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.

1936

I bury the head of a white carnation in the jungle

of purple flowers on the wooden arch of his casket,

heavy as a chest filled with clay and a grandfather’s

good intentions.

We return in an hour to see the mound of

earth tucked flat,

and a bed of grass stitched back in place,

dappled with soil and snowflakes to disguise

the faint scent of tobacco, a mason’s apron,

and nails cleaned of eight decades of

blood-warm soil with the worn blade

of a pocket knife, glass-thin and folded.

I gaze

Above the mountain tops as the skies

turn iron-gray.