This piece was abandoned in Sept. 2009 as then a part of a proposed book called Pieces of Apocalypse that began and ended with this one text. I was reading Blake Butler at the time (still am), so you can see shades of him in it. I was also high on Shane Jones (still am), and so you can see him in there too. And while this story (fragment?) in places rings of my own phrasing and vocabulary, it is clearly my attempt to be someone I am not. This is a constant struggle, staying true to what I write no matter the viability of a final manuscript, no matter how tight the audience might be. I call it artistic integrity, but it is perhaps only well-masked stupidity.
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Birds on a soaked lawn, pecking heads down, holing grass. Dust prayers. Wormless, bead eyes and dark cloud rolls, sky fat, rain hanging down.
Sunny days coming over the lip of his ocean, a boat of dining-room chairs, his head of woven skin.
The dead eyes of a cat swollen to a pantry ceiling. Bloated slow mumbles from shelf to dark. Flashlight in his teeth, hands pruned. Head grazing the wide blades of a stopped fan, pull chain a floating spider, a question on his skin like How much rain can we make? The wet pages of a dictionary. Shreds of words. Particles. Points of light. Nonsense in a beam. Facsimile of sun. Carpet made to seaweed, the shaken stirred bottom. The bubbles that gurgle out in this: fuck, fuck, fuck. Dolphin legs and slip-stream arms, tight dimming tomorrow. The black of water, the black of raining sky. Ocean. Water into water, silver reflections, battery eyes on stripping open floor. Counting out stars. The rain will shed him from this roof, the stars all blackened and swelled-shut eyes, speaking to him in records gone static.
When the squirrels all started avoiding the ground, the yard, taking to trees, he should have thought about what it would be like to forever float, to rest on his back until he couldn’t tell the sky from the water holding him up, and then turning over to face down would have been like rolling in a quiet bed, slipping a leg out of sheets and breathing, until his lungs turned were water-balloons, no arms to throw.
A dead man in a boat, upright in a straight-back chair, he doesn’t move his mouth. The things he isn’t saying, they echo across stretches of water. The world is made of water. The human body is made of water. Water is all water. These as answers to unasked questions. The pelting of rain, a constancy of droplets. Shoulders hunched and the dead man’s head tilted, throat funneling rain-water down and out a hole in his chest. Dead man as fountain, dead man as sieve.
The tops of trees are only visible. Boats across the water. Children swinging in leftover branches, their arms are rope. Monkey faces and pissing over the curtain of a boat, boy urine to water and words: get all of you back on the fucking boat. And then no cannonball because the dead float, willed toward and by, how it goes. Face down their shirts soaked in water. Face up their eyes sometimes open and filling with miniature lakes, rivers down their temples, the children howling and their teeth useless fangs, toe-touching back onto a father’s boat, watching men and women go like lumber, down a world that is all water.
If there was a wish, it would be to see fish dying in un-soaked rhythms on dry wood docks, the ocean below them sucked out, dried up and the earth made into cracked mustard seeds. If there was a wish it would be for an oar to steer it all straight and with more hands to row. If there was a wish it would be that this sail above them was only dreaming and the white was sun-scattered heat punching through window glass, and the roar of motors wasn’t pirates coming to eat their throats open and lash other shapes to their own, gasoline rainbows and making of them a watery dead-man platform.
When trees had ground to hold he laid on grass pillows, read books with his shoes off, and the sunshine curled his eyelids closed and he dreamt of stopping elephants with the palm of his hand, a dust combing through his hair, a blackened men to his left and right, guiding him through motions, a jeep running loudly and the brush as tall as his hat.
The rain comes and doesn’t stop. Water lashing his back, the whip of blood, of knowing. How it is to never have existed, always wobbling on water-legs and never planting. When their were roots that felt like living. An ocean infinitum.
Tracers of deer hurdling through his yard, past his windows. Tan hides screaming, tearing wet leaves from lilacs. Animals and rain pinned to trees, birds exhausted, insects gone underground or washed out, their tiny exoskeleton boats panning down flows. Deer heads coming at him. A screen of rain. Their white tails flying from his door, hands on hips and watching them disappear into water. People huddled, congregating, all the neighbors at all the windows, watching deer legs pound lively and sharp, all theirs hands on all their hips, asking in all their heads the same thing: can I be faster than rain?
The glass shattered was stars in water, shining wreckage, veins of powdered crystals down hallways. Canoes running. Wet hands, wet legs of pants. Thick water. Electricity off, the fridge warmed, pooled with water. The basement windows and then the second, the third. Three stories filled with lakes, rivers, glass rain. Pressure. Water built on the outside and torment lapping at shoes, scrambling. The weeks. The rain.
Blue sky looked up to, memorized lines, a break in clouds, an only pause. Rain and houses, sump-pumps. Everyone out of their doors and everyone standing looking and a small glitch of blue. Sky actual. Then clouds, gray, starting again rain.
Rain, full on downward coming.
Blue he says and hears everyone saying Blue, the only way to address peek-a-boo sky. Tortured wet, a trick of heat, the lagging sun.
Rain.
Doors closed, waiting. Sky blacking out.
Rain.
Then rain.
And then the rain.
Ducks around his table and he sat in swimming trunks, shirt hanging from a light fixture, hooked to its unlit bulbs, watching mallards weave. Feet of water beneath him, his shins. A rain that came. A sound like small laughter or crushing cars, ducks pecking at his navel. No light, the quacking of bills, beaks. Webbed feet. Arms swimming, his arms swimming.
A raft of tied together house. Two chairs and a pantry door curling at its corners, a wooden-smile. Cabinet doors and a sail of king-size cotton sheets. Raining. The wind saying to him I don’t make the rain. The underside of his boat against the sharp steeple of a church, knee scraping a weather-vane, hands groping around thighs, what feels like women’s hair, whispering sea.
He pulls a dead man to his chest, groping limp shoulders, the newly dead, little stiffness yet. Hugs watery skin, a man, and the teeth in his mouth as it falls open. The water in barge colors. The dead man in his boat, hand propped with the ace of diamonds, a captain asking do you have any jacks? and hearing the dead man let loose back at him: GO FISH.
No reflection of his face in an ocean, a blackness of millions. Oil slickness and rainbows. Bumps underneath his boat, the rattle of mountain tops, the grappling branches of century old cottonwoods, the density of endless water. He wants to see his beard, the hair that has grown and will not stop. He wants to see his fever cheeks. He wants to see all the eyes looking back at him, trying to explain how something like this happens, how the world floods over and there is no where for the water to go.
A boy hurdling a paper boat down a gutter river. Trip running fast legs and the driveway scrapes his knees and the water goes in and the boy is now a more water and a less blood. Rain in his boy-veins, taking flood-shape, sifting down into his boy heart. Racing a boat down a river, light through his teeth: go, go, go.
Before the rain, when rain was rain, they found in a dark lined sky clouds like halls and hymnals, the waver of candlelight. When rain was rain and the sinking was a moment, in a person’s chest, when something could still be solid beneath them. If hope was a rainbow, if crying babies could stop the torrent, if all the colors of screams were the colors of rainbows.
His pockets lined with soaked money, a millionaire. All the money in the world. He will be king. A king to castles with longboats of un-fallen wood, seven-hundred ports down one side, canon fire and oars to row. Controlling the water in their skies, breaking back floods, soaking up these their accolades. The money in his pocket a turbulence, all the money in the world and nothing but to watch it floating, the direction of the next current, the rooftops below them painted in green-black darkness, how a world goes dull.
Rain sounds, the people laughing. Rain sounds and all the people rocking boards under beds with the pounding of their sexes, one into another, the thumping rabbit-rhythm. The waffling of sound in and out ears. The rain a way of saying this has been enough. All the planes and the hang-gliders, the hot-air balloons, the boats the boats the boats. Dead floating, riding, the digression of all this the rain. Kissing children sounds, fish tank glass and fins un-answering.
Islands of dirty inland water, a sea of an earth and the waves of wood that bend and dip, the boughs of ships, drowning in black waving floors. When the rain is not enough and it keeps coming and all the waters have become rivers. The buzz in his sickness-warm ears.
Hallways to hallways, quiet lurching, his feet on boat boards, moving. Dreaming of snow, burying the sails, water turned to ice and all the feet skating, black-blue slipping sliding over frost, wins. Water ringing in circles, water coming down. The dead men in his boat, the collection of them, hanging their feet, dipping for stars.
The moon, harvest orange through moving clouds, named for a woman or a land or a form of love. Dead men lips making sounds like waves or ghosts: Ooooooooo. Rowing. Nowhere to go. Rowing. Raining. You’ve got to move. You’ve gotta move.
Ooooooooo.