Dear Satellite I’ve resorted to telescopes. They litter the lawn. The further you fly, the bigger they get. See, it’s still me down here, waving madly, quivering eye at the far shrunken end. And you, gigantic but eons away. In a vacuous, intractable space you are a small dark light. Stray fish scale in a river of supernovas and space garbage. Flicker, flicker, gone. But really, after the Big Bang everything else is anti-climax anyway. So what if I’ve taken to long nights in bathrobes on lawn furniture. I’m not waiting, just curious. Go, scratch that intergalactic itch while I wake up dew drenched, cobwebby and kinked. The suburbs are silent. Songbirds are just snapping out of REM sleep. A thumbnail moon snagged on the sleeve of its orbit scoots away as another sun takes the old sun’s place. I am nearly inevitable. Monday Brunch Trying out my new sheepskin comfortwear at The Golden Eagle Restaurant and Lounge on the Famous Hairpin Curve and getting a few good looks from the young ladies. I am not a lonely man. I have a lot on my plate. Though I prefer to eat my hash alone by the windows overlooking the mountainside. You can see forever over the frozen empty hills and sort of disappear among them without going anywhere. Like a good painting, where the good is the certainty you feel that you can step right in and begin to exist minus a whole dimension. But things are happening here. A kid on a leash in the next booth won’t eat. His father says ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’ into his cell phone. I give him a look. It says, I am judging you. He hangs up and starts another call. Two kids at the counter having heart attacks can’t stop giving mouth-to-mouth to keep each other alive. Right now it’s keeping everyone alive. Two soul donors, giving a taste of vigor and nerve and careless lust instead of good blood or ice-packed hearts. They have no idea how much we need—the boy on a rope staring up from the floor, the man in sheepskin pants done with his hash, drinking his coffee as slow as he can. I Like To Be The One Who Looks Away Away from you, from irises aswim with root beer and antifreeze. Yours are sweet to the lick, and I am a dog’s mooning tongue. I am on the verge. Fall tore the leaves from your summer bones and a few fell in there and stuck, microscopic and coppery. I can be mesmerized. But who wants a penny? Who a mangled heart? Decomposition is a bitch, autumn its leash and its whip. And now it is winter. While you cool, I solidify. I am the dog-headed snowman iced-up and listing in your trashy backyard. A buried cardboard box is a house caved-in, disintegrating at my feet. I won’t go in. A telephone is a tin can on a string. It’s buried in there and rings constantly for someone else, someone still with arms. Oh, the neighborhood kids have taken their sticks to me. Have plucked and broken my turnip nose and twiggy limbs. Have you forgotten? When spring ekes out its slow existence, I’ll still be here, dirty, diminished and flecked with greasy leaves, my canine face upside-down at my feet. Then warmer days will come, and I’ll be here even then in tiny slivers of gravel stuck point-up in the lawn. In dust that clings to shards of grass that sound like screaming rabbits when you put them to your lips just so and blow. Signs of Life This drudgery deep in the suburbs. The incessant washing clean of sport wagons and evidence of abnormality. The constant feeding of flourishing stepfamilies. It is one way to go. I shoot up a flare. I am hacking my way out with my machete. Someone beat a trail to me and bring the best medicine doctors. Bring your cameraman and military helicopter. I am an undiscovered species. I am the last of my kind. By day I sleep in the shrubbery. Cars rush past, dogs on walks. At night I get the feeling the moon is following me. Its keen yellowy slit. I act like shadows, dogged. To be seen is to be gradually taken back into the fold. This is no walk in the park. This is bushwhacking. This is burying a horse with your hands. Your kidney cleaning someone else’s blood. Moth in a hurricane. I am blocks away by now, and freedom looks like the far side of this expressway. That treacherous twilight dodge. The squinty moon slips behind a mushroom cloud, and I bolt from the shoulder. Surely someone back there remembers my name. Someone’s maybe missing me to death. Trespassing New England Now don’t we feel devilish, galloping at dusk past the peace pagoda with stems of stolen lotus clamped in our teeth and the ponies’ shoes launching sparks over the backs of monks stooped in alfresco meditation. Who knew there were rules about such things? Giddy, we yip and spur the lathery flanks and speed away. None of the monks stirs from his sieza. They practice their pretzelish non-doing diligently. When will we learn to expect the unexpected? Already we’d raced past the buffalo farm with its gloomy little tourists stiff with bus fatigue staring past the sad brown humps toward the happy dying autumn leaves. We wrote postcards in our heads about them writing postcards in their heads about spiced cider and photosynthesis and the life spans of ungulates. Trespassing is a tricky business during hunting season. But rules, like these ponies, need breaking, and we’ve got this bone-dry riverbed to race down and a sweat to work up playing suck-face in some hidden clovery glade. Oh, the bison have grown heavy in my pocket, who were so tiny so far away and still tiny when we snuck up to them. We should have left them bawling in their muckish pens. Here, a patch of clover. Keep your eyes peeled for a hidden glade. And feel free to begin removing your clothes. Was that gunfire in the distance, or thunder? Let’s howl at nothing in particular. Let’s set the buffaloes free. back |