God,
I am a drunkard
in the morning.
The promises of night,
poured out
with the wine.
And now I shake –
palsy-like, sweating,
begging for another drink.
This is how you left me.
God,
I am a drunkard
in the morning.
The promises of night,
poured out
with the wine.
And now I shake –
palsy-like, sweating,
begging for another drink.
This is how you left me.
Lead without title
Make change without credit
Push off
Push off
From that steady shore
Now is the twilight
Now is the dawn
Ours is the liminal space
The medium
The substance between
We define by our absence
Make whole in our separation
Embrace me
Embrace me
Embrace me
I will not fail you
The bowers of my house are hung with fog
droplets make a slow procession down the windowpane
like the opening of mass
priest easing down the aisle
But it is an August warmth outside
and humidity
like a hammer
hangs glistening at the doorstep
The air conditioning unit sputters and groans,
weary of summer
A great discrepancy grows between what I want
and who I am
Jagged and Knife-like as a mountainside
roaring through clouds afire
My tattered ends dragged into the thin air
The storm, unseen
slams, like a plane into the spine
and surges
like great waves upward, over crest
and ridge, past me,
to curl thousands of feet above
in a plume of hail and darkness
Soon
soon enough
shall the storm cross over
But in this one moment I can savor
in my all-panicked mind
Savor the breath as it moves
warming and cooling within me,
hold this blueness and blackness
and hail and rain and stone
like jewels in my eye, taste the salt and
the rust
of blood and wait,
wait for this darkening,
wait for this coming,
(almost pentecostal)
breath of God.
The back door to my house
has a second door inside it
A hole to the garage
Covered with a soft plastic flap
Which smacks when it closes
like a gum bubble
popping
in a second graders mouth
And we leave the garage partially open at night
for the cat to come and go as she pleases
But the possum
full and round
which I found
curled up and asleep
in our kitchen sink
this morning was an unwelcome surprise
This is how my house is
Full of doors
with holes
Second doors
for those that matter most
And the possums come in often
and rummage through my pantries
But I keep the second doors open
Covered only
in soft plastic
or a tattered hanging screen
or a sheet of paper with a faded crayon drawing
Open
For those that matter most
We come to things in strange ways
Perambulatory
Approaching from the side
These things that makes their nests in us
Where our sorrows and our joys hatch and grow
Sometimes
As an angel
Falling
Arms splayed out
Like a plane falling to earth
Wings extended
Pouring towards the truth
At screaming speeds
Then suddenly a bright snapping
Skin into place
Unpack the word love
And find a widow pouring
Handfuls of dirt upon the grave
Find her waking in the dark
Years from now
Alive
Between the seams
There is a stopper
In a bottle
Which I hid in a drawer
Many years ago
In a chest which
The adults in my life
As a child
Moved into a room
Unknown
In my house
While I read a book
They sat me down with
A tale of a man
With a wife and a house
In a place full of lights
The man was a man quite ordinary
Not extraordinary
Except there never was a book
Like this in my house
And these adults
Were never people
Never people whom I have known
My dad was there
And my mom
But not them
Someone else
In stolen skin
And smiles
And speeches
And judgements
Ah, we come to heart of it
Now in the quickness
The heart
Stays still
And beats
To the tune of the drummer next door
The well I drew my sadness from
was deeper than I knew
But further down,
further still,
there is cool, sweet running water
roaring
like the breath
of God
Go out
go out
From the last place you were
to the furthest hill
you can see,
Then, go further still
And when you have drunk your fill
of starlight
Come back to me again.
There is cricket song
in the night
a cat pounces
and the song lessens
by one
or does it change
this song?
move an octave
change chord and bridge
like some nimble gymnast
lithe and supple
overarching, stretching
belly-first to the sky
dissonance swells
in the ear towards harmony
Note follows note
movement chases movement
And the crunch
of shell and bone
mingles, strains and collapses
into harmony again
Chapter 1
Land Enough, and Time – 1937
Prophecy scours through a family like a glacier scours the land. Tearing rough grooves in the firmament, pulling great chunks of stone from the mountain, reshaping the thing itself, and sometimes washing it totally, utterly away.
When I was much younger, when the touch of it was still fresh upon my forehead, I imagined that prophecy pulled order from chaos. Conquered the great mercurial scattering of fates and pre-ordained us as a family to greatness. God forgive me my hubris, and us our iniquities.
The touch, as it were, came upon me first at Easter when I was seven. In my youth, holidays meant great family dinners, even in the lean war years since Uncle Frederick owned the grocery. Mother would clear the couch and chairs from the living room, pull the long dining table out of the dining room and place the two leaves into the center. Places would be set, even for the children, of whom there were only the three of us, some small servings of wine would be poured, sweet pickles and olives placed into serving dishes and the family would feast.
Great Aunt Clara, my Father’s Aunt was peculiar. Her mind, while apparently never truly salient at the best of times became unhinged sometime around the time that I was 4 or 5. This, coupled with her penchant for petty theft made her an entertaining component of any family gathering. Often at the close of dinner as she crossed the front step of our house on the way out, items which were unsecured inside her dress would tumble out – a saltshaker, two nutcrackers, a decorative soap piece in the shape of a rose. But this entertainment was to be the smallest, and most benign of her gifts to me.
It was her touch that spring day, which would, like a forge-fire burn through my life and the lives of my children. I had excused myself from the diner table while the adults were waiting for coffee and wound my way back into the house to the bathroom. Not having noticed Clara’s absence at the table, hearing her voice leak from around the partially closed bathroom door startled me. It was low, but melodic, more song-like than conversational and in a language completely foreign to me.
In retrospect, I believe that the language was completely foreign to her as well. Her denial of the event in later years, in her harsh whisper, her breath smelling of dinner mints and cigarettes, her voice low and raspy with emphysema, convinced me of it. Instead, I believe that this terrible thing came upon her like a waking dream. Not something she cultivated, nor even of which she was aware. But startled like some great beast out of its slumbering lair, it anointed her with it’s fire-tongue from the plains of her youth and her distant ancestry.
I hesitated only slightly at the door, but Clara’s chant, siren-like, drew me toward it. When I pushed open the door, she was in front of the sink, silhouetted by the light streaming in the window. Her blouse had been unbuttoned and hung around her waist like a discarded skin. Her chest was bare in the sunlight. Her breasts dripped with water. Her arms moved rhythmically back and forth beneath the faucet, her hands and their semi-translucent skin were held together, palm up, as if receiving the Eucharist. But it was the water from the sink, not the Body of Christ, which pooled in her hands and which she poured out upon her skin. The water splashed against her chest with the force of her movement and slicked down between her breasts and curled along her stomach where it soaked into her hanging clothes. She swayed slightly in her frail frame as she moved and her song-chant rose and fell ever so slightly in keeping with it.
The sight of her, in her half nakedness gave me pause at the door. But the spectacle only held me captivated for a moment before I realized I needed to stop my crazy Aunt from flooding the house. I crossed the threshold and approached her with some reserve. As I drew close enough to restrain her, she stopped her chant and her arm movements, turned and stepped close to me.
I could feel the cold of the water on her stomach close to my face. I thought to step back, but could not for fear and startlement. Instead I looked up into her face. Clara stared down on my, some strands of her white hair had pulled free from her clips and shown in the sunlight like a crown. Her dark eyes stared down on me, water dripped along the lines carved by age in her pale dark throat. Then the palm of her hand was upon my forehead, pulling my long hair back with her fingers. The cold and the dampness shot into me from the touch and anchored me to the tiles. My shoulders seemed to draw back and my arms to hang loosely at my sides. I made to speak, but her words were first. No longer in an unknown tongue or a sonorous voice. But in a deep resonance that seemed to echo in my very bones she spoke, or perhaps she did not actually speak, but there were suddenly words between us, as if they had appeared in the gulf between thought and act, between intention and speech. There were words, and to me they felt like the first words spoken to me across the darkness of the womb. I cannot explain them except in such esoteric terms. They felt like what I have imagined a spell must feel like to informed ears. Words of making and unmaking, of the place beyond the born and the unborn, beyond the light and the dark, where all things come together and you can see the halves put together in their wholeness. The words came crashing across this divide, and even in her whisper roared in my ears.
“The child of your child shall dream the great dream. He will bring us great and terrible times.”
Then she was away from me, her hand no longer upon my brow, my hair still damp from her touch. She stepped back a pace and seeming to come around as if this were commonplace she pulled a hand towel from the rack and began to dry herself off. I remained rooted to the spot, a small drop of water rolling down between my eyebrows and down beside my nose like a tear.
She turned to me again. Her face, just a moment before stern and pointed, now had a relaxed somewhat bewildered look upon it. She glanced at me quickly and then down at herself. Her countenance took on a shocked look and she mumbled something incoherent and fumbled with her clothes.
“Oh my, what am I doing here?” she said as she straightened out her wet blouse.
I found my voice then and said hesitantly, “Aunt Clara?”.
“Jane? Oh. Dear, do you need to use the restroom?”, Clara asked with a confused smile as she looked cautiously around.
I must have stammered something, though I can not recall what because Clara nodded and gently tottered around me towards the open door. Absently as she walked by the vanity she reached out with her hand and snatched a small brooch which she deposited into the waistband of her skirt. Then, trying to smooth out the small concealed bulge, she walked out of the room.
The words she spoke stayed with me, long after the cold and the force of her touch and the wetness of the water faded. They smoldered like some dark coal in the pit of my belly, slowly burning in the dark and the fog. They would grow to a conflagration which would in time raze my life’s work and kill my daughter. They would grow to consume me and in their maddening enigmatic phrasing doom me to a life of questioning half-steps and second guessing.
How I would strike that day from my life had I the power. But now, I must live through these twilight years with their legacy fresh and bloody, and their truth still untested and unknown. Though the child grows even now in this springtime. How great, how terrible shall be his works? Was I mistaken, and my pride and my fear merely manifestations of some old betty’s dementia fueled ravings. This would be the cruelest turn of all. And yet I cannot say, even at this late date. And I cannot face him, him nor his grandfather. Visiting days are few and I have requested that I be left alone with only my room and the peacocks in the yard as company. Perhaps it was madness which coursed through her fingers that day, not water. Perhaps it was not cleansing and rebirth which her arcane blood poured forth in some ancient tongue, but the transference of a curse upon the later generations. The Bible claims a cursed family, one who has been doomed by the Lord shall even unto the seventh son of a seventh son be bound to the fate set by their wickedness. Perhaps Clara in her delusions knew some truth about my fate, knew even then that I was bound by my weaknesses to be a betrayer, a Mother who would kill her own child in her selfishness.
My only wish is that they would unbind my hands that I might wash myself clean of these sins. I would strip half-naked and wash my breasts as Clara did. I would not harm myself again, only hope to wash myself clean. Lord let me wash myself clean. And, Lord may the child of my child dream the great dream. May he bring us through the great and terrible times ahead.
I sat down
At this table
Before
So long now I don’t remember
But the cup of coffee
Which started
Steaming,
Black
Without stars
Turbid and turbulent
And bitter and sweet in turns,
Is almost finished.
It has grown cold in my hands.
But lost none of its body.
The oily press against the tip of my tongue,
The pool of bitters in the bottom of my mouth,
The silk against my throat,
Cold
but satiating
I wish, I wish, I wish
There were another cup,
Beyond the hue and cry of this table,
Beyond this wind and this word and this flesh
But I can see the bottom of the cup
Through the smallness that remains.
One more drink and it is done.
I would wish to sit.
Soak hot sunlight into my bare feet.
Or open my nostrils wide to the frosts,
And breathe,
And breathe,
And breathe,
Till this last dram evaporates on its own.
But. That is not for this cup.
This cup,
Holds the last of it.
And the draught which stays in my hand
Sings sweet songs,
Night songs,
Parting songs.
Not a siren’s song.
Not a call upon the night.
Only songs from the deep stretches,
Of green cloud-skittered forest,
Where high on black volcanic soil
This coffee caught starlight,
And in some elemental dance
Of alchemical fire
Purged water and soil and sun
Becoming more than all.
And it comes across in this moment,
As a small voice,
A note half heard
Through the movement of breeze on late summer leaves
Singing to me.
Home
Away
Beyond
To a tune I do not know.
I wish, I wish, I wish
But wishing moves nothing
One drink is left, then all is done
And nothing shall make it differently
In this world where so much bends to our will
This last holdout remains.
So soon I will raise this cold cup to my lips,
And savor
What remains.
Till I flood with blackness,
And the stars shimmer apart,
Break free from the orbit where my eyes fixed them
And spin up beyond and out
To the points they belong.
Sometimes, deep in the night, I hear the wind outside my room,
and I begin to think of age, of geology and the ancientness of matter,
then I become very sad because of the temporariness of us, because
of the impermanence of all of us, Yes it is beautiful and horrific and sad
all at once,
Sometimes, deep in the night, I find my nightmares coming quickly with
bared teeth, slinking through my drowsy defenses, and I become afraid of
what could be truly inside me,
Sometimes, deep in the night, I feel the sorrow of it all, the deep
rich sorrow, like midnight waters under a new moon, like living oil
in the bowels of the earth I feel it as my bones resonate it in unison
with the low pulse of the stars,
Sometimes, deep in the night, I know I am slipping into mediocrity,
and I fear the day I forget that there ever was marrow to be had,
Sometimes, deep in the night, there is no poetry in my words, there
is only a specter of a shadow disappearing into the night, black
is only black, and the rain will never come,
Sometimes, deep in the night, I know the truth, and it is the void,
and it nothing, and yet it is everything, there are separate truths
I think between night and day, one of shadow, one of night,
Sometimes, deep in the night I can hear my children crying from some
distant time, and I wonder when I will meet them,
Sometimes, deep in the night, I know, eventually, I will die,
But most times, deep in the night, I am only flesh and
my god died young, though I still pray for the dawn
Author’s note: This was written back in the Spring of 1998, so the ending will seem dated. I have chosen to put it up here in its original form instead of updating it.
I realize that this is not something which is normally written down. But it must be written down, and read by at least a few, so that when it all comes to pass I shall not be doubted again, because the written word stands as a witness for itself. But it seems that there is something lost in writing that is not lost in speaking. Perhaps it is the human aspect. You, my dear reader, will have no one to assure you that this story is either false or true. You will have neither facial expressions nor vocal intonations to clue you in to the veracity of this story. And yet you should believe it, as I too believe it. Not because it is a wonderful and frightening story (though, that it most undoubtedly is) but because it happened to me and I cannot… dare not, doubt my own experience; but even more than that, part of the prophecy, for that is what I now call it, has already been fulfilled. But we shall address that later. Alas though, once again you will have no way of proving the authenticity of that either, unless you were to trouble my mother in her home, though you would find her rather unintelligible now, after the stroke, with the pale, pasty left side of her face slumped in a perpetual frown, and her left arm dangling uselessly at her side, like the empty sleeve of a jacket or coat. But this all happened before the stroke, two years, in fact, before the stroke, in early October, 1989.
Indian Summer had marched across the land to settle in Tulsa in the last half of September. The stifling heat of August and early September fell away, leaving us basking in the low 90’s day after day. In, case you don’t know Tulsa, or Oklahoma for that matter, the sun shines every day during Indian Summer, even this year, as the rest of the world felt the backlash of “el nino” we sat baking in the sun until late October, when the fall rains came. But ‘89 was especially sunny, not a single cloud to mar the afternoon activities of a boy of 12.
Now, that is another thing which may give rise to incredulity, my age. I was only 12 then, and am only 21 now, but Alexander the Great conquered all of Persia by his 25th birthday, and Jesus taught in the Temple when he was twelve, so why is it so incredulous that such a story could come from one so young, I ask you. My friends were young enough to die, so is it so incredible that I would dream in such profound depths. Especially only three weeks after they found Rob and Steve in the dried rushes which flank the Arkansas River near our home.
It is possible, I’ll admit, that I had death on my mind. What with my father’s death only a year before, after his car wreck; and then so recently after having witnessed my two friend’s death as the rushing wall of water from the broken water main caught them in the storm sewer behind our house and ripped them from my grasp as I tried so hard to pull them out of the manhole on 21st street. You see it was a pastime of ours, sewer exploring. We used to venture through the subterranean tunnels that run like lifelines beneath the city. Hours, we spent exploring those seemingly endless labyrinths of damp concrete and tar.
It is possible that my mind became slightly warped after their deaths. Dr. Naufzinger told me that thinking and dreaming of death was common after such traumatic experiences and that was the most likely reason for the story which I am about to tell you. But she said something else, while I sat in her baby blue office staring out the big bay window, watching the cars drive past the two twin white pines which stand guard over the cracked sidewalk leading led up to her office on 51st street.
“It is not unusual for you to be dreaming about them, Adam.” She stated in a matter-of-fact tone, as she pushed a solitary strand of auburn hair behind her left ear. “You have nothing to fear from it. Unless of course your dream comes true.” She said with a slight chuckle, as if we shared a common joke, just the two of us. But it was no joke as you shall see.
It was mid-October, the time of year when the catfish roll on the surface of the water just after sundown, rising to the top and then swirling back into the muddy blackness of deeper water. And I slept in my room, in the second story of our red-brick house. Outside cicadas’ sang in syncopated rhythm, in low droning unison, and their song reached gently into our house through the seals around my windows, which Papa Granville installed when he built the house forty years ago.
Our house sits on the top of a hill, a mighty two story castle, in the middle of Tulsa, 21st Street and Lewis to be exact. As a child I always imagined it as a bastion, a major fortification that guarded the mighty recesses of our heavily wooded backyard from invasion. And there were times, especially after my father’s death, when I would wage war myself in the tangle of brush at the bottom of our one acre lot, defending our household from the invading grapevine and ivy that spread like Huns across our iron gate fence.
But my room does not overlook our backyard, since Papa Granville added it later, after my mother wanted a room which she did not have to share with either of her two sisters. Carved from the attic, the two windows of my room stare out, south and west, while our backyard stretches northward toward the oak-clad slopes of Reservoir hill and beyond.
On this particular evening, I slept; slept and dreamed of my two windows. In my dream the room was cloaked in darkness. But the darkness was more gray than black and my chest of drawers and nightstand appeared as silhouettes of black angular shapes on the gray walls. I sat in bed, tense and wary, for I had heard a sound, a low creak, that resonated like a thunderclap in my young ears. For the only thing in my house which would make that sound was a footstep, human or other, on the threshold of my door. So I sat, waiting for the slow jangle of the doorknob which would sound when it turned, and the sharp catch of the latch freeing itself from the doorframe.
But, suddenly my room lit up; stabbed by a rectangular beam of blindingly white light. The light crashed through the west window, charged across the gray carpet, and stuck in the center of the room. Then, just as suddenly my room was plunged once more into the gray blackness of night as the light died.
In that split second between light and darkness the door opened with the familiar jangle and click. The dank odor of stagnant water and the pungent odor of decay assailed me as I turned to gaze at the open door. Beyond the threshold a coal-blackness enshrouded the hallway as a curtain hides a stage. But slowly, almost methodically, the silhouette of a boy cloaked in shadows, detached himself from the darkness of the outer hallway and walked, straight-legged into my room. The utter darkness that pervaded the hallway outside my room slid like water from him with each step he took inside. And out of that shadow I began to see Steve in the gray light. His black short cropped hair and sunken eyes emerging from beneath the retreating shadow, exactly as he was that fateful day just three-weeks before.
But, unusually, I was not filled with fear, or sorrow, rather a warmth began in my stomach, burning its way upward into my chest and head. This warmth seemed to give me courage and consolation as I looked upon my drowned friend, standing, now, in the center of my room, in a rigid almost military-like stance. I believe that I sat there for a full minute staring at Steve, his long pale white arms held tightly at his sides, head forward, chin tilted up. Then suddenly he spoke, in a different voice, far more melodious than I was used to hearing, with the deep tones of a church organ played in solace for the dead.
“Come with me my friend.” His said with a voice that sang, as he raised his right hand and beckoned me towards him with stiff slow movements. “Come with me.”
Then he swiveled sharply on his left heel, waited till I had risen, then advanced out into the clinging blackness of the outer hall. I followed. There are no words for what a state his voice and movements had placed me in. I saw a hypnotist once, who placed people in a trance with the sound of his voice, the magnificent Mr. Mephesto, he called himself; and I am sure that I looked as if I too were in a trance, as I followed Steve out of the comforting grayness of my room.
As I passed through the threshold of my door, I felt the onslaught of a chill on my outer skin, like being dunked in cold water, that only the warmth of my chest and head kept from my heart. Once I crossed the doorway, the gray light of my room winked out and I was left in total darkness. But there were sounds, like a thousand men whispering to each other, with the undertone of a faint echo that sounded like footsteps in an empty gym. In this darkness I walked straight, marching forward to a cadence of seemingly bodiless voices. For even though I could not see, I trusted in my friend to watch over me. I am not sure why, it was simply a feeling of complete trust that could not be explained in the waking world.
After only a few moments I emerged onto the screened-in porch which juts out from the eastern side of my house and overlooks the sloping hill of our backyard. There was light here, brighter than my room, but still gray, and illuminated by some unknown source for there seemed to be no shadows across the leaves of the twenty or so potted plants my mother kept on an old dilapidated card table in the center of the porch. And instead of the whispers and footsteps I heard the faint rustle of wind through the leaves of the cottonwood that flanks our house on the west.
I saw Steve turn and disappear down the steps to the backyard, five feet below. I waited. Steve paused at the bottom, to look up at me. Once again he beckoned with his arm, calling me towards him. Obediently I swung open the screen-door, and carefully, with my eyes on the stairs, descended. When I reached their base I paused and looked up at Steve. In the gray light I could make out his profile, sharp and defined in this strange light. Then he swiveled and swung his right arm out, like a general presenting the sight of his greatest battle. At his gesture I turned my head and looked out upon the expanse of my backyard.
My breath caught in my chest as I gazed out, northward. As far as I could see, people sat, cross-legged, with their arms resting on their knees and their faces raised to the sky. Where the pecan grove stands in the northwest corner of our yard overshadowing the ivy-clad fence, there were people, not trees. On the east side of our yard where the compost heap has festered for two generations, there were thousands of people. The wildeberry bushes and tangled hackberry trees that abutted our yard in the far north had disappeared, making room for hundreds, maybe thousands of people all seated and staring intently at the sky. Thousands upon thousands of people, covered the hills to the east, north and west, all staring patiently at the sky.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched as Steve joined the seated masses, crossing his legs and raising his head towards the sky. I stood, as if my feet had become roots, holding me to this small point of earth at the base of the sideporch. I did not sit, but I raised my eyes heavenward.
What I saw was the full moon, standing watch, an ivory guardian in the center of the sky. But there was an absence of stars, a total void of everything but the moon. Then, suddenly out of the east and west billowing black clouds came surging in, born on the breasts of some furious wind. These clouds charged forward until the entire sky was engulfed in the onslaught of these apparent storms. But, as the fronts reached the edge of the moon, they began to swirl in an intense spiral, like a whirlpool, which hid the moon from sight. Yet the gray light did not lessen, and the broiling, spiraling mass grew and grew until the center began to dip downward, like the tail of a tornado descending to earth. From this tail a small section of cloud separated, and moved out so that it hovered in the northern horizon about one hundred feet above the ground.
On that cloud hovering on the horizon, I beheld a dark-haired woman, who seemed to shimmer with the blue light that surrounded her. She was clad in a billowy dress that flowed out across the cloud, like a bride’s gown before an altar, awaiting the sacred vow of commitment. Her arms were raised, palms opened outward, in a gesture of embrace. Around her head, in a halo of sorts, were nine planets rotating in unison with the whirlpool above.
At the sight of her, I knelt, unbidden; knelt before this woman who could only be the Virgin Mary, with her billowy dress and celestial halo, come to embrace the people gathered in my yard. Suddenly, from around me the sound of wind through the cottonwood died, and the voices of the seated masses spoke with a sound like the rumble of the very earth upon which we stand.
“Seventeen seventy-five, Eighteen Twelve, Eighteen forty-six” they bellowed in a deep, rhythmic chant like Catholics at Mass.
“Eighteen sixty-one, Eighteen ninety-eight, Nineteen seventeen, Nineteen forty-one” The masses continued, without pause. The only movement was the shifting of lips as the people spoke.
“Nineteen fifty, Nineteen sixty-two, Nineteen ninety-one, Nineteen ninety-eight.” Then the voices stopped, and in unison, the multitude of people that sat upon the hills behind my house, slowly bowed their heads, and with ceremoniously slow movement, crossed their arms over their chests and were silent…
…With their silence my dream broke, and I awakened in my bed upstairs. The morning sun was evidently stealing across the eastern sky for small rays of light lay across my southern wall. I raised myself slowly, pushed the covers from my body, and felt their warmth retreat as I stepped barefoot onto the hard wood floor of my bedroom. I walked to my closed door, opened it to the familiar jangle of the doorknob, crossed the threshold and took the stairs down to my kitchen.
My mother, already awake, sat at the kitchen table, a steaming cup of coffee in her right hand.
“What are you doing up so early on a Saturday” she questioned as she tilted her head slightly to the right.
“Had another dream” I managed to mumble as I sat down opposite her.
“Same one?” she asked.
“No,” I said as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, “different one.” And I began to tell her my dream.
When I had finished telling the story of the dream I stared at my mother, there sitting in the light of that early Saturday sun that streamed through the double paned storm windows: her green eyes shining, and her red hair pulled back, away from her face and tucked behind her ears, the small creases that fanned out from the sides of her eyes, where she squinted when she laughed with a strong aroma of coffee on her breath when she spoke.
“Michael, those sound like dates.”
“Yeah, I think they are.”
“Maybe you should write them down.” My mother remarked as she looked over her shoulder at the digital wall clock.
“Maybe,” I said, nodding in agreement.
“What were they again.”
“Seventeen seventy-five, Eighteen Twelve, Eighteen forty-six, Eighteen sixty-one, Eighteen ninety-eight, Nineteen seventeen, Nineteen forty-one, Nineteen fifty, Nineteen sixty-two, Nineteen ninety-one, Nineteen ninety-eight. That was all of them.”
“Those are wars, granted all American wars,” my mother suddenly exclaimed as she took another sip from her coffee, “but wars nonetheless. Everyone of them from the Revolutionary war up till Vietnam.”
When she was silent I turned my head to look out of the double-paned storm windows, north into our backyard, where only moments before, in my dream millions of people had chanted dates to the Virgin Mary, dates of wars. I sat there watching the sun crest over the tops of the hackberries and the compost heap, lighting up even the ivy clinging to the iron fence beneath the pecan grove at the bottom of the hill, but the sun brought no warmth to me that day, even when I walked out and stood looking up into the sky, where the moon and clouds had met.
Now, you, may ask, so what? What is so important about a young man’s dream of dates and the Virgin Mary that could conceivable steal the warmth from the sun. Well, I will tell you this: the second to last date that they chanted was 1991, the year of my dream was 1989.
On a burning August day in 1990, Saddam Hussein, leader of the fourth largest army in the world invaded Kuwait, freezing America’s oil interests in the Middle-East. The stand-off took five months, but war came. It came in January of 1991. Now, 1998 was the last date. Perhaps the date of the next war. But you may still wonder what is so important about possibly knowing the dates of wars. Well, though war is something harsh and brutal, it is not the idea of another war which bothers me, it is the quiet that followed, when the people bowed their heads, crossed their arms and were silent, which haunts me now. What the silence may indicate I do not know, but I can imagine.
Once again I know that there are those among you who will not believe me, such a tale simply cannot be true, you might say; and you have no way of proving either its veracity nor its falsehood. Well I will state once again, I do not, and cannot doubt my own experience, especially after 1991. So I leave it up to you to decide whether such a story as this will be believed now. But should you doubt it, this written account shall stand as a testament to the truth of my dream, long after this year ends and we have seen why the millions went silent.
“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”
It was at dusk that I sat under the auburn skies of late November watching the leaves from the oak limbs above me pirouette and fall. They reminded me of us, these leaves; struggling against the wind, struggling to regain their limbs, the source of their life, before the winter came. But the wind roared in my ears and those leaves just swirled and fell. Sometimes I would reach up and snatch one out of the wind, only to stomp it to the concrete sidewalk which bled cold into my bones. “Sometimes it is better when the struggle ends soon” I thought as I held those leaves to the ground to keep them from blowing off, down the road towards Texas and beyond.
“Down that road lies this my friends” I muttered to the leaves as I patted my coat pocket which held my tattered red notebook, pencil and knife. “And this”, I said, as I rubbed the coarse fabric of my clothes. These clothes which had left the quiet streets of Tulsa as jeans, jacket and sweater, but which I had called bed, blanket and home in the dry rolling hills and dark plains of the Mexican llano.
Across the asphalt and curb, I watched as the shadows gathered in the details of the red-brick house and stored them in the blackened shapes of night. I watched as the ever-green magnolia, in front of my boyhood home, became a darkened giant swaying to the rhythm of the wind, and the fall-bleached grass became an ash-gray carpet rolled out for the night. And I watched, and waited for the night to swallow whole, the two years that had passed.
The two years of leaves that had fallen, the two years of grass that had been cut, and the two years of life that had continued in this house while I had been away. But more than that I waited for the words to come back. Those twenty words which even the 3,000 miles couldn’t erase. Those twenty words which had haunted me in the moment before sleep, to dwell in my dreams, and greet me when I would wake. I waited for those words, and for the guilt and the sorrow that would come with them. Because for now there was nothing, not even a numbness, but rather a chasm, a great abyss where once a mighty continent of grief and guilt had lain.
Three days had passed since I awoke to that cavernous shell, that great absence within. Gloria had told me what it was, what it had to be.
“Alexander, you must return.” She had whispered. “It is the only way… for reconciliation. Go now, mi amor, mi vida.”
And it was the way the she spoke in my native tongue which had moved me, moved me to an understanding which I pondered as I sat outside beneath the oak tree on Eldridge street watching the light appear in the bay window of the house.
It was from this contemplation that I heard words once more. Not the twenty words of before, different words; words which rushed in to fill the void and to clamor about inside me, screaming for release.
Gloria claims that to name the dead is to bring them back…into you. I disagree, the dead are always in us. I know, now, what two years couldn’t teach me. I know now what it is like to speak the words of the dead, to never escape the past; because the past lives in you. I had thought for two years how horrible it must be to be a part of a culture where each individual is bound forever to their family, both living and dead, and to never have the ability to escape their hold. Yet now I know that the dead are inside us. They give us life and live through us long after their bodies have returned to the earth and all but their dust is forgotten.
Those are their words. These words which now rage through me like a phoenix igniting.
“Yo me hablo por lo mismo y traigo tambien la palabra de todos los muertos que se murieron muy callados. Por ellos hablo, en mi palabra hablan los muertos todos, los callados de siempre.”
“I speak for myself, and I also carry the word of all our silent dead. I speak for them, through my words speak all the dead, the silent ones forever.”
And so I arose, a single silhouette in the coal-black night. And stood for a minute listening to the wind hammer in my ears, with the cold of autumn on my face. Then I struck out across the asphalt and curb, to the opposite shore in this sea of darkness, to walk through the door and into the light. Two years had passed. Two years were gone. But I no longer traveled alone. My father walked with me.
There is reason here,
Behind this fence.
And outside,
The world is wide
And wild.
The blood and the Clock
Mingled
And we were all
There ever would be
The boy stood looking at the tree. The tree was old. A grandfather of cottonwoods, that bent with the summer winds and smelled of hot nights and summer sun. Eighty-three feet tall, the boy knew. He had walked its shadow and knew. He knew its height by its shadows length, though each fell differently. The shadow with a coolness, and a tinge of night, and the tree with a groan, and the heady smell of sap and decay. But that was all to come, at the moment the boy stared at the tree, tracing its bark, his green eyes twisting upward along the wooden tendons and sinews that raced towards the sky. He breathed deep of the summer air, felt the moisture of the creek behind him expanding with the heat, pushing down on his skin, holding the sweat in. But the tree seemed unfazed, swaying softly in the sticky breeze.
The boy was barefoot. The gravel bar hot beneath his soles. The boy caressed the soft grass at the foot of the cottonwood with his eyes. He knew the coolness of it, the softness like fine silk. But he remained on the gravel, letting the heat burn into his feet and surge upward like magma to sear his head with the tingling sensation of pain. He tilted his head to the right listening to the soft murmur of the leaves in the summer wind. He smelled the heavy scent of sycamore leaves and the bitter smell of crushed nightshade. His skin felt heavy from the heat and the humidity, his mind felt poised on the edge of numbness and pain.
He remembered his mother’s voice, light and clear. It would certainly have carried over the rustling leaves and the valley with the creek. If she had called. But she didn’t, she couldn’t now. So he imagined what the grass would feel like beneath his toes. How soft it would be, how cool from the shade. He imagined the difference between the grass and a slab of stone buried in the earth on this summer’s day. He thought it too would be cold, but not soft, maybe smooth, but not soft. He realized that there would be no padding, that the rock would be hard, it would not give like the green grass. His feet would not sink into it as they would the soft earth at the foot of the cottonwood, damp with the creek’s water and the dew. There would be only unyielding resistance, nothing would remain when he stepped off of the stone. There would be no footprints, no crushed grass springing back towards the heavens. There would only be the cold hard stone. That thought made the boy grimace and his mouth turned downward a bit on the edges and his green eyes narrowed a bit and he raised his hand and pushed his thick brown hair away from his face.
Then he began to dig his toes into the gravel beneath him, and the burning increased and his mind sang with it. But he kept on until his feet were buried beneath the small river rocks, buried beneath the heat of the surface, buried within the shadow of the gravel where the small rocks kept cool. And he thought of the sensations, the difference between hot and cold, and pain and comfort; and he decided that it did not really matter, either of them, because here on top, even on the gravel you made an impression. You could always look behind you and say look, there are my footprints, there where my mind sang with the pain of the heat on my soles. Or, there where I cooled them on the green grass, or even there where I partially buried them and found the edge of the heat and the cold in the layers of gravel. Those are the places of my passing.
And his body shook a bit, with the sun pouring over the top of the cottonwood, bathing him with light. And the short rasping sounds of his weeping mingled with the rustling of the leaves and together they became a whisper of that one day, that one moment, in my fifth summer. The summer when I decided that I would rather be there on the edge of the river rocks and the grass, where the trees grew by the side of the creek, feeling the edge of pain and heat and cold and comfort; than with my mother.
And I cried because I knew it, not the words for it, those came later. But the feeling of it I first knew then, beneath that tree. The feeling of separation, and isolation, and being forever alone.
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani”
I
walked
Down the rain-blackened asphalt of Monte Cassino,
In the ashen grayness of dawn
Watching black bellies of pregnant clouds
Give birth to the Sunday storm.
And knelt
on the damp cool earth
floor of the coarse granite grotto
and prayed
to the stone idol of the Virgin,
the God of my fathers,
the Lord of the Rock,
Prayed that I was not alone…
But stone is deaf,
and statues mute.
So I stretched out
to kiss the earth,
my pagan Mother of old,
but the soil
remained soil
on my lips,
as the voiceless thunder shook my bones,
and the rain fell,
fell down,
down upon damp dirt
and maple leaves
cold statues
and dead weeds.
So
I rose.
Empty idols of statue and storm
Silent beneath the rain.
And walked
Through gray dawn
Alone.
She asked me for a gift.
and I gave her a memory.
A blinding swift rush of wind across a winter-bleached field at sunrise
when the breath comes sharp and crisp,
like the virgin breath of a newborn into now air-filled lungs,
and the frost like jewels in the waxen hair of the earth,
and the skeleton forest of oak and ash a black shadow sprouting details
as the sun crests the hill,
and her eyes shining like emeralds in the morning light.
This I gave to her,
to hold through age and night.
And the day became a candle in the cave of her mind,
While her story continued
word
pen
paper
tongue
teeth
bone
stain
blood
strain
spread
stain
spread
strain
blood on
paper
staining
straining
calling
towards a god
of language
who can
speak
me
alive
and dying
die
but in living
truly
truly
live