Rail Runner

“Please refrain from photography for the next thirty minutes,” the voice crackled over the speakers, clearly something stated a hundred times before, but almost impossible to enforce.I could, however, see the temptation to disobey it. The sunset that we had raced from Albuquerque had illuminated the land in a light that reflected back the color of bronze, speckled with the lengthening shadows of shrubs and Joshua trees that grew sporadically over the now-rolling hills. It seemed more Biblical than American, distant and solemn, almost holy and healing to those willing to purge what had made them sick. Both beautiful and dangerous at the same time, it made perfect sense that photography would be prohibited. This was, presumably, how it must have looked before it was realized that people were just as willing to pay four hundred dollars a night to have their spirits and bodies healed in a mud bath with Enya playing from a speaker in the corner.

“Again,” the voice returned a moment later, “Refrain from taking pictures. We are in tribal territory, and they have asked for privacy.” It was a tone that assumed empathy of people who disregarded the history of the land, who ooo’d and ahhh’d at the cacophony of Navajo and Apache-themed decor that covered the airport walls in carefully chosen places. The Albuquerque airport was the kind of building that could only be commissioned by white people who recognized the problem at hand and, thoughtfully, decided to beat people to the criticism. Hiring indigenous artists would disarm anyone uncomfortable with genocide or reservations, and those not cursed with such consciouses could even buy war bonnets in the gift-shops. The aesthetic was, unintentionally, something from “The Shining.” I could all-too easily imagine Shelly DuVall running frantically from an ax-wielding Jack Nicholson, stopping, against her better judgment to comment on the use of color coordination in a Navajo vase behind glass or the precision of the lines in an Apache weaving.

I had no interest in photography of landscape, no matter how enchanting, snapped by an iPhone from a moving vehicle. Only the day before, the couple sitting next to me on the plane had been disgruntled by the severe turbulence over Iowa that had simply ruined their picture of America’s breadbasket. “Someone,” I thought to myself, “Crashed during severe turbulence in Iowa. Carol Lombard? Patsy Cline?” For obvious reasons, I elected to keep such thoughts to myself. “No. Carol Lombard was in Nevada. Patsy Cline was near Nashville, I think. Ritchie Valens sounded right, and the irony of it all was that he hated flying and won the seat on the plane as a bet.” They soon grew bored and talked about how Phoenix was such a romantic city, despite, I privately added, having a terminal named after Barry Goldwater. I could never fall in love in a city that would electively name something after Barry Goldwater. It was an impulse against glorifying the evil white emperors of yester-year who lined their pockets tormenting innocent people under the guise of a “Moral America” that I inherited from my mother, who insisted on flying into Dulles rather than have her name and Ronald Reagan’s on the same page. It was, I presumed, on the off-chance that someone hundreds of years into the future might find her ticket and assume she had some sort of fondness for him.

My thoughts were on them again as the landscape blurred by us. They seemed, I concluded, like the exact type of people who had voted for both Reagan and Goldwater. They were dressed meticulously (too well for the flight) and reminded me strongly of the type of people who complained in public that no one ever dresses in white to play tennis anymore and that a refusal to send handwritten “thank you” cards was directly related to the moral decay of American society. They would be here, I determined, taking pictures. Ignoring the requests of the people who owned the land, preferring instead to bask in the delights of capturing something lovely on film without knowing that a picture couldn’t accurately portray what was whizzing by from behind plate glass. “There,” I said to their imaginary personas, “Is your Moral America. Centuries of small pox, broken treaties, and stealing children away and returning them unable to speak with their parents and all they get is a plot of land big enough for a train to cut through in half an hour. Snap away while the lighting is good.”

A trailer park appeared. No doubt that would be the photograph they would delete, whoever was sneaking pictures. The concept of people trying to carry groceries from the car in one trip, or putting rocks on the trashcan after seeing a raccoon gnawing on an empty pizza box one morning distracted from the natural beauty.

More open fields and hills. More Joshua trees. More ghosts of prophets who wandered off into the desert for no good reason, rubbed mud in their eyes, and hoped against hope that their prayers would rise like paper kites into the heavens and something other than silence would be returned. This, of course, could only exist in the ancient world. Instead, people now assume forgiveness on the parts of those they wronged and left their prayers discarded behind them like candy wrappers they assumed would be picked up by someone paid to do so. What person now would crawl on their knees through the desert and cry out to a space they privately knew was empty?

“Who have you wronged?” I ask myself the question out of nowhere as I wonder if I would ever be the kind of person to try to keep raccoons out of the trashcans and if the desert could heal illnesses that you yourself hadn’t thought of. I think of something else before I answered, although I knew it perfectly well.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you may now take photographs again,” the voice announced. Yet no one stirred. Those who wished to take pictures had not refrained, and those bored by what was outside the window continued to read books, send text messages, or think about how the streets in Santa Fe smelled like cooking food with hints of expensive spices that people breath deep in their lungs to ward off the husks of their own sadness.

And no one, no matter how tender hearted, seemed to notice the fleeting sight of the little black calf, a spot of spilled ink on the now-golden hillside illuminated with the last brightness of daylight. Her new legs trembled on the incline as though they were too fragile to sustain her weight much longer. The pink velvet of her mouth was gaping upwards where, I believe, she was calling for someone. The incline would have been too steep even for an adult cow to climb out of, though I could somewhat imagine this wayward calf, the baby that the rancher might affectionately moniker “a rascal” stumbling down into the loose, deep soil of the embankment without concern for how she would climb out. I, too, could imagine her panic when she realized her predicament (or at least that she no longer felt mild and free in the linger warm of a blessedly temperate February afternoon). Seeing no living around and unable to get her balance, she opened her mouth and screamed the pitiful wail of an animal in peril with no familiar face around. She looked, I imagined, to the crest of the hills, hoping to see the juggernaut of copper-brown fur and horns, or the smell the diesel exhaust from a ranchers truck as it frantically scanned the property for the mischievous little calf with a raven pelt. Instead, she is answered only by the whistle of the train passing her without incident as her cries turn to frost in the evening air. 

Lobstora

The call it scenic, the black

Tar spine that cuts into the crags

Of decadent Malibu as the sea

Kisses with boyish shyness the

Retreating face of a continent

That ends too abruptly.

If you parked your car, confusing

The birds that fly home above you,

And stood barefoot in the tide

(you haven’t done this in years),

You would notice the pitons of

A lobster’s head, hollow and

Discarded.

You think back to the stories you

Were told as a child of the cosmos

And the beliefs of people destroyed

By smallpox and freeways who left

Their words unwritten as a final act of

Revenge and seem to remember the

Story of a lobster nebula that cradles

A nest of stars somewhere in the

Galaxy.

Or perhaps you think of reading that,

Without intervention, a lobster would

Live forever as it trudges like a

gravedigger through low tide. This,

You realize, is a symbol of endurance,

The paragon of long life and some

Thoughtless bird has pecked it to

Death and ripped the strips of meat

That would last with

A beak just as crude and ancient.

Already you can feel them waiting

For you to return to your car

And continue up the coast, unfeeling,

You must know, to your absurd

Desire to mourn the repulsive.
They, too, see stars and the lights of

The approaching city churning in

The same darkening ocean.
You reach for your keys to the sound

Of ruffling wings as they groom

Themselves for you.

Canada Geese

Something about "So Far Away" seemed like a perfect "atoning" song.

 Outside my window, the first chords are broken by the clamor of Canada geese as they make their way across Lake Mendota.

 It was a year ago when I still believed that if I were careful enough and clever enough, I could escape unhappiness. I thought of my own bitterness like something clumsy, ancient, and almost blind: present, certainly, but bumbling and unable to find me unless I was careless. I regarded it was an almost superstitious understanding of moments of baseless melancholy, sudden sadness that sat in the back of my mouth like the aftertaste of some acrid medicine. And, like many superstitious people, I collected talismans that I thought would divert it: the cool breeze of a fall day, acting as though I were busy when I wasn’t, looking out my window as a mixture of rain and snow pelted against it and imagining that being inside a warm room was reason enough to be content (if I said this to myself enough, it would turn into something present enough to be considered).

 In the past year, I have run again, packing up my life, discarding what must be discarded (whatever happened to that box of potholders and the empty whiskey bottle with the interesting shape), and going again to someplace new where I would again sit on the evening before the Day of Atonement in weather slightly too warm for the season. I would, once again, have my windows open and let the air shuffle the stillness of my room and wait for the forced hunger.

 I would, once again, believe that by abstaining from what sustained me, I could purge the lingering wisps of angst that clung to me like the remnants of a spider web in places I couldn’t precisely locate, as though these feelings were sustained by food and water, as though it would howl like the slowest dog in the pack, arriving to the carcass too late for meat, and wither into something that could be contained.

 It was the geese that I couldn’t forget. Being on the ninth floor, they flew level to me, and I wondered for a second how they knew what was coming, how they knew what to flee and when to return. I scold myself gently. “Silly boy,” I say to no one in particular.

 However, for a moment, I couldn’t shake the wonder of their instinct, their ability to fly thousands of miles from the cool-blue lakes of the north and the forest grounds covered in pine needles and find their way back again when that world was more temperate. Instinct, again. The geese did it just as easily before the cities and before people tossed hunks of bread and their own regrets into ponds in hopes that the waterbirds would eat them in the same mouthful.

 It wasn’t something I could help but be impressed by. I had spent years looking up at spreading v of birds in the sky. I had been told that if I ever hunted them, to shoot the bird at the back of the flock. If you shoot the first bird, I’d been warned, the other birds would see and scatter, but if you worked from the back, you could get the whole flock if that’s what you wanted. It was, I suppose, a moment when instinct wasn’t so impressive, when only seeing the bird in front of you get blasted out of the sky was the first sign of trouble, but you also have to think about what kind of person would aim a gun at something like that in the first place. Yet, for a moment, I could think of nothing else but the flapping of wings and the fantastic bliss of knowing exactly where you are flying. 

"Silly boy," I say again. "Don't be seduced. You wouldn't even know what you are flying away from."

I quickly slice a hunk of baguette and leave the rest of it to harden (I hadn’t thought about the fast when I purchased it still slightly hot from the oven) and slather it with peanut butter to sustain me for 25 hours (you can stop at any time, you know, no one is watching). I listen for a moment, but the honking is gone.

 My head is filled of the sound of my own chewing, and I look once again out the window. 

The geese disappear southward as the first stars of twilight blend seamlessly with the lights from distant windows.

Standing on Top of the Wisconsin Capitol, 2004

The sky, I decided, was criminally blue.

It had a hue that was almost subversive, water-like without offering sustenance or a cessation of thirst, and I distrusted it on principle as I matched the static flecks of white on the lake with the wisps of cotton-soft cloud above it.

It was one of those moments that I insisted on as a 14 year old. I was, at that point, becoming acutely aware of my own ordinary-ness, which I wore with the discomfort of a new t-shirt that hadn’t been washed yet. However, I still demanded with the insistence of a small child that I be given private moments of contemplation. I held onto them with miserly fierceness, clutching them in my fist as though they were costume jewelry: something I thought to be precious and enviable. This was such a moment. I had yet to wrap these up in the soft-grey folds of baby blankets and toss them carelessly into a box or closet. And so I stood on the marble slabs of the great midwestern temple on the plains and stared with revulsion at the for reflecting colors that it could not absorb back to me.

The previous winter had ended. I wondered for a moment if it would have been different here. Those months of self-imposed exile, the dark, cold nights where I swallowed soup and my own bitterness from the same metal spoon would without doubt have been colder and darker. But Georgia, too, was subversive in its stillness. The air was cold, but did not move, blocked and hiding in the thick groves of pine and dormant oak trees like something slow and malevolent. Perhaps the wind here would have been stronger. The ordeal might have frozen like bubblegum in an ice box and broken off in good-natured pink chunks. The deadly lachrymose howling of winter wind here might have gathered up my sadness and tossed it in shards across the expansive woodlands and fields of the frozen north. Instead, I held it like a ball of strange medicine in the pit of my gut. I’d kept it private, too, overestimating how desirable my own private tragedy had been to those around me. I pull my long sleeves down over my wrist, excusing the too-hot-for-the-weather attire to modesty and preference.

I thought, too, of a piece of fire wood that I’d taken into the house that same winter and laid on the floor of my bedroom. Two branches had sprouted from it, giving it a vaguely human shape. I’d thought for a moment about a story I’d heard of a childless couple who simply took a stump from the forest and raised it as their own, feeding and bathing it as though it would grow as tall as its sister-trees that hadn’t fallen to a careless blade. I thought, too, of how their hearts must have broken when the stump was malevolent, when it slowly grew in appetite until it ate them both in large, splintered bites. It must be, I thought, entirely tragic to be eaten up by what you had seen life and beauty in. With that, I plugged a tool into the wall and drilled the firewood  full of holes for reasons I can no longer remember.

We wander back inside the dome of the Capitol and I stare out to water on either side.

“Where,” I think to myself, “could you run here if you wanted to?”

I think of the answer, but hold it in the same tight firsts where I kept what I assumed everyone wanted from me. 

Reunion

"Reunion"

They followed, I am told 

In the ancient whispers 

Of a family's tragic secrets,

The tracks he left in blood-warm

Mud towards the forest where

They heard the shatter of gunshot 

Breaking the stillness of an Arkansas

April evening with a thunderstorm hovering iron-grey in twilight like

Birds on a phone line. 

 And the mythology of a bloodline would not 

Grieve the loss, the blistering of blood, bone and hair across the needle-sharp floor of the pine grove.

 Generations would not weep for what the earth could not return. 

They would leave a picture of him as a boy, 

sitting in a chair that left long shadows of afternoon across 

the landscape, as he smiled towards the camera in the same suitcase,

 as his parents' marriage certificate and a signed picture of Elvis Presley.

No one would speak of his shoes left neatly, caked with mud, at the edges of his final world.  

They would call him good. 

Sea Turtles

“Sea Turtles”

It was told to me that a red sky in the morning

Was a caution to sailors. The cool-scarlet glow

Of the sunlight that would burn away the morning

haze like a fierce sea witch gave reprieve to those

Sensible many who opted to stay in the safety of the

Harbor, sitting still as the green and brown crest

Of sea turtles shattered the glass-smooth waves

As they journeyed into what those on dry land

feared.

I read of them, too,

The fabled beast of ocean and brine

Who carried, according to the ancient

People, the globe on its back, oblivious

To the tremendous weight of a planet of

Constant movement, unafraid, it would seem

Of sharks, regrets, and the infinite depth and uncertainty

Of the salt water.

Here, too, the weight of a planet and of the latter days

Of a terrible century and pulled, yanked with

Insistence and, pulled loose, only

Growing taut again through inconsolable tears.

Yet we survive by resilience,

We survive by pushing against the current of

Deep water. By aspiring to carry what must be carried, with the

Empathy to find balance,and the curiosity to move towards

The red-mellow sunrise rippling across the surface

Of the morning sea.

Hitbodedut

When her father

Jumped in the Arkansas River,

My grandmother took a pair of

Scissors through her blackiron hair,

sending it falling to the floor in prayers

Of bitterness because she had been

Told that her Apache ancestors

Sheared away loss and tossed it

away in handfuls to the terminus of desert wind.

I walk today into the woods,

Gasping with famished lungs at the

Thinner air of the Colorado mountains.

I talk to you for a moment on your birthday

the day hovering ghost-like and gargantuan

In the echo of my steps across ice-smoothed

pebbles.

I decide that I will no longer say I miss you,

nor look for you in the hours of silence, content

At last to let your husk be swept away by

The impotent gusts of a late-spring snow.

I pull out a small blade and cut a tuft of hair

(nut-brown and thin, unlike my grandmother’s)

And whisper your name as I toss it into the breeze.

It falls to the ground as snow grows heavy in

evergreen branches. My tears fall ceaselessly

at what the sky refuses to take.