A Heaven Gone

Misery is an awful kinship. Windows of humor roll down low and whistle at our glorious legs and gawk at the stiff and enthronging death of accidents. The hump backed light of the moon is the funnel cloud of direction, sawn off and mighty. We smoke bouquets of tobacco and flex our thumbs like whales surfacing through the sunny thickness of the air. The bright edge of the sea is half a country away and we are dry and walking through muddy woodsmoke curtains that call themselves the great wide open. We drape our emptiness on the spiky pickets along the way, old plastic bags we’ve no use for. At night the caliginous demons of shadowy ditches beside us are full or not, and the violence of air passing us behind vehicles is cozy and cool. We watch some sort of bird fly up the sky in a frenzy and analyze the constellations of oak trees out at the edge of that field. We are a heaven gone from where we came from now and the filth of myths covers most of this journey. I am growing fat even now beneath this hunger and I am sorry. The humble pair of us just needs a ride to the other ocean, free of bullets and wrinkles. One of us is sure to die feeling all of this. We load our possessions into a truck and close our hands around them again too soon to throw them down to the dusty ground again. I start to think things are blowing up around me when nothing is happening, in entire moments of quiet. I descend even myself and lose hope but then there are pauses where I discover it again and this hope vamps until it becomes arrhythmic again and I lose the beat and the melody. Then it’s just the same used silences to try to fill me up. Our conversations resort to double entendres and factoids, and our imaginations begin to travel that impossible and outward journey where even we don’t know how long it’s been that the sun has been high or that a car hasn’t passed. Our consolation is that even dry land creates horizons and we are always standing at someone else’s. Our showy outsides, old and dirty as they are, lie and say there’s a jingling being right beneath all that dust. It keeps raining all the time for a while and then not. We find a barn and are tempted by it, but not enough. We imagine the horse in the middle of it, silhouetted by the slatted walls. We stop thinking and rely on the fossilization of opinions we made long ago. Our attraction to each other changes or at least wanders. We drink whiskey in a cab with a fragrant lion of a man. We try a train but those are filled with sorrows and stories of women. We feel certain of something and then it repeats itself so we lose certainty. We take it all too seriously and then don’t care. After it’d happened, they told us, “It will take time to heal, take a long walk home.” A factory of road rolls somewhere out of sight before us and creates the tarred surfaces for our feet to move upon. Some days, the way the ground moves, the distance we’ve traveled feels more like the zigzag of beads on an abacus than an arrow. We feel much like tumbleweeds rolling until a truck sweeps us up and pitches us out again. We examine each reliquary dashboard with its beliefs and statues. Estranged youth: that is what we are called again. People ask what we’re estranging ourselves from and we say spirits and rivers and hectic, exotic pistols and childhood and jobs and crime, just to keep it exciting. In each cab we shoulder ignorance and we keep our mouths shut when we can. When we can’t we descend the thickets of weeds beside the shoulder. We dance at the bulges of cannonball thunder. We don’t talk about it when the rain doesn’t come. “Gotta be kidding,” we say again and again. Occasionally nickels and dimes slap the ground at our feet. We flap around trying to gather the coins. It’s too many degrees, but we’re getting close. It is not beautiful. We are listening less and less. Birds of paper blow by again and again. Then, finally: a bay. Our feet travel us onto the solid land of a deck. Backwards like the lee of encouragement the water passes smears of history and the clustering eyeballs. Unrecoverable flotsam in the paint and thin ropes of bridges make up most of my collection. There is nothing solid out here but that on which we stand. We have barely begun, but already we are left alone by the land.