noise & silence: How the World was Made 6

Three more prose-poem

thangs

from the manuscript

How the World was Made.

Since I'm currently on the road,

here's three from the ghost

of roads past.

Grand Canyon: A Vision

I hit a traffic jam a couple miles out from the Desert View Visitor Center. When I finally reached the center’s parking lot, the car was overheating. I found a parking space, thinking I’d hang out for a while, let the car cool down. There was a cafeteria, a gift shop. And people, so many people. I wandered down to an old stone tower that had a view of the southern half of the canyon. The scene had no effect. I felt I was in a theater, watching a movie of the Grand Canyon. The only way I can be saying this is from deep inside a dream - how else?

Dejected – because of the car, because of the crowds – I sat down at the edge of the parking lot, about ten feet from an edge with no railing, beneath a dead tree. The bleached branches stretched out into space. A couple of families – obviously traveling together – stood about two feet from the edge, talking, laughing. The boys kept pretending to push each other over the edge. A girl that looked like she belonged to one of the families – eleven, twelve – stood near the tree, eating an ice cream, eyeing the boys with disgust. She eventually turned her back on them. You can see how all this was taking place inside a dream.

A raven landed on one of the branches above me, eyed the cone in the girl's hand, then lifted off – a huge pterodactyl shadow in the dust below – and floated over her head. The girl looked up at the bird, screamed, and fell backwards, towards the cliff edge. The raven plucked up what was left of the cone and flew off. The girl started to cry, hysterical. A mother ran up, comforted her. The boys smirked, inside the dream.

It was clear she wasn’t crying about the raven or the lost cone or the pain from the tumble. Even though she was at least ten feet away from the rim, I know that for a second, as she fell to the ground, she thought she was about to fly out into that vast space. Listening to the panic in her cries, I suddenly saw it, felt it – the fantastic terror of the drop. All my organs rose toward my throat, toward my own scream, and I knew that if I got up, ran towards the edge, threw myself over, I would fall for centuries, past the jagged levels of stone, exposed by floods 70 million years gone, to be reborn as a black feather resting in the eye socket of a mule skull.

(Previously published in Azure)

The Three Fates, San Francisco

He watches the valet pull his bags from the taxi, then lights a cigarette and stares at the brilliant chandelier lighting up the hotel lobby. His wife holds herself and says, “I thought it’d be warmer than this.” Red carpet unravels beneath their feet, through revolving glass doors, to the foot of the front desk. Across the street, up three floors, three wrinkled beige nylon panties hang off a fire escape grill, talking amongst themselves.

Night: A Vision

We drove for ten hours straight down 95, from Saugerties, New York, heading to Orlando. Mother believed Orlando was going to be a holy land of work: Disneyworld, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, Wet n’ Wild – and all those restaurants. I am telling you this from inside a dream.

Right before nightfall, in the middle of Georgia, we followed signs to a state campground off the highway, set up camp in the middle of a thick pine forest. No one else was there. Was there something wrong with the place? It made my sister, Linnie, nervous. She’d been obsessed with death ever since my father took off. Mother told her to stop being such a baby. Remember, I am telling you this from inside a dream.

When the sun set it was so dark we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. We had no flashlight. Mother and Linnie crawled into the tent. I was mad at Mother for scolding Linnie, so I continued to sit in the dark. Do you know the dark? Darkness out there was a creature that swallowed me whole. Crickets and cicadas boomed inside its stiflingly hot belly, a fierce wall of sound, louder than my rising panic. This is the dream. There was nothing else.

When you can’t see your own body, is it really there? Shapes came and went: men with ant heads and alligator skin; whispering bats with luminescent butterfly wings; the orange ash from my dead grandfather’s cigarette. I reached out with an arm that did not exist. Did I touch something? “Is someone there?” I said. I said it inside the dream.

The next morning, we woke, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, headed back to the highway. The car broke down in Jacksonville, so Jacksonville is where we ended up. Now, when I can’t sleep, I find myself at that campground, turning back as we pulled away, seeing my own body standing next to the picnic table. Some part of me was taken that night, enfolded into a vast body; fluid, amorphous, a black ocean with no shoreline…

(Previously Published in The Bitter Oleander)