Shifts

The sky has closed in on me, presenting a grey shroud as if it were a much-anticipated birthday gift. “Happy New Year, now be subdued.” It is dark and I am tired both from lack of sleep and dreams that have haunted me like a helpless child just out of reach; haunting for sixteen months without relief.

She is a familiar spirit visiting me for some sin of which I’m yet unaware. The lodestone of my heart; I am doomed time and time again to have my decks shattered upon the rocks only to have them rebuilt and redisconfigured.

9:25 am. A newspaper wakens me to a new year and alerts me to the successful relationship of ——- and —— and my mind is glad but my heart pulls the grey shroud from the sky and wraps it round like a blanket, tight as the grave.

Had I known ten years ago where I’d sit today, would I have set the same course? Would I have chosen safer seas, free of sirens and mysteries?

I do not know.

All I know is that any glimpse of land is more mirage than reality. We few ships on this endless sea flash code through the night. We ask each other and the stars whether we made a mistake in choosing not to winter in safe havens. The ice is packing, screeching as it collides and closes in with the sky until our sails will be torn, our masts broken, and I will have landfall –

either on the rocks, the ice or the ocean floor.

Damascus

The sun has long since left the Gap; the road, pines, and ancient wrinkled houses are left together in a wind-tossed tumult of grey. Inside, the misting windshield. If a heart throbs behind these black windows, it’s muffled beneath the blanket of kudzu that the South has wrought about her, ever-mindful of winter. The only sound is that of the engine, working to demystify the windows and lead me through the Gap.

We are led to long days spent mere feet above a speeding highway, winding through the Carolinas, years ago; how the golden meadows between the northbound and southbound lanes of Interstate 26 inevitably turn to grey, then black, only illumined by oncoming headlights. The hum of another engine, and the popping of acorns as we pull into a driveway; Mom and Dad speak softly, so as not to wake us, the children. We pull the blanket tighter – a blanket of knowledge (or is it ignorance? How confused we are these days!) We look out over the world from an overpass, knowing all its workings; like a flea knows of the bonds and bounds of gravity.

How often do we long for that blanket now, however full of holes? Then at least could we face the night. Now, if not for heartbeats hidden in these houses, we would be lost in the blackening grey, wandering beneath the kudzu blanket.

Sanctuary

I drove to the border of cloud and watched ghosts dance about its edge like waves on the sand. From here I can see the land bathed in thunderous sunlight; even from the shadows I can see that the world is filled with such beauty. There is a gossamer veil of mist, impermeable and unforgiving, that separates our world from theirs. Toeing the end of shadow, I can sometimes make out the holes in the sky where what lies behind pierces through – stars. I’ve tried to paint them, but white is hard to come by in this land between the highways.

(From the base of the clouds where the ghosts spy, we are probably only a contour cutting its way through mountainside and ocean shore, unalarmed and indiscriminating.) I asked the ghosts where white tones are found, and they indicated the cemetery. But, as I said, that veil is impenetrable; thus I stand in a meadow drenched in hues of grey so that the highway is indistinguishable from the patch of Queen Anne’s Lace to my right. I stand looking into a sun meant for a painter of white. I stand looking into a sun that whispers lines I don’t understand.

Copper Symphony

A candle shines through the doorway. My fingers still hold a smoldering wick, burning my skin like a glove. “I am home,” I say, to no one in particular – maybe the bricks need to hear it. My shadow dances opposite the flame across their mason-faces. I am a mirror to the naked world.

Above my head, behind me, there is a window. Against it beats rain softly, caressing the glass and whispering of colder weather. It is still in this room, where the candle twists. The music has stopped. My piano lies dormant and expectant. I do not think sound is necessary, here.

Flame: incessant and full of mirth. It spreads beneath the carpet and behind the walls. My body feels no heat, but the candle I see bows and rises excitedly. The air changes; charged. If I were a storm, I would have lightning for arms. Rise. Stand. My feet glow with electricity. I cannot tell you whether it is my hands or the tongues of flame that bring the piano to life, but there is music with the laughter of a fiddle.

An island forms outside the window, as the rain builds up worlds on the pavement. What wonders there are in autumn! My fingers rest; my reflection stands to make amends while I admire the candle in the other room.

Speechless

A mountain stream of thought: clarity. Pouring from a vacuum, in the midst of which I stand, there is language. A prairie of lowercase letters sway in the breeze of speech, interrupted only by the unruly height of the occasional “l” or “b”. Beyond lies the forest of the uppercase. Beginnings wait there, between the trunks of our “P’s” and “Q’s”.

I collapse into the lowercase, covered, drowning in codependent words like “such” and “as”. I strain my jaw open to take a breath and find that language is already there, flooding in and out of my lungs so that I am suffocating.

The words are written, unspoken, debilitating, decapitating, broken and meaningless without context; the words are a hell of nonentity, the words are smoke in my lungs, the words are poison in my thoughts – the words are… O! the words!

Speak, I command myself. The oxygen slowly seeps from my bloodstream as I sprawl out in speechless agony. I grasp for something spoken. The world is turning dark; I clasp the closest set of phonemes and speak:

Help.

The War of 1991

A cloud gathers behind the windows, fogging the glass. The glass curves, like an exit lane, but there is no exit. The cloud goes nowhere, degrading into fog. Pressure; building, and building. The atoms excite; heat. The fog is oppressive; the room is a steam engine. Pounding; the atoms push against the window pane, one by one by one. The curvature creaks in complaint against the pressure. A scream of white flags sliver and snake across the pane. There is release.

We creep through the cracks like children let out of school. The air is open. We run through the streets to see every windowsill decorated with broken glass. The barriers between the internal and external are now permeable. We’ve learned to let the open air inside like a lost stray. Century-old portraits on the mantle now weather more rapidly, but the faces look younger.

7:20, PM: a boy sits on the porch with a head cold. As he sits, the fog crawls slowly back through the windows and his eyes grow red. I sit across the street and dully rub my own burning eyes. All down the road, from this coast to the next, we red-eyed youths sit on our porches beside a plastic bag of medicines, unable to sleep because the fog has crept from the window to our beds.

Lake Junaluska

Clocks in the stems of leaves; gears whirring to push grass from the dirt. Blue mist haunts above the soil, tasting of mercury, like blood rather than water. Run your hands beneath streams of coolant coursing through the mountains from the heart of the mechanism; where we performed triple bypass on the earth’s core. Her breathing is in rasps; it shakes with the smoke of her artificial lungs. And we, with bloodied fists, beat the soil, watering the grass with tears of disillusioned abandonment, and fall asleep in the dust, alive only in the arms of another.

In January, when the comforter is dirty and sits in the laundry room, two bodies shiver close together in every household. There are choked sobs to be heard, as outside, trees recede from the mountains like the aging man the planet is and sirens pulse over plains of concrete chasing men and women whose faces glow with lust – worthy only of horror stories told a hundred years ago. Again, on the pillow. Regrets of having brought an untainted child into a suffocating world. In the corner a seed dies beneath the dry soil, but a seedling waits for day to sprout.