In Certain Situations

i. Summer of the Moth

Imagine yourself leaving home.

At night the moon comes out, and you fly toward your destination with the moon always in mind.

It is a broken compass made of lapis lazuli, chained by gold to your hip.

Your vision is too poor to discern the moon from the lamplight of the quiet porches you pass along your way, but you maintain your route.

There! Your cocoon has begun to break, and its silk is falling into a pile to be swept away by wind on the doorstep of your home with its fire pit and bony canopy, its porch with its coat of budding vines thrust upward against the whitewashed lattice

It is strange flying as a moth above the trucks of the highway, avoiding their drafts.

To neglect the airflow! To avoid the pull of the surrounding turmoil on your wings!

Why are you flying so far from comfort?

Bella says to you in the bright café, “Alone, he came down from the Appalachians upon a Virginian town that had no concept of the number one. Everything was merely a complement. Odd numbers were halves. ‘And it was good,’ he said. ‘Everybody was in love.’”

We must live in that world, don’t you think?

Bella says to you in the bright café, “And the man taught the people of the town that it was righteous to live in solitude. And the people were at first afraid of his word, but slowly they realized this man was significant, and that their world could be rocked by his imaginations if only considered realities. And many of the townspeople attempted to follow him through Appalachia when he departed, but he said ‘I am a throe of solitude.’ And the townspeople returned to their families.”

Then Bella leaves you, and you will not see her again.

She was the moon beneath which you traveled, and you drip from yourself at night when the temperature falls and you attempt to reconcile your present with the future you had envisioned in the past.

The shapes of yourself that dispel across the white rug, across your collar, across the egg-yellow bedsheets in the breeze clipped up before the open window inform you that the past has long since arrived in this abstraction.

“Where is she?” you think without end. “I don’t believe her bus has left because she would not have left me alone like the Appalachian in her story. No, not if she told me over such good coffee.

“Her bus is surely waiting and its engine is still cool as it rumbles in the shade of the station.”

You know that she will come back and that you will navigate the earth again beneath her moon.

You sit on the rooftop of your cottage beneath the celestial bodies and watch over the long, straight streets of Key West that you and Bella had once walked.

“She is no longer here, so I will watch for her over the long, straight streets until she returns,” you think.

And each night in the sidereal glow you remain perched, observing forever and waiting and never thinking anything but, “Bella, I know your bus has not left yet for the mainland, and here I wait thinking for ever, observing and waiting and never thinking anything but, ‘Bella, I know your bus has not left yet for the mainland, and here I wait thinking for ever, observing and waiting and never thinking anything but “its engine is still cool as it rumbles in the shade of the station.”’”

ii. Letter Home

I read this morning that the cave artists of prehistory never painted a moon, a cloud, a sun, a river, and rarely would they paint the earth by indicating a horizon line behind their scenes of bison and man in the plain, sorcerer upon the precipice. Why didn’t they paint that which let them see—let them see the bison, and the hunter in the landscape, and the bearded man, that first god, that mystery who first plunged into the gulf of the indefinite rendered with the tail of a horse, who observed the carnage as if from the edge of a butte?

Of all things to paint, we should first exalt that which allows us to see, and, after we have done so, then we should paint that which we are allowed to see. I’m moralizing again. What I mean is, you cannot tame the sun with a spear, but you can tame a beast with both spear and brush; perhaps the cave artists knew better than to try to give life to the unliving things that are so alive that they charge all else with spirit, and wakefulness, and thought, or perhaps it was a matter of comprehension brought about by a lack of immediacy, an indefiniteness.

And as the scenes of the hunt unfolded inside the cave, and men were trampled or trampling, a moon rose, a sun set, a cloud unfurled, a river rivered, and a horizon folded into a night. A cloud may have passed, but it did not think of its passing as it did. But that was in real life, not a portrait of it.

I look forward to that time we see each other again.

iii. In Certain Situations

As soon as I told myself I’d finally come back to the moment

After all these unoccupied years, I was an hour into a fantasy of remembrance.

Of fireworks, perhaps. Of baculitic flares, ashen but petaled as rose

Cinders of ghosts left ghosts pulled in by droves

Of nimble fingertips unswerving, laid across the sky’s harp.

Frigates loom beyond the sand, the decked eyes

Floundering, set flashing, crank inward by

The spectacle. It must be watched closely

As a queen Anne’s lace picked apart and flicked into the wind.

There is little to be understood on nights when stones float past on gusts

Set at rest over dark landed graves, burning momentarily.

The mulberries were hurled to scatter across legged clouds and smoke.

I reckon from the picture of the veiled lion

It is not too late to apply your myth to mine. Blood flecks

The stone but the stone does not bleed. Two children

Set together tremble, one wears out first: A case of knowing

Too little is immediately recognized as rainwater beneath clouds.

Good, the clouds are beginning to just be clouds,

Not “hyacinths of white snow through which the girl of eight exacts her gambols,”

Or anything of that sort. Neither does the moon think of its rising, nor the sun of its setting.

Now that you’ve left, please tell me

You will not forget where you come from.

You will simply let home change without your influence

For a season. Then you will hop back into the stream from the shore

Where you got out. There will be new water gorging past. You will

Get in slowly. It will be cold. You will adjust,

And feel refreshed. That sounds good to me.

After all, I am speaking to myself.

How long since the body has longed for anger, for sleepless nights

In bed believing itself to be something supernatural,

For power through hurting another’s body?

The body has been made in my image. I have hidden behind it,

Controlling its lame speech and crooked step, like a child

Committing profanities of the flesh away from blame.

The body is the fetter and the space enclosed.

The soul is the image in the mirror

The body will not turn the light on to see.

How strange, thinks the child, to return from the vistas so briefly

After traveling for hours in search of them. Now, he thinks,

Tell me why the heart confesses its desires only

After they have become impossible to satisfy.

When was the last time you looked out over water so vast and wrinkled

Its surface looked like innumerable animals

Trapped and punching beneath a dark blanket?

A portion of the immense seacoast approaches on iambic feet,

Washing first

The moment away, then another

In, slowly.

The cloud passes,

But it does not think of its passing as it does.

Into the cheering of night goes the soul, and it becomes lost there,

Lost in innumerable ways behind steel and satin,

Towers of a lone cloud’s rainfall as seen from a distance,

like a mountain hung in space. One charged with the gesticulation of

Lighting massages a flatland momentarily, but quickly pulls away,

Massaging and rescinding; speaking casually, however, with the soul.

The stranger has a shadowed face beneath a burlap hood. Only her nose

Extends into light from the hood’s shadow.

Shadow extends across the body.

What an opiate it had all seemed to be then, but whatever

I feel now is so much more inebriating and leaves me in low places

I have never seen before. Now I am intoxicated always,

Because I have seen the weakness of the self.

Gaze without eyes toward something you have never thought of before.

Allow it pierce you.

For these two months, I stay as busy as I can so you don’t become an idea.

But I am an idea myself.

How could I not be? Or you?

May I ask you to meet in secret every night

In the shadowed bushes off a church’s path? When I touch you, I touch your skin, at least.

I remember you, you who have deserted me twice consecutively by dream.

In snow, footprints cannot be obscured.

Even a fresh coat retains indentations.

The fabric of distance is stitched into dungarees.

Once, I waited for you to love me. I looked to the sea.

I walked into the dark of the theater and envied the characters.

I desired their containment and their educations. There were no loose threads

About them. They never said a word that didn’t sound deserving of a script.

Their lives did not unfold slowly, moment by moment.

They did not live a moment undeserving of the cinema.

All their longings were satisfied. And, if not,

They didn’t have to think about them after an hour or two, as we do.

In certain situations a pipe is comforting

Because it slows the clock-hand.

When I was young, I was taught to desire cremation.

Some things will always hit the drum too hard.

 “I despair of my sins to obtain salvation,” says the woman in the movie. “I will never be unfaithful,

But my heart may change,” I would rather she say. A dog barks

Disconsolately through a thin wall. Love is a temporary solution to the question:

Who are the two figures on the dark porch of the church?

The hands of the town hall clock revolve tensely. The night probably costs a dime.

Leaves fall in sulphurous clouds over the still harbor.

Who is to say that memory is not our closest friend?

What if the hanging curtains were parted

So an old friend was revealed to be, in truth, unsightly,

And all consolation found in them was upturned?

The veil hangs before the faces of the community.

The church hall is filled with faces behind white fabric.

A sprig of mint becomes the world, but inverted:

The world without the clutter of the multitude.

It is humbling to find one’s whole world

In a sprig of mint

Propped casually over the edge of a sweating glass of lemonade.

One can only hope all in attendance are properly invested in the marriage.

The sky is blue, and the gate is closed. The wind is mournful.

I believe I am new in town until I look to the sky

And it is the same one above me always.

I would love the town, the idea of it at least,

Even if the town hall clock didn’t work.

It takes generations to complete a cycle:

The alternating currents of naïveté and shame.

iv. Summer of the Moth

Over the summer, I failed to write an idealistic novel

Naively entitled Summer of the Moth,

Based upon an idealistic poem I wrote early in the spring

Envisioning my summer

Also naively entitled, Summer of the Moth.

I was alone too much. I found it

Can become hard to write when alone too much,

Engaging voices that surface from places not yours to carouse

In unending arguments over the past:

Chapter One: The failure to continue skating along the surface of the reservoir makes me think

The ice would, by necessity, break, but I wait until Spring

When the ice has melted, and borrow my father’s canoe to cross

The reservoir and set out on travels that ensure personal growth.

Chapter Two: A bouquet is never enough. A touch is too often misinterpreted

As insincere, even the most feeling. A letter of this sort is

Far too delicate, and often becomes convoluted—Words

Do not come to us as love comes: unexpectedly, shamelessly clear.

So I speak with a restraint that protects me from vulnerability,

Mistaken for disinterest. What is to be offered as an excuse?

That one feels a comforting lack of responsibility for their actions

When they are made to be unclear and likely to be misinterpreted?

Chapter Three: If only we hadn’t pride.

If only we hadn’t too much of it, anyway,

The excess making us feign strength where it isn’t necessarily desired.

Chapter Four: I scorn the memories of each day during each night

For stealing into the pitch darkness with my beloved,

And never inviting me to come along. I watch her look over her shoulder,

Into me, through me, her eyes watered with tears of laughter,

Led away by the hand of Time himself, and Passing,

Both of whom are better dressed than I, and well cologned.

I watch them skip off, consumed by their pink-skied

Gambols, toward all the people and places I once introduced her to,

And I know then that I have to find

New people and new places to call my own.

Chapter Five:  I live to wait for clues of love to take shape, as if the sky is my heart

And its most loving days are those filled with clouds,

While its most lonesome days are those of clear sky.

Chapter Six: My father sleeps on mission floors and

Walks through endless halls of windows

Overlooking cemeteries and multitudes of his old houses.

My mother sleeps from high noon until

The cicadas sing.

Chapter Seven: Unexplained years elapse. I begin to speak for the first time. I tell those

By my side what I have been trying to tell them, the communication

That lets them know why each of them has passed through constant pressures, and moved

So far onward like cowards afraid to put a stop to these pursuits of the unknown.

In the end, there really is joy found in all things,

Be it sick or perverse. Despite years of searching, there has been little, if anything, to look for.

What I then attempt to convey is not composed of words,

So the book cannot be finished.

Currently Listening Barely Legal/All Ages By Piebald see related

Nicolas was resting, nestled shapely into an egg in a wanly lit bedroom. Over time, he had come to accumulate several pieces of art from various metropolitan shops around the world and in these works that were meticulously arranged on the wall, Nicolas found much sanctuary. In a framed and vibrant green scene, which he himself had painted as his first grade-school attempt at minimalist art, there was a tree gently decorated with nests. Each of the nests had been painted with further vibrancy than the rest of the scene. He had intended for the nests to be aggravatingly simple in a similar style to the rest of the scene, but as he monotonously painted them they did not seem right; they were not full. And they took away from the overall aesthetic of the piece which was his main concern. Many days after school, Nicolas came roguishly to the art room and proudly poured cheap Tempera paints onto a lunch tray, mixed them, imagined and painted and felt perfectly content.
        Forty-some years had passed and Nicolas was finding his mind empty of the imagery it once held. He spent most of his time unshaven and moping in his bedroom, which was separate from his wife’s bedroom, secluded from his family. He was really quite pathetic. His children were fairly intelligent and well raised, with strong bones and a healthy diet. Nicolas loathed their free ability to imagine. He assured himself in every way possible that because he was older, his mind was more able than theirs. It was important to him that he believed that as fact. What Nicolas denied to even himself was that this great sense of detestation was merely an accumulation of aggravation and jealousy towards the young mind and it’s ability to effortlessly paint a vivid picture of anything and everything all at once.
        In his youth, Nicolas had been a keen reader of poetry. Each line or word or phrase, without fail, sparked vivid imagery that made his mind feel wet and fresh. Unfortunately, the imagery stopped abruptly the day that he got married. Previous to the nuptials, Nicolas’ head was filled with a vision of a love-soaked future with an adoring wife and two children, the number of children which he felt perfectly fit for his mental and parental capacity. He had the loving wife. He had two children, one a boy and the other a girl but he felt dissatisfied with what he held in his cynical grip. He even had a well paying job teaching art at a local elementary school. He loathed the children and he was beginning to further loathe the subject that he taught. No longer was his mind capable of taking the strain of being immersed in such a creative environment without thinking creatively.
        “Honey,” Nicolas yelled down the stairs, “if I can’t think creatively myself, how or why am I qualified to teach others to?”
        He was searching for reassurance in her response.
        "Dear, you are creative,” was her immediate response; she was being earnest. Nicolas felt that she was lying. “And dear, I mean, nothing personal, but you’re only dealing with seven-year-olds. They could paint pictures of trees and birds and still be happy. I hope you’re not looking for any Guernica’s.”
        Nicolas cleared his throat in offense. Lionetta felt ashamed for questioning his qualifications.      
        “They are six to thirteen years old, Netta. And, next year I have a fourteen year old,” he reminded her from behind his closed door and down the stairs.
        His wife, Lionetta, was a pot of love boiling over in admiration for Nicolas and she believed that he felt the same for her. Deep down, he really did; he simply needed a scapegoat to project his own amusingly monotonous feelings of loathing upon. (If, for a moment, I could draw a comparison: she was a teetering tower of sweet sugar cubes and Nicolas was the grinning red-headed menace of a child who would thrash and kick and laugh as he knocked the tower of sugar cubes to the ground.) Lionetta believed that the occasional fit that Nicolas would engage in merely served as a cute and forgettable assessment of her devotion in the marriage. Nicholas figured that at age forty-seven, he only had about twenty years to live and needless to say, believed that he was past his prime. 
        Every day, during his hour long lunch-break and free period during his teaching hours, Nicolas would walk deep into the forest behind the school to gather sticks, branches and leaves. None of the other teachers understood what Nicolas did during his nature walks and none of them were ever able to squeeze this answer from him. He was very secretive about the project and he was very seduced by the idea of having something all to himself.
        Nearly three miles into the forest, there was a vast clearing. Nicolas had been visiting the location occasionally ever since he was young and there was a tree on the outskirts of the clearing that looked remarkably similar to the tree which he had painted when he was in grade school. This notable similarity made the woods far more tantalizing to him. The tree reminded him of his precocious creativity when he was young. Under the tree, with the sticks, branches and leaves that he collected, Nicolas was building a nest. The nest was not fit for a bird, but rather it was more than comfortably sized for a human. The nest was not worked to completion and it was already thirty-four feet tall, sixty-six feet wide and the basin was twenty feet deep, according to Nicolas’ measurements.
        There was not a question in his mind of whether or not he wanted to build each day, but he simply was required to. If, one day, Nicolas decided not to work on the nest, which had not happened since the commencement of the project three years earlier, he did not know what would happen to the inside of his poor, fragile head. He did not want to risk finding out what would happen. It was his simple, intrinsic knowledge that, as one would eat a meal, his afternoon would be spent working on the nest. What Nicolas failed to realize was that during his excursions to the forest, he was creating and exercising all of the creativity that he thought had disappeared long ago.
        “Dear, what have you been doing in school these days?” Lionetta asked at dinner. “I hear that Buxton boy is really making some great art with you.”
        “He’s good, sure. I’ve had better, though. I mean--what I mean to say is that I think that the museum putting up his paintings might be a bad thing for him. He has this strut in class now--Ever since they put him in the gallery. A fucking strut and he’s in, what, fourth grade?”
        “Nic, the kid’s!” Lionetta guiltily interjected, reminding him of their presence. “Put a quarter into the swear-jar! I think we’ll put the kids through college thanks to your foul mouth, dear.”
        Nicolas rose from the table, swept the food off of his plate into the trash and sloshed hot water and a rag into his bowl to wash out the sediment from his soup that had collected at its basin. He placed two quarters in the jar, one for each of his children and genuinely felt guilt for using such words in front of them. The jar really was quite full, he noticed.
        “Well, the next project in class that I’m having the kids do, some have already started it, as a matter of fact, but I’m asking them to build a life-sized egg. You know, big enough so that they can fit inside. It’ll be a little home away from home for them, I guess. They can use anything to make it; that Buxton kid’s making his out of scrap branches and twigs that he’s finding in the forest. I think this is his first real respectable project, really.”
        On the day of his project’s completion, James Buxton’s grand egg that had been lined with pillows and coated with polyurethane to remain waterproof per strict order of Nicolas, mysteriously disappeared during lunch block. Nicolas insisted that he had no idea where James' project could have gone because it was so large and that nobody would have had any practical use for it. James had spent much of the year on the egg; he had been working on the project from very late fall until its completion in early April. As Nicolas watched the egg’s meticulous construction throughout the year, he grew increasingly hateful and jealous of it and its creator. It now rested in the center of his nest, three miles deep in the forest—exactly where he had brought it on the day of its completion. Nicolas had painted it a brilliant turquoise to resemble a robin’s egg. James Buxton never saw his wonderful egg again.
        By the time that summer had passed and the coming autumn was falling upon the town, Nicolas’ extraordinary nest was complete. It was amazingly large and nearly rose beyond the canopy of the forest. From the ground, the only way to enter the nest was to crawl through eight feet of the sticks, dirt and twigs with which it was constructed. Nicolas was sure to leave the entrance indiscrete so that it would not be evident to a passerby, of which there were few by the clearing.
        On the day of the nest's completion, Nicolas crept through the entrance way and up eight feet into the nest. He felt proud of his work for the first time since he had been married to Lionetta. He had created something that nobody else would ever understand. He suffered from delusions of grandeur with the nest and imagined all of the birds of the forest coming to live in his nest. As he pulled himself into the basin of the nest, the hole behind him closed. The twigs of the nest itself slithered and crept and tied together in unbreakable knots. Nicolas laughed as all of the robins, owls, sparrows and birds of the forest gently decorated the sky and swooped through the spacious canopy into the nest. Nicolas raised his hands and laughed again. The birds gathered upon his shoulders, hair, feet and clothes and laughed with him.
     “With you, friends, I am complete!” Nicolas yelled to the company of birds. They chirped more as they excitedly laughed with him.
        Ensconced in a hooded-robe of birds, Nicolas walked slowly and joyously over to James Buxton’s turquoise egg. The egg was a very comfortable fit for Nicolas and he climbed inside with the birds. He remembered his painting on his bedroom wall at home and how the nests had been empty and only now, he realized now why they had seemed incomplete. He had now filled his nest and he felt absolute perfection.
        Without the aid of the birds, Nicolas was never able to leave his nest. When he wanted to gather food for the birds, they would sink their talons and beaks deep into his clothes and lift him high above the canopy of the forest. They would then drop him down to the ground and Nicolas felt as if was flying while they held him hundreds of feet above the Earth.
        The people of the town never understood where the great nest came from or what rested inside and ironically enough, Nicolas’ children were the ones who found it and reported its presence to the rest of the town. When they were young, Nicolas brought them to the clearing to play and since their father’s sudden disappearance, the children wanted to relive all of the moments that they had spent together. They remembered him as kind and unshaven and with a short temper—a loving short temper.
        With the birds, Nicolas had no temper at all. He never felt the slightest angst or grief. He gathered them food, they robed him in plush feathers and treated him as on of their own. Every night he slept in James Buxton’s egg and joyfully reflected upon his life and wished that wife and children, whose voice he occasionally heard on the other side of the nest, were comfortable in his absence. He loved Lionetta and he loved his children and he loved the birds because he understood himself. He had created something that was entirely his own.