We Make Mud

We Make Mud: Revisited

We run around town, with mud in our buckets, and cover our whole town up with mud. When the town men and town women come up to us brothers to ask us what do we think we are doing, what us brothers do is, we cover up with mud their wide open mouths shut up. The mud in their mouths, this shuts them up good, this keeps them from asking us brothers what is, to us, a question too stupid of them to be asking. What we are doing — isn’t it out in the open, what we are doing? You don’t even need eyes in the back of your head to see what it is we are doing. What we are doing is, we are making our town, this dirty river town, we are turning this town back to what it was — back in the beginning, back when all things were made out of mud. Us brothers, we get our mud, we make our mud, down by the muddy river, down where water and dirt meet to make mud. The muddy river is where we come running down to it to fill up our buckets when our buckets are in need of more mud. What we do then is, we run back up through town and run our muddy hands over whatever our eyes can see: houses and churches, bars and donut shops, liquor stores and hardware stores and the building where, inside, the sheriff, it seems to us, he is always sleeping. Inside these town places, the towns people of this town, they stare out at us brothers with a look that says, look what those boys are doing. Us brothers, we look back with a look that says, look again: this is what we are doing. And with our hands dripping with mud and with more mud, we cover them up with mud. We do not stop this covering up, us brothers, we cannot stop mudding it up, not until all of this dirty river town is good and muddy with mud covered up. We build humpbacked hills of mud where once there stood rows upon rows of single-storied houses. And if you look over there, up the river a bit, upriver from where the black husk of the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the mud, this is where, us brothers, we make us a mountain made out of mud. The mill too, us brothers, we cover it up with mud, so that only the rusted tops of the smokestacks can be seen up from the mud sticking up. These smokestacked tops, they are our town’s clocktower steeples where, us brothers, we climb up with our muddy buckets dangling empty from our fists, our hands hanging hammerless, our faces gazing up at a mud-colored moon that is half made out of light, that is half made out of mud, until us brothers reach up with our hands, we push up on our toes, and turn out the light.

Mud Love

We each of us brothers each take into each one of our hands a hammer and a handful of rusty, bent-back nails, and we run around town one night nailing and hammering all of the unnailed things that we see around town: boots and buckets, baseball gloves and fishing rods, bikes and kites and rowboats that no longer float, sandboxes, fish nets, little girl dolls without any clothes on, garden hoses, swimming pools, lawnchairs and barstools, baseballs, basketballs, horseshoes and stacks of magazines, books, typewriters, boxes filled with birth certificates, baby pictures, postcards and poems, love notes scrap-paper-scribbled by the hands of faceless names, baby strollers, rollerskates, knapsacks and sleds, dusting brooms, spare tires, chairs that rock in the wind: one by one we each of us each take these things into the hands of us brothers, and we nail these things, and other things too — dog houses, barbecues, sleeping bags and tents (have we yet mentioned fish? fish heads? fish eyes that never stop staring?), milk crates, wooden ladders, mud-crusted shovels, frayed pieces of rope. Get the picture? And last but not least, us brothers, we take hammer and we take nail to the each of us brothers. We take each other by the hand. We take our hammers and nails and we hammer and nail all of these things, one by one at a time, we hammer all of these things into trees and into fencing posts, into backyard telephone poles and into the shingled sides of houses. But first, before we do the hammering in, we cover up all of these things with mud — this, to protect them, this, so that when somebody else comes into our town all that they see is mud. Us brothers, what we see, what we know, is everything that is under the mud: any thing and every thing in and of and from our dirty river town that might be up and picked up or taken away to some other place to be got rid of — some other place without all this mud and smoke and rust, a town, a world, without a muddy river running through it. And so, because of this, up against this, us brothers, we do what we can to stop this from happening. So this is what us brothers do. What we do is, we raise back our hammers. We line up those rusted nails.

The Moon is a Star

When the river dried to mud, us brothers, we walked down to the muddy banks of where the river used to be, and with our boy hands, digging down into this mud, us brothers, we dug down to where, we believed it, there was another river there, there was another river down beneath where our river used to be, there was another river there running underneath where this other river of ours was now just a river of mud. Us brothers, we dug down with our hands, we ate mud with our mouths, for three-hundred days and nights. For three-hundred days and three-hundred nights, us brothers, we dug and we dug until we dug ourselves down to where this mud, it turned back into river. Here in this under-the-river, under-the-mud river, this other river, underneath this mud, this river, it was even muddier here, here in this river, this river, it was even a dirtier river than the dirty river was that used to run its way through us brothers’ dirty river town. There were no people down here, here in this other river world, down underneath where our dirty river used to be, there were no mothers or fathers to call us brothers Son, there were no other boys along this river to ask us to call them Brother too. There were no steel mills sitting shipwrecked on this river’s muddied shore, there were no houses here built on or up from the river for us brothers to call our own, there was no town here for this dirty river to run its way through. No, there was only the river here, here by this other river underneath where our river used to be: there was only the mud of this other river holding this river in its place. There was no moon here, here by this other under-the-river river town with no town for this river to run its river through, there were no stars here in this other under-the-river world, there were no birds here, there were no fish here, no singing fish here, there was no Girl here for us brothers to say to her, Hey Girl. It was just us, the two of us brothers, with this river and the mud that this river made. It was just us and the three of us — brothers, river, mud — and for a while there was no other place for us brothers to want ourselves to be. But after a while, after a few hundred more nights of us brothers watching this other river flow on by our muddy boots’ feet, us brothers, we said to each other, it was time now for us brothers not to be, all by ourselves, all alone with just each other and this river and mud. So, us brothers, what we did was, we dropped down, onto our hands and knees, down into the mud, and we started to make. We made, up from the mud, up from the river, we made Girl. We started at the bottom and made our way up. Girl’s knees were especially muddy. Girl’s knees, they were so beautiful, in their mudness, that us brothers, we wanted to stay forever on our knees kneeling. But then, so that we could better see Girl, here in this river night’s dark, us brothers, we made us a moon for us brothers to better see Girl by. We made moon, out of mud, and we stuck it, this moon, up against the muddy night’s sky. Girl took this moon, when she saw this moon, and she took a look inside it. Look inside it, Girl said to us brothers, and she lifted us up in her hands for us to see inside. Us brothers, we listened to, we did, what Girl said for us to do. We looked inside this moon. Inside this moon, there were girls, other than Girl, there inside this moon. Us brothers, we looked at these girls. Then, when we were done looking at these girls, we looked with our looks at each other. There was this look that us brothers, we sometimes liked to look at each other with this look. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. Us brothers, looking with this look, we looked this look back away from each other. We looked with this look back into this made out of mud moon, into this moon with these girls there inside it. When we did this with this look, this moon, it shattered into a million pieces. Each broken piece became a star.