InnerSpace - dailyness micro-fiction/poetry project

Get closer to the flower, I say, not as bees for the nectar, not the pleasure of it, coloring the eye, or for the subtle perfume opening, but to survive. Every gift has a price, father said, hard to imagine such a world and happy that I didn’t. As the lone passenger on the bow of the ship leans forward to catch the cold front, the brace of arctic spray, so it is and will be, on and in it, my hand is always reaching up the coiled rope and so here we are. Watch the shadows, you said, it was Midsummer’s Night, on the wall the actor’s shadows danced as did we, when we squint our eyes and the bells from the clock tower rings, we let loose, skin flushed, a sound to rejoice in, and we lift each other up and dance in front of everyone, as bees do for flowers—not to survive, but to live.

But now, through the window, yourself beside yourself layered on a world sequestered in glass, an abrupt edge, flawed, images of images, stare down at the street where everything slides away and beyond, a radiant moon arcs across the street, a black river where cars and motorcycles flow down the center, gas-lit and red as the glow of cigarettes, static from the T.V., the neighbors making love, and the moon’s oblique light, osseous, aqueous, and then the fog comes, opens it’s mouth and eats the city, the black river turns gray, the cars and motorcycles disappear, the edges an abstraction, kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the fog gets to its business, an embarrassment to his mother, the ocean. Through the window, everything shrinks, except the fog, mangy and tattered, drifts up the street like a whelp, outcast and alone.

Far away from the sleep of blood, the decaying moon, the dream of childhood falls like a cashmere blanket. I am still alive, I say. I have a golden tongue and Lorca’s shadows of tears to quench my thirst. When dawn comes raging, I close the windows and blinds, burrow down into the blankets, my cave. I want to live a dream I once dreamt. I want to return to fields cut by dusty roads and rusted railroad tracks, the iron my grandfather cut. I want to roam in the loamy light, without a compass or watch, however dry, gold dust days. Whatever gives in me, the shallow pulse, gives way at last, as a levee does, unwilling, tentative, and I am left standing in front of a mirror, unconvinced by my reflection that I’m awake.

A poet told me, “my father was a man who lived and died.” He must have known my father. There must be a place where they make them, some factory, a dark, grimy place of oil and gears and a long winding conveyor belt where all fathers are assembled. At the end of the snaking belt, there’s a war-room where they fill each head with maps and lines of scrimmage, weapons and tools are dumped in, a cracked mirror is next, so that each may see the world in their own image. There is an order to each spectacle, but there is no reliquary, no redemption, only a machine, duty, honor, the weight of obligation, a closet full of ghosts and a squeaky door that needs oil.

Each question about my family leads to questions, they blanket me with dreams and fill a small reservoir this night that is not night, a wish, this escape that only youth can make, impetuous, impervious as the sun, the fiery shape that in this photograph, we squint, one summer, together for the last time, we defy gravity in that fantastic leaping pose on Lake Michigan, the mad slap of landing in warm, wet sand, and not just in the now of remembering, the fateful neurons in their aging, the slow dance, not just the ramshackle family, the notched tree and frayed swing rope over Naaman’s Creek. So the hours flow, not just the voices, scattering over the field like blind birds, not just my father, who is lost somewhere in Florida, my mother, more a cautionary tale than real, not even language can save us, if I call it pain, what does that mean? My thin, wire pulse quiets in the dark thrumming, it carries me with it farther, like light accelerated toward shadows, questions move quickly enough to name, forsaken, they fall over me like rain.

after Lorine Niedecker 

I.
There’s a better shine, my friend tree, along the river to the lake where Black Hawk held. Remember my little granite pail? The museum man, Mr. Van Ess, advised not to shoot the gentle Clapper Rail, while his wife, Asa Gray, hung her unmentionables on the clothesline post as soon as it was warm enough. Well, spring is not young, he’s an old man who seined. I say to Paul, you are my friend. And my old mother, what horror, how we lived—childhood summers—with a clean man, and later that year in the great snowfall, I read Li Po and swept snow from my porch.

II.
Oh, past the graves where I rose from marsh mud where my mother saw the green tree toad. But I am long now and sick of Time’s watery summer. Hear how the white gulls chatter like new-sawed wood from the mill? Lights lift over the lake, O late fall and springtime’s wide with summer’s July waxwings. People, I shout, people, and energy glows from my lips.

III.
It was 1937. Depression years and I’ve been away from poetry. My life is hung up like an Easter cross and it takes a year for dusk to settle. There’s something in the water that makes it rise, the wild and wavy event, in what some call, Leonardo’s light while at the lake, men leave their cars for church, as praiseworthy as watching dancers on skates in winter, some float off, some are saved.
IV.
It’s a poet’s work to notice these things, to prime the pressure pump and consider at the outset of Lake Superior, the traces of living things, even my own life by water, this—a paean to place.

Inside the last house without a roof, it is quiet on the shelves; tiny volumes neglected as dust. Bookmarks sprout haphazardly like buck-shot road signs on country roads near fenced in pastures, pages smell of wet hay and manure, in brown and green fields hemmed by cardboard slats and thread, where cows plod, waiting for something to happen, and it happens and it’s not going to happen whether or not I’m in front of a wood stove during a four-day blizzard or gluing little bits of wood together for a tiny town made of toothpicks and bark, where tiny citizens stroll, living a thousand lives wet as a horse’s eye—never leaving the room.

The dead branch of a tree, not the branch itself, but the fall of its shadow, falling over a brown bed of leaves not its own on a particular hill our platoon lost and won for the third time, and if that is true then the flashes from muzzles still sparking, the discharge of gas and ejection of brass from rifles, and the bodies that fell, are simply a trick of memory, the way the mind distorts history and events, like witnesses of a singularity who record multiple interpretations, and remembering that day; the precise angle of fire, pacing out and measuring, mortar and mine, I hold perfectly still against the falling failing light.

I am a henchman from the hollow of a hurricane, I say to my sister, as she sets the table with tiny cups, a little girl’s tea set, they’re useless, I say, while outside it snows, and after it has fallen on the fields behind our house, we go outside and walk along the drainage ditch to the pipe under the driveway, where one summer I dared her to crawl through and she got stuck, and now, a dead groundhog lies frozen in the opening of the pipe, I pick up a stick and try to turn it over, my sister cries for me to stop, and I do. Later, we drink hot tea out of toy cups and wonder where the groundhog’s shadow goes when he dies, and if summer will ever come.

Against the north façade of the water-clock, in the glare of twilight crowned by a double cornice, I watch water fall over the edge of the trough where it turns the bronze armillary sphere for the marking of seasons, and the five changing manikins ringing bells to remind me time is a dead thing when it is ticked off and counted. As for my transgressions: to have killed. As for my sentence: to walk alone, untouched in a land where only the living keep time and bury the dead under earth and stone. Not a prince but a brother, unrepentant soldier, exiled, in rags, I crouch outside the city gates, face in the dust, crying alms, for any living listening.