Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

—James Thurber

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

—e.e. cummings

If I die, survive me with such sheer force

that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,

from south to south lift your indelible eyes,

from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.

I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,

I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.

Don’t call up my person. I am absent.

Live in my absence as if in a house.

Absence is a house so vast

that inside you will pass through its walls

and hang pictures on the air.

Absence is a house so transparent

that I, lifeless, will see you, living,

and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

—Pablo Neruda, “Absence”

Somewhere earlier in the afternoon there was a string of words that seemed almost like a revelation. That is now an old, painfully familiar story, and at the bottom of the day I can no longer recall those words, that revelation. I cannot even truly retrace my steps, or the journey (a laughable term in this instance, as in many instances) of the day behind me.

I do remember thinking at some point, “Look at this fucking place,” referring, I think, to some typical stretch of over-developed suburbia. I also remember thinking, “Why doesn’t the President just decree that henceforth all American flags be displayed at permanent half-staff?”

That wasn’t my revelation, but it does make real sense to me. It would be a rare and honest acknowledgment that this country is in a now constant state of mourning, and so lingering and pervasive is the sense of sorrow that most of us really could use such ubiquitous public reminders of the shame and grief we should be feeling.

As I say, though, that wasn’t my revelation, and so qualifies as little more than a digression and a brief reprieve from my usual preoccupation with words that have gone missing.

But couldn’t it all have been

a little nicer,

as my mother’d say. Did it

have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?

I know this body is impatient.

I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.

Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.

I want no more than home.

—Robert Creeley, from “Goodbye”

I cannot ask, cannot say, cannot bring myself to you, to this, to the world. I am not strong. I cannot find the lamp switch, cannot carry the light, cannot move it into all the dark places where it is needed. I cannot keep scattering bread crumbs.

I cannot formulate questions; the words get all tangled up in my head, the important and necessary punctuation mark appears in all the wrong places. It keeps asserting itself –inserting itself– too early and often, impatient, whether in an attempt to keep it vague or simple I can’t say: What? Why? How? Yes? No?

I have no control over the weather. It does whatever it wants to, entirely against my will. I have never been able to find this arrangement acceptable.

I do not eat, do not allow myself to desire, refuse to acknowledge need. I hear, whether I like it or not, bongo drums, insistent, relentless. I hear the rising and falling of jets, a ceaseless torment, the sound of some freedom I don’t have.

I wish this world trafficked in simple explanations, a foolish and naive wish if ever there was one.

I heard a man say, “I fell into this racket a long time ago and I’ve been falling ever since,” a comment that has returned to me again and again over the last several days.

My hands have become useless, can no longer reach, or have nothing in reach they wish to reach. My hands are done wishing.

I do not know what I have become.

“They’re bad and they’re good,” said Pod. “They’re honest and they’re artful –it’s just as it takes them at the moment. And animals, if they could talk, would say the same. Steer clear of them –that’s what I’ve always been told. No matter what they promise you. No good never really came to no one from any human bean.”

–Mary Norton, The Borrowers

It may be that alien animals are attracted to individuals possessed of certain psychological traits.

We can surmise that energy-seeking entities were around that night, and that the poacher’s blood would have met their needs.

Scattered work.

Magic of the city.

Web of shopping.

Antonio Villas Boas had blood extracted from a clean incision just under his chin by the unknown creature or creatures.

It also seems to be blood that the cattle mutilators are after.

Mike Corradino has reported finding ‘dead animals, chicks, rabbits, raccoons with their heads bitten off’ and the blood completely drained from their bodies. This is in areas where sightings of the skunk ape have been recorded.

Eccentric nucleus.

Degrees of publicness.

Old people everywhere.

Neither shooting nor electrocution seems to have deterred the Jersey Devil.

As near as I can describe the terror it had the head of a horse, the wings of a bat, and a tail like a rat’s, only longer.

Dancing in the streets.

Teenage society.

Sleeping in public.

The beast looked like no animal he had ever seen, and it was removing an overcoat from an old woman who was lying face down in the snow.

The rabbit-like creatures, working in concert, were purportedly strong enough to bring an ox to its knees.

Grave sites.

Holy ground.

I’m throwing a going away party

A party for a dream of mine

Nobody’s coming, but a heartache

And some tears will drop in from time to time

Don’t worry, it won’t be a loud party

Dreams don’t make noise when they die

It’s just a sad going away party

For a dream I’m telling good-bye

—Cindy Walker, "Going Away Party." (There’s a great new version on "Last of the Breed," the forthcoming Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard/Ray Price collaboration on Lost Highway)

So, then: Even after all that impenetrable darkness and the long, bruising fall, he would live, and emerge gulping and incredulous into a world painted over in a flat coat of muted gray.

In the old happily-ever-after version of such a tale, a man in the grips of blind despair would be saved by an angel and delivered into the loving arms of a family and a community of which he was an essential and irreplaceable member.

There are, though, only humans in this place we still insist on calling the real world, but some of them –and even perhaps most of them– are from time to time provided a moment of difficult grace that allows or compels them to perform the sacred duties of angels.

It happens. It has happened, even if the realities of the present require that a man in the grips of despair be first conscripted to a version of bedlam that is both humiliating and harrowing. Such a man must live through a dress rehearsal of dying on his journey back to life, and he must be able to see in bedlam a mirror as well as a sort of fractured kaleidoscope of the world he lives in.

He must recognize that he lives in, and belongs in, all versions of that world, and must learn to believe that the terrible and terrifying things he has seen and experienced are gifts just as surely as are the wonders and the wild happiness and the heavenly days he has been allowed. The man has to learn that he is who and where he however helplessly, however reluctantly is, and that is all he has, and it is a precarious –and precious– gift.

Why don’t you begin by telling me about the dreams you said have been troubling you?

I’m locked out of my house and can’t find the keys.

I am walking around in an unfamiliar city and everyone I encounter is speaking a language I can’t understand.

I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize the face that is looking back at me.

I’m moving through a huge crowd with my family and friends and when I turn around they’ve all disappeared.

I’ve lost my way in a dark forest.

I’m being swept away in an avalanche.

I’m falling from a great height.

I’m in a little flooded boat that is rapidly being carried far out to sea.

I am drowning.

I’m being suffocated, strangled, smothered, buried alive.

I am trapped in a burning building, aboard a sinking ship, in a car that is spinning out of control.

I open my eyes and can no longer see.

I open my mouth to speak and nothing comes out.

I put the needle down on record after record and hear only silence.

I wake up one morning naked in an unfamiliar room and there is a pile of blood-stained clothes next to the bed.

An inquisitor I can’t see makes impossible demands of me, and my failure to satisfy these demands will result in my banishment from the kingdom that is my life.

Driving home from work one day I discover that my address no longer exists; the house I live in and everything in it has disappeared.

I drive around and around for days at a time and never find my way home.

It was like this.

It was this way.

Here was the way it was.

This is how things stood:

Silently. Still. At attention.

That was one moment and

unfortunately this world is

all about one moment to another.

In the next moment everything was

swirling and it was as if I was a

plastic man crouched in paralyzed

terror in a snow globe filled with

sand and loose garbage and shredded paper,

cupped in a pair of giant hands

that never stopped shaking.

I felt so small and yet still

could not bring myself to answer

the phone or return your calls.

They have a term for this feeling, I’m

sure, and a remedy whose name would

fit conveniently on ballpoint pens

and pocket protectors and desk

calendars and NASCAR jumpsuits.

But, anyway, listen:

I apologize. Truly, I am sorry.

Surely nobody chooses to feel

like their skin has been

turned inside out and salted.

I suppose I learned too early

that they have a word for everything,

and that has been a ceaseless torment

as well as an occasional delight.

You should do me a favor and take

my dictionary. I would miss it,

but, really, you should. I beg of you,

take that fucking thing and feed it to the dogs.

You see, it was like this.

It was this way.

This was the way it was:

The library was the garden

where my mother took me for

swimming lessons and I

learned to drown.

I’m got the car loaded with music, my dog, and blankets, and am headed west into the teeth of a blizzard. I’m preparing to be erased by the endless range and big sky. Wish me luck. I’ll be back in a week, and if I figure out how to use the technology I might post from the road.

If you feel like it, send me some poems, stories, or reading suggestions while I’m gone. I’m in a serious inspiration drought.

Please be well.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”

Two days and two nights the tiny ship sailed into the great lake. Just after sunset on the third day the ship came within sight of an island rising out of the lake.

The island was shaped like a large puff pastry, and was dense with sturdy pines, many of which had survived generations in that inhospitable place. Jagged rocks were piled up all around the circumference of the island, and the wind was driving waves against these boulders, creating loud and frequently spectacular explosions of cold water that rose high into the night sky and were scattered like luminous fragments of colored glass.

The Captain gave the order for his crew to drop anchor. My heart was once again loaded into a round tub of a rowboat and lowered into the heaving water. A dozen of the stoutest crew members manned the oars and wrestled the boat through the waves. My heart, frozen and lacquered with ice, was now a surprisingly heavy and awkward burden.

A weathered dock jutted almost imperceptibly out into the lake at the bottom of a trail that emerged from the trees. The mice maneuvered their rowboat into a position alongside this dock.

A trio of young women came down the trail through the woods, their way lit by a swaying lantern. No words were exchanged as my heart was transferred from the rowboat to a wheelbarrow. As the women began to push the wheelbarrow back up the trail, the little boat was already straining back out into the mist of the lake.

The trail zigzagged through the trees, purposely digressive and worn over centuries at sharp, almost forty-five degree angles designed to ease the steep incline. The growth of old trees obscured the fact that the island jutted out of the lake to such an extent that its exact center was a strenuous climb from anywhere around the island’s perimeter. The trees also hid from view a large chalet-style cabin that had been constructed on a stone foundation at the top of the island.

A sort of tribe had occupied this cabin for many generations. They were quiet, purposeful people, small of stature and somehow not entirely human. Though possessed of keen senses, every member of this strange tribe was mute. All of them, everyone that had ever occupied the island, was descended (in a manner of speaking) from a man who had settled there long, long ago, this after having traveled a great distance by boat, accompanied by three giant mastiffs.

This man had fancied himself an alchemist. Once established on the island, however, all of his attempts at alchemy had been failures. Undaunted, and gifted with a prodigious and magical imagination, he had nonetheless succeeded in time in conjuring, out of the raw materials at hand, companions for himself. In the laboratory where he had hoped to turn base materials into gold he had learned instead to produce breathing beings. And having failed at alchemy in a literal sense, this founder of the island, and the generations that followed him, became in time recyclers of human hearts. They were surgeons and they were artisans.

The first heart had arrived on the island in the middle of the 19th century, on a cool June night when the moon was full and the sky was so clear that the moonlight had made of the calm lake’s surface a glimmering jewel box. The original heart made its journey alone in a boat.

Perhaps its arrival in that place was purely happenstance, and it is entirely possible that had not the moon been so bright that night, the heart would have drifted right past the island and continued on its solitary journey north. As it was, though, the heart had glowed like a luminous garnet floating far out in the lake, and some of the island’s residents had spied the mysterious object and rowed out to investigate. Puzzled and amazed by their discovery, they had towed the boat ashore and lugged the heart up the trail.

The founder had known immediately that what he was looking at was a human heart, badly damaged if not entirely broken. Without hesitation he had determined that they would repair this heart, and after much trial and error he and his assistants succeeded in restoring it to perfect working condition.

Having mastered the most difficult task of all, they were faced with the question of what to do with the heart. For a time they kept it in a jar in their laboratory, where it pumped and gurgled and provided continual astonishment. The old alchemist was troubled by its presence, though; he felt certain that the result of their hard work was destined to find its way south, back to the human world, where he knew good hearts were always in great demand.

Eventually, as is so often the case, birds provided the solution. A charm of finches that often spent summers on the island had established a sort of telepathic communication with some of the mute residents, and when the finches flew south in advance of the first snow they carried with them the story of the repaired human heart. In the land beyond the lake the word traveled through all the animals of the forest, and finally was passed along to an ancient Guild of heart deliverymen. Though the members of this Guild hated being called fairies, they were in fact, at least technically speaking, fairies.

The Potentate of the Guild of Heart Deliverers worked closely with a network of animals and angels (this sort of thing, of course, is always difficult to understand and explain), and had been providing heart transplants centuries before human medical science had ever dreamt of such a thing. Before connecting with the island laboratory, however, the Guild had always had to work with whatever raw materials (often damaged) they could get their hands on, even as they were diligent in attempting, as often as possible, to replace bad hearts with hearts possessed of genuine goodness.

Once a relationship –however unusual, mysterious, and informal– was established between the Guild of Heart Deliverers and the old alchemist, hearts began to arrive at the island on a regular, if unpredictable, basis. Some were transported by geese; others, like my own, were ferried by boat.

These days each of the hearts is boiled in a mixture of fish oil, cedar berries, and quicksilver, jostled for days in a contraption that resembles a giant rock tumbler, and then outfitted with all new plumbing.

Twice a year –once in the early spring and again in the late autumn (usually as a harbinger of the first snows)– a flock of sub-angels arrives at the island. These creatures are grimy and ungainly, seemingly part geese, part human. They are, though, celestial beings, but crippled, still tormented by mortal dreams and aspirations, and as the lowest order of angels they are assigned a majority of the grunt work.

The repaired hearts are fed to these angels, who fly them back south and implant them in the chests of their intended recipients as they sleep.

The ragged angels will be making their semi-annual trek to the island in a few weeks. I’m holding out hope that I’ll be one of the truly rare and lucky recipients and will get my own heart back. Bigger, I hope, and better.

God says if you love me you will make me Beef Wellington. Even though you are a vegetarian. We will go bow hunting for angels. Aim for the heart, even though they do not have hearts. They are most vulnerable when they are playing the harp. I hate harps. They keep me up when I want to sleep. I must change this some day. If you love me you will let me sleep. If you love me maybe I will. Let hours turn into years. The smell of meat and pie floating through endless kitchens of desire, which is heaven, what else could it be? Warm ovens burning all day remind me of loss. Which is another word for love. Which I have been explaining for thousands of years.

–Hugh Steinberg, “The Cranky God Poem.” From Potionmag.org (via Rileydog)

—Abel Pann

But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen –and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen.

—Randall Jarrell, from The Animal Family

But I’m here, though, aren’t I? At least for now. Don’t count me out.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

Funny how we hunker down in our little canoes

in the middle of the scummy green swamp and wait and wait

for hope to appear, for ghosts to die and come back as bodies.

–Susan Wood, from “The Lord God Returns”

One night a few weeks back I got whacked with a shovel and shoved in the trunk of a beat-to-shit Nova. The tweaker who whacked me drove me out into the country and dumped my body in a corncrib.

It was a cold night, and as I rocked at the edge of consciousness my heart was removed from my chest by a tiny old man with strong hands. This little man, who was wearing a miner’s helmet, perched on my breastbone and opened my chest with a rusty saw. There was a stiff wind whipping across the fields, and to keep himself from blowing away, the man –he was from a long line of heart deliverers– had secured his body to the framework of the corncrib with strands of baling twine. He worked long and diligently, and the procedure was precise but bloody work.

When he had finished he wrapped my heart in burlap and loaded it into a waiting carriage pulled by two peacocks and driven by a fox wearing a red velvet top hat.

The carriage traveled many miles along dark roads. At some point during its journey it began to snow, and the snow grew heavier the further the carriage traveled.

Eventually the carriage entered heavily wooded country, where the sky was suddenly blown free of clouds and a bright moon illuminated mile after mile of evergreen trees heaped with snow and mottled with shadow.

The fox drove long into the night, all the while singing and whistling quietly to the drowsy and plodding peacocks. In the early hours of the morning they arrived at a lake deep in the woods.

The lake was a vast thing, dark and ceaselessly rolling shattered moonlight ashore. It stretched to the far horizon, and was so black in the distance that the constellations appeared to be complex geometrical diagrams drawn upon a chalkboard.

Out in the lake some distance was anchored a miniature sailing ship with a scurrying crew of mice. My heart was a very small thing by this time, and it was carefully unloaded from the carriage, unwrapped, and packed in a nest constructed of pine needles and birch bark. It was taken aboard the ship by a contingent of mice in a rowboat.

While the peacocks drowsed and pecked tentatively at the snow-covered earth, the fox watched these proceedings from his perch on the carriage. Though he had been trained to not eat the mice, he was distracted by their presence all the same.

Once my heart was safely secured in the ship and the crew members were back aboard, the captain, a fat old mouse with long whiskers and a jaunty cap, gave the order to set sail. The ship eased out into the darkness of the lake, rocking in the turbulent waves, its sails providentially bowed by the stiff breeze that carried my heart north at a steady clip.

(To be continued)