16.0
The world went silent when our hero drove away without her — left Nebraska stuffed in cotton to the edges of his ears and jutting out around his head — someone had studio sound-proofing ready to install — they had predicted our heroine’s decision — and it went up around him for the days of his return — which he estimated would be three insofar as he could think — since he was entirely aimless — the rush had been to get there — new arrivals past his comprehension — the drive to California started going east, then veering to the Badlands — the first night camping left him hardened to its energy, and in the twilight before sleep he thought to solve its craggy maze — he parked anywhere at dusk and kicked centuries of rock from the chalk outline of his shape, that he might stretch out in his rictus, with just a pen to light his digs against the inky dark — the cosmic black surrounding him ran farther out than lakes as big as seas — try as he might to reach the edge, it rippled faster, yonder and away — its gallop was unceasing, he was at a trot — it did not make a caw, a wail, a peep — it did not pop its knuckles or whistle bades come hither — now a craft was launching on its platters made of zinc — for want of bronze a people fell, never to regain the cities someone else had built — passing ox carts scratched the walls, the patties in the street — but hooves went without clomping, instruction like lip sync — and trucks reversed without waking sleepers down another street — aeroplanes took off without rattling the knickknacks on the shelves of those whose children grew and left — whacking weeds and mowing fields went eerily on mute, and horns jarred no one up from their phone screen — hearing aids turned up to full blast — speakers went there too — but the only music penetrating cotton was on a staffèd page — it was performed but only heard in focus in the mind — tunes lived on between the ears and jeers went unreceived — promises of love were made in duo orbs, the only looking place such promises were ever truly made — the list of countenance in marriage to apply and avoid had greater import even still when speech was swallowed permanently in Dakota Bad. Then there was our hero with his hands clawed into the wheel, who’s in a tempest of regret and rage against his fate, who’s pressed in on all sides by klaxon waves, who’s in a tantrum in his mind, itself a gale of rain blown so hard it hurts bare legs and brows — a hurricane has torn off his spine and threw it in a pit of radios that actively give cancer, that burn chemically — the one thing that can scream is in his wounded throat — he lets the dashboard have it — tempered glass goes spidery, the tires go off their axle — he hears it as it’s happening, the looming cliff, and every kennel’s worth of dogs directed at him — now he listens to it all, the brief cacophony.
She was a creature of the moment — he of the moment passed. She had a memory that went on only in her brain — the lover in her heart was the lover in her bed — happenstance and thought were storms and the clamor out there tried to be the clamor in her mind — so he made a harbor fair, where rich green earth could starve a typhoon of its fuel, and coral reefs made water breaks that slowed the fearsome tide — and on that crescent petal beach the dock where might be invitation — in repose the silk was loosely looped around a pier — that was enough to moor the land, damaged by the sediment, all porous and jagged, that stacked itself in points to rip the bottom from a hull — the coral made a living maze of obstacle to reach her — without a seasoned navigat no one could make contact with the dock — one who knew the turns to take at which point at which tide would cross the patch of shallow sea — a GPS would result in scuppering — the average captain drowned all hands in the attempt.
Years passed well fed for our heroine in idle fantasy — the harbor couldn’t stop the salt from clinging to the eaves — nor those drops that fell on her when tempests round her raged, but they could not capsize her nor give any cause to sink. At any time she wanted she could travel — though everything she needed was here in cornland, there was something dreary in the old same old — more pronounced in contrast to the paradise of staved off needs — twas dreary sometimes everywhere, which shrank before the open space — anything in front of vastness will seem small — though that were true it was not practical — reasoning that’s been the downfall of whole peoples — and crumbs swept up will vanish thrown onto a mess — and there a lifetime falters for the want of what’s not real. When self-awareness it regains, the harbor finds her there in craft but not in art — that much of her has picked out whole new lands to shore up with her view, she passes onto others what she sees by how they see her — her handsome brow and tinsel cheeks, and eyes in shadow so the aqua’rine stands out like oceans in the black of airless cosmic pulling, however loosely, the disparate together — it is the night that does it — the space between the stars, that treats us like we’re toys, moved by radio from knobs we cannot see — everything we’re set against only tries to please, while what we pine through lenses for is parroting our enemy — the very gods inhabiting the pretty distant orbs mistrust our beseeching when it’s accident’ly heard — though they send Triton’s wrath, the harbor is near mint — there reposes our delight in craft if not in form, and there it is content to rest as he had intended — the harbor’s highest compliment — it looks the same today as on the day he made it, as we tell old friends on either end of their last sighting, regarding when we met.
16.1
All children know the forest, their genes remembering ancestral homes, their minds alight with all the living moving things around them — they want to touch the puffy leaves and eat the tasteless poison berries, to pick up pods and crack the scattered nuts between two rocks, to find some running water and stare into it, and try to trap the salamanders that swim and seek two things — to eat and not be eaten, and also there were sometimes arrowheads for amateur I. Joneses, the excitement of the find as coupled with the muteness of a genocide, the misguided but important feeling of connection to a rotund past, where every day is charged because it represents a myth — the noble savage stands beside his frightful enemy, the migrant colonizer who was really really into Iron Age mythology from the Middle-East, for whom the wilderness made anxious, as it harbored demons, and he called it “howling” — a civil man goes savage there, he thought, away from candle light and brimstone liturgy, its constant reinforcement, til lessons more than reach the border of subconscious –more than enter it, they reshape it — and now the verbiage is on the tongue without passing into thought — every chant’s a try at ‘radication — and a forest contemplative is a place where evil reigns, instead of what it really is, a city of mycelia, which is why the most intolerant, who are at once the most obedient, are attracted to the woods, for the feeling it ignites in human beans, through a sense that science proper has not mapped of yet, whereby we sense connection with the grand mycelium, and thus the living planet — like the natives did — becoming almost cognizant of the nurture that goes on there, from seeds to spores to all the pleasant silent forms that feed and shelter us. The forest has been a managed garden back to the HRE — but it was counter to the connection the migrants had with their Middle-Eastern deity, who in made-up stories told them what competed with him must be tamed or else destroyed — the happiness of fishing, climbing, gathering — reading, tramping, snogging — sneezing from the pollen and running from the bees — finding garments to fling off, feet soaking in the stream — of worries being mended by the gentle tuneful wings — and chanting of the insect brood that we’re aware of only when the meter changes, that ex-post-facto memory that we’re adept at tuning out, distractibles — and branches overhead that alternate the light upon our faces from patches bright to slivers of the night.
Physical approval lets one’s ego rest. She had it in the hopeful eyes of other men, the okay look that sits atop their lust, and in the other women currying her favor, where winning means a minute of the hope she might put out the vibe, maybe hope a reference back to words they shared before. Men wanted to enamor her and put her into the sardonic realm, where one’s too cool to be impressed by anything, in lots of work in double shifts and rarely any fun. And she will be a target for the way she looks, and she will be enarmored in response. The pressures on her will exchange but never lessen, til she finds she isn’t skating by so easily, and there is less interest in her art, and that is when the simple past will resonate again — he is a part of that, not in whole, which is the way that he would have it — as bearing down there’s Chiron to be met — and mothers take the fishless passage in their children’s place — as our hero had convinced himself that their love was like this sacrifice, that which had guided him to her across the land, and should have, would have —
Slowly marks the orbits lining up, when happenstance meets the briefest willingness to change — the tree-lined lane’s revealed, with cooking on an open flame and water running near — exotic quiet birds and higher apes in forests and tall grasses — none would feel the need to eat her, and she would not be stung, nor pricked and thus envenomed, nor bitten and made rabid — and love skirts, brushing up against the feelings that remove it — they are close together, the baser selves and love, and have the things in common that bring about a lifetime of just barely hanging on, that put asphalt where the pollinators live, that strip the habitats of long-armed kin, that end existence in the wild, whole branches of the fam’ly tree.
And yet she found her feelings enriched in his absence, in a state that had no interim and also had no flux — the switch was instantaneous — camera phones have shown it isn’t love we want, it is attention — love comes after if it comes at all — what one cannot stand is non-existence. And all the choppy Hebrides will then expurgate their gold — it takes the form of coin and drops in open hands — her deeds are mighty in ambition — then age will make her moral compass stick like stakeholders — to stop her inner peace from being rent by everything, and every danger’s lining up to whip the partial copies that she let, nay wanted, to be made — and grew them in her innards, and was fond of them at times, in restless celebration, at all hours, and in every room.
16.2
There isn’t much to call upon within a patch of shade — there must needs be a withering if there’d be any light — it’s there assistance springs to life when backwards we would be, and there our country aids us — it takes our arm around its neck — we’re velcro’d to its side — with it we can hobble on, in its demanding grip — ongoing in its ‘sire, a program that outlives a man, eternal as to practice, if not in actual result. As ways and means converge in mire, he kept them company. It did not assuage the stakeholders. They must express that which sets them apart — they activate it on dumb animals — why not then on bodies they’ve already softened up? They are without conclusions — to get where they are they had to be as asps (anti-social personalities) — those who were not that already — and were punishèd, so that’s what they mete out — among the many things they parrot, they are reactionaries of the highest order — their tantrums are Olympian, their retribution lasts as long as they do, til they stroke out from their withered veins. They are dismissive like an archer, who shuts out everything but drawing and release. The only thing they understand is money — boredom does not seem to be a factor — endowments for the arts are kept up with their jonesing for a slave — and they enact it off the job in leather dungeons — saying mommy daddy while there is an organ pushed inside them — next day they take it out on someone lesser, as they see it, down the hall — giving back — combining private raking with a babyish display of pubic might — they’re on the phone right after, booking an appointment for that night — the very thing they cannot have is what they want the most — like talent — they might find themselves intending to say yes to raises and then hearing no come out — then concentrating on the reward most precious to the unemotional — their masters — the half-people, the clinic’ly unfeeling.
Our hero was a murd’ring boy, an arsonist was she — and many other things in future parentage — medic, counselor, cop, chef, driver, teacher, ideas generator, dungeon master, patience modeler, friendship lubricator, peripheral inhibitor, secretary, tour manager, mechanic, diplomat, butt wiper and bather, censor, self-censor, party planner, interviewer, lie detector, championer, biggest fan, nurturer, storyteller, self-esteem injector, a fashioner of one able to be loved, to love.
He looked about the highway and she scrolled through her phone — wondered how to change her social sites, to trumpet she was free, knowing if she let their status linger it would make a problem for him, or he would become one — she fretted over how to phrase it — auto-complete helped — and this took up a lot of time, spent not worried about him — friends suggested meeting up — men on the sidelines too — she told her friends I’m staying in — she felt at home at home — her inner circle called a sesh — they convened to support her — one had brought her babe along, that took all the attention, but also gave perspective to our heroine — whose phone apps were all buzzin — with fellas wanting to convey concern and aphorism, in the form of sticky liquids — some wanted to feel her chest through layers of their clothing — others just to talk, but all in want of something. Her friends were her protective mothering, though joked they did of all the athletes she could pown for them, as one of their clique’s prime functions was vicariously living — it gave them strength in drudgery, and defenses besides. One opened up the window for fresh air — distant fires were making smoke — they found the wind was whistling — the tune was of their virtue — not Victorian but of the internet — they could repeat it, could adopt it for their own.
All the wastrels fade away so that we need not burn them — feeling so agreeable at being complimented — tossing flowers to the crowd while endocrines are railing — the lighting perfect, every wrinkle is steamed out — the shift goes to what the babies bear, if stilted or allowed — has caught the eye of people going past, appealed to them — has let the scion know his street is different now, these scions of the lower class whose roots are claims to certain land now rented on the internet out of their budget’s reach — it’s changing for the one percent as well, who will have the lots removed from them to balance what’s become unfair, while leaving them a lot of what they’ve earned — the tops of mountains they denuded — the million pharmaceuticals that will never be — the slowing of the rains — the sickness of the patent seed designed to terminate — the worse that they’ll let out. The book of nature’s inutil — the very air’s unreachable without machinery — how people are an anxious thought to think — they will dismiss it out of hand, or become angry from the start, and this is repeated by their parrots — the American state is barely civilized ferocity, its muscles tensed and ready — open to whatever mark will keep its page selected — in ink and in sinew — and cabled to the folks back home, all docile and complacent — their faces with a citrus squeeze, skin like tarmac to roll over, pressed into service by their aspy liege, believing that his irritants aren’t his alone but theirs to rectify, and if unable then to bear as burdens — apart from that they may be felled, leaving ma and dear old gal a one-sided reunion — the chilblains have their cockles up and leap into the fray — we pass them over without thought — oh how our focus stays — and how the measures proven wrong refuse to be redone. The book of nature has a tether round his neck and round her ankle too — unsilk and corrosive, along for wherever their masters place them — while creatures ooze up from the floors and bread grows penicillin — is this what you want, they ask, a dozen times a day.