Seth Abramson

Twelve dollars sixty cents, & the fact that there is no blood no storm can’t wash into dirt, that the time for these words is already ended, that for all the rain that has been here before so have I. & there is less water in the world than a famous woman once said, & I know that, & that the stars in the river also are real I also know, for they disappear also & refuse also to be touched. & I have touched bare things, & it works— it can be the sole unbraided moment in a life— but even so, what better days look like to me is still the tiny gore of heartbreak, & long walks with small shoes that can’t be taken off, & schools in a city I love that put molded cages over their clocks, because that works too to remind us we are not ready. & the worst of all is anything that stays as it is when touched. At lunchtime a woman famous for her ability to praise the ineffable says she can’t believe anyone returns to where they came from. But of course they do. In fact some do nothing else. & what is it they leave behind? Perhaps not the meaning of time, but the time of meaning, & the fact that whatever happens, tomorrow will change it.

Here we are in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving their pulp to pittance at a gas station in the city that never peeps— and here is the city with its Martians in leather and excoriated thunderbolt- boas, its Bible-trippers, its vintage bazookas for barter not sale, its reluctance to be reluctant, its speed for hire, into which we atrophy ourselves to briefly fit— and we are never so close to the joys of oil, the grease inside which a fat becomes a fit, as we bellow magnanimously praise on the least well of those who pass, ones who are dying we salute: we are coming from the war, they are going to the war—

1981, &  for three days in Nebraska penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation all over again in one-light towns. Three days in Nebraska, &  a hundred calves come out bloody &   new as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum &  glow, turned liked searchlights into Colorado, where everyone’s already wearing their lucky shoes. It takes just one look at a boy from Ansley— there is love &  there is money &  there is everything in between, touched by both— one look at the packs approaching the drag in Imperial, as first &  second boy say hey & hey to third &  fourth— Three days in Nebraska, &  the bigger the sentiment, the harder it falls, &    all over the dreams of the pretty end somewhere in New York City, but just this one time, just these three days in Nebraska, the boys are clicking their boots &  singing I wish I was here in Nebraska

Come see the woodpile behind the cannery. Come through the wall to where the wood was chopped and the difficult wood was hewed. There is a short history of commotion here, where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise at the sky— a hundred feet or more the shavings swept through disturbed air, and made their own music, the music hands make, such a yellow crackle and such a thrashing in the morning. Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive, the men in dusters cutting the twine, loading the long ghostly planks like ballast into iron barges. This will be packing for a transatlantic box, or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks will burn whenever you strike them, and this, hack at it however you like, is nothing more than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now even the men are doing only what they were made to do.

She came to see him in the safehouse to interface without biography or autobiography. I am, she told him, the only one here who cares whether you continue to live. I care, he said, but it was formulaic. His propensity, not a precondition. The ground beneath his feet smelled of everything other men’s feet had ever ground into it. It was blank for all horrors, all aftermaths. A fly dazzled in a sunbeam through the windowpane. Like water, he seemed to say, & she agreed with him. I would like water, he repeated. She pretended not to hear him, because that was the sort of slippage that could save him & suddenly she was not against it. He could continue to live if he could continue to mean himself or anything as poorly as he had just then.