Insomnia Diary

Radical neck

Radical neck A match beaten by frail wind lights the cave of his hands, lines that jump like the ibex of Cosquer in the rippling glow of a torch, the hunting-magic of vanished men. Smoke weaves through his lungs into blood, ghost of plants, of the earth returning to his body. One Camel down, nineteen to go. Another image: on the train to St. Louis when windows still opened: when men wore hats like boys now aspire to tattoos: one hand on his hip, the other swinging a smoke back and forth, a small rhythm falling inside the generous rhythm of the train. He turned and smiled at my mother, pointed to a red barn falling down, being absorbed by the horizon. He stood almost the whole way, giving his glance to the distance, and returned to our seats larger, puffed as if he’d become part of land’s green wish. —— “The skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” —— Always the question of how to address the dead. Dear sir. Beloved though rotted man.You who dwell in the scented couch, fabric of walls. Yet my father remains exact in what he says,  each communiqué encoded in action, something he did, as if he returns through what I recall. Visitations, translucent frames, his arms arcing toward a block of wood, the ax bold in appetite: the bow his hands made tying shoes, always left then right, a celestial order: wrist-snap of Zippo top, the crisp click into place like the settling of doubt, his fingerprints on the metal case proof he’d mastered the prophecy of fire. His advantage: forever happy in these things: or precisely morose: or bent toward a river’s “slow and mileconsuming clatter” with a face washed of need or edge, the only moment I saw him absolved of himself. A crystal will only form around a speck, an imperfection: in a rush a world arises, encloses, becomes. Like this he comforts, intrudes, a twin voice in a restaurant invokes his face, then slides his laugh and fetid breath into place, and for a second nothing lives that isn’t him: I’ve no recourse but to pursue: yet he’s done with me. —— Radical neck: dissection and removal of jaw, lymph nodes, tongue.  At theVA they called them half-heads, chop-blocks. I visited intending to stare like a child, to covet his words, by then muted by phlegm, the esophageal churnings of an aborted throat. But I looked in bursts, seconds before I’d turn toWilliams Pond or the far copse of alders, hoping wind was caught in the water, in the hair of trees, that robin or rose would hover as excuse, a glory requiring my eyes. No one came close, even staff strayed until it was time to wheel him in. All the while he smoked, plumes escaping the tube, all love given that pursuit, a reflex gone deeper than life. —— As a child I loved the smoke because it adored him, clung to, stroked his face, filled theValiant with an animal made of endless shapes. And the packs themselves, smell of tobacco new, unlit, the music Raleigh, Chesterfield, Lark, ashtrays shaped as Buddhas, crowns and spaceships. The cough was always there, his second voice, and when wasn’t someone asking him to stop, my mother, then me, then doctors holding his clubbed fingers, explaining a man shouldn’t pass out getting dressed.The smoke clung, became his skin.When asked what I wanted done I said burn him, make him ash: my revenge: his only wish.  ...