Charlie Brice
Things That Come in Waves*I. X Rays, Gamma Rays, Microwaves, MRIs
How deep must we go-- past skin, past bone, past muscle? Descartes thought the soul resided in the Pineal gland. A pea-shaped bleb of light cleaves to something anterior, or caudle, or posterior. Eventually we are all read-out by someone in a white jacket we don’t know; a stranger who, between a sip of diet soda and a bite of peanut butter bread, counts the peaks and troughs-- calculates the dead. II. The Gravitational Harmonies of Deep Space We were never a beginning, only the other side of a collapsed star, black hole excreta; random whim of an indifferent singularity. The Big Bang: the next feature after a celestial intermission between a gazillion cosmic films, an astrocinematic ructus with no beginning, no final act. Only we end, eventually not even a mote bowered in some defunct god’s eye. Our son, his world, my wife’s hand, my myopic Everland. III. Sound That finds itself then gets lost finds itself becomes confused drops into splendid solitude. Goldberg Variation number twenty five deliquescent embryo come alive but barely so-- the question, will it survive, lingers throughout. Glenn Gould’s hum carries Bach’s song to its refulgent end. We strive to grasp its meaning. It eludes us now, then, and again. IV. Weather Fronts It can get so cold that your soul turns to frost like rime around a cocktail glass; so hot that your heart bakes your writhing lover’s back; so rainy that retted streets flow like the River Lethe, your essence a flood of melancholy; and the wind, the wind turns your wheat field pages like ancient sacred screeds caressed by cowl sleeves. Are you listening Heraclitus? Change was all you left us. *Titles taken from The Windward Shore: A Winter On The Great Lakes, by Jerry Dennis The Great TacticianThere you were naked
at the river’s edge, exhausted after your two day swim. Nausicaa stood over you when you awoke a smile of yearning and compassion on her soft lips. You thought she was beautiful and terrifying. You didn’t know whether to grab her knees and hope for mercy, or use your honeyed speech, beg some clothes, the direction into town. You chose words and she showed you a mercy that, had you paid attention, could have changed Western Civilization. Instead you ate her father’s food, tossed the discus around, impressed her brother and all the boys, but once back in Ithaca, you destroyed your enemies with a wrath that would have shamed Achilles. Your boy even hung their lovers, watched, with glee, their tiny feet dance to death. What of their pleas for mercy, Great Gamelegs? What of Nausicaa’s compassion, man of all occasions? You chose words and so did they, but your heart was cold with greatness. We could have had three thousand years of mercy. Instead your savagery endures: the glory of dead heroes piled one atop another and another. Chasing Jesus ☊Ohhhhhh Jeeeeesus, I’d yell,
and Zorba would redefine desire, reconfigure yearning, reconceptualize predation, and lose it in the way only a 95 pound white German Shepherd who thought that Jesus was a squirrel could. After “sit,” “come,” “stay,” and “down,” I’d taught him that the true vicar of Christ on this earth was a squirrel. Interrupting his wails and squeals at the door, his psalms of religious fervor, I’d imitate a southern Baptist preacher. “Do you believe?” I’d ask. “Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior?” “Yes!” he’d bark, “Hallelujah,” he’d cry. When his zeal reached launch-strength I’d let fly the door. He’d scream down our porch like a Comanche in those old racist westerns, or like fat Auntie Ursal when she caught me spying on her flesh-folds during her bath. Imagine a young squirrel as this white toothy blur blasts across the yard; a vision of massive jaws closing on its soft, crunchable, body. Imagine the shrill realization of being food. Even before terror, the squirrel brain transmits scram, guides it to the nearest tree where safety hides in tall branches. Their parents, who know this game, wait until the last second, then bolt up a sycamore leaving Zorba to dance, a squealing sparring partner, roping-a-dope for Jesus. He’d stand guard, like a soldier on Mount Olivet waiting to drive his sword home, although the Z man would never vinegar a wound. At night, when raccoons and skunks made it too dangerous to let him run untethered into our yard, I might yell “Oh Jesus” anyway, to test the verisimilitude of his faith. The Zorbster would run panicked circles round our living room, screaming and moaning, dog language for, there must be some way out of this house without relying on these human nitwits to open a door. Clearly he was hoping for a miracle, the parting of the walls, the dissolving of the windows, or visions of many Jesuses dashing around the house, on top of the bed, under the bed, in the bathroom, caught in the sink, ready to sacrifice themselves on the altar of his ferocious delight. But there were no miracles for Zorba, whose happiest moments were with us, wherever we were. Last week his great legs finally failed. His decline was swift. He still sought Jesus, but a viewing reduced him to a mournful howl, front paws painfully raising his kingly chest, then back down. He could do no more. His execution was scheduled for 3:30 in the afternoon. At 9 that morning he made it 20 feet down our walkway. “We can’t do this today,” I told my wife who, always more connected to reality, shook her head. At noon he soiled himself in our front yard, his sphincters deadened by his diseased spine. His desire to please puddled in shame, he turned away from us, the lake, and life. I held him when the doctor started the injection. He took it sitting up, too regal to lie down. I told him how much I loved him, and what a good dog he had been. He’d catch Jesus now, I said. I told him this and patted his soft white fur until he no longer felt my desperate touch. DaydreamThose cottonwoods were thrilling,
they danced like ballerinas, and sometimes went mad throwing their white blazon all over the city like furry confetti. “He daydreams,” my mother read aloud Sister Susanna’s terse and torrid critique. “What’s a daydream?” I asked. “It’s when you look out the window and stop listening in class,” my mother said. But the music I heard/ saw out that window: The Nutcracker Suite-- elephants scattered like leaves across the sky. Jesus jumped from his cross and chased Lazarus to life. Someone picked up the end of a river and found frogs reciting the Baltimore Catechism. Streets rolled up into concrete spirals like the toffee we bought in Jackson Hole. “Don’t daydream,” my mother said. Sister Susanna, so gray, read everything to us third graders out of a black book packed with prayers, pleas, and purposelessness. Out the window she danced like a sailor, wore a parakeet on her shoulder, a patch over one eye—Sister Long Joan Silver yelled, “Ahoy, matey,” and swilled gallons of rum while the St. Mary’s Marching Band played Mussorgsky, “The Great Gate of Kiev.” “Stop daydreaming,” my mother said. Comments? |
We'll All See God but Not with Our EyesWhat was Jim Harrison thinking
the day before Easter 2016, the day he died. He lay on his studio floor pen in hand. He’d been writing a poem when his chest closed. He believed, despite all evidence, in the resurrection. Was he thinking of Jesus, His blood spoor lancing the atmosphere as He ascended, or was Jim preoccupied with holding on as he fell through the upended sky, grasping souls of the Anasazi, not yet inured to the mud bath of death, or the nitwits he’d have to put up with in heaven? Was he thinking of Linda, his wife of fifty years, gone only months before, or of the many bears he knew, revered, and feared? Was he scratching the chin of a favorite birddog, maybe his hound Rose, whom he loved beyond expression? Maybe he had a vision of the rear-end of a waitress he knew in town, how she smelled, to him, of roast beef, potatoes, and gravy. Was he thinking of the meadowlarks, crows, kingfishers, and cowbirds who accompanied him on what he called “this bloody voyage?” And what of the pounds of pork roast, foie gras, and quail he ate-- the gallons of vodka shooters and Brouilly he drank, the packs of American Spirits, the brisket from Zingerman’s, buckets of tears shed over impulsively opened and consumed cans of Hormel Chili, or the Herculean effort expended on that famous thirty-seven course thirteen wine lunch he ate in France with a few cronies? Or maybe he finally became a bird, his lifelong ambition, and flew into that cloud he dreamed and shared with us. Put Them All Together (With Stage Directions) ☊(Sing to the melody of the soppy Irish song M-O-T-H-E-R)
M stands for the murderous feelings you had for my father, wishing him dead the day before he died from a heart attack. O stands for the ostracism you endured when, after you attacked me with a broom, I didn’t speak to you for a year in the eighties. T is for the trial you put me through when I brought Judy, my Jewish girlfriend, home to meet you and you bragged how you had “Jewed-down” Mexican merchants on a trip to Tijuana. H is for the humiliation I felt as you boasted to your friends that I wore “Husky” pants when I weighed 164 pounds in sixth grade and you didn’t think I was fat. E stands for the psychotic envy you displayed when, in your seventies, you proclaimed that you were “prettier” than me. R is for your favorite name for my father: “Rotten Son-of-a-Bitch,” which you called him when he was drunk and didn’t care. (stop singing) Put them all together and they spell … regret. They spell … I loved you anyway. They spell … I’m glad you’re out of your misery. They spell … it couldn’t have been otherwise. On Wealthy St. in Great RapidsI look at a window
that isn’t anymore, a plank of sun-bleached plywood where the pane should be; the weatherboard, splintered, worn by days of snow and sun, survives long after the sill’s decay. Judy couldn’t make this trip; pain weathers her body, arthritis in every joint—Crohn’s Disease. Thirty years ago her surgeon drew a circle three inches west and two inches south of her belly button—the spot where he’d construct her cherry tomato stoma. Every day of her life she attaches her ileostomy bag after cutting out the flange and carving flesh-colored glowworm strands of silky paste placed so to affix the pouch to her tummy. Sometimes Judy and I dance naked and wild around our bedroom. I say, I love you in your birthday suit. Judy says, My birthday suit plus one, worried that I don’t love that extra part clothed with a red flowered flannel cover, like one of her nighties. His Voice
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