innerspace

I see unwritten letters, unfinished projects strewn about, loose socks here and there, dirty laundry piled up like dishes in the sink, inevitable as the moon, it’s time to account, to be accountable, to reconcile the sum of the day, accomplishments? I see the turning of the pages in a book I have not read, nor have I written, some construct elaborate neon signs flashing “failure,” and so I’ve come to recognize perception, the sun brightening or am I projecting the illumination, either way, the effect is that I can see beyond the end of my childhood fields, the summer wheat and the adjacent fields of summer corn, there’s not time enough at the end of the day, to recount, gather in, fold the dusk into the crook of your arm like a child, endeared to the sound of your voice. It is horribly wrong, here in this place, to lose this light, we’re not all in this shit together, I say. If this had been a movie, it must be set in an adult trailer park, where the protagonist fills the sliver of space around his trailer with pinwheels and plants, windchimes hang from the awning, he steps out in his boxers, surveys the light creeping, sits on the hood of his brown Plymouth, sips his coffee, wonders if something will happen before the end.

I forget that my hands held limp bodies, fresh from the field, but not daisies, every thought leans backward until it breaks, leaning on the alarm, the air-raid siren. I see you waiting at home. The distance between us might as well be the length of this multi-verse. How can I explain to you, I imagine, when I return, that I will never return. I’d like to pretend this is a screening of my life. I misread the script and was late for my cue, stumbling forward on the stage, I mumble my lines, for God, Country, and Corps. I sling my rifle over my right shoulder. I resign myself to the gallant strain of an ant, my tiny muscles flexed with fight set against the painted canvas backdrop of oil-well fires, and the set of a slag iron sun. I wait for the credits to roll.

My failure to evolve is causing me great distress. I cannot level and grade my lawn or plant tidy rows of lavender and juniper like the finely tuned lawns that surround my frumpy lot. I have difficulty with even the slightest calculation. The shanty where I was born, where other evolutionary challenged rise from pond scum, is now a highway tourist trap on I-95. The highway signs begin at the North Carolina border and every 100 miles another sign proclaims, “Come see shocking creatures who have never evolved! You won’t believe your eyes.” I don’t know why I can’t.  “Try,” say the good people who brought me in to this world, “to visualize your growth, your evolution.  Otherwise, you’ll end up with the rest of the sideshow freaks.” But I can’t get the hang of it. The heavy instructions passed to me from my ancestors fall from my hands. It takes so long for the human to become a human. When I return to the pond scum from where I rose, I think maybe the bolt of lightening didn’t have enough amps, perhaps the essential amino acids decided to go on strike. I am a rhetorical gravity-bound question mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal that can’t figure the meaning of aspiration or when confronted with bills through the mail slot, understand amortization, the fine print or how to balance the checkbook.

I desire a name that fits everything I do not understand. The mechanics of this unlovely thing, this unwieldy word of all things unknown, is a veritable Rube Goldberg of vowels and consonants. To say that I want a word for what I do not know is to say that I mean to forget what I already know. I want to speak the name of the first soldier, a boy really, who first took his life, or the friend who never came back from patrol, the IED took everything from him that anyone could recognize, and have it pulled from my memory as one pulls a loose thread from a button on a shirt, and pulling, watches as the button rolls away under the couch and is forgotten and instead of sewing a new button, the shirt is relegated to the pile of forgetful shirts that are deemed useless and set out on the curb to be picked up by Goodwill.

Once, I watched nothing but snow on T.V. for a year and never stopped, much to the disappointment of my mother and my therapist. I just wanted to know what the patterns in chaos would say concerning my soul, I found solace in the hidden numbers I uncovered through the black and white static. I scrawled numbers across the walls in my room, felt my whelming youth brimming, buoyed by the knowledge that one + one = everything minus an absent father = bewildered and the memory of his face, a moving wreck of skin. This is an unfinished equation. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this poem is too small to contain.

It’s not that I don’t respect the salt work of blueshirts, so when my brothers say they don’t have time for wordshit, I take it personally. I do it, I say, so that I can understand what a distant sun tastes like, or what it must feel like to have my corneas seared. Why make sense of the world, they say, things are what they are without help from us, and the fallback adage like a cowboy’s spurs, it’s in god’s hands, whatever that must come to mean, a steeple, a church, perhaps the truth lies in hands, the hand moving across the page, the written word, the bricklayers sweat, and the single veritable fact that no solid structure is built without shims.

Come to think of it, I should confess. I was the son who drew his Daisy Pellet gun on the Cardinal. Dead-eye. Dead bird. There’s no son who hasn’t got his gun, isn’t instructed, squeeze the trigger, don’t pull. I suppose Freud would have a word or two to say about it. Oedipus and all that shit. Freud got a few things wrong, we don’t kill because society suppresses our sexual energy. I kill because I can, because it’s as easy as take-out from a drive-through. It’s clear that the metaphor for a gun isn’t going to help when you’re at the end of a barrel or have your finger on the trigger. We shake our fingers at each other and point, like a weapon, a cigar is a cigar, a gun is the way I take what can never be returned.

I am baffled by the brilliance when you talk from one room to the next, when you turn toward me, toward me, as improbable as I am I say, you say, not improbable, inevitable. The way you turn a phrase, turn it, as if peering through your inverted microscope to turn the cells in your tissue samples, you say, differentiate; turn them from one kind of living thing into another. And I want that for us and for others, to turn, to differentiate, because we, like cells, cannot bear inexactitude. The love of anything is meant to be specific and pluripotent. And looking at you now, I am taken back to childhood, when we knew with certainty that something watched and loved us. Our lives are miraculous and wholly ours and all we have to do to move forward is to show up and when we’re pressed by unseen loading devices, gravity, the loss of a loved one, the many tasks of the day, when we feel disassembled, differentiate, differentiate.

It is told and it is told and it is told again until the story turns from a cautionary tale to a casual conversation over Sunday morning coffee, until the memory of our lost son becomes less than a sidebar in the local newspaper obituaries. When you look at his photo, he is transparent, ghostly. Some lose children in lonelier ways than war. I hear you say, if only he was born late, perhaps. When you left me, I remember picking up a fistful of dirt from our garden, the vermiculture had died, you said, because we did not give them enough love, did you mean that now, then, when you turn from me to look at his picture, the way he was, before the deployment, how he said he had lost his wallet and what would he do, if only he had unpacked his seabag, went back to his room to sleep as he had when he was on summer vacation and a teenager, and you, saying, if only I had slipped him some poison, just enough to make him sick, just enough to keep him alive.

When I squat in the abandoned house, I tear down tiny strings of Christmas lights, strung up around the perimeter of the ceiling with white plastic tacks. I determined that holiday decorations look sad out of season, there’s no excuse for it. In February, I stole newspapers from the front lawns of neighbors and cut out small paper hearts, wrote the names of everyone I have ever met on them and pasted them up on the walls and ceilings. At night, through the hole in the roof, the stars look over me, they help keep me honest, they remind me that distance is easy to cross if you can think, thought is light and light can bridge all distance, carrying with it the sum of everything that came before. There, among the paper hearts, the starlight says, Now is the time to overcome problems. I debate the finer points of Sartre or was it Descartes, of wanting things to remain as they are, though they can’t. So when I turn to leave, I remember to take down the paper hearts and carry them with me. My resolve is stronger than ever.