Yes.

Less rain and more ice. It was November when we left.

Mmhmm.

There are fewer trees here too. A lot of open fields.

Silence.

Do you think anyone tried to follow us?

Shrug.

I guess they would have caught up by now. That helicopter, too. No one’s looking very hard. Which I guess is what we want but I’m still kind of surprised. Maybe they knew this is what we wanted. Maybe it’s okay.

Pause.

Or maybe we’ve just been lucky so far.

No response. The crunch of frozen ground underfoot.

Am I bothering you?

No.

Sometimes you’re so quiet I don’t know what you’re thinking.

Another shrug.

It’s easier to keep going if I have something else to focus on.

Keep talking then.

Only it wasn’t a dream and when I woke up there were bloodstains on the carpet where your face was turned but you were already gone.

Home, you said.

Really?

Yeah.

You want to go back?

With your chin on your knees in the shadows under the tall white trunks you looked smaller than you should. You picked up a stone and threw it far out over the hill toward the river where it soared for a moment and ticked off the rocks at the bottom.

No you said. I never want to go back.

The air had thawed in the sun and a flock of starlings followed us through a dead cornfield thatched with sagging telephone wires. Above the crisscrossing lines they sang in a swirling vortex the sound of their wings like propellors, their flitting shadows a trembling patchwork over the till of the earth. In the mud the corrugated tracks of some machine had trapped puddles of rainwater and within these the birds circled and the white clouds soared in the looking glass sky. A window to the underground world, rippled by the occasional wind.

By the rusted hull of a pickup truck in the shade of naked elms you had taken off your coat and I sat on the slumping tailgate while you stripped a length of barbed wire from a fence post and wound it around your hand. The metal was brown and brittle and when you had enough you looped the wire around the post and gave it a turn over itself and tugged lightly and it snapped with a twang and the fence shivered loosely.

What’s that for, I asked.

Traps.

You tucked the coil into our pack and sat beside me on the squawking pickup bed. Overhead the starlings lighted on the black branches of the elms and filled the canopy with their quarrelsome calls.

November still, I said.

Yes.

It’s warm today.

Mm.

Warmer.

A quiet laugh cut short as you coughed into your fist. It took longer than usual for you to stop. I waited.

After a ragged breath you wiped your mouth with your sleeve and said Let’s go.

Crossing the last empty plain I watched your shoulders as the birds carpeted the field and feasted on insects surfaced by the rain. Our feet sank in the mud and lifted fragrances from the earth. Wet seedbeds and deeper roots still green. The smell of life waiting dormant beneath the guise of winter.

A world is made many colors by the sun. Under the sailing sky you were every color in perfect pointillism. Torn and patched and stitched with brighter shades underneath, a quilted impression of imagination unbound. When I wake at night in the antiseptic silence from the same vibrant dream I try without success to return to that unseasonably friendly day, the clouds like Alpine mountains caked in snow, the fields freckled with yellow sunlight. I can picture your muddied boots and the imprints slightly wider than mine, slightly farther apart. I can feel the give of the soil and the gentle pull of weeds. But I cannot see you in such color again.

The wind sharpened and the starlings veered and funneled up from the ground over the telephone wires and toward the woods to the east. It was three minutes or more before the last black wings danced past the trees and flickered out of sight. Gauzed in sudden silence the farmland darkened in the umbral reaches of a cloud. There was a dull pain spreading in my leg but I said nothing about it and we continued on into the wild gray woodland alone now save for the cotton white vapors following weightlessly above.

THE MIND IS A FRIGHTENING PLACE

It might have been a dream.
I remember many places
Only visited in sleep.
Houses, for instance
With windows wide and endless stairs,
Halls like mazes traveled somnambulant.
So you see, my memory is tainted.

Sometimes when I unlock the door
The lawn is underwater.
The cars float past,
The streets are downed with seaweed,
The trees wave their arms like monstrous anemones.
I hold my breath.
I am the imprint of a shell
Dusted out of a crude manmade hill.
Scientists found me
And picked me apart,
Studied the structure of my bones,
What I ate,
Where I slept,
How I lived.
There’s a lot you can guess from footprints.

Do I have honest eyes?
They shy away from speaking
And flutter along the ground like wounded birds.
I read somewhere that it means I’m lying.
I used to like watching television.
Now I prefer books.
At times I look out the window
And realize I’ve left the ground.
The house has unhinged itself
We’re rising into space.
Above the clouds the atmosphere
Is dark blue. The air is thin.
I hold my breath.
Gravity releases.
The room begins to spin.
I collapse on the ceiling
And the windows explode.

The end.

Then the Lord stretched out His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.”

- Holy Bible, Jeremiah 1: 9

Dear
God.

Once I thought I knew.
I thought that voice was You.
But now, who?

One very important question,
It’s not simple.
The answer won’t come easy
As two and two.

I am no prophet,
No Jeremiah, no saint.
(Hell, if you know me,
Then you know me through
And through.)

But let’s put it
Hypothetically.
If you knew me before
I grew,
Before I was born,
Before toes and fingers sprouted in stumps,
Before the bloody embryonic lump,
Before generations of generations of befores,
Before all of this and more,
Who was the me You knew?

Was it that you shaped and saw
My future in a crystal ball?
No, I don’t think you’d find that
Much surprising.
It’s the wording that troubles me.
“Knew.”
Were you my familiar then?
Did we chat comfortably like friends?
Will some forgotten memory
Of sacramental toast and tea
Return to me upon waking from this mortal sleep?

Irreverent,
Blasphemous though it seems,
I’m altogether honest.
The road to Mount Olympus is steep.
The world of the living
Feels less and less a dream.
At night the streetlights
Flicker red and green.
I stare out into empty fields
Where the rain sleeps in watches
And squats on heavy haunches
And laps up a quiet drink.
I stare and think
And pretend not to think.

You’ll keep a light on
In case I decide to come back in.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

- Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”

The wineskin lies deflated.
Once holy and precious sacrament,
Dead tissues now repose.

I ate my way out of your heart.

Your dried and shrunken ventricles
Closed up like purpled rosebuds,
Aorta curled and withered,
Paint-peelings of muscle membrane.
I could breathe a dandelion puff
And send you skittering away on the wind.

Your hands I cut off and kept in a jar.
Selfish as always, I wanted a guarantee
So I sit at the window and pretend
Warm blood still runs through them,
Pretend the rest of you still
Holds me.

But your face has gone.
Even in the photographs, blurred and faded
You vanish like a ghost.
I cannot recreate your chin,
Your nose,
The two slender lines on your forehead.

If we should meet again in brightest day,
And pass each other on the street,
I would not see you,
I would not know it was your face.

But still I look for you in every wretched place.

I used to write pretentiously.
In metred verse and poetry
And rapturous prose,
Commit these lines to memory:
The Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost. In haunted fields
I watched the white mist rise
Round rusted crooked fenceposts.
Now I stand long hours behind glass walls,
Watching trains glide toward unknown cities.
Trim and fast and pushing northward,
Or heavy boxcars ribbed with snow
Trundle slow as treacle along the steaming ties.

Oh how the world still turns
Despite our desperate lies.

On a sidewalk deep downtown
The cigarette haze of dirty jazz,
The impatient impetus of people moving fast
Stamping out the cold with bullet-hole boots.
Fluorescent caverns swallow up the stars.
Her beautiful midnight headdress
Forever stained yellow with artificial light.

Let me go down to the sea,
Or count the planks of a rotting pier
Beneath the winter’s shimmering bodies:
Orion’s belt; Polaris–the Lodestar,
Points of navigation withstood the test of time.
I sat down at the water’s edge
And with my feet soaked in the frozen drink
I watched the tides disappear into the east.