from Another Sky

All that time I had been thinking what love’s wild terrain cruised, like a pickup in the dark on rough limestone, flint outcroppings. Some distant scene of youth — fishing or hunting. Along scrub oak trails a pretended wilderness interiorized like dream energy, an origin or self-sampling of how to one day be. Grow wild in cobbled destiny — it’s yours. A rare turning or value like a view of battered moonlight you had known. Drunks stammered to their cars the parking lot lit up. Loud V-8s like nineteen seventy something. All those years to tear one up with are carried in shadows by hackberry, walnut. A beginning takes root in quiet circulation of blood and nerve we are.

A first name in the coming frame of identity. Dogs and rabbits, private pets of shared circumstance. The sky rains fuel and snow. Pear blossoms open. Reinvent origin to suit late tale’s completion. Côtes du Rhone and crackers. My children read of distant lands, allow themselves to raid pathways of neglected deities. Through a window snow passes a glowing streetlight. In my memory days reach toward faceless, non-seeing expansion. Breath and light travel my spine.

In a cabin in Texas when I was fifteen drinking cheap wine for the first time staggering to piss under hackberry’s barky roughness, I saw my breath against porch light between me and black sky. Now unsettled, another rider approaches. Her eyes widen as if awakened by voices rendered by letters. No ease of seasonal surfaces.

When I stepped out of the car I smelled coolant as steam lifted from under the hood. Lake, summer, jerking off in an Oldsmobile. Radio and a sad bird sound, not a dove, but maybe a whip-or-will like a forlorn Midwest fantasy. We would hunt at dusk and the older boys sipped whiskey by the fire near our tents. Snow hardens in April cold. The stories will not focus — they spill. A mythic energy being raids the old fields quietly for sudden amusement. In those days the woods pulsed with lore of unknown origin.

Faded Polaroid of a man and his son by the crow statue. Cerberus toy, an ancient hammer. Boys laugh, “rough-housing,” my father said. They brush teeth in a cold bathroom while wind rattles our windows. Like a ghost, another sky comes to waken the gene domain. A corridor in the skeleton contrives wild branchings. Elms heavy with snow.

Oval window sky lifts white to see. Linear stances, wires. I had been hoping to reach an old memory, a place with pop and candy. My father’s station wagon and hunting rifles. This morning snow came thick, wet. A snow globe intensity of whirling motion. In the window light invited awe. Slushy ice on my boots. My children mixed batter for crepes. Now the sky’s reach eases anxiety. A mechanized bell. Sugar cookies packaged in Savannah. Turbulence and word pace. Pakistanis deported from Lesbos. An interior ache no bodily comportment can find.

Like Houston heat and grackles. Gulf wetness, sun, oak branches. Serial departures from old friends. Past selves pillowed by labor or expansive regimens of age. Tonight in my parents’ house listening to my father cough; I drink Centenario and pilsner in a climate for those whose heart rates have reduced to a minimal capacity. Blood’s hot glow like bright live oak leaves newly burst. Days to drain approval or moody sustenance. Learning always by love’s distant visibility.

Or the talk of sentences, the beauty of an extended line of thought; a corporeal arrival of inner adherence to outwardly mobile deliveries. Eggs and hand-made corn tortillas with green salsa and habanero sauce. Bowl of fruit — juicy tangerine, apple, banana. Pine planks under bare feet. Climate of the Swiffer—party preparations. And sentiment’s strong course enlivens directed ethos, devotion. The personal’s impersonal endurance where friendship coheres not as meaning but as arrival again into our now.

And to hold in mind the certainty of erasure, a body’s absorption into nation’s intensity. Migrant child’s head shorn at Greek entry. Bearings or entrance, an enlivening of tongues to train whose warrant? Sound of an owl shapes twilight. Suburban deer, a fantasy of returning, daring. Never here, as in “here,” but prolonged by robust orders of misplacement. To say how we come to see begins a jubilant lingering in condominium morning. A pattern intervenes — we entertain its prescience, a driven nation. Not even the syntax means what we say.