Bruce Bond

Now that obituaries come online with coroner reports and full disclosure, imagine the ways to betray a man come out of hiding to die. Ask the bloggers who weigh in on my friend’s bad habit, who make of it their own drug strung out across a mirror, so when they pay tribute to their power, how they had their doubts about his talent, his flu, I think how lucky I was to receive the kindness of the weak. My death space, as they call it, as if it’s me who died. A life, we know, is complex. But death is simple. A place to talk shit, to license grief, or barring that, to kill it.

Beneath the waver of the dorsal fin lie the blood-shades of lamellae, their skin so close to the vein they breathe, filter, gather, flex, set down in loose and frangible parallels you find in gills of mushrooms, clams, and concertinas. Wave after wave, the tissues of the water breathers conceal what they reveal, according to their vital rhythm. Fins that breathe flit this way, that, in the give-and-take of panic and lust and tropical surge from no one place. To every fish, flesh, nightmare, and song: a private opening and the name it bears. Let us call it tomorrow or lament, the heart of my volition

If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of   heaven and those of   place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick, a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds. Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth outside at night, someone in your family dies. There are laws we make thinking it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a floodplain by the Mississippi that once poured slaves upriver to the fields. We are a hurricane in the making. We could use a magus who knows something about suffering, who knows a delta’s needs. We understand if   you want a widow to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes. He is not himself anyway and walks barefoot across a landscape that has no north. Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog, a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind, a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless, than you will ever be.