The green dog devoured him with one last long and lingering look, then departed the house he’d raised children and grandchildren in, mourned a wife and dreamed his less-than-practical dreams in, looking for what lay outside, and what lay beyond.
A DREAM OF THE DEAD
The dead dream all night the life we have this morning. They love the way we, who know so little of sleep, try to drive it from our bodies with the day’s first yawn.
Almost as much as they love the bright yellow of egg on plates they used to own.
Almost as much as they love the sadness of cupboards, and the years tucked inside so carelessly, with no thought of meaning, or the eventual shape of it all, lying in the dust disarrayed.
They watch us from the rough boles of forgotten trees, the ones left unnoticed between the buildings and on the edges of town, sharing the space with termites and fairies, and the carved-in promises, to names whose faces are now beyond the reach of even imagination, whose pronunciation is the arcane prayer we make as our eyes close, too soon, at the end of the day.
But compared to the dead we are a quiet breed. We hold onto longings for decades without speaking their facts. We’ll strangle our children before speaking our minds. The dead recognize our problems with the truth, for they have seen us tremble so many times in the wake of their passing.
How often have we seen that color, that pale color unlike any other, astray in the last moments of sunset, a thread of it tracing the slant of the spring rain, and just a touch around the eyes of the child we love past reason? It’s the color of a dead mother’s heart, but we cannot bring ourselves to say so.
And this absence that swells the lungs with shadow, this despair that cannot be whispered or even shouted away, it is this spirit now which animates our days.
The dead understand these things and more. The dead know the music of diminishment and the deceit that bolsters joy. The dead wrap themselves in garments of exhaustion so they might pass unnoticed from night into light. The dead are the rags and the mud, the lamp and the lungs, the stab and the limp and the vulture’s singing mouth of the world. The dead yawn even as we yawn but their throats are yellowed and poisoned by the souring energy of the world. The flowers they hold in their glowing hands have been stolen from the poor, blossoms turning to ash as the dead glide wearily through the world. Their eyes are bald of lashes, turning to glass and scabs as they spread like felons through the world, committing their crimes against crab and dove, child and falcon as they saturate every promising landscape of the world.
For every quiet snowfall is a cold comfort pulled over the dead. Every wayward smile is food for their whispers, every shaded ravine a quarry for the hiss, the whistle, the endless complaint, and whine of the dead. Every butterfly swollen with dusk plays the priest for their hollow pleadings. Every shy and unknowing gesture becomes an invitation for their helmeted kiss.
For this is the truth of it, the tribulation, and the detour: the armies of the dead have made a carnival of our small disasters. Within their hidden elevators they descend the grave height from reason into those secret places where even the best of us aspire to fool.
I tell you we’d be better off killing them, if we only had the method, if we only had the time.
SATURDAY
You know you have misgivings but you cannot articulate them. Your mind is a flaming bird alighted on a sinking boat. Some days you can feel neither hands nor feet and it is your eyes and tongue desperately grabbing. This is what happens when the world finally changes, when it shakes off its hide, and everything invisible slides from its pores. You can barely catch your breath and you are so afraid if you breathe too deeply you will take in something living and then what will you do? You might attempt to blow it out of your lungs or vomit it out of your stomach but you know the aggressive desperation of the invisible, its need to hang on, so how might you expel it without it dragging some essential part of yourself along?
These are the cautionary thoughts of those living at the end of the world. These are the tales we tell ourselves as the lights begin to dim and the cold creeps down from the mountains. These are the preparations one must make when everything unseen, unheard, and once thought merely imagined finally make themselves completely known, descend from their attics, crawl out of their caves, smash their windows, transcend their closeted realms.
All week you have felt deceptively clean, your skin scrubbed, your collars ironed, your socks fresh from their packaging, your rotting breath disguised by some cancer-causing sweetener. All week you have smiled and nodded and showed your appreciation. All week you have attended to your chores. But now at the end you can hear the whispers issuing from your cells. Here at the end you can see the face of all that was turned away from you. There at the end you can smell and taste the decay in your own spinal cord.
Here is the place you have lived in most of your life, these walls this carpeting these horizontals these verticals your pants your shirt your cocoon your packaging. Here is where you huddle against the winds that scrape away everything. Here is the one warm spot derived from your own body heat. This is your pinpoint on the map of the universe.
Your bed writhes with recovered memory until you can no longer stand it. Rising up on impaled feet you stagger across floorboards oozing the debris of lifetimes, every forgotten toy and lost dime, fevered notes to self and all, the infinite divisions of trash and discarded skin, every misplaced acquisition vibrating now with the power of wasted energies.
In the rooms of your apartment, furniture floats through a porridge of dust and air before bursting into tired old flames. The photographs recording your life revolve into tunnels and doors as old lovers and family and friends whose dissolving flesh irritates your fingertips pass from the warehouses of desire into this small booth of regret where you have lived more years than you can remember. Here the phone rings day and night and either you ignore the summons or pick up the receiver on a thousand miles of empty air. Hello Hello your syllables break without releasing sound. The letters of your attempt make scratches in the jellied air, which fall to the floor where their segmented legs carry them away into the mysteries of the baseboard.
So this is what it’s come to: dead hours waiting for an exterminator at the end of time, your furniture gone to fire and everywhere you step is a worry of vermin. This is everything your parents warned you about with their very lives. You wander your empty rooms railing and shouting speeches in some language even you do not understand. You beat on the sealed door of your life until, tired of your whining and complaining, it releases you to lobbies and corridors where your fellow inmates howl at the bars. Down flight after flight the stairs fold up behind you, the rooms close to nothing and the halls telescope one inside the next until the moment you step outside, everything that once protected you is a sloppy stack of cards in a trash-pasted lane.
Despite the inexorable forces which threaten to pull you into rags and sticks, you take a moment for this glorious sun, this exquisite warmth you’ve never spared much time for, even though, finally, when memory and passion and your last hope for the attention of another human being fades away, it is this distant holy fire you will miss the most, and the unpresuming embrace it makes of everything you’re still able to see. All around you the air boils and brightly colored threads rise and fall through the texture of it as if attempting a repair. Here and in the distance the arbitrary plantings of grass and shrub, iron and concrete forms launch themselves into sky where they blast apart beneath the gaze of final perceptions. The crusty hardscape of the world withers under the countless, minute cracks of your awakening, becoming fine as powder then blowing away on the winds that raze generations.