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FLIGHT OF POLAR OXEN ON THE VERGE OF TEARS (& other stories) Morning after a sort of storm. Autumnal. An orchestra of
clouds. Dark clouds in luminous skyscape. Clouds the color of cannons. Tarnished clouds with bright eyes. They transport her body in wheelchairs and on a rolling bed. The wicker creaks; she is a basket, a bucket. Sloshing with organs and excrement. She isn’t allowed to walk again. No, not ever. They roll her past windows. Too fast. She tries to wave her arms. In a week her room fills with baskets of pecan barks. They are on the floor, on the windowsill, with her in bed. Someone else brought a snowglobe, which she swallowed. Contains winter, water, part of a mountain. Threatens to block the trachea completely. The room is white. She closes her eyes. She steps down into the pastures. Head bowed she makes her wavering way under the brown light. It is December in Georgia. Again. The bed moves forward on its castors. Like a glorious sleigh it lurches towards the window. Her face and arms hang out into the sky. The world breathes through the sleeves of the beribboned nightgown with its stranger’s name in the collar. She hears floorboards creaking in the rabbit hutch. She smells honeysuckle. It is the house she grew up in. Or she is still growing up and this is still her house, and downstairs are pieces of blackberry pie in a paper bag. Otherwise it’s a hospital and she’s being carried around by the neck. The room is white. The room is hippopotamus-colored. The room is transparent. The doctors lean over her, moving their lips. MOUNTAINS OF HOT WOOL. They seem to say. Syrup arrives on a silver trolley. It is black syrup, born in a pharmacy of birds. What I saw was in a dream, and when the plunger was pushed it entered my bloodstream, digging its claws into my neck. There was a brief thrust of the heavens before I felt the syrup taking shape. It hardened inside my arteries, in the intricate mold of every tube in every finger, forming licorice-like cords, circulating nothing. They position her under a constellation. She gropes for it. Someone trembles, a moth. She blinks, her mouth moves. It looks like she’s about to say something. Vomit splashes out of the cradle. I am no longer here. I go to the snow globe. It’s in the bottom of my head, close to the spine. It doesn’t sleep. It devours me. Always moving around, bumping into the things I don’t want to think about. Up through the front of the throat. Down towards the toes. The glass is cold and inside is this mountain you’re supposed to believe is underwater. Turkeys are running all over the mountain. You can’t see them because of trees, they’re black and naked with branches like needles. I leave every room I’m ever in. I fly into the snow globe, a tiny figure with arms outstretched, circling around and around in the water, in the snow falling through water. I haven’t seen any turkeys yet but I’d like to, someday. Turkeys running through the woods. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE! Sleep has left a dark stain on her mouth. She’s in a dream in a room with an open piano that’s been invaded by spiders. She strikes a key and hears voices. Pieces of snow songs. The voice of a boy whose trumpet summons turkeys. He must be touched. There is a noise, a clicking of chemicals. A capillary bursts: she sees November.
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The ice barrier around the island splits and breaks into cakes. A
single goose takes flight
for the city. She follows the wind behind a flock of embarking clouds.
She feels their warm
breaths touch her skin. The city is a constellation of lights, between
them an empty lake.
She glances down. There is a place on the water under low tree branches
where her flock
used to roost. She remembers leading them towards a safer place. Clouds
of thousands. The
air shaped by new lines, billowing at the round parts; a ceiling that
could hold good dreams. Humans form a potential "cloud gaggle" and advance with oars. Their movements are stable and unfluttering so as to come rapidly within paddling distance. The moon is out. The grass is feathered. The warm blood around the people hearts invites the geese to drink, to become drunk, to reveal secrets. Those of them standing on the outside have already closed their eyes to the procession. These are young girls, musicians, having robed themselves in the warm clothes and tennis shoes of deceased grandpapa. They are calling to the geese through wooden cones. They try to direct flight elsewhere, motioning with their hands in their pockets. Wind diagrams are rearranged and rotated. Airplane engines are shut off, propellers muted with mattresses, stuffed rabbits, other sleeping implements. The machines fall down and smoke evaporates. For a moment the air is as quiet as it might’ve been a hundred years ago. The girls pause, reaching for the instruments that would coax the geese away. The flock reaches the chosen site. They spread their wings, revealing tarnished underfeathers. Each plume like the foliage of stars. A single goose advances, alights upon the decoy corpse. Its eyes are closed. Its chest is open. The goose thrusts her face into the body, is disoriented in the soft cavities of the heart and lungs. The youthful musicians press their eyelids shut and turn away. Slaughter occurred in the middle of vast migrations. Hunters would drive in from Omaha and shoot the birds until they had literally killed wagonloads of them. They stacked the deceased in piles that spilled over the sideboards. They whipped the mules straining in their straps. I remember standing on the prairie with my bright red accordion. It was almost April. The sky was a topography of wings. They wiped out entire populations. I remember waiting for them to turn in their flight. I had my fingers on the keyboard. Sometimes I lie awake and I think I’m hearing the five thousand wings. She’s above the river, she’s over the roof. Snow brightens. Streetlamps explode. Plumes of smoke disappear into the firmament. I call back some memory. I let it go. |