The angular underbrush of garbage,
where not crushed, writhing and trembling
in the street-winds’ wakes and eddies,
the road cinched at the throat,
sticky with souring dew of palsied trees.
We are never quite clean: the sunken gutters
bear their residues. I have washed my hands
over and over.
The shock of the eternal present,
the glut of sensation, the assault of light,
and the roaring deafening now all wither
to a desiccated ordinary,
barren and rattling.
You know it as you know all things
you no longer regard as miraculous:
a shadow dyed into the flesh.
The rain, when it comes, is shunted
into fallow fields, the fertile ones
basted with the runoff,
the stalks of weeds upraised.
This oracle clutches even to the cinders
of all things burned.
What can be said of the children of this age?
they are are like a society of explorers and archaeologists
who became convinced of the dearth of truth in their own borders.
they collected maps and atlases, weathered and worn,
laid them on their walls as tapestries,
assembled in small, wide-eyed groups to decipher and connect
drew to their chests compasses and electronics,
knelt at their shrines of computers and books,
became convinced of a harvest of history and rubies,
emeralds and wisdom in a land not their own.
they sold their possessions, their homes, their birthrights,
wrote their wills, swept together savings bonds, retirement plans,
trust funds to finance a journey to this place, this fresh frontier.
they cross-examined and cross-referenced their charts, their legends
with stars and satellites over ocean and into mountains
far from their homes, arrived at the site foretold by their plans,
and immediately set about to unearthing it in a storm of shovels and machinery,
only to uncover a vast, intricate emptiness,
a pattern of resonant tunnels and blankly majestic caverns, a nothing, a failure.
They quickly left, abandoning their lattice of equipment and cordons,
and returned to their own country, taking refuge with what remained
of their friends and relatives.
Of their trip, they stuck to the lie they had told themselves on the journey back,
which told nothing of the echoing caves, that they couldn’t follow their maps,
that lost and running out of food, they had been forced to abandon their search.
They vowed loudly to return, quietly pawned their guides and maps,
nursed their humiliation with bravado, let a disquiet seep into their palms,
the caves themselves roaring and thundering in their eyes.
Here at (t)wn, we often bring you things worth noting for their attempt at substantive beauty, truth, or some combination of both. But we did not start out that way, necessarily. Although it’s very poetry heavy now, when we started out, we just intended to have a group blog about anything in particular. Asides, observations, witticisms, lists, etc. So this blog post is in some ways a return to some of the neglected spiritual roots of this blog.
Today, someone over at invisiblecreature.com (a graphic design firm that specializes in album art) posted a link to the below video on twitter (@icreature), saying “Kinda sad that a YouTube clip could literally ruin a day.” I was expecting something like a video of a puppy being run over, or some kind of Current Event. Instead was this (You may need to go over to youtube to watch it, it’s not being kind to our layout):
You only need to watch about half of the video to get the idea, so if you become nauseous, feel free to stop. You can even stop after the first chorus, if you’d like. I retweeted the video, appending my own comment: “Scrap the human race and start over again.” The inimitable and astute music and culture-critic Joel Hartse remarked that watching the video, he couldn’t figure out what I found so objectionable about it. So I posted the following diatribe on twitter, which I have lightly edited and collated, and forms the body of this post:
“Let’s set aside the winking day-glo aging hipster pastel faux-punk of the video for a sec. (A lot to set aside, I know). But let’s. The backing track on the verses doesn’t even pretend to do anything but vaguely hint at a chord progression, leading to an anemic chorus that tries to substitute orchestra hits(!) for a hook, the autotune slathered on the singer’s voice like so much mayonnaise. Is there a song underneath somewhere? I can’t tell, but I can’t be bothered to even check. There’s no way of appreciating or even approaching this song. It’s a Clarke’s monolith of pop trash nihilism, impenetrable and inscrutable. Oh my god, it’s full of stars!”
He can see the ragged mountains from where he sits, their edges like torn paper. Their trails are hidden, but he remembers them, their inclinations and slender switchbacks, the incredulous silence when the wind ebbed,
the curve of her hip as she lay in one of the sudden clearings. The way she scooped water from the streams
in her hands, so full of casual ritual.
It is early morning, so he knows she is on one of the paths, halfway between her cabin and one of the springs. She had constructed a liturgy from the forest’s whims, He remembers the way the edge of the trail crumbled under his feet, the constellation of clouds that watched him as he fell, how lucky he had felt that he only broke his back.
Her trips down the mountain, to see him, became briefer, the space between longer, until the last day he had seen her, and she told him plainly: she could not love that which she knew would die. She went back up into the mountains, with their everlasting life. There was no violence in him, but he prays for vengeance, for the rugged ways to be made smooth, for a consuming fire.
On our way from Sacramento to San Diego,
the car quit on us, politely giving 10 miles
of stuttering, coughing notice.
I couldn’t be angry with it: midsummer,
heat rising from the ground in waves,
the earth itself boiling away.
Any sane thing would give up on working today.
We each stared at the engine block in turn, blankly, expectantly,
as if waiting for some curtain to be drawn back
or to be possessed by some fit of understanding.
The only thing I could understand was the heat,
the violence of it, an almost audible roar.
we decided to abandon the car and walk to the nearest town.
We crushed through some broken glass on the shoulder.
I could feel the shards collapsing,
even through my shoes. I imagined being barefoot,
shuddered at my own fragility.
Last night’s dream sprung in my mind like a trap.
I stood on a balcony, looking out on darkness.
The night evaporated quickly, rushing over the horizon
as dawn arrived, the day bursting in, fully formed.
There were whole pieces of flesh missing from the earth,
rectangular chunks simply cut out and removed, gashes filling
with lava, water, oil; tectonic entrails.
The sun kept rising, like a guillotine, deliberately
yet not slowly. I stood there at the balcony for centuries,
watched the wounds ferment and sour, then scab,
seal the holes like painted plaster.
When we arrived in the next town, clothes soaked in patches
throats coated in dust, I waited awhile before drinking in
the air conditioning and piped water,
paused to savor the thirst and soreness in the heels of my feet.
I could still feel the glass under my feet,
the remains of someone’s mistakes
like a threat made, or a warning given.
She paints, and I watch her.
The quickness of her brushstroke makes me nervous,
afraid that the painting will unravel
under her recklessness. She laughs,
she wonders why I think slowness means care,
asks what I make of the ambulance,
or the mother’s quick breath and push.
My usual answer to a question I cannot answer is a laugh
the brush never stops scraping and diving, singing the canvas,
cajoling; the coax, the whisper, the hard sell,
call and response between palette and easel,
both quivering and trembling with the force of it.
So I laugh, I remember God with all that time on his hands,
taking half a day to make his own image, from some dirt and a taken breath.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this house,
or even thought of it. All its shadows lie familar,
the maps I made in my childhood still read true.
But the grass is too high, and brown, yet somehow
still sprouting seeds. The windows are unnaturally bare,
the house rests too lightly, insubstantial.
It is more than quiet, and the detritus of someone else’s life
lies in a makeshift pyre on the sidewalk spilling into the gutter
like an offering to the usual gods, those that are veiled and mute.
The tree in the center of the yard, I know.
it stands, shorn of leaves and blindly defiant,
branches patterning the sky like capillaries.
Ants have died in the slow currents of its sap.
I can see its roots flexing and curling
under the skin of earth and slabs of concrete.
I smell a wet stench, hazy and rotting.
The fridge was not emptied before being set on the pile,
and the air is engorged with it.
The house has softened its proud, complicated edges
with each changing of hands. I imagine it ceased being a home
long ago, carved into currency, sanded down to a bet.
For a second, I consider looking through the windows
to see the corners and walls, to try reconstruct the inner landscapes
from the riddled, creased blueprints of my memory.
But it seems rude somehow, like commisserating with a new widow.
It’s simpler, anyway, and I can see what is to be seen from here.
The familiar shadows have lengthened and matured since I arrived.
When I was seven or eight, I developed a chronic cold,
perpetually dripping from my eyes and nose.
The doctor consulted his oracles, conducted a ritual;
I was allergic to the tree and the grass of my yard.
I felt that betrayal fall full upon me,
bruise my uncalloused trust, wished the tree a stump,
the lawn full of rocks. The curse went awry,
as the prophecies of children often do.
I believe the nervous twitch in your fingers,
as you sit there, hands neatly folded.
There is nothing like a polite truth; it seethes
and elbows and shouts, paints garishly on walls.
The streets outside are drowned in water,
dirtily entombed, reefs of fences accumulating
trash and silt, makeshift currents carving out their paths.
I don’t know how many graves the water makes.
I see the claims time has made on your thinning wrists,
your watery eyes. I don’t trust them.
We are not your bodies, you and I.
This is not what you have sown.
The silence, thick and stupid, is stretched out between us.
We are divided like continents. My words
mean as much to your ears as the sound of an unanswered telephone,
or the inscrutable cries of a stranger’s baby.
It is the wailing truth:
The flood waters will not recede for me.
These visits to you have tightened my grip on this world.
I horde memories, stack them up in my basement,
fill my bathtub with conversations and sunset.
I look in the mirror often, flex my fingers, grit my teeth.
I don’t ask for much resurrection, anymore,
but I have not yet furled my hope.
I ask for only enough to fill up a knapsack, or a purse, or a basket;
to pray over and break and share until my hands lie empty.
