing was coming and was inescapable. It was an ozone tang fused with something other that yes made his snout quiver but also his heart. Something necrotic. Not the strain of decay you’d want to roll in, a thing much worse. Putrefaction. Blake felt his tail curl like a sneer between his legs when he first untangled the smell from all the rest on the early summer air and he knew his world and all worlds were about to change but he could not warn his two-leg people with words. 

Piney, of course, sensed it too, and even when Blake lay quiet in the unlit corners of the barn he’d catch her anxious night whistles hying from the house when she dreamed. They each would comfort the other in daytime, nuzzling and licking, eyes heavy and freighted with dread.

Blake knew he owed his very name to his two-legs and their love of a long-dead wordsmith and dreamer (and my dog, did they privilege words and dreams, speaking them over for the joy itself), so he waited and shied from overt alarm, mindful of antiquity and the inscrutable ways of his adopted clan.

Came first the blight that blackened the green things. Hunger bided its moment and stole in behind, and Blake’s two-legs soon cried and made of themselves lightning trees, black and rigid and implacable, and began to slaughter Blake’s playmates in the barn, whom he loved: the small, horned, surefooted ones; their gentlefolk kin clad in cumulus coats of softness; the pink ones who were bright and avid with tender mischief.

After which they believed in nothing. The rain of dark birds. Creeks pulsing black with the stink of rot. Dry thunder amid teethlike rock.

Times the wrongness didn’t equate with anything Blake knew or loved.

“Sweet Blake,” whispered the mother. “We fear things will get worse for us all. I wish we could save you.”

I know this, thought Blake. I knew this before you.

The father was silent. But he too then whispered, “‘Some are born to endless night.’” 

So it was that after the bad air came worse men.

Blake remembered his people, recalled his efforts to save them, but he was shabby and not ferocious, and his two-legs fell one after the other, the father and the mother fighting valiantly, and their boy child, Eric, and the marauders absconded with his favourite, the girl child who was kind beyond measure, sweet Eleanor who he’d played with in the hills. 

Slat ribs and mourned kin united him with Piney, until even she was slain one day on the roadside by a single clade of an endless stream of two-legs ruined and set loose by this new world’s dictates.

Here he was now, nowhere to go, eviscerate of purpose, bereft of plans.

Maybe the mountain wolves, emboldened or desperate, would decide for him. He even made it into the foothills until a heart change breathed on the embers of his resolve. 

He turned from the hills where the howling of wolves caught the desiccate wind and shambled toward home or where he believed home still to be and he stopped for a moment at the place on the road where Piney’s blood still marked her departure from this world and he let out a broken howl of his own, hoarse and plaintive, and hoped the wolves would leave him alone because alone he was. 

My Heart

This adventure, ready to be told. 

Upstream must be a falls since we hear it, but here on the silty bank it’s quiet and gentle while we watch a woman hold a young boy’s head under the surface of the cleanest stream, pebbles bright and colorful below, resolute while he kicks and bucks and attempts to rear against her grip then slows until his body brooks her assault and his dark hair waves like tendrils of so long.

Between the dog and the wolf lies the fleeting butterfly of youth.

Eventide. Sicily. Zimbabwe.

“Give me your hand. I will hold it now and beyond.”

This cocoon we arrived in, snared between a train’s blare and the stutter-step of the land. Someone told me there were mushroom clouds over New York City and maybe Palermo too. I was two-thirds into my trip, urgent to curl inward, blessed by topography and the sky’s corvid plaint. Mercy me. Lucky me. I never saw the land itself upend.

That whole wood—those quaking dreamland treetops—flinches in the glare of our stopgap moment.

Ain’t no one can bring the news like… Shine Billy Until… Swine Hilly Unwell… Spine Silly Upswell… Crime Filly Upscale.

It’s a silvery muscle caught in a creek and released, a quick last shiver in the treetops.

It’s drama and glamor and the scarlet clamor of a cardinal; admit you never understood Manc swagger.

Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu.

Claudia is a woman playing an accordion in the barroom on the headland. She must endure jokes from the regulars, all men, about catching her tits in it. But she isn’t playing for them. A man who might have passed on by is snagged by the wheeze of her songs and changes course to enter the small room. Claudia only thinks of blood in a river. Of a bloodred heart.

“I miss you, my singular boy.”

Slung amid the clatter, clenched like knotted ganglia, the night is mostly silent till a siren blurts, greyed beneath this brickwork, cursing such rodent luck this far underneath the aqueduct. 

Cry, my blackcurrant eyes, my sly rat face.

“Did Anna fall, or was she claimed?”

When did you arrive? How have I missed you? I meant to write a poem or even a song, awaiting your approval, but my aim failed, all these sounds imploding like elastic chatter, some cleansing, cumulative, noteworthy collapse.

Not everything succumbs to appraisal, and much exceeds our grasp.

"Entre chien et loup." 

If you are here, please love it all, most everything, the faraway horizons, the clotheared, ruined, spangled things that mattered. 

________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

All One Song

In this valley, thronged, the crack of ice as bluest shards implode and drop, crystal tails and powder—oh my dreamland castaway lady and lord—trailing. When at last we emerge from this frozen northern twilit place, a dark hut squats in our path, weak smoke tendriling from a busted chimney, the faintest muddy orange dim and low in its pitiful windows playacting muted glances.

Inside is a place of men. Large and bruised men, nursing their watery beers and their cryptic histories.

Bradford finds a small table and we sit opposite, like chess rivals. A man brings us beer in bottles.

“Tab?” he asks like he knows.

We both nod and he leaves.

I point to my head and point with my other finger at another part of my head. “Look at this. Look.”

“What?” Bradford is somewhere between bored and on board.

“I don’t know how to make this part work with this part.”

“Huh?”

“I got an intellectual and a lowlife creep at war in here. I don’t know how to reconcile these parts. I’m a goddamn high-rolling sweet-ass motherfucker with negative aspirations. One foot in the gutter while the other strolls the shining city on the hill. No sooner do I sink a Bud Lite than I dream of Freda Kahlo. I sue for peace while spoiling for a brawl. I don’t know what the fuck I am.”

“You a whole circus without the ringmaster.”

“I guess. And no taste-master either. I got no taste ’cause I want to taste all the tastes.”

“Not sure I can help you with that, brother.”

“Place needs music,” I say loudly, which only makes the barroom quieter.

These hard-drinking men might be men at a stream, casting lines. Steady. Stoic. No one really knows. The night outside might darken or not, the songs of birds stretching out some elongated moment. Might could drop a quarter in the slot and hit a letter and a number, hoping for Neil or Drake or Lana or RiRi.

Men like these don’t compromise—a weakness, not the strength they proclaim. Look. A tree connects the sky to the earth. And it reminds us to also grasp limbs. Put it this way: even the guys who ridicule “tree huggers” still knock on wood, I’ll wager.

A song selects, and y’all know its effect, and its dress rehearsal respect blares external. 

Neil. Old now. Grey. Still shredding those one-note solos. What something was and what it no longer ain’t.

The stymied wolverine wince and ruined caribou rasp of Old Black. A dark northern lament under slow-turning star wheels, the nighttime snow wide-as-fuck open blue under a half moon. Or under the aurora. And yes, as the man said, the old man now, go look at his life, it’s all one song.

He enunciates the word borealis like Elton sings auditorium.

Whatever the grisly outcome tonight, this is all and fine and damn near everything. 

___________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

The Corner

It’s still March; the sun doesn’t climb high, yet the trees try to lift it. Testing thermals, an eagle strains to pull it skyward with its wing draft, to reciprocate. They reach a kind of equilibrium no one is sure they want.

Which is but one way to tell of our world now. Forces pulling, even friendly ones, others pushing, anxious of upsetting an unacknowledged balance, of tipping some unseen fulcrum. Like bison on the plains, leaning top heavy and narrow-eyed into horizontal snowfall, bracing for the calamity we only dimly discern.

The people of the village tell us not to go past the Corner, Marla and me. Never venture beyond where the road curves, that grey loop turning up the side of the hill, a ghost’s cursive. How can they not know such beseechments only make transgression more beguiling?

“What lies past the Corner?” we ask.

“A thing spawned by mischance,” they say and cross themselves. 

All stockpiled quicksilver valour, uncontainable as a reactor core, Marla will go past the Corner. The inevitability of this dark, compact girl I love. Have loved since we were measured by weight not height and first touched fingertips and laughed like springwater, before we grew into language and even became human. The question is, will I ever dare follow?

***

“I’m a crone now, a dry slate headland buffeted by too many tides. You ask me why I’m angry? This isn’t anger; it’s bafflement. How about this? I used to believe there was someone counting all the insects, ready at some allotted time to sound the great alarm, to urge us to some agreed upon response when thresholds were crossed. Action. Coordinated effort. I mean, there are people watching the corals bleach, and they’re distraught, they cry onscreen as they tell us with voices shook full of woe, but we watch until the end and the credits roll. And the credits roll. And the credits fucking roll. Until the great irony of the real ending dawns on us, when we realize there are no credits, just this infinite debit. Not even a theme song. Only silence. Silence. Like the universe didn’t pay its Netflix fees.”

***

The answer now; here it is, all these years later: Marla might have led, but we have all begun—some of us trembling, others sorrowful, a few even smiling and stepping light of foot and without care—to round the Corner, no one able to say or even know if this is sayonara or a strange and even hopeful kind of hello.

Maw

Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends. 

Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?

I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.

The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.

Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.

Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was. 

I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.

Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.

“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”

I answer you.

“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”

Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?

I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?

The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.

____________________

Image © Kathrin Swoboda