Recall ridges lined to the horizon with barbarians who favor pastel colors. Headbands and silk shirts and jewelry of the sort that makes people’s mouths water. But serves only to weigh down the wearer so that he doesn’t float away. The heavy stuff. The gold that comes from the bottom of the sea. Talk about your difficulties in extraction! The value of aimless travel lies in its tendency to deceive. To make one remember the marble quarries fondly, the work there something not without its glamour. It’s a wonder, though, we don’t just fall over dead as soon as we’re back on the surface. Smoking, incinerated -- just a pile of bones beside the stroganoff. And the faux crystal glasses. My guess is the body doesn’t react to the elements -- rain and thunder and oxygen -- the way it has been explained to us in the textbooks. Rather, it follows its own line of reasoning. One that is no more open to our understanding than is the origins of the moons of Jupiter. Or the thought processes of the limpet clinging to its mossy rock.

The Root of Our Word Vespers

The story makes its rounds at the VFW, salting conversations that might otherwise center on how to spend money you don’t have. Or why aluminum behaves in such predictable ways. It is a point of pride with anybody in that part of the city that they are not made of the same substance we are. They are more creative by virtue of the humiliations they must endure. But does that mean we are supposed to just sit and molder because the rain is the very worst thing we have to deal with for whole months at a time? Because there are no polar bears unless they got loose from the carnival? No sand fleas so enormous they can be expected to drain the little ones dry in a matter of hours? Up the road, they have a center for experimental psychiatry that is painted pink because its director believes divorce is a byproduct of the industrial colors favored by our parents. By people still arguing about who is going to purchase the shoes and who is going to call emergency services when a pine tree comes crashing through the roof. Again. All of which suggests habit is meaning enough. Once we start doing something a certain way, there is no reason to change it. Unless we desire change for its own sake. A thirst akin to that for speedboat racing. Or insulting people you don’t know just as soon as you meet them. Our phone books, though, are another matter altogether. We run our hands over their pages with all the angst and regret one ordinarily reserves for the lid of a coffin.

Epic of the Insomniac

We know the details because we’ve been paying attention. To the obit pages. To the Readers’ Digest. The cabinet sits in thirteen pieces, not all of them the same size or color. Which indicates it is not intended for everyday use. But rather to throw off whichever pursuers we dreamt about when the wine was chalky. Oh, they will know this is coming! But what’s to stop the fountain once it has begun? What’s to keep the garden shears in their drawer after the lights go out and the dogs start barking in unison? It’s as if we have an inkling ahead of time of our rivalries, our difficult decisions and what goes into them, the way turmeric goes into the bouillabaisse. But as for the rest -- those who balance the pencils on the end of their shoes as a parlor trick, those who decry such performances as buffoonish and cruel -- they will remain exactly where they were before this day ever rolled around. Which is to say on their backs in some fashion. Whispering to folks who haven’t been seen in years. Who exist primarily to remind us that the highways and access roads don’t wander close to streams for no reason. They are there to allow the teenagers to play their fervent games. All in the vicinity of the box elders. And the power lines mumbling their incontestable lessons overhead.

Copyright © Charles Freeland, 2007.

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