Swayback

The untenable sickness to be human, in celebration and celebrity calendar driven, outside the stream of my own house’s strain, in the middle of a country in its later years, seeing the place I used to call home – the television screen – announce the turning of the year. In and amongst another clan’s cave, another selfsuspending timeleaping wave of human violence and confusion and craving for peace, a craving so strong it would make murder a quiet lake to sit by, finally, and rest. And wish someone would know, the very one it needed to vanquish, the very one that owned the lake, the very one that showed the picture of the lake in an old faded color snapshot, peeling off the softcardboard back, a tree bleaching to white and a rowboat tied up to a piling stood on by a bird.
The last day of the year, the light fading, I and others putting a handbrush to a old old horse. The horse won’t see this time next year. Its grey mane, the circle of time pressed down into its back, its slow patient eyes that are planets of language – all these will have vanished by the same time next year, making it not the same. A horse’s leg is a signpost in the road, showing the turnoff. Take it or not. Spend a frigid night in its gutted steaming innards, swathed in the library of blood. I REMEMBER, the arrow reads. Volumes.
Deals cut, occupations mistakenly called marriage, talent mistakenly called love; the names of things.
I’ve one elbow in the dike, the arm holding the hand mirror. I could live on the land and kiss the city a wet one good good bye. An explosion of many contacts awaits my return to the Borough of my birth, and then the ball will be in the air, a hundred voices calling for it, but I’ve got the bead on it, and I’m in the right spot. Watch it into the glove.
I should have asked, What did you mean by what you said? I should have said, Your father is dead. If you want me to be him, you’re a murderer. Instead I helped, I cared, I soothed. Fed the dying horse. Put the earthtonguesmell on my hand of its mouth in my glove. Watched the night’s greyblue cover slide down the earth's hip to reveal all of space. And when the alarm went off, when the clock lost an arm, we each pointed a festive pistol at one another, and pulled our paper triggers.
Being married is probably the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. The hatchet come down on the boat rope in the photo that set the whole world adrift. I needed to get out more.