Katie Ford

Down by the pond, addicts sleep on rocky grass half in water, half out, and there the moon lights them out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest of amphibious flowers I once heard called striders, between, but needing, two worlds. Of what can you accuse them now, beauty?

For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs— bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle, bodies growing disease like mushroom coral. It is tiresome, tiresome, describing fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs into some slow, future forest. My beloved, he tires of me, and he should— my complaints the same, his recourse the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes over the living freeze of heart after heart, and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself, the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone to wail across the plains or beg the bare city. I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans, the figs that outlived summer or the tedious mineral angles and their suction of light. Have you died? Then speak. You must see the living are too small as they are, lonesome for more and in varieties of pain only you can bring into right view.

It disappeared. It reappeared as chimney smoke that burnt through carcasses of swallows stilled, and that it portrayed no will was why I followed that smoke with this pair of eyes. It was that it didn’t need or require my belief that I leant upon it as a tired worker upon a gate.

Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that,she was nothing. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last. It wasn't a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild— and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime. I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor of my beaten house. She seemed to see my whole life by ordinance of some god who wanted me alive again. Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken into the corners of violent sadness. She wrote my address across her chest to let everything listening know where my life was made. We waited, either forgetting what we were or becoming more brightly human in that pine, in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills, not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting from the yard part of what she required. Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would when the molasses warmed over the pot enough to come into the brandy, to come into the night begun by small confessions— that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor, that the woman he loved was with another man, his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space. Then I told of the assault at daybreak between the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script and song. There must have been chanting, as it was on the hour. What we said was liturgy meant only for us and for that night. Not for anyone else to repeat, live by, believe. Never that. Our only theories were inside of our hands, flesh and land, body and prairie. I reached to smoke down his next-to-last, which he lit and made ready. The poultry like a war ration we ate all the way through. What we wished, we said. What we said, we found that night by these, and no other, means.

God is not light upon light, no more than goat is need upon need although there, where it grazes, it is sun upon coat within which ticks and stray-blown feed burrow into the pocked skin of such foul scent covering the underflesh heart that could eat this farmer's grain or the barren mountain's bark high in the solitude of sheer animal peace laid over sheer animal terror. We ask the animal afflicted by its time, its impoverished American meadow that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed to abide with us. It does not need us. We think it needs us. We must forgive God God's story.

To bomb them, we mustn’t have heard their music or known their waterless night watch, we mustn’t have seen how already the desert was under constant death bells ringing over sleeping cribs and dry wells. We couldn’t have wanted this eavesdropping of names we’ve never pronounced praying themselves towards death. I try to believe in us— we must not have heard their music.

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away, and dared not hover over the child whose breath opened as transom of a frail house. Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary, for ghastliness already shot out its own defining in rags of fired light. Pigeons would not sleek it over their dirty coats, nor fly sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence. Each day bridgeless, each night birdless, all the nocturnals needless at the expanse of our nightwatch. But wake at the moon, we could, mumbling,are we in a horror show?—inside of sleep our shock-white minds caught on reels where a child's body breaks the heart and the mother can't know if she counts as a mother. I don't know if the child heard what wept at the bedside, orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets against all the mothers falling, all the fathers under what each branch let down: there's a hidden weight to snow.