On The Road To Nebraska: Pt 3. Waving Blind In The Fields of Wheat

The bush spoke it was thunder, it was earthquakes, it was the pounding hooves of the herd, it was the many thousand flapping wings of every bird, it was the roar of a waterfall, it was the rush and scrape of an avalanche, and the felling of a tree, it was all of these and more. It was what is. 

The words rushed through Sal, wind through wheat. 

"YOU HAVE COME TO ME" 

"I have" 

"THIS IS GOOD, WE HAVE MUCH TO DO, I HAVE MUCH TO SHOW YOU" 

"I am afraid" 

"THIS IS GOOD, WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO WILL BE HARD, WHAT I HAVE TO SHOW YOU WILL BE TERRIBLE, I HAVE PREPARED MIGHTY WORKS FOR YOU TO PERFORM" 

"but what if I fail?" 

"YOU CANNOT, I AM SORRY THAT YOU CANNOT, I AM PLEASED THAT YOU CANNOT" 

"how can I not fail? I have failed at most everything in my life." 

"I AM THE ONE WHO BUILT YOUR HAND, I HAVE BUILT THIS TASK TO FIT YOUR HANDS, DOES THE BEAM SHAPED BY THE CARPENTER FEAR THAT IT WILL NOT FIT ITS PURPOSE?"

"If I am the beam then, yes I fear that I am not equal to any task that you would give me." 

A great sigh came from the bush, and at the same time a chuckle. 

"I HAVE TAKEN YOUR EYES SO THAT YOU MIGHT SEE" 

and once again blackness filled the world around him, and Sal only felt the sand beneath him, and the wind on his skin. 

The heat from the bush was gone. The things he had learned were gone, rushed out of his head as a herd of horses gallops along the plain and is gone from sight, over a ridge, leaving behind only their thunderous hooves. He felt shaken and sick. He fell forward and caught himself on his hands, and he dry heaved for what seemed like hours. Cars rushed past on the highway. He was alone and blind, somewhere in Nebraska. 

Confessional 1

I want to write well enough that when someone reads it aloud, it is like a meal falling from their mouth filling up the ears of everyone in the room.

On The Road To Nebraska: Pt. 2 The Fire At The Center Of The Earth

The flame rushed over his skin. The flame was his skin. The flame tasted of tangerines and lemon and cinnamon and saffron. The flame smelled of lilies of the valley and blood and hot iron. The world was gone. The road was gone. The truck was gone. Everything was gone except for the flame and the voice. The voice that spoke in a million voices at once. The voice that spoke as the wind speaks, it blows and rushes down from high mountain peaks. The voice spoke to Sal and Sal heard. He heard by God. He heard God. He heard religion.

He felt the pain of Jesus on the cross. He felt the grief of Abraham with the knife. He walked with Buddha down flower lined paths in grace. He was in that cave with Mohammed. He was the lightning. He was the rain. For a minute he was a cloud, a cloud formation rushing over the plains and he was a herd of buffalo below himself galloping and then he was the rain pouring down onto them and then he was the rain falling onto soldiers on the battlefield and he was the rain and the blood from the soldiers and he was the rain and the blood and mud. He was the mud that a seed sprouted in. That a vine grew from. Then he was the vine. Then he was the fruit of the vine and so on until at last he drifted down into the center of things and saw a bush burning with fire and heard a voice speak to him again.

It was dark and light dancing. The voice was the edges where the two met. The voice was the whole of it all. Sal heard. Sal listened. Sal shivered with the energy of it.

Comprehension, pure comprehension rushed into him then. Sal saw what it was to be a wave. What it was to be a particle. Saw the sum of all the knowledge that will ever be. Saw the sum of all the knowledge that could ever be. He understood for a moment the actual history of eye color in humans, he knew all the people with blue eyes that had ever existed. He watched history unfold from the first eye mutation. Blue, and brown and green and black and yellow and purple and red and sea gray and white. All the human eye colors that ever existed. Sal saw the lives of every single one of them, and then he saw the lives of every single person with those eyes and he could not hold on.

He was a pipe through which this flowed. It was a rope that ran through his hands. He couldn't squeeze onto it or it would burn. Burn his soul, burn his mind. He knew then that wisdom was to ride this wave to let himself be carried on its surface. To let what needed to be shown to him shown to him.

He saw the impact that created the moon. He saw the neurons fire in the first person to think that the moon was created by an impact, it was a woman in the distant past and she knew about asteroids and impacts before the knowledge meant anything to anybody. She was a priestess of the moon and marked its changes and faces and passage through the sky. She knew the earth was a sphere. She knew the earth orbited the sun. She also knew that her lover was sleeping with a man. She knew many secrets and did not tell.

Sal saw the purpose of his life; and wept for it was at once too much and too little. He was not the savior of humanity. He was not the soul of us. He knew that he would die emptied and hollowed out by the world. He would be chained. He saw that he would pour ashes in his hair. He saw that no one would know his grave. It would be a meadow just off a high mountain pass in Wyoming and he would walk there and die in only fifteen years. He would lay down in the melting snow and the sun would warm his body and the animals would feast on his flesh and flowers would grow around him and only God would know how he died.

This all flowed past him. He felt drawn towards the bush that burns. He felt the voice wash over him. The knowledge that he gained with each step towards it was more and more important and made the knowledge from the previous step less and less important.

When he got to the bush he sank down to his knees. It was a collapse. It was appropriate. It was orgasmic. It was like the fall of Rome. It was like giving into a knife being thrust in your heart, that last gasp you give before you fall dead. It was like the last push through before you and your lover cum together. It was the very last bit of resistance. He sank down to his knees on soft white sand, like a lover yielding, dying, giving in, giving up. It was appropriate and good.

On The Road To Nebraska: Part 1. A Voice Like Trumpets Sounding

After a hundred thousand miles in a year the road starts to get wearisome. Sal was weary of the road that's for damn sure. He needed a vacation. Needed a break. Sal needed to stop crossing Nebraska. East and West and back again, always on I-80.  The winter sun was setting. Always setting. The CB was full of the same idiots and Sal was tired of the radio stations he got on this part of the run. He liked outlaw country but that was about all he could listen to on the radio out here and he was tired of it. Sal was weary of just about everything. The flat land around him looked tired too. The fields that stretched out on either side of the road and he was tired of trying to conceive of where they ended. Somewhere south, to the right, they ended in the Gulf of Mexico. Did they though? Sal wasn't sure. He'd need to look at a map. The question of whether or not Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico was directly south of him at the present moment carried Sal for twenty miles and then it faded into the grey-brown distance of the fields. There was only the monotony of the endless plains, the endless low rises and dips. There was only the low hanging clouds that never seemed to go away, never seemed to let any sunshine in. There was the road which Sal's eyes read as a moving image, the endless stream of a broken line down the center and the painted yellow on the right and on the left. Bridges went over the truck. Exit ramps flew up on the right and on ramps descended. Somewhere outside of Grand Island, 80 closed down to one lane. Construction for six miles. The cars slowed down, and then they all stopped and then Sal heard a voice and a light flashed and a voice spoke and everything went black.

The voice was so loud he couldn't hear what it said. It spoke with such force that he couldn't comprehend individual sounds or words. The voice spoke to him without moving the air. It raised the hairs on his arms and sent pulsing waves of shivers down his spine and down his limbs. He shook and shivered and spasmed and quivered and the truck lurched forward and his foot hit the brake and it stopped. Sal was deafened and blinded and suddenly alive in a silent black void.

The endless fields of grey brown were gone. The winter sun had set and the world turned into a pool of ink. He felt wind move over him, he felt fire in his gut, he felt each and every one of the hairs on his head stand up. Stand straight up. He had lost control of his body, it moved on without him. He was present though. He was present and felt everything. Heard everything. Couldn't comprehend everything it was too much. It's like when you loose yourself staring into a fire at night only with your whole body. The word is fascinated. The word fascinated is not enough to describe what happened to Sal on highway I-80 in the middle of Nebraska. 

The door to the truck was opened and somebody put the thing in park and Sal was unbuckled from his seat. Hands lifted him up. He felt touched by light. Wind whispered over his skin. He felt every fiber in his clothes. He felt every hair in his body stand on end. He could smell the engine. He could smell the heat from the brakes on his truck. He could smell sweat and fear, his own sweat and fear, and the fear and sweat of the people pulling him from the truck. He could smell every idling car on the highway backing up behind them.

How do you know when God has called you? In the Bible they say that God speaks with a voice as loud as trumpets. Sal didn't have time to think though sight-blinded, and the rushing wind of the world sussuring in his ears. He couldn't think, couldn't process, is nerves were on fire from the heightened sensations rushing in through his skin. He could taste the air now, not just smell it, could taste it, and it was like breathing in water. He felt as if he was thrown into a hot bath of glass. Everything moved thick and slow and seared him with the heat. How do you know when God has called you? How do you know there is such a thing as God? How do you know that you're not experiencing a psychotic break?

There was no time for fear. There was no time. There was only infinity in the hands and the wind.

Birthday Candles

Julie blew out the lone candle on her birthday cake and wished really hard. Her breath hit the flame and the flame went out and smoke followed her breath and left a trail in the air. Everyone looked at her and smiled and asked what she wished for. She told them she couldn't say, that it would ruin the wish if she said it out loud. 

Truthfully she couldn't say what she wished for. Some years ago a melancholy had gripped her and hadn't let go. It was the slow sinking kind of melancholy. It was like she imagined life in winter in the Pacific Northwest must be. Not cold enough to kill you outright, but cold all the same, and always there, dripping and raining and sapping your strength. 

Her parents had moved to Arizona sometime early in her memory. They moved from Missouri and while she didn't have any specific memories she remembered green, bright green and three was something back there with waving grass, and a thunderstorm. 

The smoke alarm went off then and Julie's mom realized she'd never turned the oven off after she took out the roast and the yellow squash and the zucchini. Suzanne got up from the table and knocked over her wine glass in her haste to get to the oven. Marv got up and dragged his chair by the back to a spot below the smoke alarm. He stood on his chair and disassembled the alarm and took out the battery. He put the battery in his shirt pocket and got down from the chair. Julie watched thinking to herself that something about the way her father moved so methodically would be important to remember. She thought maybe someday he'd die and this is what she would remember about him. Then she mentally flogged herself for thinking about this. 

Julie's boyfriend Stan got up from his spot and went to the kitchen to see if he could help her mom. Stan was always useful like that, Julie resented him for this. It's what the melancholy does. 

Julie's melancholy turned people upside down and inside out around her. She would think of things that she should love about people. She would make long lists of their redeeming qualities and then begin to think less of them for these traits. Julie suspected this was because somewhere along the line she had learned to hate herself on some level. She suspected that she disliked people for their good traits because she thought she deserved to be miserable. Julie sat at the table and watched everyone around her move with competence and purpose and she felt jealousy. She was jealous of the way her Dad took the smoke alarm apart without a worry that he might break it. She was jealous of the way her Mom remembered the root of the problem and went to go fix it. She was jealous of the way her father and mother worked perfectly as a team, disassembling the parts of the problem, the smoke and the noise from the smoke alarm. She was jealous of the way her boyfriend tried to help.

She knew intellectually that nobody expected her to solve this problem. She also knew that didn't matter. Julie sat at the table and brooded and looked at the cake in front of her with the lone candle on top of it. The candle wick was burnt and curled in on itself and the pink wax had melted away from the outside and showing the white underneath. Julie looked at it and felt disgust, the old familiar light dusting of disgust she felt when she looked in the mirror. Not good enough. Sick. Wrong. Waxy and pale and poorly shaped and curled in on herself. Just like the half-melted pink candle. She wondered if her purpose was over. If she'd had a flame and it had been lit and blown out and if she could be re-lit or if she should just be put in a drawer or thrown away. 

Her father and mother and boyfriend came back to the table. Julie tried to pull all the black muck of her thoughts deeper inside, tried to shove it down and not let it show. She practiced this quite a bit. She shoved it down and tried to have a good time. Smiled as her mom passed her a plate with cake and ice cream on it. Mint chocolate chip. Green like Missouri. Inside she felt gray and rainy like the pacific northwest. Outside the sun blazed and baked away the suburbs of Phoenix. 

After they ate their cake her mom took the candle out and put it in a box in a drawer. It had twenty-three single candles, all a little burnt, showing some of their insides, a little melted and shaped weird. She put the box in a drawer in the back of a closet upstairs. She stroked the outside of the box before closing the drawer. 

From The Passenger Seat Of A Plymouth Voyager

Stuck on the highway. In the cold like this. Stuck on the highway with the car broken. In the fucking cold. They're all gonna drive by me, half way between the Twin Cities and Des Moines and they'll see my fucking car stuck on this fucking highway and think I'm some sort of idiot who doesn't know how to read a gas gauge, or I'm some kind of incompetent idiot who drove into the ditch and they won't know that I died.

They won't know that I bled out in the passenger seat from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the thigh. They won't know that I saved somebody else's life. They won't know that it doesn't matter anyway because right after I saved her life she walked out into the blizzard and she's probably dead. They'll just think I'm some sort of dumb idiot.

And I am, and so is Christine. Christ. Who brings a loaded gun on the way to a family gathering? A meth head that's who. Fucking Christine. God damn it. I knew she and Brad where on some fucking shit the moment I got in this fucking Plymouth Mini-Van.

I hope the tourniquet holds. I hope I don't die in this fucking Mini-Van. The ambulance is on its way, but I hope they can see me in this fucking blizzard.


Fuck. Don't go into shock. How am I supposed to not go into shock? You're a goddamned asshole. You know that? Well at least I'm not the asshole who brought a loaded gun. No you're the asshole who tried to take a loaded gun from a meth head who was driving in a blizzard waving a gun around.

Christ.

I'm so tired of her shit. She's my younger sister and she was always jealous of me. That's the way younger sisters are.

When I was pregnant for the first time she went out and got pregnant too. Even though Chuck and I were married. Christine just had to go out and get pregnant. Then she lost the baby. I wouldn't put it past her to actually lose the baby, but no she was just doing a lot of drugs and lost the baby because her body was shutting down from whatever she was doing.

I'm tired of being grouchy. I'm tired of being the one that always cleans everything up. We're too old for this shit Christine. I'm forty-three my kids are teenagers.

God I'm pissed.

I hope that ambulance fucking gets here.

New. Personal rule. Never get any vehicle with Christine. Even when you think she's been sober for eight months. Note To Meg. Fuck Christine. I honestly don't care if she dies out there. Like from a logistical level now.

I know, I know, that sounds cold, but that bitch just shot me in the leg on our way to Mom and Dad's house.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. That hurts.

There's the ambulance.

Good.

Christ.

Goddamn it Christine.

All Piling Up

The snow fell deep that winter. It covered everything. It piled until you couldn't hardly see the mailbox by early January, and then they had to dig out a hole in the snow for the mail to be put in the box by mid-January. The Jorgenson's dog had to wear little boots on its paws because of the salt everybody spread around. The cold and the salt made her paws crack and bleed if she didn't wear the little boots. She hated the boots. When you looked at her you could see her lowering her head in shame and she walked funny because of the boots. She didn't trust them. That was Sheila for you though. If you tried to give Sheila a treat she wouldn't take it from your hand like most dogs. She would make you set it down on the ground and then she'd smell it for a minute or two and look up at you accusingly, like you'd tricked her before. I never tricked Sheila. I like dogs. I wouldn't do that to a dog.

I was cheating on my taxes though.


And my wife, but she was cheating on me too. We both knew about the other's affairs. Hers was with a guy she liked in college. I had always hated him. He talked close to you at parties and tried to get you to agree with him about everything. It always seemed to me like he was trying to sell me something, like selling me on the fact that he and my wife weren't fucking.

I went the more traditional route. My little affair was with one my students, Irene. She was never going to play the piano professionally. Hell, I barely play the piano professionally and I'm a professor.  Irene had a real mind for music though. She was going to make one hell of a musicologist and I told her so one day after we had finished having sex. I told her the part about not being able to play the piano professionally.

"It's nothing personal, you just don't have the chops, and I'm only a little bit better than you. I know you'll be better than me in a couple of years." I told her as I stubbed out a cigarette.

She was still smoking hers and I thought for a minute that she was going quiet, quiet before the storm. I thought she was going subite to gather her energy before attacking me forte. She didn't do that though.  She just looked up at me, and said "I know."

As I waited for the storm that never came I composed a speech about how the assholes with the talent get burned out anyway. They have to practice six hours a day and study for another six and that's just to break even, and the truly talented assholes have been doing all of that since they were seven so they've never had a life, and it's much easier and better in my opinion to just be a professor. But all I said was "It's nothing personal" and the awkwardness filled the room. You could hear her old radiator ticking as the metal warmed up, hear footsteps deep somewhere in her old shitty apartment building.

Outside it was starting to snow.

That winter I stopped cheating on my wife. I think she stopped cheating on me with Stephen. I'm pretty sure. We never brought it up. I think we didn't bring it up because both of us had gathered evidence of the other cheating. I was waiting to use my evidence on her when as a knockout punch in a fight. I had it planned out. She was going to get me on the ropes at some point, she always did. My wife, Sarah, is a much better fighter than I am. She kicks my ass up and down the street. Sarah remembers everything and she knows how to duck and dodge around arguments. I'll bring up something perfectly logical and she'll twist right past it like she's made of water. Like she didn't even hear me. Like what I said didn't even matter. Other times she'll act like I pinned her down and skewered her and she'll make me feel like a monster for it, and I just thought I was fighting fire with fire.

I really do love my wife.


I think it's just that we got married too young, or maybe I'm an asshole. I think they're both true. I am an asshole. Things can change, though.

Sarah was doing dishes that night I came back from Irene's. The night when Irene told me she knew she wasn't going to be a professional piano player. It was snowing. Sarah was doing the dishes with her back turned to me and I don't know what happened.

We're in our mid-forties, and long ago we talked about not having children. I think we both resented each other for how easy that decision was. What I'm trying to say is that our house had been cold and cerebral for a long long time. That's a big reason why neither of us really cared about the other's affair.

For some reason though, when I got home that night. When I saw her doing my dishes, it just came out of my mouth, the first thing I said when I walked through the door.

"I'm home." and I meant it.

It snowed a lot that winter, and we didn't care. Sarah and I, we didn't care one bit. We didn't care. We just fell in love again. Like we hadn't been since we were kids.

Marching

Feel it swell in your feet my friends. That is where it starts. It's a song that flows into you from the land. It goes from your feet up into your knees and thighs and loins and guts and finally into your heart. Im Herzen. That's where the song takes root and starts to live and breathe and sing. Then we're marching and singing in the streets. All of us are together, united together, because we have suffered a long winter together, a long time together, we have lost together and this is our moment. This is now the only moment when we get to share the fact that we are alive. This is the time when our voices join into a swelling chorus that even God in his high heaven cannot ignore, and the devil runs before us, running into the night. For we have, just for this moment as we all sing, found a place where neither God nor the Devil can harm us. We have come through the burning plains and freezing winds, we have marched together and died together as brothers, and I love you all so much, I would die for you, bleed for you, starve for you, and my brothers this is life at its sweetest, and let us sing for the ones we have lost.

We are sleeping in the mud. We are hearing you cry. I see you my child my darling my dear my love my life my hope my joy, my sunshine on cloud tops and breaking waves, my heart hears you cry and scream in the dark and we sleep on mud and moss and pine needles under the stars and by fires and our faces are smeared with charcoal. I love you I love you I love you, don't cry my dear my darling my life my love my hope my joy my sunshine on cloud tops my breaking waves my crackling flames and whistling kettle, my love we will be borne up from this, I promise this. This is not our end my dear my life my love my hope my joy my sunshine on cloud tops and breaking waves my crackling flames, my whistling kettle, my woolen blanket, my feather bed, we are not done yet we are not dead, we will rise from this, rise from the ashes on our faces streaked with tears, we will build a place here, in the mud and the pine needles, here in the cold, here we will build a place of warmth, oh my love my life my joy my hope my light, my sunshine on cloud tops and breaking waves, my heart my hearth my crackling flames, my whistling kettle my woolen blanket my feather bed

Sister Harriet

Sister Harriet stood in her doorway looking up the long slope of the valley towards the grandfathers' peaks. She stood still with her head cocked, just looking up at those old peaks, covered in snow, like a bridal gown. The white of the snow came down the sides of our valley, the place where our people had been born into the world and where we would die, God save us. Sister Harriet would stand in her doorway like that for hours and we could not tell if she was listening to something here, or if she was listening to God.

It was late winter and the dust in the streets had turned into a black muck that got all over shoes and boots and splashed up pant legs and clung to the hems of skirts. She could smell it coming. Spring was just around the corner, soon her mornings would be warm and filled with birdsong and sunlight and we would all be saved amen God praise us amen, God save us amen. God kept us all winter long amen. God and Jesus saved us amen. Like little lambs he blesses us and cherishes us and wipes away our tears like the melting snow.

This was Sister Harriet's twenty-fifth spring in our valley. The church in all her wisdom had sent her to us to teach us the bible, and to teach us the mass, and to teach us to say our prayers to Mother Mary who wept, and still weeps, for her son, for us, she who intercedes with the Lord on our behalf, begging him to be kind and gentle to us. Sister Harriet taught us all our catechism and our rosary and she was the only one who would stand up to old Father Elias who told us we were unclean for the color of our skins.


Here in the high mountain valley we called home oh the hills rising up above us where our fathers herded sheep and we wove that wool into cloths dyed with fire and flashing blue the color of Mother Mary's veil. The blue of forgiveness, that's what Sister Harriet taught us, blue is forgiveness, and that's why God spreads it over the sky. Showing us that our sins are washed clean from us like wool before it is dyed, washed clean and pure and white. Father Elias taught us to fear God. Sister Harriet taught us to come to the Lord and to come to Mary and bow our heads before them like we do to our own parents. Our fathers started to drink then. Started to take the wine and the liquors that had never spread to our valley until now. They started to beat us. We'd show up to Sunday school with black eyes and loose teeth and Sister Harriet would tut her tongue at the sight of it. We were too young to know anything else though. All of us little children, a chorus of innocence in a harsh mountain valley at the edge of the world where all we had were sheep and the river and the bright burning blue of forgiveness spread over the sky.

Sister Harriet stood in front of her little cottage, which our fathers and uncles and brothers had built, piling stones and mortaring them together until she had a snug little cottage that she could heat with her wood burning stove, things Mother Church provides her missionaries. Sister Harriet stood in front of her door, which she had to stoop to walk through, and she breathed in the air and smelled the coming spring and she praised God who keeps us, praised God who loves us and teaches us, praised Him who sacrificed himself to us, for us, for our sins. The mountain air was warm rushing down from the north, warm wet air rushing down from the north. Some days you would swear you could smell the hot wet jungles, smell them with their hidden dangers, with the screaming demons that lurk in the dark wet undergrowth, waiting to drag you down with their claws and teeth. Waiting to cloud your mind with their poisons and drugs. 

The grandfathers didn't go to church. They would sit out in the high pastures and sacrifice a ram. Sacrifice a ram to the old gods who had sheltered us for so long. They would chant and hum and sing and drink from a skin. Drink the urine of a man who had eaten mushroom caps and seen visions. He would then piss into a bowl and the bowl would be set in a high place, in a cold high place, so that the gods could touch it with ice. Then that man who had seen their faces, had seen the old gods faces, like long distant cousins, old ancestors who had worked and lived and died in our valley, old grandfathers the faces of our people, and he said they wept for us, said they cried out to us on the moaning wind, reached out their hands to us with the whispering pines, tried to embrace us as the earth someday embraces us all, he the one who had seen these faces and who knew their hearts, would take the bowl and clear from it the ice that had grown on it. Gently with his fingers he would clear the ice and then pour the bowl into a skin, into the sacred skin, marked with red, marked with the blood of ram after ram, dark red brown leather, worked and worried and polished with years, and he would pour the urine into the skin and pass it around, and each grandfather would drink from the skin and they would pass the skin until all had taken it into themselves, until all of them had taken the  voices of the ancestors, of the gods, of our long gone cousins, into themselves. In the firelight they would look into each other's eyes and see all the secrets a man hides from the world. All the shame and pain and fear that a man hides in himself, and they would see this in each other's hearts, laid bare by the old gods, and they would hum and sing to each other. Songs of brotherhood, songs of love and friendship, until the fire died down and then the gods would come and walk among them. 

The grandmothers had their gatherings too, but theirs was kept dark and secret and they did it in a cave that every child is scared to go in. They would lead a lamb, into the cave, into the dark place that they had prepared, a place they called the womb of the earth. A white lamb was carried there, and we were not taught what happened then. There are no windows into the womb of the earth. There are no fires in the warm wet cave the grandmothers prayed in. Their secrets are lost to us children. Mother church has broken our chains. 

Sister Harriet though we watch, we watch as she takes one of us into her arms, one of us who has been beaten by a father for some imagined disobedience. Sister Harriet takes one of us into her arms and wipes away our tears, like God wipes away the snow from the high hills,  and she makes one of us laugh, by tickling us and kissing us and singing sweet songs into our ear as she hugs us to her breast and we feel safe don't we? Safe there near her heart. She makes us feel safe there, safe with her. We love her.

We love Sister Harriet, as she stares up the valley, and looks to the place where the waters are rising, and soon there will be fish and birdsong and we will plant potatoes and the traders will come up the valley to us and we will give them wool, and they will give us dyes and then we'll move onto the summer pastures, and we will not see Sister Harriet again for months and months. 

She smiles up at the mountain peak. We think she smiles at us. We think she is smiling at God. 

Bullseye

Staring into that blackness in the center of a band of red. I've seen it a thousand times before in my life. It's the card that keeps coming up no matter how many times I cut the deck. This is my story of circles, circles bound and circles spoken. Hear me know as I yield up my life to you. Feel that great rush of wind fill your lungs. See the light come flooding in. Smell the blood. Smell the life. Smell the fire, light in the dark.

I am born, it's happened to me several times, first in a hospital. White tiles, green curtains, shiny silver, white enamel, green scrubs the smell of disinfectant, cheap pine scented disinfectant.  There's not much that makes sense left from this birth in me. Just scattered sensations jangling around in the dark. Strong hands grip me. Light wakes me. Air shakes me. Then the next birth comes on.

I am three years old standing on the edge of a soybean field. Standing in the wreck and ruin of an abandoned farmyard. The other fields had neatly knitted up the edges and a barnyard full of rusting appliances and scrapped cars is all that’s left. I am three years old and I am staring at the setting sun as a storm cloud passes in front of it. The sun burns through the clouds like a fiery iris, and I know God. I feel strong hands grip me, light wakes me, and air shakes me. My father picks me up and we run to the house as it starts raining, hard.

Six years later in a distant relatives house I am staring into the glass eye of a pheasant dead and mounted on a shelf. The band of red encircling the dot of black, and over it a glossy sheen. There is a fire crackling somewhere in the room, but I was lost in the depths of the eye. I feel invisible hands grip me; grip my lungs from the inside. I feel God's hands. I am woken by light, by bright red fire light shining from that glossy eye. The air shakes and shivers and I shiver and shake with it. I see the sun burning behind the clouds and the edges of my vision blur with light that may be white tiles as I feel God.

I am twelve sitting in the dark staring into a campfire. My Boy Scout troop is sitting around listening to a story told by our troop leader. I stare into the fire where a knot on a log has not burnt. Deep black charcoal ringed by a burning red rim. As the scout master tells us about a hook scratching on the roof of a car I feel strong hands grip up my spine and grab me by the lungs and I'm in the presence again. Light wakes me. Air shakes me. I see the flash of the sun behind clouds. I see the edges of my vision as I scream myself awake from birth and I see the glossy pheasants eye lit with fire light. Air shakes me, light wakes me, I am gripped by strong hands.

I am fifteen and running on the field with the football in my hands and the pads like the armor of justice around me and I'm running towards Victory and the land of sweet rewards. Running 'til there's fire in my lungs and legs and blood, 'til there's fire in my soul. The hit comes, strong hands, the ground hits me.  Light wakes me, the air shimmers and shakes me and I see the fiery red and bold dark black, and I hear ringing like a finger on glass or high distant rolling bells. I see the eye of a pheasant and the sun behind clouds and a burning knot of pine and a I see a black circle rimmed in red and bright white light.

I am seventeen tall and strong and bold and I am running through the woods with my crossbow, the deer are being driven and flushed this way by my father and my uncle. I see movement to my right, air comes burning into my lungs. I turn to fire and there I see it telescoped by adrenaline: the eye of a deer, blackness rimmed red. I fall to the ground gripped by strong hands. Light wakes me then. Air shakes me.

We are in an ancient desert city it's our third patrol of the week. How the dust and dry mud of these buildings can burn is beyond me. I am a machine gunner on top of a Hummvee. I see movement to my left and I swing the gun around and cycle rounds of thunder and fury and bolts of fear at the movement. We are under fire from all directions. There is swirling smoke there is red wicked flame, there are screams and explosions. I see friends and foes die, cut down before me. Wheat before the scythe. I know these things I hear them. I feel them. I see them. A rocket hits the front of my vehicle and I am thrown by the blast. Even now in this hot violent dusty land, now in the circle of death and ruin, now in the place where none of us know why we are fighting, but we fight until we die and bleed and can struggle no more, even as I lay on the ground stunned by the blast. Shook by it, shaken by it, taken by it. I feel them. I feel strong hands grip me. Light wakes me, air shakes me. I feel God. I am born.

Big Guy

There was a guy I knew once. He was a big guy. Really big guy. Seven feet tall, and big. I'm six foot two, but he made me look like a kid. Made me look like a little kid. His hands were huge, so big you'd think "he could crush my head if he wanted to". But he didn't want to. Mostly he just wanted to get out of the way.

Growing up he didn't want to do any of the things that people wanted him to do. He didn't want to be a star football player, or a basketball player, or play at the net in volleyball, or wrestle, or do anything like that. Later he'd been asked too many times to move heavy things, and move people's furniture, and break up concrete, and push stuck cars, and haul things around in wheelbarrows that he stopped being friends with most people. When I'd talk to him mostly he just wanted to go away from everybody.

He was really nice, but he didn't want to be around anybody. I think he'd gotten so much attention his whole life from being so big that he got tired of it, and just wanted to go out somewhere where he felt normal sized.

So he did.

His wife had left him and took the kids. It had nothing to do with his size, and everything to do with how people deal with the disappointment we feel in each other. Or maybe things just didn't work out. Who knows, I didn't really ask him about it, seemed like that was something a little too personal for us to get into.

He went out into the mountains. He was gone for years and years.

Then the mountains where he lived got crowded with people. They came for all sorts of reasons, skiing, fishing, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking, looking at trees and rare birds, trying to fill up something inside themselves that is missing when they're surrounded by tall buildings and concrete. They bought up all the land around him and built houses. Mostly they were older than him by a couple of decades. They were retirees. Some of them had made enough money that they were pretty young, and others were the regular kind.

The day he left the mountains he'd gone for a walk in the morning, and one of his new neighbors had seen him on the gravel mountain road that all the retirees had paid for, and he said "Shit you're a big guy, did you play ball in college?" then before he could answer the retiree said "Hey, I've got a piano I want to shift around in my house, there'd be some beers in it for you." People were always offering him beers as payment. If he'd been the sort of guy that drank, well he would have been set. He wasn't set.

He didn't like beer. Didn't like the way alcohol made him feel. He liked marijuana, not when he was around people. When he was around people marijuana made him feel itchy and shifty and all the other sorts of nervous. He'd hold onto himself around the middle, like he was hugging his own stomach. He'd rock back and forth, not fast, but anything a big guy like that did you'd notice pretty quick. His favorite thing to do was to roll up a joint and go walk around the woods. He liked to look up the undersides of trees when he was high. He liked to do it when he wasn't high too, but he liked it better when he was high. He liked the way the light came through the leaves, and the wind moved through them and made them shiver. He liked deciduous trees the best, Catalpas were his favorite. Coniferous trees would do in a pinch but he didn't like them as much. I asked him once when we were talking about trees if he'd ever made it out to the Giant Redwoods. He said he hadn't, and then he looked sad for a minute.

He looked sad a lot. He had eyes that just looked sad. The wrinkles around the sides weren't there from laughing or smiling. He'd had to do a lot of hard work in his life and it wore him out and made him tired. He didn't like people very much, and it is harder to be happy when you don't like people very much, because there's so many people.

I think he was alright with me, because I'm pretty big. I'm on the small end of big though. People ask me to do a lot of things, but I'm happy to do them, because I like people. He was just too big though. Nobody could get their arms around him for a hug.

I never asked him about his sex life. I was brought up to believe that some things are private.

When he came back from the mountains it wasn't for very long, but I asked him to go fishing. We sat by the river, under the trees, and I fished. He didn't fish. He said he didn't like putting the hooks in the bait, or taking the hooks out of the mouths of the fish, or gutting the fish and pulling its insides out. I don't mind that stuff too much. I did when I was a kid, but I think you have to get used to stuff like that. Don't get me wrong I don't like doing things like that. I don't like putting hooks in worms. I don't like grabbing a fish out of the water and looking at the fear and terror in its eyes as it tries to suck air through its lungs and suffocates on it. I don't like pulling the hook out, and I don't like pulling its insides out, but I like to have a fish fry sometimes.

We sat by the river and I drank a beer and he rolled a joint. He smoked it and didn't offer me any, which was fine. I didn't offer him any beer. When he was high he started telling me about the mountains and how they'd filled up with people.

"Why don't you like people very much?" I asked him.

"I'm just tired of them." He said. His shoulders drooped, and I guess that made him look silly to me, sitting on the river bank like that. It was funny to see a big man like that droop, there was something of a cartoon in the action, it was so expressive. I laughed. He didn't like that, I could tell, but he didn't say anything.

"Why don't you like them?"

"I guess, I just feel like everybody's always looking at my body and thinking of things for me to do with it. When I was growing up everybody wanted me to play football or play basketball or play at the net in volleyball or wrestle or box. Then they started to get ideas about how much I could lift. My ex-wife only liked me because she felt safe being with a big guy like me, she left me for somebody else, he's only six foot eight, but they get along better. I don't know, that doesn't sound like a lot does it?" He sounded sad. He got sad a lot when we'd sit by the river and talk. I didn't mind, I think that's why he liked me. I let him be sad.

"No, it doesn't, people did the same thing to me." I said and opened another beer. I wasn't getting any bites on my fishing pole, but I didn't mind.

"Its more than that though. People look at me. They say things about me. They come up to me and think they know me. They don't ask about me."

"I ask about you." But he didn't hear me, he just looked up at the underside of the trees.


He moved out to the desert. I guess nobody gets filled up by things in the desert like they do in the mountains because he's still out there.

Blood And Oil And The Ocean In My Chest

Every night before I go to sleep I try to scrape myself clean, on the inside, where my heart used to be, before I ripped it out and told you to go, I drag bags of broken glass through my veins, I pour acid down them afterwards. I try to cauterize the wound. I try to make sure that nothing can grow back. I do this because hearts can grow back. They're tenacious little fuckers. They come back when you're not looking, and they can start breaking and bleeding at any moment. Mine usually tries to come back when I'm lying in a bed without you. Without my arms wrapped around you, it pumps blood all over my sheets, and I lie there and sob into my pillows and wish that I had scraped myself clean by looking at pictures of you, and remembering the fights and not the softness of your skin and the smell of your hair and the way you'd look up at me, catching me looking at you and say "what?" in that way that you say it that just causes my heart to gush blood like the Deepwater Horizon well gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I'd like to cut my heart from my chest and put it in a safe at the bottom of the sea, but it would pump blood into the ocean whenever I go to sleep, running my hands over the empty spaces where you used to fit so snugly against me. Pumping blood by the barrel full into the abyss while I stare up at my ceiling thinking about how you'd put your retainers in, and how I love your laugh, and your brown doe eyes and long lashes, and how I wish you could wrap your arms and legs around me and I wrap my arms and legs around you, and how I wish we were different people that matched up differently, and how maybe then we could have stayed together and I wouldn't have had to cut my own heart out of my chest and thrown it into the ocean. 

In the morning I wake up. I am very still when I wake up. I think to myself it is another day without you. It has been another night without you. It has been two hundred and twenty nine days since I woke up next two you. That is twenty-three million eighty-three thousand and two hundred some heart beats since I woke up next to you. That's eight thousand two hundred and forty-nine drums of blood coating the ocean floor. I do the math as I brush my teeth. I do the math as I put my clothes on. I do the math of the disaster as I put one arm through the shirt. I do the math of the disaster as I put the other arm through the shirt. I think about how many swimming pools of blood that is (just over three average swimming pools). That's the blood that I have pumped through my veins since I tore my heart out and threw it in the ocean. It's lying at the bottom down there and I can feel the weight of the whole ocean in the cavity in my chest. I can feel it every minute with every step I take and every breath I take and some days I feel like I'm drowning at the bottom of the sea but not in salt water but in blood and its the blood I've pumped through my heart since I told you to leave. 

I read your website every night before bed. I read the poems you post there. I cut myself on your words. I take them in and force them down my throat. I shove their jagged edges into the cavity in my chest. I read your words aloud to myself in my room, only I speak in a whisper because I have the whole weight of the ocean pressing down upon my chest. Some nights when I read what you have written I spring a leak. Salt water leaks out of my eyes. It must be coming up from the cavity in my chest that is tied to the bottom of the ocean. 

What The Ear Hears In The Mirror

"Well Jeffrey what are we going to do about this?" Mrs. Dittmer asked. This was one of her favorite questions. Always we. The words she used made it seem like she was going to be part of the solution, and by that she meant that she was not at fault. Jeffrey knew the only answer that would please her.

"I guess I've got to buckle down. Try harder you know. I keep getting distracted."

Music filed in under the door, or maybe through the cracks in the windows. It was there in the background. A piano was being played somewhere, it sounded mournful and yet somehow light.

Mrs. Dittmer smiled a tight smile. Her lips were pressed together so tightly when she smiled like that, trying to cover that snaggletooth. "No Jeffrey. We've tried that too many times already. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go to your parents with this. Yes, I've already contacted Principal Sorenson and he agrees with me. We're really going to have to do something about these test scores of yours."

The piano played on in the background, and Jeffrey tapped his foot lightly in time.

"Please don't, you don't know what they'll say. I promise I'll do better, let me take the test over again, I'll prove I can do better."

"Jeffrey that wouldn't be fair to the other students, they don't get the chance to take this test over again, and neither should you."

The music was swelling now. Swelling in Jeff's ears. Didn't she hear it? Why didn't she hear it? It had to be a concert pianist visiting or something like that.

And then something happened that nobody could explain. The world jumped forward twenty-three years in time.

Mrs. Dittmer was dead, cancer. The middle school had closed, republican governor.

In the meantime Jeffrey had gone on to be an average student, and had graduated high school and college and gotten by as the manager of a local office supply store.

Peculiarly twenty-three years in the future Jeffrey found himself as an adult, with all the little betrayals of age, staring into the mirror and having no memory of the past twenty three years. He was a handful of years shy of forty and still felt like he was fourteen staring up at Mrs. Dittmer.

I am a salesman. I sell flower services. I sell flowers, but in my heart I like to believe I sell dreams. Sweet little lies that fall like raindrops, and shatter like a crystal vase after you've thrown it against the wall in anger.

Have you ever heard the story of Atlas? Yeah, that guy with the world on his shoulders. Well you've probably heard it as a Greek myth, but it's older than that. Anyway, he didn't start out with the world. No the guy started out with a plate of beans. He was a waiter in one of the first restaurants. Nobody knows the name of the place anymore, but we do know that they had the first tablecloths, and they were red. The napkins were red, the candles were red, the plates were made out of red clay, in fact at that time even people's skin was red, because of all the red clay dust, it didn't matter what color you were underneath the dirt, you were red anyway. Everyone was red, from the mayor to the little kid begging for apple cores on the streets, everybody was red. And Atlas? He was really red, because he sweat so much. The dust just stuck to him. Anyway. There he was in the restaurant, carrying plates of red beans and rice to people, when all of the sudden a snake dropped from the ceiling right on top of table seven, the one where the city council man and his mistress were eating. Everyone starts screaming and hollering red bloody murder. Atlas didn't miss a beat, he ran over to the table, looked at the snake, looked at the city councilman and his young mistress, and lifted the whole table right off the floor, and held it up to the ceiling. Oh, man, the room exploded in applause, here was this guy, sure he was kind of big, and kind of tall, but not too big, and not too tall, but man could he ever lift tables. He had saved the city councilman, who later ran for and became the mayor in the city official's annual fight to the death. So that's how it started and then people kept asking Atlas to lift more things, here lift this bed, beds at the time were only a little bit bigger than tables, people weren't really into sleeping all that much back then. So Atlas lifted the bed, and then a long bench with people on it, and then a small tree, and then a whole house and on and on, until he was lifting the known world, which really wasn't that big, but still pretty impressive for a local boy, but then again everyone was a local boy back then. The point is by the time the story of Atlas lifting the whole of the known world got to the Greeks size of the known world had gotten a lot bigger.

Get Yourself Bigger

"I'm here because I want to be. That's the only reason. James, I'm going to call you James, that's ok right? Anyway, I'm here because I want to be here. You have to get that right. When I'm ready to leave I'm going to go find my wife and tell her I'm ready to get things right. But right now I'm too small." That was the first thing Henry said to me. We were sitting in my office, you probably know the drill. You've seen enough movies about the marginalized and depressed. You've seen Edward Norton stare intently at the camera and turn away quickly. Turning into himself, as if there was something deeper there.

I am not a doctor. I don't have the qualifications for this job. I'm not even sure how I ended up doing this. The patients, we call them clients now, talk to me like I am there therapist, because that's what they are used to doing. I guess it is a kind of therapy. Its not part of their weekly hour with their actual therapist. I am supposed to make notes, and I do, because they, the clients, say really interesting things. 

Henry for instance is obsessed with his size. He has been diagnosed with Body Dismorphia, along with the usual list of disorders and maladies that pull people out of the general population, by which I don't mean prison, I mean the actual general population. Henry beat up a man at a bar downtown. He wasn't even involved in the initial fight. Which was started because a man thought a girl was trying to take his coat, when she was in fact making sure it didn't fall. Anyway, Henry beat that man into permanent brain damage. The victim now rides around town on a tricycle because he can't balance on a bicycle anymore. 

Henry turned himself in, two weeks later. He said he was afraid of doing it again. He said he didn't have his head right. I've been talking to him twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays for about six months now. 

The fucking thing is this: Henry is right. Here's what I wrote down from our last session. 

"James, the whole thing with the bodybuilding, I realize now that it wasn't about muscle. I was just being dumb. I was getting bigger in the wrong place. I should have been getting bigger on the inside. You know? Like, oh man, I should have paid more attention in school, what do they call it?" Philosophy is what I chimed in with. "No that's not it, I don't know what it is but that ain't it." Then the meds kicked in a little bit and he lost focus and started staring at the wall. They do that sometimes, the clients. Everyone does it, but the drugs the state gives people here, the drugs exaggerate certain things.

"I'm like a child staring up at the clock at school." He said, this is the sort of disconnected thing that you have to follow with these patients because when you do, oftentimes they end things up in a beautiful way, this is what I have learned. "I'm like a child staring up at a clock on the wall at school, and I don't even see the map of the world next to it, and that's the thing that is ticking away and not the clock. Everyone is ticking away, all of us, and we don't see it because we're focused on the thing that's moving." This is a sentiment that is repeated a lot in here. The world is moving on, and we the witnesses and the victims and the perpetrators are not, because we are beholden to some sort of different time scale than that which rules the outside walls.

I go home to my apartment and think about these things. Then I go to work, I do not work full time at the hospital. They should call it an asylum like they did in the old days, because nobody is getting better, they are only accepting that the staff along with everyone else will become indifferent to them, just like everyone else in their lives. Eventually everyone will stop visiting, parents, siblings, wives, children, everyone stops visiting in the end. Life covers up profundity with reality, and so it goes.

Here sits Henry, a boat against the current, and I can't help but agree with him. He is too small on the inside, and so are all of us. The thing is though that the space that we try to fill is becoming increasingly infinite. We are all trying to bridge an ocean, and Henry is the only person I know who acknowledges that his lifeboat may not breach that ocean, and that is why he beat a man into infirmity. God bless Henry., 

A Relationship

She walked into the room. It was a very cold room, the kind of cold that sticks to your skin and not your clothes, wet and chilly.
"I know what you did" Was the first thing George said. It was a really awkward way to start up a confrontation. In hindsight George would later rethink this tactic, and swear to himself that a build-up would be better than barreling directly into the matter, but now he carried on conspicuously. "You fucked him didn't you? You fucked that bartender."

The accusation caught Harriet off-guard. Not, because it wasn't true. It was certainly true. She had engaged in sexual congress with the bartender who introduced himself as Red. A man long in limb and crooked and yellow in the teeth, but still there was something she found in him.

"Yes. I did George." She said unapologetically. This was the end then. Before this very moment the relationship may have continued. This was the branching moment, where the spiral arm careened off the path that both of them had imagined laying in each others arms.

The coldness, the factual nature in which she said "Yes. I did George." cut him. It was to him as if she couldn't imagine another outcome. As if she couldn't imagine a world where his trust in her wasn't betrayed. As if she could not imagine a world where her emotional engagement in him outweighed her carnal needs. Of course that's not why it happened.

Now for Harriet the conversation took her back to that night. The drink, the drink after drink. The fear. Things with George were moving to fast, they were going too well. When this happened with Brian he had left her, just before she graduated. She and Brian had a whole life planned together, and that was less than nothing, and now she was beginning to imagine that with someone else, and lighting cannot strike twice, especially if you make sure it doesn't.

So that's how it ended between them.

"Yes. I did George"

"Jane, you are not going to believe this." I'm practicing what I'm going to say. I've been pacing up and down in front of her apartment building for a full twenty minutes. "Listen, Jane I've been offered a..." No, that's not going to work. "Jane, I'm sorry, but I can't let this go on anymore."

Yes that's it, I've got to make a change. It is still cold out. Even though we've had three days of sunshine and all the snow has melted and birds are singing in the trees they keep planting by the sidewalks. The trees that are never going to get older or bigger, but are going to die choked by cigarette butts and empty plastic water bottles, and chewing gum scraped onto their trunks.

I'm suddenly glad I'm not a tree. But maybe it wouldn't be so bad. If I were a tree I wouldn't have to see her with him. I know what they're up to. I know how she looks at him, when I'm in the room. Dance lessons, you bet your fucking ass, dance lessons. I'll eat my hat. What kind of dance do you do on the mattress when I'm not around?

No. Poison. That's a poison pill, that thought will grow vines and choke your mind. Stop it.

Just another nip from the flask. Wasn't it supposed to be warm today? We've had three days of sunshine, and the last time I read the newspaper my horoscope said I'd feel the sunshine coming through.

The homeless man on the corner, didn't ask me for change. He just let me walk on by. Do I look that bad? I know this coat is ripped, I keep meaning to sew it shut, but I've only got a little bit of time left to tell Jane that I'm leaving.


"Jane!" I shout up at her window. There aren't any lights on but I know she's there, hips tipped up to heaven and him pointing south at hell.

"Do you hear me Jane?" Lights go on and off in the other windows. Another sip, another smoke. Is she coming down? Should I run? Hearts beating faster. Why? I practiced this. There's a cop on the corner down the street.

"Jane I'm leaving now." I shout. I shouldn't shout so much. It is ripping up my throat.
I've got to go and sew my coat.