The Last Navigable Night

It’s two years, five months and one day before you finally realize that all of the constellations conspire to form an ouroboros that twists like Consuela’s careworn petticoat—a device for transforming rib bones into fangs to drain away the purple muscles. It’s best to remember this fact for future reference but to keep mum at present. You must navigate the maze of bladed trade winds with your cargo of gold bars and violet bulbs as the rest of the crew mutter about home while lashing knots and eyeing the prow like lascivious boys outside a brothel.

This whole voyage began under duress and cannot end without arcing into a bay where they must all be arrested and you must confess to certain irregularities in the ledger—a series of black figures writhing like fingers beneath a white lace bodice. Surely there’s a hint of poison in the air on this last navigable night. Surely the sea needs no mediation with the flaring heavens or the heat of the interior. Surely there’s no need for privateers and the pretence of honest wages to go together, so you log your farewell:

The balmy amnion of this final night alone
bathes the belly of the cove,
but the low droning of distant locusts echoes
beyond the lucent headwaters
to remind me that the hinterland’s hard clutch
snakes around dear Consuela
as she struggles against the confessional wall:
a confused witness to my desire,
she holds one hand and deals with the other,
binding dawn with a red silk rope
as if she could dock the sun on a heap of stones.

The reenactment of this drama always makes her feel treasured, especially after a few fingers of whiskey, so you never spare a detail whenever she requests it. Your therapist also approves in theory, especially given your difficulties with repressed memories. You, however, wonder if it’s wise behavior on your boss’ yacht during an evening jaunt on Lake Eerie, but you bet that a man like him understands the difficulties of balancing the weight of grand ambitions with the burden of normalcy. Surely he has a sense of how one must go about weaving a thousand lines of narrative to support a single image.

Piece by Piece

At half past noon, the monsoon season starts to bubble sweat beads across the flagstone façade, flooding this puzzled world even at 3,000 feet above sea level. And soon the town’s sign bows its welcome and the high desert’s arroyos and mountains shift into streets and houses. And in a flash we are out of town again, caught among the paved grids and waving antennas of ocotillos. And, snapping into gear, a man grinds his truck eastward as juniper berries are jellied under a cotton awning back home. And the gas station attendant kicks at slivers of obsidian behind the neon graffitied dumpster, cursing the girl who never notices him. And a pack of stray tourists photograph the horizon above the swollen scars that encircle the ranchland’s waning mineral rights. And two scraggly amateur archeologists drag towards the shade, discussing how obscure maps bear artifacts for all who would grub for them. And a stooped retiree identifies his childhood haunt by the baked and cracked fingerprints of a dead watering hole that a neighbor at the café describes to a little girl. And, in a trailer by the highway, a divorcee lazily watches Tom Mix ride into town amid suspicious glances and whiskey glasses, certain that the winds outside signal a dust storm. And a bearded bunch of hunters notices that the bobcat’s tracks have been camouflaged by a mounting wall of scrub brush clinging to a cave mouth. And longhaired high school boys smoke cigarettes in earnest among the starved cedar trees that haggle for subsistence along the escarpment. And a greying lady rides a pony westward beside the waving ligatures of horse hairs that cling to strands of barbed wire. But by now the jigsaw puzzle has been solved just enough to suggest a whole from this patchwork of vagaries and dusk begins to climb across our table with growing impatience. This is when we must reconsider our idle recreation, drawing definite connections within and well beyond the framework, beyond the curvature of the earth’s demarcations, deciding at once on those lives left forever waiting between the thumbs and forefingers of strangers. But dinner, love, dinner must be served up by half past six regardless of whatever pieces or prospects remain pending of this miniature civilization.