The brown-bent figure in the shabby suit
hunched over the organ (like it would save his soul)
stretched his fingers habitually,
cramming the weary morning with coffee and the
honey-colored sun that dyes the pews.
-
The organ is sighing through it's huge lungs,
remembering the way eight fine souls were
buried in soft wet earth. Organist is disheveled,
autistic, but right. He knows what to say
when she says goodbye. He's no Tennyson,
but he has sleepless nights around an old
brown radio, dreaming of static and a thin
white arm. He leans on his knees, worn shoes
forward like the cover of his story. He never
learned today's words, and he still calls girls
'my dear' and takes his hat off when he speaks
to fathers. Twists it in his hands. Finds solace
in the colossus of the pipe organ, lending its
voice to the weary dusty people, its shine to
the silent aching people. Lending him its power
and he is not frail today. Organist, don't turn.
--
Make certain you know what you're getting
into before you open a book of hymns. There
are other reasons to sing than because your
soul needs washing. Things like organs echo
and don't turn away from the organist. The
water falls on your shoulders in your soul.
--
In chanting script, they write his obituary,
but all he ever read was note of music. He
had nothing to say to you. You have nothing
you know of him. You don't believe you can
understand why they try to play organ music
at his funeral, when all he ever did was murmur
broken words and rock in his seat when some
interloper was given his place at the organ.
--
Tennyson, you forget that I was saving myself
for the organist and his piano fingers. You don't
have one thing to give me with your reasoning
structure of beauty. You forget that I understood
his insomnia, broken phrases, his need for a better,
larger set of lungs to speak his mind. Organs and words.
Tennyson, you forget that I have never slept
Tennyson, You Forget That I Have Never Slept
Molasses Cookies and the Third Time the Rooster Crows
instrumental conversations, pt. II
Flat black eyes looked up from over Ian’s hollow-body. Six weeks had passed since the Transverse Music Festival, and Ian had gotten as slow and dark as molasses. I sat down on the bar stool, tracing the white carvings in the black wood with my finger. The stool rocked on its spindly legs.
Ian looked at me from over his hollow-body. A shield. I shrugged. Ian had called me here, and Ian would start the conversation.
The clock- made out of a tire, with oversized hands- ticked heavily. The curtains were closed. I got up and opened them. I went and sat back down, and Ian got up and closed them again.
There was nothing really to do. Ian started playing the song- The Chameleon Glare of Turning Hearts- from the Transverse show, and I got up and started making cookies.
I knew my recipe as well as Ian knew his song, and for ten minutes, our recall went on in perfect rhythm. I cracked an egg into my green mixing bowl while Ian experimented with the first bridge. I measured out molasses while Ian’s molasses eyes followed his fingers up the fretboard. I made little mounds of batter while Ian hummed along with the ending. I set the oven as the last notes rang out, and then I turned around and I could tell Ian was ready to talk.
“It’s been six weeks,” he said slowly. I looked down at my hands. I knew that already, Ian.
“So what do I do?”
“You’re asking me?” I was more surprised than angry, for now, but I could tell that I would be more angry than surprised before this was over. I brushed aside the flour on the counter and sat down.
“I guess not,” sighed Ian. “I wrote a new song. It’s called Peter Grieves. Can I play it for you?”
I knew before he started playing what it was going to say. That was how things were with Ian and me. I thought he was acting like molasses, so I made molasses cookies, pretending they weren’t carrying a message. Ian played the song, pretending it wasn’t talking to me, to give me the message he didn’t dare to speak.
Walks on the water of sparrows and thieves,
Gives up the standard, denies and grieves,
Flies you in through a slate-blue door
Falters and fades and falls cold on the floor.
I don’t think you’re reading the story the way it’s written
These battles and flights of birds are the resurrection..
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
A slave girl blinks her peacock eyes
“Hey, aren’t you one of Jesus’ guys?”
Well, mockingbirds’ mouths are built for lies.
Harsh as birth the rooster sings
Down falls the hawk with broken wings
The owl is sleeping when the wolf-dog springs
You’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.
Down in the streets there are fish and men,
Broken bread and fox’s den
Peter wakes up to a blackbird’s claws,
Over blood-rust cities a black crow caws.
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Feathers fall down in covered eyes
Rips them open, ignores their cries
a raucous chorus of vows and tries.
I can tell you what daylight brings:
A cold dead air like diamond rings.
Peter fails that to which he clings
And you’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.
Asks without faith and gets quail like hell
Rises like a heron for show and tell
Lives and dies in a phoenix flame
With an upside-down cross to remember his name.
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Money turns ash by the souls he buys
A new stream bursts and an old one dries
And a crippled pelican finally flies.
Dead birds don’t own fears or kings,
It’s the lives ones that the serpent stings
Peter grieves but Jesus lives,
and we’re red eagles on what he gives.
Ian finished on a D minor, hovered over it to let me get the full effect, and finally lowered his guitar. We watched each other for a while. Then I sighed my surrender.
“Okay, Ian,” I said. “This time you win.”
Ian got up, took off the brown cardigan I had been wondering about. It was too hot in Ian’s apartment for cardigans. Beat me to the oven when the buzzer went.
“Peter grieves...” I said musingly, and Ian made a sort of imaginary movement towards his shield of a guitar. The score still stood pretty even between us, after all.
Uilleann Girl
“Look,” she said, pointing with a strangely childlike arm. “It’s laughing at you.”
He turned. The sun was hanging woundedly in the air, wavering and smudged like tears or watercolor. It did, indeed, look like a smiling mouth, and the red-tinted cloud above it like two eyes.
The sun set quickly, to the tune of the uilleann pipes that he played when she wasn’t paying attention. Her fiddle was waiting for her in its careless case, but she just sat on the stone wall over the sharp drop of rocks and green grass, watching where the rim of the sun still shone like a lip of neon blood.
“You know why, don’t you?” she said suddenly, when the sun had surrendered to the turn of the earth. He thought she looked distractingly like she was going to fall, balancing with her arms outstretched on the uneven stones.
“Be careful,” he said, going over to her. He had to be ready to catch her. “Why what?”
“Why the sun is laughing at you.” She danced away from him, teetering and twirling precariously. He leaned over the edge- heights scared him; he stayed away from the edge whenever he could, loving the view of the fields but hating the steep cruel half-cliff that let him see it- to remind himself that she must not fall.
“Why?” he asked, when it began to seem as if she wouldn’t explain.
She came over to him as unreasonably as she had gone.
“You think your pipes are a substitute for a voice.” She whirled around again; the ragged, uneven edges of her soft brown dress struck his arms as he reached out involuntarily to catch her.
“You think I will fall,” she added, jumping lightly down from the wall. She was barefoot. Perhaps that was why she could balance so easily. He looked at his stiff black shoes, and followed her.
Still careless, she took her fiddle; tuned it.
“You know?” she said. She always strung out conversations as long as it took for him to join, but he always took as long as he could. He nodded and joined her song. He didn’t have to look at her to see the familiar jerk and rock of her body as she moved with the music, but he watched anyways.
She walked over to the edge of the wall. It was dark in earnest now, and she was only a silhouette. He followed her. Wanted to watch her, guard her from falling. She stopped at the edge, and he came close enough to see her. Her brown hair fell over her face and caught in her eyelashes and lips. Her face was deep in shadows.
“Of course,” she said, leaning over the wall, still playing, “It’s laughing at me too.”
She sat down again on the edge of the wall, lilting out music. He played along so he wouldn’t be able to speak.
“For the same reasons,” she said.
Keats, September 1820
When I wake up, he is coughing into the sheets beside me. He sleeps- if sleeping it can be called, that agonizing roil of twisted sheets and stabbing pain. He sleeps through his tearing coughs, and I can read the end in the reams of paper ripped from his lungs. In smudged, imperfect typewritten letters I see the neat, businesslike scalpels coming to sever the final cords of flesh that hold his spirit to his body. I can close my eyes and bleed my tongue. I can circle his bony wrist with my hand in an effort to keep his soul.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
Thin and aching, the thought sings through my head like a stream of golden chemical, gently eating away at the soft tissues. He is going, he is going. Softly, softly, my mind turns to a bright lake of acid. At night, at his side, I can sleep myself into heedlessness, stroking his wasted head- bearing his children, growing old, dying beside him in bruising dreams.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
In the daytime, when he is not made vulnerable by his bare chest and dropped defenses, I can sleep myself into forgetfulness, walking quietly with him, talking as if nothing is wrong. Grey drops of mercury rain onto his mobile lips from the clear sky, and I can ignore it during the day, when he dresses in black, makes a hard, glossy black shell of life around himself. His palms leave black stains on everything he touches- on my hands, on my neck, on his fork, on the banisters. He is vital. He is black as ink. His teeth cling to daytime like a starving wolf, and I’ve always believed what he says.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
The morning comes like a crack of light, the only light that can show me how things really stand. Like the dawn of creation, an empty planet where clear vision is possible. The world from space, when the sun begins to cut it’s way out from behind the circle of planet. Death casts a fuzzy shadow across the curve of planet when the first breaking light of the sunrise snaps over the horizon. I turn my head on a pillow of choking feathers, brush clear my eyes, and look at him. His bare white skin. His chains of eyelashes. His black hair like needles in his scalp. His heavy, grey lips, parted raggedly over the words of death, imperfectly typed on thin white paper. I can close my eyes and cling to his living body and forget that the spirit inside is being severed into death.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
The Old, Acceptable Nature (Hourinthias)
Better Days, With Nothing To Blame On Youth
The air is cool and our smoke is curling up around this conversation we never meant to have. We haven’t been drinking, but we’re a little bit drunk on youth- it’s strong stuff. And it makes us move beyond our politics, past making caustic jokes, through wishing we could stop talking and just kiss. So, here we are, feeling immaculate and isolated. The cigarettes hardly help at all, now I think of it. If the world was a mountain, we’d be standing alone on the summit.
The stone wall is something good to hold onto, strong against our backs- concrete, earthbound. We are far out of our depth now, and we are afraid.
You ask first, but I admit that I was about to anyways. And I don’t even think to love how you look so puzzled that you’ve actually said it- I’ve never been so strangely detached.
Answers come slowly, but they come. Our words don’t float away like balloons, but tangle into the smoke and hang in the air, reluctant to go.
I say, “I’m not afraid of much. Just going home, and waking up, and finding out that the future doesn’t matter either,” and you say, “Sometimes I think it would be easiest to say I’m afraid of everything.” I guess I don’t really see the difference.
You say, “Half the time this feels like a wonderland, and the other half, as steady as hell.” I see the difference there.
I say, “I always said those things don’t matter. Does any of what we care about matter, either?” You flick your cigarette to the ground and shrug. That’s answer enough, no question.
The air is cool, and aside from the dead light of the streetlight and two little orange-red pinpoints on the ground, the night is dark. Any other time, you would have kissed me by now, but we went through that place like death valley.
You say, “Sometimes I wish it would always be as steady as hell.”
I say, “Yeah. This wonderland always turns out to be too much.”
We go back inside.
Intercede
So this morning I woke up, and that seems to be how I always start my stories. As if my life was made up of thousands of day-long stories. As if there was no continuation. I can get lost reading Sartre and it makes my whole day feel like something else, and the next day, not remember the faintest emotion. Anyways, this morning, I woke up, and I felt a story pulsing in my veins. That always seems to be how I live my life; a series of stories waiting waiting waiting to get out.