Chase Twichell

The noise throws down twin shadows, hunting shadows on a black joy ride. They roar up the silver vein of the river and out over the stony peaks, which have been shrunken to a luminous green musculature on the screens. Who are the pilots, too high to see the splayed hearts of deer tracks under the apple trees, or smell the cider in the fallen fruit? Who are the vandals that ransack the wilderness of clouds? Below them, a thin froth of waterfall spills from a rock face. They see its sudden wreckage, its yielding gouts, and the wind tear into the papery leaves of the poplars, roughing them up so the undersides show— a glimpse of paleness like a glimpse of underwear. The pilots are young men, and still immortal. Already in the cold quadrants of their hearts they imagine the whole world flowering beneath them. It feels like love, like being with a woman who flowers beneath them, so that they wonder how it would feel to go on riding the young green world that way, to a climax of spectral light.

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile, cut-apart trees soon to be smoke, or even the smoke itself, sinewy ghost of ash and air, going wherever I want to, at least for a while. Neither inside nor out, neither lost nor home, no longer a shape or a name, I’d pass through all the broken windows of the world. It’s not a wish for consciousness to end. It’s not the appetite an army has for its own emptying heart, but a hunger to stand now and then alone on the death-grounds, where the dogs of the self are feeding.

At family gatherings, a Family Friend liked gathering the girls to make us sing rounds. We always wanted the spooky one, Have you seen the ghost of Tom? Long white bones with the rest all gone

After my father’s cremation, my sisters and I agreed to bury him privately when the ground thawed. One will plant a flowering tree, one see to the stone and its cutting, one call the grave digger and the town clerk. It’ll be just us, the daughters, presiding over ashes that could be any mammal’s, or those of any love dispersible by wind. Let’s bury the secret violence to his dogs, Pompey and Tara, Juba and Molly, their ashes already gone to this ground. And his “escapades,” as Mom called them. Here withers that branch of the tree. Let’s bury the ring inscribed In perpetuum ave atque vale(translated “Hail and farewell” by my father, “Hello, and good-bye forever” by Mom, a token dating back to the First Separation) and a tennis ball for canine shades. Your dad is with his dogs now, said more than one person at the funeral. It’ll be just us, the three inheritors, on a raw windy day in Death’s kingdom, lifting our eyes from the hole to the mountains hazed with spring, saying,In perpetuum ave atque vale, minor god of our father. Let’s each of us drop a few dog biscuits into his grave.

On the first warm day, the aides fret about his pate, fetch his hat. I push him out the automatic doors into the pallid sun. Dad thinks we should stay put until all the Indians are back in their tepees,

The mower flipped it belly up, a baby garter less than a foot long, dull green with a single sharp stripe of pale manila down its back, same color as the underside which was cut in two places, a loop of intestine poking out. It wouldn't live, so I ran the blades over it again, and cut it again but didn’t kill it, and again and then again, a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke on me like a swarm of bees. It took so long my mind had time to spiral back to the graveyard I tended as a child for the dead ones, wild and tame: fish from the bubbling green aquarium, squirrels from the road, the bluejay stalked to a raucous death by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter, who himself was laid to rest one August afternoon under a rock painted gray, his color, with a white splash for his white splash. Once in the woods I found the skeleton of a deer laid out like a diagram, long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools with the string rotted away, and the dull metal shaft of the arrow lying where it must have pierced not the heart, not the head, but the underbelly, the soft part where the sex once was. I carried home the skull with its nubs of not-yet-horns which the mice had overlooked, and set it on a rock in my kingdom of the dead. Before I chopped the little snake to bits of raw mosaic, it drew itself into an upward-straining coil, head weaving, mouth open, hissing at the noise that hurt it. The stripe was made of tiny paper diamonds, sharp-edged but insubstantial, like an x-ray of the spine or the ghost beginning to pull away. What taught the snake to make itself seem bigger than it was, to spend those last few seconds dancing in the roar and shadow of its death? Now I see, though none exists, its grave: harebells withered in a jar, a yellow spiral painted on a green-black stone, a ring of upright pine cones for a fence. That’s how the deer skull lay in state until one of the neighborhood dogs came to claim it, and carried it off to bury in the larger graveyard of the world.

Whenever I touch the cairn marking the summit of one of my parents, touch the top stone, an animal caution comes over me, sinew and muscle like the brook’s, a sudden shivering green-brown flame. Soon they will be constellations, and I a small tower of stones.