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Chapter 8: Bird Talk
Ollie stood on the banks of a wide and strange river. Compelled to take a swim, he jumped out of his boxcar and ran down to the water. He waited until the train passed, and for the first time in many hours, Ollie found himself in quietness. He closed his eyes, listened to the great sound of nothing. Well, it was at least nothing to the city. The place was actually quite noisy: the crickets, the chatter of the nearby stream, the wind and all its’ passings through the reeds, the branches of a great wide oak.
He took of his clothes, and for a moment, he thought about walking slowly into the water. Then he jumped, cannonballed into it. Felt good. So much of his life had felt so confusing, but now there was something of clarity. The water was muddy, and in its’ cool muddiness, there was clarity. Or something like it.
It felt like he had been wandering for so long.
Well if you go where the clouds hang low and the waters pull and take, then watch out for the smashing lull of the bitter quaking drake. You don’t know your copper’s worth, you don’t know those sighs, until you’ve taken your arteries and layed ‘em on the railroad ties. Do you know about Bob Dylan? He started out so clear, then became delusional at best when the world they made him steer. So keep your songs for people, and away from recording machines, or else you will be made to steer and the world will thus careen.
Ollie rose out of the water, only to see, barefoot and dressed in a white suit, looking like an African American Mark Twain, was Ollie’s friend the ghost.
“’Lo there! Nice day for a swim?”
“Haha! Hey there Mr. Ghost! What brings you here? Still on tour?”
“Yessir, I’ve been haunting quite a bit since I last saw you. Iowa, was it?”
“Nebraska, I think.”
“Ah yes, Nebraska. Not much haunting to do in that place. Already somewhat creepy as it is.”
Ollie got out of the water on the opposite bank, and though wet, put on his clothes. It was warm enough that he’d figure they’d dry out soon. He looked back over at the ghost.
“So where you off to now, ghost?”
“I’m on special assignment.” he said, and his eye twinkled.
“Special assignment?”
“Very special. Requires me to travel and everything. Confidential though, can’t mention a word about it.”
Ollie smiled, curious, but courteous enough not to pry.
We fight the hell out of ‘em, the spiral shells and pointed shells and brain-holding shells alike. Then there is the right, coming, drumming along. Steaked down, she is coated in blossoms, Aphrodite of the memory. What loose translation comes to be, what Gatsby takes his residence. The flash, the classic simple note, the artist takes his never, held in palms so tangerine with fragile life, the strife upheld in dignity. I am soured by the scene, the trumpets cackling from the barracks. I am soured by their faces, turned to face the growling eye. I have no stories here to tell, no great morals to comprehend. And in the darkness of wishing wells I’ll pull up Ollie and his renderings. I am a loose and crooked jangle, and outwards in my fishing boat, I’ll coax the ends to strangle fish, and out riding such waves we will go. The fish, they are but scabs of living upon a perfect, lifeless sea. So strike them all from hallowed living. In hollow hell they will confide. I am the fishmonger.
The bastion wells from beneath the sands, I am getting to abstract. He looks at the west, he looks at his hands, dirty, as they’ve always been. Subtle structures to confide, this is a long and sour din. He lifts his mind towards the lots of heaven, whatever those are. Break, break, with steadfast waters, on the roaming gallop, cur. Break, break, as nation totters, flurries, afterwards, burns.
I found myself getting too abstract in my thoughts, so me and Ghost hopped on the next train, which luckily was going at a slow enough speed for the time being. The sun shine, spotted upon our faces. We got off at a nowhere town, I had some money, so we bought some food and decided to head out walking for the coast. It wasn’t all that far a distance, said a man working at a gas station, and we figured if we just walked we could get there in 3 days. We wouldn’t have to hitchhike with any sketchos or nothing. So we walked, and as we did the sun dented out faces, the distance we walked grew within us, became part of us, just like Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Laureate Street. Oregon was adding itself to us, these states becoming more complete, more part of something on the whole.
At times I feel that words become so meaningless. There are so many words, so many words that mean so little. But we use them, because there is so much that needs to be conveyed. To others, to ourselves, these are what words are used for.
But right now, as I write this, all words everywhere are stupid.
And back at the place where we began, the forest stood, and there was water, too. The bubbles rose from sitting stones and the sun beams bloomed. But what a different place was Ollie now, filled with the smell of olives and beer. And in the pauses of the day. The heroes come roll the bonfire, the stakes are sunk into the earth. The worth is waged, and everyone sings in their most naked voice. “We’ll do up the houses” they sing, they sing, “we’ll do up the neighborhoods, and neighborhood king. And in all embarking ship we will place flower bouquets, elegantly arranged.
And all the cosmic indifference, all the people who went blind, and all fitting in the tiny places, the cubbords and the keyholes. I will build the smallest palace, roaming through the battoned tolls. Bring me to where I need to be, chase me down the streets. The place I hope to end up is stuck in stone and peat. The moss will grow, the people will ground in where they need to be heard.
For the last several pages, these words have been struggling, untelling. These are smudged, blurry words, and they’ve been used to misdirect my thoughts. My, Ollie Eavesgreen’s, thoughts. All return to love.
As a baby, his favorite smell was sage. When the people came from the high-risen west, he would smell champagne and cry. As a boy, when the flowers burned brightly upon the window sill, he remembered pancakes and stories about King Arthur. And at night his father had feverish action. He couldn’t stop moving, always had to do something, and it was burning him down. The shakes get born when I pressed that bottle to my experience, and my experience upended, and now can be considered dead.
We pass through the snow and the pine beneath, the clouds to the sky leave the sun bequeathed. The mighty trail is now our God, and our footsteps become our penance. Breathe in the mountain air, breathe out the city menace. Oh hope, oh fate, oh abstract things, I’ll throw you back from my apple core face, and on, moving on they will hear: Long, long, the road keeps going, and who they hell put it there? The wild river doesn’t move like this, but beside each other, they’re near.
The mountains brood, cloaked in white and green. This is the winter, and what winter means, I’ll never be sure, I fear. Sound the great cries, the ships that set sail, the motion that roams through those muscles. Those who steal, those who rape, they creep through the night under coats, jackets, and murder. What murder means, I’ll never be sure, I fear. Chained to our homes, we begin to hope through the world, the shifting roam of drifting age. I will respect the sand as a person complex, not strange to these eyes, to these searching toes.
Build your buildings tall my friend, as tall as you can think them, but don’t cling to those images when the wind busts it down. It happens, whether or not you frown, or stamp your feet or upset your family members. Stuff goes up sometimes only to come down. Don’t worry love, I’ll keep you around, but remember that we too are gonna die some day. Afterwards, wandering through the dark, I’m not sure if we’ll see. I’m not sure if we’ll touch or taste, or even be anything. But I’ll still feel that love there, I know that, whether it is built up to the sky, or rubble on the ground. It’s still there sticking around. What else I know, I’m not sure.
The trees, the trees, the trees. I’ll be one some day, I’m sure, I’ll get old unless I’m wronged. And in swaying, and in stillness, and all in subtle motions expressed and unexpressed, I’ll be there watching whatever land I’ve been placed in, as it will be my own. Ownership is simply a connection to the things around you, and how can you say that you’re more connected to these rocks, this soil, than anyone else?
“You’ll get lonesome,” she said to Ollie, where they sat, “and things will change. You just gotta keep walking on and on. There’ll be big and tiny places, there’ll be vast and miniscule personalities, and out there, somewhere will be me.” They looked at each other, and he thought he saw the devil, in between the curves of her breasts. The wildnerness had taken to him, and one of them began to undress. The earth it shook and rumbled, while the two of them stood still. The deepness of each and every man who’s hoping to be a saint, is about as deep as a fountain drink, sticky, and a little to sugary. The lightning, now he is crazy, he comes down hopping all over the place. Somebody is gonna attempt to kill you, or else they’re gonna love you too much. The life is just a bumbling thing, and everyone else is dead. Forks went out on the table, they danced around grandpa’s guts, and all the peace of the world, and the raccoon-eyed children ducking behind mother vanity’s pant legs. The satisfaction typed into a New York computer, began to rain on my child. I ran into the file cabinet, and there for weeks I hid. And when I came out of there, they threw me into the shit. And sounding out with a gun in my grip, I gloomed across the land. Jungles came into my ears, and heat flew through my eyes, and I stuffed cotton up my nose to keep away the smell of flies. No wait, reverend Jackson, don’t picket on my lawn, I’ll tear down every angel, crack them open, and look for the songs. What luck for a horse to get shot with gold, on an afternoon platter at the Hilton.
The mixture of gold and silver in a young man’s mind, throws all goodness out the window and leaves his palms at a spit-shine. The Lucifer that resides in each and every small cabinet shelf, is nothing compared to Heathcliffe and his seventy whelps. I’m whirling in the ambulance and looking to give help to the chronically narcissistic. We’re a nation of flowers sitting beside a stream, we are watching ourselves and feeling so cool and clean. The world has become an image, not to be lived, but seen. Our people are becoming fatally two-dimensional. This is the America I built into my back, this is the America with built in culdesacs, this is the America, dementia, off-track, and I’ll sit, tapping imagination through my senses.
Outside, the people eloped, the boated and moped in their secret closeted lives. I later, came to her door in the form of a letter, and five dollars spent. Leaning, wind windowsill, people living next to nil and nil is such a happy, happy place. The longing and the leftover and the wide-eyed waking men, conquered Don Bulreguard with his fifteen minute men, but they were too slow on the uptake, and then they tumbled down, broken quite thoroughly into their shoes and inheritances. Diamond Daisy rallied Jesus and Edgar Allen Poe, together they went to Kansas City to get rock and roll overthrown, but the white-chapped Buck Lawson with his jerky and his gown, declared everyone everywhere to be stupid. Absurd is the sky and absurd is the ground. Crazy are the people and crazy is sound. And in all insanity if you yourself get found, then you have won over nirvana. Good luck with compensation, for a hell of a job, ‘cause heaven is off on vacation.
So stark is the contrast between white and green. So strange is the brown, so strange and so mean. I have been left to foxtrot on my own, so gallop into the snow, the blizzard will go, so upon your shoulders into undertow of water, getting revenge for in the first place getting taken. Blue are the piecemeal men in their homes, red are their women with flickering tones, white are the children, burning as coals, about in explode in self-admiration. This is the present, your present. Unwrap the fucker.
We get so far away from home, that is all that happens. The trappings of our paths become that of our anthems. And backing into corners, red-hot guns blazing, we smoke ourselves into personal war, within ourselves, decaying. Motion becomes so expensive, after so much sitting. Living gets so tough after all of this making out with death. I’ll find you, widowed highway, if you care to find me.
That pain might kill you if you play those cards upon the table, if you eat that bread you may fall off the daggered end of the world. Forget peace and all the mind behind weathered people and their sighs.
Trouble. She is a word I know. Remember me to Louisa, the girl inside the well. And if she don’t recognize my name then down the road I’ll sell my life for the rest of days to come. Oh gun, woken by the morning dawn, woken by everything wrong. Oh gun, gun song, gun dance. The world twists in and out of itself, the pieces slow and matter, uncontrollably, handles itself into basketed warmth. Sparked, in the deepest cave, freedom.
Hey, wake up as slow as you need to. The breakfast fire is coming to, and the landslide halted long enough for us to breath. The seagulls are gonna wake up when they will, and they will direct us back to where we need to be. Song, remember that you came from everywhere, and we will listen to you, wherever you need to be. Coated cemetery, earth candied with stones, and fumbling for souls. Home, coming back to royalty. Life, heading straight downwards until collapse commands and at last seethes. Forest, wherever you need to be. Heart, wherever you need to be. My lungs will continue breathing.
Now that I see the road I can be content that I am moving. The yellow spine between to arms of white, stretching outward, diving through the land. The tall-standing telephone poles hint at messages coming, going by. We are peasants of the road signs, and pagans of our atmosphere. Junction gonna get me to where home is, and then soon after I’ll be getting the hell out of here. My friends might say I’m crazy, but too many things are broken to stay sane. Trampled cadence, hurried and low, along with the footsteps of the bruised career. The road writes, shocked with its’ own petrifaction. He ate an orange and looked at the scenery, moving around him and his car. Snapped through perfection, distance collapses, his life is dyed with green and brown. His brother was never found, just his car by the road on a lonely night. Maybe he left to die, or maybe he just needed to escape.
The rust on the red truck, the one they take when they want to go fishing. The rust is gray, and they are numbed. Winter comes with throwing stones, smooth and black, held tightly in his palm. And out they fly, on Tin Man Lake, where the ripples play. Mossy trees, free of leaves, reflected in the water. We stare and stare, looking for shapes in the muddy deep. Gosling breath, baited line. That golden sun is going down.
Circled song, under fingernails. Brown is where we’ve been, through mortal heiress hale. Roam through the hay, the yellow give-ups, the palaces we’ve sat within have broken down in bowls and cups. Back at the break, cusped with her hands, people are laughing, wearing their tans. Mr. John Sabbatical is roving through the dumpsters, looking for a lost copy of Don Quixote. Meanwhile his scabbarded friend scans the land, entirely of paste, walking undrowned and dowsed in brotherly hate. Fissions are loved, the beach is filled with smoke and the people run into the water. Land was always more dangerous anyway. Would you rather burn or drown? Would you rather die from being lost or being far too found? Soldier walking on the expressway asks his uncle if he can get another cigarette. Uncle smiles and shatters the road into sixty safe bets. The radio blares out a goatsong and everybody eats plastic. The happiness is found within the ballistic path of an opal. Find me there, I’ll skip you across the water too. Find me there, I’ll jangle with the best of them, I’ll wear my rags and dance shadow into the alleyways, hunt rats and jumble speech in wild ways.
Change is given with the hug of a winner and the smile flashing sideways hiding the killer and a dog barks longing for a new order finisher but he’s going to have to wait.
“Romance will come again. Just when you least expect it.” he said, eyes straight on the road, but mind on everything but it. “And I really mean it that way. It’s the expectation that kills everything. That, and you gotta be complete. You gotta be a complete person in order to be properly incomplete without a certain girl around.”
What the hell was this guy talking about?
“Ollie,” he went on, “There is a center of the universe, and from this center we are constantly quaking. Yessir. But to look back at that center is to look at the most beautiful thing ever-but you can see only half of the most beautiful thing ever. So its’ your job to find someone exactly on the other side of that beautiful, so that you can see, reflected in them, that whole other side of beautiful that you can’t see from where you’re standing. It helps if they’re made out of shiney material, too. Like tin foil. You need yourself a tin foil girl, Ollie, you hear?”
“Uh, yeah. A tinfoil girl. Yeah.”
“Good.”
Ollie had trouble finding another train that he could hop, so he took to hitchhiking. That’s how he found Ed. Ed had just been dumped by his fiancé of two years. They were supposed to get married next July. He had already bought his tuxedo. Soon he would wear that tuxedo, thinking of nothing else he could do with it. And one day he would pick up a man, also tuxedoed, and hitchhiking with a tuba. They would live together for the rest of their lives. But they haven’t met yet.
There is an ocean of light above the clouds where the dregs of heaven pool over the earth. You enter the house and the world tilts to the side. Yellow runs straight through the windows and life gets what is needed. C’mon boy, you’ve been here, where the sound is thick and the water is clear. I said keep it, keep it together. The dreadful row is far away from here. Feel the life as it fires through, the mighty push, the wilderness is coming out to play. Get somewhere in your light, wear that jacket red, baby, you know how to. Shoulder all your heavies, and I’ll gain words to tell. The earthquakes grow big here, and all the changes fill, get large and bright. Step out towards the balcony, if you’d like to. These people slowly drive me past where I can stand, the place in afterwards where evil strands its time away within the trees uprooting things and making peace, yeah that’s what evil wants as well. It wants the quiet peace, like the kind you find in hell.
Slow water becomes a roll, while deep in the riling cove, a tinfoil girl who glints and shines, contains your leftovers and your mind, wake up from the place of sex, consoled mongering beneath a heaving chest. Look after your waging world, knotted upon and curled around life as is, the country kids are looking up the pop stars names in the phone book. My ears hurt from past experiences, the places where the heads of state roll and take away. Remember, you’ve never seen me this way. Groping for the least likely possibility, I want to strike out loud, I want to get out of here and far away. Speak slowly when the dogs come, they are excitable. Years full of dragons and pot-bellied tears, out in the booney’s with the yellow-green steers, and the great tall lumberjack who violently clears out a space for great queen Victoria to sit in. The masquerade cavalcade comes loosely. In the beginning the twitch started thinning, and whatever we were started bleeding into the streets, mixing with the pavement and cracking to release.
She wanted to be a stewardess, like the kind she saw in the mod magazines.