This Clumsy Living

My iron age

31 My iron age The fallen redbud covered in lichen reminds me of failure, liken lichen to rust, a parasite, symbiosis, I am missing Woodhaven, River Rouge, cities of steel plants, car plants, I am missing the twentieth century. Something in industrial man wants a smokestack on Paris Mountain, the air pinked, pollution prettied, man of the gewgaw, compressor, man of two front doors every five seconds from the Schuler A transfer press, the viral nature of making, pathogen of leather seats, cupholders, headroom, as if desire is a material and not a spiritual calamity, as if calamity isn’t a substitution for the variable x. Desire is a spiritual x. Solving for x, my wanting the redbud to be alive is my wanting my eyes to go out next April and land on a bright patch of air, a place of rest, for wanting to rest, where wanting becomes having, having becomes floating, floating (like words in parentheses, like whispers of pillows before sleep) . . . I can’t finish that sentence, I am not 32 any deeper into my life than I am, into sense than confusion. This has become an enjoyable experience, arriving at that place in, moment of mind, where I touch, with words, a shape beyond which there are no words, like trying to see my face in the mirror of night. I am this far: in this place of green making, factory of cedar and vulture, it’s unavoidable to ask how our making went wrong, if it did, are we meant (is anyone, anything meant, telos, I can’t get there yet, I will never get there, that place in the mind where you see God blink) to be wild and not know it, to miss that language isn’t enough, the word a feral thing, a knife separating out, is mind fever, should we give birth to five billion plastic cups, enough staples to hold the air down from here to the Sea of Tranquility, to keep the moon from getting away, and not regret but burn? I am this far: I miss the dying factories of my childhood as seen from highways in Michigan, 33 from walks along abandoned veins of trainpaths, their few windows pupiled by rocks thrown for the smash, the rain music of glass, I pried, dug my way in, prowled among the shoulders of abandoned presses, conveyors shuttling rats, always looking for the personal which marked the procedural, picture of a wife kissing a boat named Betty Lou taped to a girder, the woman wearing a dress from the sixties, hair a blond pagoda, she was likely dead long before I looked into her eyes, the color of grease by the time I met them, color of a way of life. And here is my incognita: am I more interested in death than life, after is the longer span, after is unknown as before was a mystery, they join in what we can’t say of them, in the place of guesswork, whatever eternity is it isn’t this, isn’t me, is husk, maybe I like missing most of all, the cicada shell, my favorite thing was a maple that had grown up through a wheel, I thought of the tree as a finger and the wheel a wedding ring, the wheel 34 pinched the tree by the time I met this marriage, the fit gone wrong. ...