Iris

Reams and

Reams of skin,

Quietly,

reeling in.

 

Drape a cloth,

A word,

To cloak,

What I don’t deserve.

 

A fan, a flame,

A common name,

Your tattoo drawing,

Down my aim.

 

A room, A bed,

A rented view,

I don’t care what,

Or who are you.

Ophelia

I begged him not to

Leave wordless through half-latched lids,

Heady, hot, stale air and

Fresh winter down.

 

Then barely saw him go,

Our new child failing for once

To wake me.

Silent, on this of all days.

 

What fleeting contrivance could have slowed,

Or hurried him to me?

Had I kept him talking too long?

Or longer, would he be?

 

Racing, making lights,

Speeding back to us?

To me?

To our little, pink, family.

 

The storm of the century,

We lived, we’d at least that long.

Countless mornings until then,

I will wake if I sleep at all,

 

And through half-latched eyes

I will beg him, soundless

 

Not to leave us,

 

To leave me.

A Three Hundred Mile Driving Lesson

     Our van chugged along the graded highway offering up a funnel of dust into the blotchy sky behind us. I had just had my first driving lesson, given to me by my girlfriend, all hands and innuendo, reaching across to show me things she thought I should know, lingering on my thigh. I was exhilarated. We pulled out from the empty campgrounds without paying and tore out across the prairies. I was only supposed to take it as far as the overpass, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.

      I had never sat behind a wheel on a road before and was drawn forward into the depths of the flat yellow earth by the most overwhelming sense of release, offering myself into a world that was suddenly at my feet. I continued over the overpass, barrelled on past a Machinery Store and towering rows of harvesters like giant hulking green beetles, damp in the morning sun. Twenty-Five years of weight seemed to slide off my shoulders and crumble behind us in dusty clumps either side of the long white line, dissipating in the same buffeting air that tousled my long hair through the tiny triangular window by my dash.

      We passed Ranch gates with bleached skulls and tumbling hollow and empty grain elevators, still emblazoned with logos of the day. You could watch them for miles rise slowly from the grass, shocking in their height when you pulled right alongside in the otherwise unbroken flatland. Eternal cotton-ball clouds shot off and away in all directions, like that mirror infinity effect you see in a restroom or a lift, chasing away and beyond the horizon, completely unaware of this tiny blue creature scuttling from town to town. Unaware that what I was doing was completely illegal. I had no license. And I didn’t care.

      I drove three hundred miles that day. I passed Giant log trucks on single-lanes and they passed me countless more times, wracked by the air they displaced, pushed aside and then sucked in behind. A rush to hold steady and counteract the forces and allow for the old vehicles’ idiosyncrasies, and then cruising once again. We climbed down into and then rose again out of the Badlands of Alberta, coasting between the hoodoos, tall pillars of ancient mud capped with heavy stones, standing like calcified mushrooms, playing with my eyes and transporting me to new dimensions in my nascent mind. Chips of stone would poke out through the exposed strata and they could be teeth or toes of long dead beasts. Elaine would reach back for snacks in the storage behind us, placing them between her knees to where I would gladly reach. There were no traffic lights or reasons to stop, slowing only to avoid the sheep that licked the salt from the roadside.

      We skipped along behind the Rocky Mountains, keeping them always to our left, the plains stretching impossibly eastwards unbroken until Quebec, almost three thousand miles away. Elaine had fearlessly driven us through round and over the Rockies several times before, now we were trying to keep off the main thoroughfares to avoid people, traffic and Mounties. We wanted the road. We wanted the sky. We wanted everything and we took it all with our hands at ten and two.

      As the hungry sun devoured the road behind us we trundled further into nowhere and before long were the only vehicle on the road. Trees swarmed towards us from the foothills and the roads began to meander slightly, snaking between the buttes, following the valleys. The fuel needle dipped low as though to gauge the sun as it bottomed out beyond the sawtooth ridges. We watched for a copse or a hill to open up or fall away and offer us a gas station. We drove on.

      The needle bottomed out as the sun had and we feathered the throttle, coasting downhill when we could, pushing the unerring thirty-year-old 318 engine to the very limit of what it could run on. We laboured to the brink of a shallow valley and saw, nestled between a colony of youthful pines and with the plains seemingly spilling out the back door, a station, the first for hours. Our van began to splutter and chortle and I had little choice but to slip it out of gear and freewheel the final mile or so, until we came to a dead stop alongside the pumps, without ever once tapping the brakes.

     The place was closed, but the blue bug lights were on inside. We didn’t mind. We had everything we needed. We camped right there, feeling the cool air cascading gently down from the mountain-tops like a river rushing to meet the warm air rising from the plains, whistling gently through our bug spattered grill.

      We watched the clouds materialise above us, as though they formed from the very vapour of the person I had been all this time, all these years, in all those places, right up until the moment I sat behind the wheel, in this van, all those miles ago.

Out on a Limb

I swear this is true.

    I live along the old main road to Dublin, a stretch of road bypassed by the new motorway that killed the local shop, a ghost of a road, unlit and pocked with potholes, flanked by mossy broke pavestones erupting upwards like the spine of a narrow cement range. A treacherous path in the dark, I’ve landed on it full with my face on leaving the pub, a pub that has yet to die like the string of others along this stretch choked of their custom by the new road. I’ve stumbled down these stones with my dog in the rain and walked the odd blushy girl to the bus stop to try to catch the last one of the evening.

    Not far down the two hundred or so yards to the crossroads, splayed out against a cinderblock wall as though desperately wishing to remain unseen, stands a doleful crabapple tree that drops sour fruit for the worms and birds all along the path at the right time of year, yet another hazard to contend with on a drunken walk home. My dad swears he planted it as a boy.

    There’s a man who walks this stretch and by this tree every afternoon on his way to the petrol station to get his paper. He wears a green wax hunting coat with elbow patches and a fisherman’s cap pulled down over his ears. He walks with his face angled downwards and clutches a walking-stick under his armpit, or the newspaper depending on which way he’s going. He is short and stout and makes his way up and back every day with his companion, his pet corgi. I’ve watched them many times. They seem to have no relationship. They seem more like two individuals who have both ended up alone, and so walk together. They don’t interact. The dog never wears a leash, marks a pole; the man walks on as if he isn’t even there.

    In the mornings sometimes you will see this same dog walk in the exact same way alone along the path. He would reach wherever he’d usually go and then would return like clockwork, never hurrying, never stopping, ignoring the traffic and other dogs. I told my wife when she came here first that the dogs’ owner had died. I told her that every day since, at the usual time, he would walk, first up, and then down the road again, just like he used to with his old pal. She cried at the window with her hand to her mouth as she watched the dog go.

I told her shortly afterwards it was a load of crap and she slapped my arm.

    I remember how crestfallen, how fractured she had looked when I told her. She had really been taken by the story. The idea had touched something innocent and pure within her, had caught the imagination of her inner-child and she was whisked away in a self-indulgent wave of emotion that had welled at the base of her skull, spilled down her back, flooded her ribs and sloshed around her navel. It had washed memories from their musky boxes and scattered them out on the floor of her mind. She was grasping at them and holding them to her chest and smelling their essence through the damp. For a moment it had been her dog, and his old owner was her grandad and it was a home-movie only she was walking too, and it was Christmas and they were crossing the fields and she had a coin in her pocket for a bar of chocolate and he one for his cigar.

    She wasn’t mad at me, but I knew I had betrayed a trust. I had burned her slightly, and she was slow to put her hand back near the source of the heat.

    I decided not to tell her then that the man was known locally as ‘The Thief’. He had broken into most of the houses in the village, including our own, and had spent several years in prison. My dad said he had only stopped because he busted his knee climbing over someone’s back wall and couldn’t run anymore. He had made a nice amount of money in compensation after that fall, from the very family he had just robbed. I kept all that to myself.

…

    On Christmas week I was home again and out the same window I watched a large weathered family car pull up across from our house. I watched a woman hop out and retrieve something from her backseat. She scurried up the path, yanking the neck of her fleece up over her mouth, holding it tight to her neck. She disappeared out of sight but returned just a minute later empty handed. She got in her car, made a u-turn and drove off.

    In my dad’s overcoat, I scuttled across the ever-wet road and investigated. As I approached the crabapple tree I could see something shining in the branches. It was a clear plastic bag and it was tied to one of the outermost limbs that stretched like an eager hand reaching out towards the path. Inside I could see a neatly wrapped present in gold Christmas paper, tied with a piece of twine. Tucked in beneath the twine was an envelope upon which was written, ‘To the Man who walks the Dog’.

    I paused for a moment, intrigued. I quickly glanced back up the road and then I was untying the bag before I could stop myself. I slipped the unsealed envelope from the twine and carefully slid out a handmade Christmas card. On the front was a picture of a man with a hat and a small yellow dog standing beside a fire and a Christmas tree, drawn onto it by a tiny young hand, and coloured with crayons. I opened the card and looked inside. In large, uneven, hesitating letters the same tiny hand had scrawled…

‘I see you every day walking your dog. Your dog is very nice. I hope you have a nice Christmas. Here is some jam. Love Cliodhna, age 6.’

    I slipped the card back into the envelope. I carefully closed it up and tied the package back to the limb, only a little further out than it had been before.

Boy

 

My boy, my boy.

Where the days have gone, the leaves in the gutter?

My boy, they crunch ever onward.

Mountains,

Craggy grief arching upward like a broken spine

From the unseen momentum

Floating plates beneath our feet,

Reminding us,

The ground we walk is treacherous.

 

My boy, you left. You left and are gone.

We weep in the moments that tumble down before us,

As we go about our day,

Bringing us nothing but streaky cheeks

And dry mouths,

As though to dessicate the monster that roils within us all.

He thrives on swallowed tears.

We weep,

And still you are gone.

 

You are gone and there you are;

On the news of all places.

Your name in lights.

Two years and more and there you are,

Forever twenty one.

Forever smiling.

 

Our boy,

Our Boy.

 

Don’t see us like this.

 

Leave us now.

X

Dawson City Limits

Up here the daylight never left us. We wandered into bars in the gold and blue of midnight and stumbled out again with everything appearing much the same. It felt strange to be drunk in the brightness. Everyone looked exactly as drunk as they were. It was like watching a crowd of people dancing to music only they could hear. Joints were passed around and beer smuggled out of closing taverns in plain sight of the pale policemen puttering by. Upon discovering I was Irish, a boy named Seamus put his finger on my lips and stuffed a half ounce of ‘Yukon Green’ into my breast pocket. He cartwheeled away, quite literally, and did bike tricks around the shark-like cruiser. They were obviously acquainted, the cops watching him lazily like a bug that wasn’t worth swatting. I suddenly had a minor-dilemma wafting from drug-stuffed shirt. I kept my head low and walked-straight.

The rest of the crowd trickled back to their parties or cars, some scaling the peak that towered over the tiny lost town to see the eternal sunset or sunrise, depending on your own disposition. I became vaguely interested in a faction that seemed loudly intent on drinking by the river. I ambled up beside them with some form of wee-hour introduction, allowing my accent do the talking, and I was in. We wound our way over the unpaved streets, hopping up onto the wooden boardwalks where the melt-water had failed to drain away. The windows of square clapboard stores and apothecaries boasted long-gone products from the gold-rush; Ointments for frostbite, prospector’s chemicals and high-grade snuff.

The Palace Grand Theatre stood as I imagine it always had, the cultural heart of the ‘Paris of the North’, empty and sagging with age, reliving worn-out memories of its youth over and over for the travelling hordes. We passed, a young francophone pissing on the porch.

Our troop included a Kiwi who camped beneath a paddle-steamer that rested on skids on the north side of town; a couple of Quebecois who planned opening a café come art gallery in the abandoned ‘Camera Obscura’ by the riverbank and lived in a car, and a lesbian couple from Vancouver, who seemed intent on proving how different they were. Everyone else simply was different and got on with it.

We settled onto logs and started a fire as the almighty Yukon lumbered by on its way from Atlin Lake to the Bering Sea, boiling and brimful with added water from the thaw, ice-floes and giant trees hurrying past on their way to the sea or a snag. The source of the Yukon is less than a hundred kilometres from the sea, yet it doesn’t reach saltwater for over three thousand more. Like the crew assembled around our fire, it takes the scenic route.

The low rumble and the high-hiss of the almighty vibrated the earthen bank and seemed to unsettle the already delirious insomniac birds. Their evening and morning songs became a desperate medley caught on repeat, tiny and hoarse. A floe settled on a tiny gravel bay and we tried to sink our beers into it, more for novelty than anything else. When we did, the floe began to shatter in the most exhilarating and mesmerizing way, slowly, like ice-shard dominoes spiraling inwards from the edge. It took three or four minutes to finally clink to a halt. The shards tinkled like the highest registers of an empyrean piano and lay rigid armless soldiers on piles of fallen brethren. We marveled in this shared delight that was so wondrous it almost seemed inevitable, then picked some shards for our whiskey.

I turned to leave after a few hours, once I had begun to sing certain songs for a second time. Like the birds I was hoarse and delirious. My Kiwi friend had gone in search of thin tourist brochures he’d kept for toilet paper. I couldn’t understand the Quebecois as it was, let alone after they smoked all their contraband. The lesbian couple were noisily uncoupling over petty arguments. I slunk away and left the debris of the unending day strewn on the grass and fine-silt on the riverbend. I clambered into my van, the suspension squeaking on four girthy tires, over the bones of the dreamers of yesteryear, the gold hunters of the Klondike and all who were made and destroyed beneath the leering gleam of the guilded sky.

Bixby Canyon

I would drive to the graveled roadside. Wedged between the mesas and the canyon that capitulates before the hastily-named Pacific. The canyon that falls beneath a curved bridge, offering views beyond the capacity of the human imagination. I would drive there one more time, veering off onto the verge with a playful scuttling of stones, the sea air already pouring into my freshwater skin. I would turn and ignore the bland passing faces pressed to a thousand closed windows, desperately clinging to the air they’ve carried from wherever they call home, afraid to contract the madness of the western coasts. The madness that claims and maims ever more each day. The madness that whips a tempest from the loins or pounds down the floodgates of our internal pharmacopeia. The madness of the pipe, the motorcycle, the guitar, the surfboard, the syringe or the word. The madness that plays out at the ends of the world.

I would crunch my way down the worn path, the path well travelled to the feet of the golden cliffs, watching the ankle-high stream weakly trickle down the last few yards of shore, to die and be reborn into the ocean. I would watch as the salt inundates the fresh water as it does my own skin. The stream is a poor tribute, and still it spills its very essence into the green depths without hesitation, met by gentle waves of the eons. I’ve never once seen two seas the same. The permutations and combinations each ripple or swell creates or destroys are beyond infinite. It’s a wonder we can even recognize the ocean when we see it. Perhaps our minds only recognize it by its flux. There cant be one visual definition of ‘ocean’.

Shells are made of calcium carbonate and trace amounts of protein. They even have growth rings, just like a tree. My shell has growth rings too. My shell is made of the mistakes I’ve made and continue to make. My shell is a job, a family, a dog, a car, a tendency towards substance abuse, self-loathing, sexual deviance. My shell is the look in my wife’s eyes that tells me she’s ashamed. The look of irretrievable love. The look that no clever words or act of contrition can abate. It becomes the very colour of the eye. My shell weighs down so bloody heavily on my slug-like body it leaves a disgusting trail behind me on everything I touch, an incriminating trail easily followed from anywhere, of weak-will and ineptitude. My shell is 45 years thick, of blindly towing an invisible line that had long ago been severed from any worthy load. My shell is the shadow of death that looms ever higher over me. It is the knowing and the compliant resignation, the laying down without so much as a single shot fired in anger, a single defiant syllable spat from my lungs. My shell is no longer conveyable.

Here on a beach in northern California the salt dissolves my weakness. I can shed the weight and lay upon the sand of a billion years. A thousand elements support my pale body and encroach upon my skin. Tiny rocks of glass and stone and gold and shattered shells and shining things. The sun can toast the ghostly reams of flesh I offer to the sky. The bay holds me like a curious hand before the waters, then casts me off into the universal deep.

I go willingly.

 

LoveBuzz

Her blood vibrated from some scared core, radiating outwards in warm tingling waves to the ends of each hair and rebounded from her fingertips. The world was no longer out. The world was in. the world was an endless depth with no walls and infinite prairies of the wandering mind, and her eyes were the innocent all-knowing domes on an infant-submarine probing the under surface. The world no longer seeped in through a woman-shaped hole. The sea became the sky and the birds plunged down into the vast depth of the atmosphere below. Every thing rushed to be known to her. Every thing formed a peaceful melee of kindred beings and waited bustling and patient to make her acquaintance. They caught her eye, they twirled her hair and applied uncommon sensation to her exposed skin. They wheeled away and blistered off in a billion directions and back to their own rightful places, the natural order so clear and unquestioned as though friction had been suspended. she no longer needed the questions she’d drably draped as cumbersome garments each day, after the emptiness of sleep was rushed to be filled each morning. She knew the answers, though if she tried to define them they quickly fled. When a blackbird sings we do not need to try to grasp it.

Fear became wonder and wonder became knowledge and knowledge just trickled onwards into the liquid void and flowed through her mouth and escaped unchanged through her veins and glistened upon her skin. She danced and the perspiration was just a new sheen of knowing that sucked her clothes to her body until she flung them off into a wet pile, the husk of the great liberation. She came into contact with surfaces which had taken on whole identities and she became a psychic anthropologist encouraging the room to tell its stories. There were other people there, but they were ambient. She felt them sometimes as she inched over the strange anomalies that sometimes hinted at her sensory organs. She heard their smell and tasted their pulsing aura. She knew they were all with her, on the same journey, unique to themselves. She lay upon them and encouraged their explorations with her hands and body. She no longer laid claim to a body. How could she? It belonged to everything.

In her wildest visions a tea cup became stark and extrinsic. The light flowed around it but still the cup stood silently in the midst of the eternal. She reached out to it and it felt cold. It felt solid. It felt worldly. She didn’t like this. She wished it away but the more she did the more it obscured her perceptions of the wonderful. It grew in size, blotting out the colours, the heat, hacking away at the ribbons of time and understanding, ripping the cushioned grassy carpet from beneath her. A thousand pairs of curtains were slowly opening and closing before her. Through the apertures she could see a hand or an empty carton of cigarettes or a smouldering lump of wood. She could see a photograph, an emptying bottle of whiskey and her paperwork from her long forgotten day-job. The curtains would more and more remain open until at last they faded completely. The clock had stopped careering backwards and forwards and was settling to its usual pace. She could smell heat and sweat. Not the sweet perspiration of earlier, but the damp musk of shame and misconduct. She looked down as she rose back into the shell of her body and saw that she was naked. She could feel the sensation of over burdened muscle and the ache of friction. The walls still buzzed with added texture and mercurial patterns. Around the room men she couldn’t place were still in their throes or were slowly lunging after her again. The stained couch suddenly felt itchy on her sticky back and as she rose shakily, ashes underfoot, the colour faded from everything. She tried to grasp at all she had known before. It simply alighted from the bough and rose away in disgust.

Schlachtfeld

They clawed their way yard by aching inch. Stones and thistles were hardly even there. The woolen uniform scratched against the wounds and the skin that was now hardly even human. The smell was not of lush green crops of an early summer. It was the smell of unwashed bodies, of dying bodies, of dead bodies.

The grime and the natural oils of the skin mixed to create a waterproof membrane, and an unearthly miasma. The fresh air only served to cleanse their palate, so they could smell it all over again.

Mile after mile, with their chins tearing open upon each sharp stone, they crept and strained to keep their heads below the level of the grass. One slip now and they wouldn’t even hear the bullet before it slid silently under the base of their skull and liquefied the jelly that held the memories of all they had seen and hoped still to see. Their wives and daughters, the knives and slaughter.

The Russians seemed not to regroup, but to regenerate. An unrelenting gush of wide-jaws and long noses cascading down upon the line of trenches and through the leaky woods. They were commanded by their guns, the barrels protruding from their eye like a parasite that controlled the young Slavic minds and spewed tiny streams of oblivion at the fleeing Fascists.

This was Blitzbesiegen. The world was ending.

The two men did not now have the time to think what world might await them. The promises of glory lay rotting in the mud and smoldering in the gruesome pyres. The materials of the earth scattered and obliterated and life laid waste in exquisite inestimable carnage. The dreams of medals and prestige and the trappings of heroism dissipating beneath a hot foreign sun.

And still the Reds closed in. The young Soldat and his Unteroffizier could hear the rattling loot and the clanging accouterments of impending doom. Feet fell heavily and the grass parted for hefty boots with a submissive swish. Though the language they heard was alien, these sounds were as limpid as a mother’s sigh.

They hastened now towards the break in the horizon, a lone tree, which would provide them cover or at least a direction. As they neared the gentle lip of the slope the young conscript unsettled a kit of pigeons. He didn’t need to see his Unteroffiziers face to know how it read, in as much as he need not have seen his own.

As the birds beat clamorously upward, several Russian syllables tumbled with them into the listless air followed by the solid clunks of many barrels accepting their tiny doses of oblivion.

One Line Poems…

The Floor is Lava!