I don’t want to go into the jungle where things are orderly, prefer piecemeal seething glances and rough tongues trained into mad domesticity. Not no ordinary jungle animal, I prefer the town home jaguar with a nice suit bursting silently out his eyes, lisping
he’s like
she likes
the hunter bobbing for apples in the dead summer heat.
The other day walking I saw a regal mountain goat with a beard perched upon his haunches and surveying his kingdom. What nonsense flies through my mind to see such a familiar sight in such an out of the way place. A friend!
I said, “Oh, man, my man, you’ve stood so long, so silent in this poise. Your hooves so entrenched I see no movement. You’ve not moved. We could have known each other better if we did not know each other so well. I see what you see reflected across this city onto you. It may be on me for this feeling, call it nostalgia for our sake.”
His pause was concerning. I was on the point of continuing on, miffed, when he said quite austerely, “You must see the fire, then. It’s been burning for years around nipping buds. It’s making its way down and will soon hit Broadway and from there it will ravage. It will move up the avenues, clearly. But you must know it was merely one of those things, merely a look askance which started it all. Set it so. And I’m sorry! I’m so very sorry.”
And here it became more frantic and I must admit I felt put upon and confused.
He continued.
“Try as I might to, but can’t. I’ve been watching, yet. I’ve been waiting for the slow burn instead of the quick incineration, but all there was to move is my pyre and this coat, this frame, ahh…I couldn’t bear for it to burn on such short notice, after such long consideration. I had to look elsewhere, you understand, and not at my feet because I knew it’d be too hard to stand a move when the heat became unbearable.”
I told him after such histrionics to calm down, no such blaze would ignite nobody’s brow and nobody such being as such could be themselves a walking testimony to desirous hell, to which he replied, “Nobody just walks here but dreams me and this speech is down there. You even know. This is obvious, since you came here and found me, still. Let’s not be so childish.”
And what do I say always after merely wishing for landmarks along this way other than that they would not speak thusly and with such photogenic perspective.
I asked him, baby, will you buy me a hippo someday? There have got to be others like Jessica on the internet that sit with their maw gaping, so cute, like me, and so hungry, like me. And I opened my mouth and flapped my jaw a little, coy and snappy, like I learned in pictures and other places as befit a lady. Look at her! If you haven’t seen, then watch. This’ll be brief, or at the very least, entertaining.
Afterwards, he said hippos were fierce creatures with sharp teeth and territorial to boot- nothing to keep as a pet where in the smaller hours they’d be big in the house, tromping along and no. So, no. And besides, then some other reasons about impracticality and mandibles and death and competition with different and (I’ll grant) more suitable house pets. And money is an issue most of the time and when it won’t be, to buy a woman a hippo would be to make a sugar baby out of her, a prostitute with a hippo, and there was that thing to be considered, the investment kind, you know.
I told him, hurt through the haunches, it’s not a question of a hippo, sweet man, but will we someday do something not now but later. It’s a measure of time, not girth. Of silly promises and serious beasts down the road to be dealt and cared for beyond measures of physicality or finances. She told him, it’s not a real question, doll of mine, lover under covers, but a hippo. A hippo, in this context, is not a question, it’s a promise of illusion and besides.
He took one look and rolled away, and a big, weighty silence, then. So a hippo, indeed, all heft, so void, and a great expanse of wilderness.
Really it was not what we were expecting when we asked all that of him. Summertime is always an odd place in the desert, hot heads and general lethargic-come-hither-and-dither about believing. I don’t know. We all didn’t know what he was thinking, except that when he was jumping the fence to the pool we figured very little and whatever not thinking very much, but blood marrow faith and we were all jumping the fence and so it went that when he hesitated and said it wasn’t a good idea we all berated him for being less than promised.
Because, we’d heard “six days a week,” “7 minute miles,” “double shaker,” “man-about-town,” and “more than the number given.” At some point, read hundred page attestations, witnessed first-hand feats of vague bravery involving kindness in the face of ridicule, resurrection morning after, smelled bitters and amaros triangulated across the body and no trace of leavening upon his breath. Also, saw “lithe,” “nimble,” “fortunate” written in modern day counterparts to entrails and tea leaves. Spittle, hearsay, and muscle mass.
Perhaps that’s why when he turned, we insisted, he fell, and the spire punctured his throat, we screamed, then prayed. Someone said that it’d be proper to wipe his brow, so then we wiped his feet though they dangled far above our heads. Our man laid out, we vowed never to trust in the palms of our feet nor cross a bar above our shoulders.
I didn’t feel like it at the time, but you know how it goes you say something sometimes and there’s nothing to it but to stick with it no matter what the outcome or how it strikes people. It’s one thing to be unreasonable but another to be considered ridiculous when it comes to saying something and doing another. Look I told her sometimes situations like these just grow into themselves. Even if it hurts at first really it can still come to be a very nice thing because you know I wouldn’t lie to you even if it would save my life.
Consistency, an old lady told me at the grocery store when I was little, was what anybody ever wanted. I liked how her teeth stacked in her mouth and it seemed like evidence that she knew from first-hand experience, her being older and wiser and all, that she knew what she was talking about. And I’m not one for analogues because they get things confused and that is bad but there’s something about a good set of teeth because it’s like something for your words to get over. They’ve got to be strong words, right words.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no chump that says something like I like someone’s teeth and then Bam, that’s that. They are right. I never said I would think someone was right just because they had good teeth. I think and I can discern one thing from another. My teeth aren’t the best. It’s nothing to make a fuss over, honestly.
Anyways, that little old lady, I owe her and her chompers one. From the second I walked out of that store I could tell that my life was going to be hard but free from lies. I looked at the doors to the parking lot and I said “These will open and I will walk out” and I did. I said it and I did it.
I said it again to her too standing by the side door but that wasn’t so good or as good actually because she had her glasses off and her bare feet one on top of the other for the cold of the floor. It wasn’t her fault, it was the heat of a moment where a tongue sets to wagging, but in the end she’ll see that it was best that I did it because she wouldn’t be able to trust me at all in the future if I hadn’t. What would have happened if I didn’t love her when I said I did? I’ll never cross a word. I think she knows that. This isn’t any different. Like I said to her it’s always better to be trusted and leave when you say you’re going to than stay and be known as unreliable and unstable. I’d rather be stubborn than unstable because there is nothing else for it in this world than to be there for someone support-ways.
There is no band, or will be no band
where we are heading in disguises
A few surmises and a glance.
It takes a tear in the fabric of over there
For the glare of the T.V. to bring us to a hill,
A tangle of blankets and a mound of bodies,
A hyperreal state, a stare, and too quiet question:
“What is going on?”
“In the movie or here?”
“Either will do.”
There is little to be done as we watch ourselves
amidst and between glass and sheets when
These are our limbs and someone else’s life
reflected once and refracted infinitely;
The mote in someone else’s eye.
“Wait, what is going on?”
“Here, or in the movie?”
Neither will do but out there
Where on a hill they have our song,
But there is no band, and will be no band.
Dear Mildred Rodgers,
We were in bed one late, drunk night. I don’t know if you remember, but I asked if you would miss me, to which you relied, “In all honesty, no. It will be a great weight off my shoulders.” And I lay stunned, cowed, etc. Then you said, “What are you thihnking? Of course I will. You ask the strangest questions. Will you miss my cold house?”
And I said, quite frankly, “Yes,” but let me amend my response.
Last night I was in a drafty old farm house worked with polished wood and smoke. I sat in the kitchen drinking stewed wine and instant coffee with people dying. The wood stove made the room cozy and rosy and intimate, heavy almost with feelings of self-aware tragedy. It was late, three in the morning, perhaps, when I stood up from the table and announced that I’d be off to bed.
In the cold hallway, fumbling through passages and forgoing light, I could see my breath. It stuck to the windows. It stuck to the sheen of wood along the door frames, and I wiped it off with my hands.
I thought of your question and that frigid, drunken huddling. I thought yes, I’d still say yes, only now I’d realize that yours was a cold I could always leave if I only opened the door. But who wants to open the door?
Love Always,
Philip Carey
It was Independence Day when she brought to shore wreaths of wilted flowers from the bodies of men drowned in small, water-logged skiffs at sea. They’d celebrated too early and accepted gifts too early at sea, from the sea. Anemones, plankton, nudibranchs, and man-of-wars. She brought them between teeth like tiny arrows. She said, “Some said it was Independence Day and these dead men, their bodies, god bless their souls, but perhaps their bodies, too, had bubbles once, so some said to bring them to you.” These men and their flowers fell at our feet as we rose in a common cheer.
I’d heard from second-hand sources of this new development, or not a development, but a vow stemming from a memory. This latter interpretation was given over to me by numerous sources, all of which were not entirely credible, but by their sheer number seemed to indicate a general impression, a mood or feeling attached to such actions as manifest during non-developments, from promises made and rendered by one person to themselves which may indicate a change, but may also intend a barricade.
What happened was that seemingly on a whim, but probably on a memory, he took to insisting that he would neither speak first nor respond to anyone unless he had raised his hand and been called upon, “quite like in grade school.”
While I was not present for the all too familiar situation in which he began this endeavor, I do know that he had been talking rather vibrantly about this, that, and the other with an intimate but large group of friends around a mid-April barbeque, when suddenly someone noticed that he had been holding a small, grimy bird shell, cracked open and crusty around the edges. When asked quite cheerfully what he had got there, he immediately broke off his chatter and fell into a deep, frowning silence. Then, he held up the egg and with a look of “unfounded” and “defiant” and “innocent” anger he stated that even though it was Spring, he had neither found any official eggs, nor enjoyed the hunt. In fact, he was quite sure that an egg was a point to be missed and dismissed. And then, “quite disconnectedly,” he announced that he would not utter another word unless he raised his hand and was called upon.
This proclamation was greeted with amusement and delight, yet as the years go on, also with an amount of consternation. To this day, many people have said how they either try to make him speak before raising his hand or wait with increasing exasperation as they watch themselves, like in a dream, ask that he feel compelled to ask to speak.
In Pamuk’s Snow, he recounts how the difference between Love and the Agony of Waiting is slight indeed. Both cause you to throw yourself on the bed with pains emanating first from the stomach, then throughout the spine, and finally to the soul. Both make time stand still and (for those who Love and are Waiting) become the moribund mallet of the object. Both make quiet moments seem supreme, yet superficial. A million memories, a million conversations, may arise that vaguely or never happened. Distractions are put into place almost as a saving grace, which in more optimal and functional times are acknowledged and sincerely lauded for their shitbaggery, rather than their cloaking nature. An element of humor is present in the Love and the Agony of Waiting that make both unbearable.
Really, I think the difference is something far more simple: One may wait for Love as a concept or they may wait for Waiting and Wanting and A-Paining. But one just downright feels more hopeful in the former rather than the latter.
It’s a matter of word choice that I have yet to settle.
