- Air So Lousy with it Everything’s Made Heavy-Thick, and: That Your August Sky Somehow Suddenly, and: Any Highway will Turn Out Night, and: That Flat Blue Plaster Sky Curves Us
Air So Lousy with it Everything’s Made Heavy-Thick
& dishearted we’ll turn down the news. Dishearted
by the rush of alongside & what is, whatwe’ll hear scorched & think scoured, here
swallowed, silted. Humbled we’ll corner-foldthose pages, map the measure it would take
to burn off all this too muchness. Fire has its ownidiom—its sentence turns, becomes another kind
of weather on our tongues. So, all this talkto buttress the palate against
some awful caving in. We’d rather the musicof loss quiet. If only a needle
after the album’s end. If onlya phone booth, that other era
overseas, a coin’s tinny drop. If beforeall sound rushes back
then every disaster we’ve known gathers upthat space in the static of if. As in, if the wind
turns. As in, if the rain holdsor if the bridge cannot. Then then
kicks up its storm in our chests leadenwhere dishearted didn’t begin but stays on. [End Page 111]
Because fi re season & then sputtered out,because gone under & all bears down,
called or not. Edges singed or wornthin or too saturated, because will run out
of names come winter. Because so many placeswe recognize or think that we do
until the river changes its mind. Orsixty years late & twelve miles from where
it crashed, the plane & its crew surface.That glaciered silence heaves off any grief
we might call mass grave, call memorialturned monument turned natural wonder. [End Page 112]
That Your August Sky Somehow Suddenly
held above us a light we’d nearly forgotten
—time moving as it does, all at once & notat all—as if to say Don’t worry, I’ve got this
covered. Now we’re taking turnspicking a word out of the clouds’
lettered hunt & peck. The streets were empty.The streets are still empty. There was a truck
pulling into town. There is another truckabout to pull away. That & the hands
want filling. But where to hook& dig in when even geology proves suddenly
the ground below our feet: the river meandersoff course, or to some ancient bedrock
only it knows, or disappears altogether & in its placethe double take & discord of tumbleweed, roots
shrugging off soil without a fight? Therewas a river we drove toward. The same river
we drive away from. There was an overflowingriver we carried home in bottles & now
there’s a river drying up. It is the same river ifthere can ever be. We know maps mostly
chart lies & necessary ones, lies of omission.We know we are telling the truth when we say [End Page 113]
that we carried the river over the riverthat we raised the river up out of the river
then crossed it over itselfthat we tied the river in a knot or we knotted
the river as best we could above our hips beforewading back out under that other August sky
in case we lost it for good. In case we couldn’tfind our way back. What we mean is both
rivers have the same name. What we mean is there issediment at the bottom of every story we might tell,
also called drift. What we mean is there wasspilled on the counter the same river we hung
on our walls. Drift: a continuous & slow movementor the deviation of a vessel from its course
as a result of currents. If the lassoed pull & tugof a thing so big is unimaginable, try it this way:
in the river was the river & the sky. The riverits own horizon, blueprint of seasons scaled never
to fit how we inch through nights mostlyalone, how we struggle to pin down, to say,
leave trace or traceable each drift—driftof daffodils, drift made seam, drift turned deposit
by retreating drift of glacier, even...