Category: Reckoning 1
Written in the Book of the Woods
I’ve never been lost in the woods, so of course I didn’t think I was lost now. I’d simply misplaced the trail. Eventually, I’d find it, because it was around here someplace. It wasn’t until I had stomped around for about an hour that I began to get the creeps, and not because I was lost. It was the sun.
It hadn’t moved; it just hung there in the sky at about twenty degrees . . .
Behind the Sun
Protocosmo found me as it finds all its inhabitants: the lost, the lonely, and the wayward. I was stranded for twenty-three hours in Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Round about hour seventeen and in the wee hours of the night I took to pacing the long empty hallways past their inert coffee and fusion cuisine franchises. An attendant found me sleeping on one of those . . .
The Hole in the Reef
Across the flat horizon: only blue, no sign of other boats, of anything at all.
“Row row your boat, row—”
“Come on.”
“—this goddamn thing.”
The line and anchor had become entangled with something below.
“Pull like this,” Oliver said.
“Nope,” his father said. “Tricksy widget. Snake charmer. Battle slug.”
“Drink much?”
His father yanked back and forth on the line . . .
Eel of the Lake
“Our water!”
“OUR WATER!”
“Our life!”
“OUR LIFE!”
“Our water!”
“OUR WATER!”
“Our life!”
“OUR LIFE!”
Neon poster boards glowed pink and yellow in the late August sun, like opalescent scales rippling on a monster made of myriad bodies. Each sign bore a slogan, praise for the lake or a condemnation of the corporate befouler, Lennox-Mills; and the protestors shook . . .
Papa Bois and the Boy
I startled you the first time.
You spilled bougainvilleas deep violet
from your lap, bursting all around
us. The whole forest was staring
at me, waiting to see what came next.
You ran before I could finish
calling your name.
I sympathized, you know.
The iron devils had already
moved in, their teeth marking your trees,
splitting rocks with their toes . . .
When No One’s Left
“David.” I roll his name around in my mouth like it is a prayer. David Malouf. He laughs when I use his family name. It means nothing now. But I like it. I like how when I use it, I remember.
In some ways, it would be easier to forget. And then, we’d be back at the beginning of time, just the two of us, as if none of it had happened. Just bodies. No past, no future.
David Malouf. . . .
The End of Occidentalism
Not man in a metal hat aboard a floating city, not carpetbagger walking jauntily from the train. All colonies begin, after all, in the mind: longing for that hub, the warm fire of London, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Rome, Jerusalem. Only there can the gravity of this life achieve its divinity; there, past the horizon, wisdom is won on streets of gold.
Next to this mental . . .
The Rule of Capture
1.
There is no such thing as an empty lot.
2.
I knew foxes were living back in there in the woods behind the door factory, but the first time I saw one was when it was running away from a realtor.
It is curious how we can identify so many animals that we have never seen. We are taught to do it as children. Especially the animals dangerous enough to eat us, or wily enough to . . .
third world problems
when rainwater becomes our source of bathing
and the rest fills a gallon of semi-clean plastic
humble roofs turn tin & rust
suddenly the word enough
rhymes with barely
the clothes we will sleep in are also living in the daylight
and the days are then measured in loss and love
humble roofs become tin & rust
we will discuss enough
but only find barely