And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
this is a road you know
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
The one wiper makes a grating sound as it rakes across the windshield. The other wiper follows, but the car is out of washer fluid, so most of what you see is a smear.
a space and then a line
Daddy stops the car on a hill and drags you out of your sleep so that you can see the aurora, though you can’t quite make it out, because you are so cold, but as soon as you crawl back into the car and he starts driving again you look out the back window and the sky is on fire with green and blue light. It is the most fantastic moment of your young life, and you hug at Daddy’s neck from the backseat with tears in your eyes.
a space and then a line
There are tears without a thought to justify. The newspaper on the seat next to you shifts as you round a corner on the highway, and you move your hand over to slide it back into place, careful not to touch Trevor’s picture on the front page.
You remember a dream you had a few nights ago: you forget the kids at a campground play area – Jeremy in the little swing with the safety bar pulled down so that he cannot wiggle out, and Daphne at the picnic table draws on the back of a Chinese restaurant placemat with the only three crayons you can find for her.
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
On this road, Zack Turner decides to get into his little Isuzu truck after drinking three beers too many. His error might not be a problem, since he only lives down in the shallows. Halfway home, a big buck wanders across the yellow line, and the poor creature slides neatly up the hood through the windshield and takes most of Zack’s head off. The pair bleeds to death flailing around in a frantic survival dance.
You have an English degree that you pay for by working in a call center, activating cell phones. You might summarize your education in a few lines of verse. The summary might look like:
\a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens\
\two roads diverged in a yellow wood\
\And I will love you still, my Dear\
\Till all the seas go dry\
\I am in the lake\
\in the center\
\And not waving but drowning\
You might add how they dragged you from under the house to pick the worms off of you like sticky pearls, but by now you would be paraphrasing. If you were to go much further, the whole of it would delineate\devolve into conjecture, detritus, flotsam, hyperbole. That is the right word:
\hyperbole\ ~ n. an exaggeration too heavily borne
After the call center, there is the hospital laundry where you fill your senses with more wretched odours than one mind ought to manage. Trevor is an orderly who begins to bring meaning to your life. Then he is an author, but he cannot write. And then he is a pilot who is afraid of heights. So, he sinks all of his
\your\
money into the car you are driving. You pay for the car with a broken arm and a shattered orbital bone, and now you have to wear special corrective lenses to keep everything from blurring up – and you think how this is a metaphor. Somewhere between the hospital laundry, Trevor, the leaving him, there are children, but they are not yours.
In the newspaper, after Trevor’s picture, the first line is peculiar, very nearly obscure:
“Women who kill their children…”
a space and then a line
You are driving and cannot read at the same time. The cell phone under the newspaper vibrates. You ignore it. They are not even your children
\Trevor\ ~ n. a monumental mistake in judgment
Trevor points out their mother at the mall food court. She looks too stoned to notice you and too thin, too papery, to walk over to the children. She would probably not recognize them. You wonder if she would recognize herself. You wonder if Trevor did this to her, or whether she did it to herself. This is before he breaks your arm. You glance in the rear-view mirror and note that your face has changed since the surgery. Trevor is a mess. But the children, who somehow ended up with you, are unbearable. Jeremy is too young to speak, and because of the steady infusion of gin through the umbilical there is some question about what, if anything, he might be able to say. Daphne, unless heavily medicated, will not stop talking. She likes to recite things. As adamant as Ferlinghetti, as dialectic as Whitman.
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
Right now, you are driving the beige Dodge Charger that Trevor bought instead of paying his student loans. One wiper grates across the passenger side and leaves a smear. The other wiper is no better, but that has more to do with the precipitation, which is neither snow nor rain but some sticky wet muck that blurs the road enough to remind you of the feeling you have almost all of the time with Trevor. Well, not at first, because at first it is never like that. At first, it is like a red, red rose. At first, it is all infatuation and flutter. Only afterwards is it a blurred intensity that falls somewhere between hatred and addiction. An itch you can’t scratch. A cliché. But, the precipitation is a metaphor. No, the precipitation is pathetic fallacy. A portent of things to come. And even though it is April, there might still be snow.
You decide that Trevor should be blamed for so much of what is going on. But that would be superficial, and there is more to it than that. It begins with the red wheelbarrow and the little cottage where you first lived. This is where you are driving to, because sometimes to go the right way, it is necessary to go back to the beginning. And this is the road, the one Daddy used to drive, where the hills go up and down and up and down like a camel’s back, and where Mommy makes him stop the car one night and wake you up and pull you out of your fog to behold the northern lights. And this is a story Mommy tells you later, not something you can actually remember. But afterwards, every time you are on this road you think about the wavering green and blue of the aurora and wish that you remembered for real, not simply as an addendum tacked on to your memory. Something Mommy gave you. And because you were there, you have a sense that perhaps you should feel guilty for not remembering: like they both did so much for you, and why, oh why, do you insist on messing it up all of the time by forgetting all of the good things? After all, she tells you, and repeats it, there were many many good things. Iterations of good things. Momma gave you the logic to find the good things and nothing but. A simple function, really.
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
It is here on this road, two winters ago, that a snowstorm traps thirty-four cars. The army is called upon to rescue stranded drivers. The actual count is thirty-five, but one car leaves the road and is not discovered until spring. You wonder what it must have been like for the driver, the wind and snow slowly cocooning her, drifting her into the landscape. You think about the simple function of volition, a moment when she lets it happen rather than fighting her way to the road for help. Perhaps she decides that sitting in the car is better than anything. You are awed at what it must have been like waiting for the cold to rid her of all the heavy burdens of life. In the newspaper, you read that she is older, retired, living alone, not missed by anyone but a cat, who also perishes while waiting for her return. Four months before anyone notices. A simple function of volition, perhaps a moment filled with deep euphoria as she realizes that soon she will be clothed in white, a phoenix, a butterfly, a metaphor for angel – something better than human.
You have a vision of yourself with the children, the ones who belong to Trevor. The camping is tense, but the children enjoy marshmallows and hot chocolate. In the morning, you pack the car to leave, and in the rear-view, Daphne is at the picnic table with the three crayons that have not melted in the sun the day before, and Jeremy is in the swing with the safety bar slid right down the chain to keep him there, and you feel compelled to leave them and cannot stop the car to
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
Life is like a road that way. A simile poorly placed. The tires hum, all tires hum, and it doesn’t matter if they are cheap or fancy: volition chooses whether you will hum along or sing a different song.
a space and then a line
Ahead on the road is a sign you recognize, and you know it without having to read it. You cannot actually remember ever reading it. A sign you have noted since before you had words. The sign contains a hieroglyph that designates home. It is a demarcation. And you have never called it Avery Road or the old concession road as locals call it. For you, it is the cottage road and this is the exit that takes you there.
\there\ ~ adv. referent for the geography where the uncle man touches you for the
first time, and ever after without letting go
The cottage road winds away from the beach, back up into the trees, where there are other cottages before it winds around to the other side of the lake. The uncle man lives back there, but you have never been to his house. He always comes to yours, chats with Mommy and Daddy, eats at the table, helps with the dishes. And while Mommy and Daddy go out to the movies, the uncle man walks you into the yard and sits you in the long grass and does the things he has to do while you listen to the redwing-blackbirds mew and caw in the cattails. He is not really a relation, but it doesn’t matter, really.
a space and then a line
The cottage road delineates down to the beach, but it also slopes up to a rocky outcropping where there is room for a dozen cars to park before the ledge falls sharply down to the lake. When you are small, you watch the teenagers park their cars up there and jump from the rocks to the water. You ask Mommy if you are allowed up there, but she tells you no. And you are twelve the first time you jump from the rocks, and Mommy is nowhere around. The driver is eighteen, the brother of a friend. Just being here is great and you are filled with euphoria. But the feeling passes when the rest of the teenagers leave or walk home, and you are a little afraid, but he sits you up on the hood and calls you pretty, brushes your hair back with sandy fingers, touches your cheek, and it is the last time you feel this way. You watch the sky blaze red and purple.
a space and then a line
And you check in the rear-view, but you cannot see the children, and you would like to say that it is tears obstructing your vision, but it is something rather more indeterminate. You see the scar on your face that still blisters red from where surgeons rebuilt the bone. There is still something missing along the cheek, across the thin lips, and the sad eyes. You think that that thing has been absent for a very much longer time.
a space and then a line
The sour weather will not let up, and the sky will not clear. The only thing holding you on the rocky outcrop is the parking brake, and it will take just a small function of volition to
a space and then a line
Torsion fracture. You say it in your mind and enjoy the cacophony. Trevor wrenches your arm behind your back and palms the back of your head; the wall comes rushing toward you, and for a moment you have time to wonder if you will hit the wall frame – the stud – or the soft drywall space in between, whether you will stop here in the kitchen or break right through to where Daphne and Jeremy are parked in front of the television, oblivious.
a space and then a line
In the long grass, you wonder what a trash it would be if each cattail ended at a cat waiting to pounce, each tiny bird marked with a little red target on each wing. The uncle man, with his eyes red from crying, he would not be safe from the cats and their claws. With each swish of the tail, each swish of his tail, you wish for cats and claws, scabbards and swords. You stare more deeply into the grass and try to forget each swish of the tail. Two words for victim:
\quarry\ v. to dig, related to stone
n. prey (homophone for supplications)
\supplication\ makes you think of sublimation – something else entirely.
a space and then a line
Beside you on the passenger seat is a newspaper. You read about Trevor; the story is appalling. There are loose sheets of paper here too, printed from the internet, and a copy of the story you sent to the uncle man’s daughter – you remember her, older than you, one of the teenagers; you were never friends
her cold empty eyes
a space and then a line
you check the rear-view but can’t find your eyes in the blur
The cell phone rings again and when you glance down, Trevor grins up at you from the newspaper, and for a moment you believe he is calling you. He is only a picture, a connection of dots in the newspaper, so you ignore the call again.
Something stirs behind you, and you think that it cannot be so, that the cherry-flavoured cough syrup has worn off so easily. You were so certain they would both sleep through.
The tall grass: a cunning place to hide. You can pretend to be innocuous, or even beautiful, the darker reality stolen by the blaze of blue and green light. The uncle man speaks softly as though telling secrets, but none of his words exist in memory; the sound of his voice is a hieroglyph signifying something else entirely.
Here is the place on the road where Trevor laughs at you, undoes his seatbelt, and steps out of the car while it is still moving. You have to slide over to the driver’s side and stomp on the brake. You turn the car around, rush back, screaming, panicked, certain he has died. He laughs at you again, punches you in the head to force you over to the passenger seat.
a space and then a line
a space and then a line
There is a necessary logic to justify your presence here. The words will not equate properly and you think you may have made a syntax error.
\Sin\tax\ ~ n. the price you pay for being wrong
You think that you have been wrong for a long time. You were born wrong, raised wrong, and all of the rest. The words are not enough.
\tax\ ~ n. measured in numbers, percentages
Language leaves for something more symbolic. Through the blur you can only make sense in small dialectic bursts. You might summarize thus:
\let x stand for Trevor\
\and y is the exponent signifying uncle man\
\consider x to the power of y\
\the multiplicand N can stand for anyone who pounded you against the hood of a car and treated every part of you below and above your crotch as insignificant\
\therefore, Nxy\
You must also add the two in the backseat, the two who are not your issue, the two who are strapped in safe as produce
\issue\ v. to come out of
\produce\ v. to create
irony
strapped in safe as produce so to minimize bruising
the number \2\ is somewhat imaginary since they do not belong to you
a magic number
a magic word like \yes\ or \no\
two who are the
yes\no
on\off
i\o
both binary values at the same time
You touch the newspaper on the seat next to you, the one with the picture of Trevor on the front page.
Nxy + 2 = It has to amount to something. There must me another side to the equation: the logic, which adds up to your existence here, the carpe diem\cogito ergo sum\tabula rasa\Descartes\Rousseau\Trevor
Let P stand for the logic behind your existence here
The argument to make everything significant
But you forgot something which suddenly occurs to you:
The English degree must be included somewhere because you paid for it, and you did all of that work, because having a degree translates to something
And degree might be indicated with a small superscripted O just beside the P
\Po\
or perhaps \P.O.\ which indicates:
\post office\ ~ n. where deliveries are made
or
\purchase order\ ~ n. the price you pay
\sin\tax\ = \purchase order\ and the equation has found both sides, it is whole
the logic somehow infinite and perfect
You touch the line on your cheek, trace the space it occupies
Something flashes in the rear-view: An alternative you had not considered
There are police cars pulling in behind you and men running across the rocky outcrop coming toward the car. Quickly, you lean over the steering wheel and twist the key in the ignition.
/a simple function/
You lock the windows, and slide the shifter from P(ark) to N(eutral) and feel the rolling, forward
\And sorry I could not travel both\
\And be one traveller\
Softly, you countdown beginning with (5)
\five because it will not be long\
\softly because your voice is hoarse from telling it\