This bar is lit year-round with Christmas lights reflecting off the varnished oak, drinking glasses, and liquor stock, and a dozen little tiki lamps sporadically glow from their stationed posts; an aura not unlike votive candles flickering at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.
I’m redefining what it means to sit here in the dark. It’s a shame they won’t be talking about this in the next century: the way he pronounced vacuous when asked to describe the room, or the shot-glass clank tuned in perfect collective pitch. It’ll either be too hot or too cold by then, and reading will be as ancient as laugh tracks and patriotic cowboys, Monument Valley now a beatific dementia that rises with Abbadon and sets with Big Sur.
But I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m thinking about you, whoever you are, wrapped carelessly in a coral, melon-white Mexican blanket on Zuma Beach with your back to me, and whether or not it’s really been ten years since I’ve seen the ocean.
Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018
In the warm glow of my reading lamp, together with Mariette as she takes her vows at the holy cloister in Upstate New York, I hear the foghorn cries of a train in the early hours of morning. The track is roughly a mile south and its whistle is frozen in place, wailing like a dying animal in shapeless dark. I imagine a car stalled at a crossing or switchman holding a lantern as he changes course at the turnout or, still being the boy galloping ’round the living room, two-thousand head of ghostly longhorn on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, flooding past the engineer who waits as hooves trample ballast, sleeper, and rail spark to pulp. I close the window, catching the faint hint of cherry blossom, and now, back among the sisters, Mariette performs the Litany of Loreto in amity with a dozen pink and white weightless chaplets piled high for Christ’s newest bride.
She sat quietly with her lunch, overlooking the Chippewa River through the dining room bay windows as sunlight pierced through the clouds for the first time that day.
From the screened porch I spoke to my aunt and uncle and cousin as grandma watched the bend in the river knee, its banks plump with snow.
I still don’t know if she recognized me standing there, or simply waited for the right moment to speak, but after some time she looked up and smiled and said “It’s good to see you, dear” before returning to the river.
Kodama
I wander the dark house after everyone has gone to bed, looking for any sign of my grandfather’s ghost. Under the streetlamp the streets shine from fresh rain like sweat on a damp forehead. As a child the signs of life were the police scanner in the living room, sometimes accompanied by his silhouette in his recliner, listening in the dark, and later, as an adult, his constant coughs and groans, signs of life from the room below, my grandmother beside him, awake, holding his hand.
But he did not die here. He left in the middle of the night, unable to breathe on his own, seven miles south in a nursing home where he spent the final months of his long life. Maybe his ghost is still out there, wandering, turned around in a cornfield or pulled by the scent of his past life to the creek he crossed as a teenager, the fields of high grass covered in dew, his pant legs soaked to the knees on his nightly walk in the dark to see June, his love, years before they married.
The signs are everywhere, they just are not here.
The white figure out the living room window is not my grandfather and I don’t ask his name. He belongs to someone else, and I wave him on. He heads through the trees to the river where a spirit can travel twice as fast. The ballfield near the river where I chased grounders and pop flies has gone through so many changes, I struggle to recognize my own memories
The light that warms my face is death.
Maybe grandfather’s ghost is ashamed now the family knows of his numerous infidelities, like the woman at the bar he saw often, a ten minute walk from home. Where do you go if you can’t go home? The river lets out at the Great Lake and there it is separated from the sky by a line only the dead are willing to touch.
Mt. Pleasant
We identified the callery pear tree and paradise apple, both white as cherry blossom. Grandma said this was the first time she had sat in the garden, though she had the best view from her bedroom window. She gave her blessing to my sister and her boyfriend and their plans to move to Hawaii and I admit disappointment in myself for not being able to offer her the same.
As we left she gave me a hug and said “If I’m not here next time you visit, you know where I’ll be,” just as she had the last five years, but this time I think she means it. The sun broke through the clouds on the ride home yet the light continues to dim.
I like the cold, overcast days of autumn. Mist freckling the windshield as leaves shiver and take Golden Gate leaps into their savior’s arms, being led across golden shores and into windswept streets and damp alleys, garbage bags, and overzealous burn piles next to mailboxes.
Closets cough up college sweatshirts and blue jeans for girls by the fire, hair as graceful as American flags fanned by the cold, dead breath of Rome, naked and auburn in last sunlight.
The birds that stay turn dusk to dawn with their songs, their meanings so vast even in death we’ll never fully understand.
We will grow tired of raising the flag to half-mast every morning at the post office, the elementary and high school, the courthouse, the fire station. Even at our churches, outnumbering the gas stations in town.
Your neighbors will lose track of national tragedies as the news reports the dead like football scores on the bottom crawl of the television screen.
Pastors, guns at their hip, wonder why the congregation wears black on Sunday and politicians ask Jesus where the youth vote went. Teachers, once worried of overcrowded classes, now count the empty desks, school halls still as mausoleums.
Days we were told never to forget, now too many to remember.
Smoke tangles with tangerine clouds on the horizon like an invitation sealed in a soft cream envelope. The dying breath of day sends an empty beer can down the street into fresh dark, where no doubt it’ll go on forever. One by one neighbors shut their windows but still the laugh tracks bounce off brick and concrete, knowing good and well this life is syndicated.
Next door two boys punch it out in the mosquito glow of the streetlamp – shirts ripped, cursing like their fathers, the neighborhood in silence as this happens all too often. The world just isn’t big enough for boys with two first names. You would’ve pulled them apart.
Last night I saw you in Cape Canaveral as rockets became raptured in ribbons of smoke and you tossed your hair over your shoulder and waved at the camera, laughing with all your body the way honest people do. Before the end you said without Him you were nothing, but even in nothing you were everything.
Often I awake in the dark unsure of where I am, too afraid to move for there are killers on the highway, haunted by white noise from an after-hours television. Maybe it’s applause.
Originally appeared in Art Focus Oklahoma: Spring 2018.
It is hard not to picture their bodies, stark in the contrast of new snow, lying in the frigid shallow waters, their backs to the sky in a final act of defiance – her husband Black Kettle’s final words heard only by yellow goldfinches, preserved like Cheyenne arrowheads hidden deep in pages of red earth, the river playing with her long black hair like bay grass in zephyr, her nine scars a handwoven map leading back to Sand Creek.
The path bends through goldenrod and field thistle, prairie sumac and Virginia creeper as I am gently kissed by honeybees in the late September sun. I ignore power lines, interstate tumult, groans of a distant train, and in the shade of whispering bur oak and hickory, the jagged teeth of stolen history prods at the soles of my feet.
It’s no coincidence the hand soap near the kitchen sink is scented milk and golden honey, and porcelain cherubs sing from hymnals above the toilet, and the shower refuses to get too hot in the morning, and every painting of fruits and flowers, cottages and streams are accompanied by scripture.
In one room there are two gold frames, side by side, twin paintings of hummingbirds dancing among purple hollyhocks, and if it weren’t for the one on the right slightly crooked, I couldn’t tell you the difference.
In the bathroom there’s another, titled: “Burgundy Irises with Foxgloves.” The caption reads whatsoever things are pure.
I note the mini-blinds blocking sunlight with washboard efficiency. I run my fingers along crow’s feet in the drywall, along door frames. I tap the window for the attention of a one-legged cardinal who takes three steps before flight.
I read as daylight drains from the room, the words softening on the page.
At the campfire I run my fingers through my hair as a woman might, one of us the sacrificial lamb. The wind has gone as embers glow like the vermilion floors of Limbo, a reminder that home is not a place and you certainly cannot go there again.
Across the lake there is a coyote effort to stir the soul, much like the street evangelist this morning outside the gas station with his band of grim disciples, clean cut in their Sunday suits, looking on as their child king treats open air to Lamentations and Revelation as if it were Macbeth and Waiting for Godot.
Evening Panoply 