The Conqueror Gummi Worm
- On the day that I turned twenty-three, I was curled up underneath a dogwood tree... The Fruit Bats sang about an earthquake and I remembered, looking down the Christmas-light-lit kitchen table, the time I was at another head of another kitchen table looking through candle-light at Gwyn, the night my parents weren't home, and we went swimming. I remembered feeling so good and right, at that table, in that light, with that person, for one nineteenth of forever. Lyle Lovett was singing about a leopard.
The flavor of Bushmill's whiskey calls me back to Lara's apartment, where she and Matt and I played cards always and told bad jokes and laughed too loud. I remember the time Elizabeth gave birth, just underneath the flimsy pineboard floor that Coleman would always listen to us laughing through, and tell us to shut up through, and Lara slept through it because we'd been playing gin and talking about civilization and Indians all night. I remember the baby's eyes reflecting blue oaks and acorn woodpeckers in spring sun, over wet grass.
Cooking chili this afternoon, when the air was chilly and wet, I remembered cooking in Christmas-light-lit Portland nighttime another birthday gift to all my friends, and a goodbye dinner to a woman I thought the world of until she mentioned overpopulation. I walked through the Canyon in the evening, hearing the 'whi-whiew' of the wigeons, feeling bad about the two-hundred fish I'd killed, and feeling bad about Makenzie, and feeling a part of every living red-cedar and vine maple and apart from every textbook and bicycle enthusiast, and ready to move on. Then I saw the ghost.
I got scared of heights for the first time in a long time the other day. I was on a barely ledge of sandstone overhanging a fifty-odd foot drop down a sheer cliff, halfway over the Hogback ridge between the Roadrunner Cafe and the White Cliffs. I could have slid it, scraping the hard-earned calluses off my hands, slamming into the wild oats and Russian thistle below with maybe nothing more serious than a broken leg. But I choked; I scrambled up, back towards the sacred cleft in the toothy grin of yellow sandstone where the water flows when there is water. Also there was the matter of the man with the gun at the base of the cliff, and the fact that it was aimed at my hat. I like that hat. My father gave it to me. But I disappeared into the rocks, and the gun walked a mile back to its trailer, and I found a safer passage that only involved a little bit of asshole-tightening sliding out over the edge into free-fall. On the long walk back into the oranging sun, I found the body of a tarantula who had somehow managed to crawl to the edge of the road, her abdomen marked with tire tread. Robert Bruce, eat your heart out.
Fleetwood Mac sang about honey, and I was in the Blue Meanie, winding down that one hill that comes off the ridgeline, down towards Nevada City, going to Maidu language lessons. Evening slid on into nighttime, when the rain fell, and then back into gloaming, with the piles of sooty snow gathered around the curves at the time of day it'd be a good idea to fall in love. I was thinking about forestry then, and making masks for the festival, and how we were going to bring back the culture with the power of stories. Later, I was at the Willo shooting pool and eating the Willo's good steak and drinking the Willo's bad beer, and later I was in a cabin made out of a house-trailer and some wood playing cards and lying about a waitress and ten pounds of Jerusalem artichoke.
I remember Oakland, and getting high by myself in the octagonal room I was renting, and playing with the cat all night. One night I bicycled back from north Berkeley through crowds of yuppies and the odor of expensive food wafting from expensive houses, with everybody laughter and warm light on the chillying Bay breeze. I wanted so much to belong to these people, to earnestly care about Barack Obama and energy-efficient lightbulbs and protesting the War with petitions. I wanted, more than anything in that moment, to come home to one of those warm houses and be a person with a good job and a loving partner and lots of friends with imported beer. I wanted to eat brie unashamed and listen to NPR uncritically. I wanted, for that one fleeting bicycle instant, to be my father in the comfortable Maryland night, in the kitchen rats will be living in when I show my grandchildren around.
Some time when I was a kid and confused, I ran off into the werewolf night to the cold woods with bare flapping leaves and the distant baying of a dog. The woods spat me out, like the time it spat me out when I pretended to care about the sewer line chewing up my childhood. I came upon a new clearing, fresh with stumps, bearing orange flags and flapping black tarpaulins, and an outlet gushing green slime into the creek. I swore I'd stick around and fight back the suburbs, that I'd shepherd the new oaks and river birches while I lobbied to halt the buldozers. The sky blackened and the the birds all stopped their songs mid-chorus, and the wind picked up the tarps in glossy black wings. "Bullshit," the woods was saying, and it was- I had no intention of sticking around Maryland any longer than I had to, California was the place to be. A cold wind gusted my jacket up all through the silent walk back to comfortable roads and square-cornered houses. That time, though, in the winter, a can dogged my running up the block, up the hill, to the Christmas-lights and the kitchen table.
I'm living in this desert town, and I'm worrying about genocide, and I dream about trees every night, and I'm 24. For someone who hasn't done much with his life, I sure have done a lot. It's quiet now, just crickets and a dog fight somewhere in the far away...
"Big city Europa
July of 64
It's 5AM
Weather blowing bitter off the Baltic.
Car slows beside him as he walks
Hubcaps slow revolution
Jaundiced-looking pockmarked face, round in window
Short greasy black beard
Couple of language stabs, settle on English
"It's cold - I give you ride.
Don't you want to kiss me?"
This goes on halfway across the cobbled bridge
Driver pulls ahead - gets out by the construction fence
Ambles towards him rubbing the bulge in his pants
In his jacket is the revolver
The hand is already in the pocket for warmth and fingers slide easily around wood grips
Slow as that predator's footsteps the gun comes out
Arm straightens, sight blade bisecting yellow forehead
Wind
Blue metal streetlight
Faint twilight shining on the corners of stones.
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
Slow revolution
1985
Crosswise in a hammock in the hot volcanic hills
Its 3AM the night after the air raid
From the ridge she watched A37s, like ugly gulls,
Make a dozen swooping passes over some luckless town
Maybe ten kliks beyond the border
In the distance the Pacific glimmered silver
Now lascivious laughter floats on the darkness from the police post next door-
Male voices - and a woman's -
Little clouds of desire painted around the edges with rum
In the muddy street a pig suddenly screams
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
Pacific glimmers silver
Moon full over shadow mansion
West coast
Can't say when
There is incense and the heat-driven scent of flowers
Tongue slides over soft skin
Love pounds in veins brains buzzing balls of lust
Fingers twine in wet hair
Limbs twist and roll
On the dresser wax drips in slow motion down the long side of
A black candle
Ecstatic halo of flame and pheromone-
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night." - Bruck Cockburn
The flavor of Bushmill's whiskey calls me back to Lara's apartment, where she and Matt and I played cards always and told bad jokes and laughed too loud. I remember the time Elizabeth gave birth, just underneath the flimsy pineboard floor that Coleman would always listen to us laughing through, and tell us to shut up through, and Lara slept through it because we'd been playing gin and talking about civilization and Indians all night. I remember the baby's eyes reflecting blue oaks and acorn woodpeckers in spring sun, over wet grass.
Cooking chili this afternoon, when the air was chilly and wet, I remembered cooking in Christmas-light-lit Portland nighttime another birthday gift to all my friends, and a goodbye dinner to a woman I thought the world of until she mentioned overpopulation. I walked through the Canyon in the evening, hearing the 'whi-whiew' of the wigeons, feeling bad about the two-hundred fish I'd killed, and feeling bad about Makenzie, and feeling a part of every living red-cedar and vine maple and apart from every textbook and bicycle enthusiast, and ready to move on. Then I saw the ghost.
I got scared of heights for the first time in a long time the other day. I was on a barely ledge of sandstone overhanging a fifty-odd foot drop down a sheer cliff, halfway over the Hogback ridge between the Roadrunner Cafe and the White Cliffs. I could have slid it, scraping the hard-earned calluses off my hands, slamming into the wild oats and Russian thistle below with maybe nothing more serious than a broken leg. But I choked; I scrambled up, back towards the sacred cleft in the toothy grin of yellow sandstone where the water flows when there is water. Also there was the matter of the man with the gun at the base of the cliff, and the fact that it was aimed at my hat. I like that hat. My father gave it to me. But I disappeared into the rocks, and the gun walked a mile back to its trailer, and I found a safer passage that only involved a little bit of asshole-tightening sliding out over the edge into free-fall. On the long walk back into the oranging sun, I found the body of a tarantula who had somehow managed to crawl to the edge of the road, her abdomen marked with tire tread. Robert Bruce, eat your heart out.
Fleetwood Mac sang about honey, and I was in the Blue Meanie, winding down that one hill that comes off the ridgeline, down towards Nevada City, going to Maidu language lessons. Evening slid on into nighttime, when the rain fell, and then back into gloaming, with the piles of sooty snow gathered around the curves at the time of day it'd be a good idea to fall in love. I was thinking about forestry then, and making masks for the festival, and how we were going to bring back the culture with the power of stories. Later, I was at the Willo shooting pool and eating the Willo's good steak and drinking the Willo's bad beer, and later I was in a cabin made out of a house-trailer and some wood playing cards and lying about a waitress and ten pounds of Jerusalem artichoke.
I remember Oakland, and getting high by myself in the octagonal room I was renting, and playing with the cat all night. One night I bicycled back from north Berkeley through crowds of yuppies and the odor of expensive food wafting from expensive houses, with everybody laughter and warm light on the chillying Bay breeze. I wanted so much to belong to these people, to earnestly care about Barack Obama and energy-efficient lightbulbs and protesting the War with petitions. I wanted, more than anything in that moment, to come home to one of those warm houses and be a person with a good job and a loving partner and lots of friends with imported beer. I wanted to eat brie unashamed and listen to NPR uncritically. I wanted, for that one fleeting bicycle instant, to be my father in the comfortable Maryland night, in the kitchen rats will be living in when I show my grandchildren around.
Some time when I was a kid and confused, I ran off into the werewolf night to the cold woods with bare flapping leaves and the distant baying of a dog. The woods spat me out, like the time it spat me out when I pretended to care about the sewer line chewing up my childhood. I came upon a new clearing, fresh with stumps, bearing orange flags and flapping black tarpaulins, and an outlet gushing green slime into the creek. I swore I'd stick around and fight back the suburbs, that I'd shepherd the new oaks and river birches while I lobbied to halt the buldozers. The sky blackened and the the birds all stopped their songs mid-chorus, and the wind picked up the tarps in glossy black wings. "Bullshit," the woods was saying, and it was- I had no intention of sticking around Maryland any longer than I had to, California was the place to be. A cold wind gusted my jacket up all through the silent walk back to comfortable roads and square-cornered houses. That time, though, in the winter, a can dogged my running up the block, up the hill, to the Christmas-lights and the kitchen table.
I'm living in this desert town, and I'm worrying about genocide, and I dream about trees every night, and I'm 24. For someone who hasn't done much with his life, I sure have done a lot. It's quiet now, just crickets and a dog fight somewhere in the far away...
"Big city Europa
July of 64
It's 5AM
Weather blowing bitter off the Baltic.
Car slows beside him as he walks
Hubcaps slow revolution
Jaundiced-looking pockmarked face, round in window
Short greasy black beard
Couple of language stabs, settle on English
"It's cold - I give you ride.
Don't you want to kiss me?"
This goes on halfway across the cobbled bridge
Driver pulls ahead - gets out by the construction fence
Ambles towards him rubbing the bulge in his pants
In his jacket is the revolver
The hand is already in the pocket for warmth and fingers slide easily around wood grips
Slow as that predator's footsteps the gun comes out
Arm straightens, sight blade bisecting yellow forehead
Wind
Blue metal streetlight
Faint twilight shining on the corners of stones.
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
Slow revolution
1985
Crosswise in a hammock in the hot volcanic hills
Its 3AM the night after the air raid
From the ridge she watched A37s, like ugly gulls,
Make a dozen swooping passes over some luckless town
Maybe ten kliks beyond the border
In the distance the Pacific glimmered silver
Now lascivious laughter floats on the darkness from the police post next door-
Male voices - and a woman's -
Little clouds of desire painted around the edges with rum
In the muddy street a pig suddenly screams
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
Pacific glimmers silver
Moon full over shadow mansion
West coast
Can't say when
There is incense and the heat-driven scent of flowers
Tongue slides over soft skin
Love pounds in veins brains buzzing balls of lust
Fingers twine in wet hair
Limbs twist and roll
On the dresser wax drips in slow motion down the long side of
A black candle
Ecstatic halo of flame and pheromone-
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean's roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night." - Bruck Cockburn