Birdsong
By Barry Graham

               for Howie Good

Friends, gather all the fallen branches for a fire. Quick, send the extruded plastic moon to this address, and because the ambulance driver will get lost in the maze of small, unlighted streets, send the moon out for an encore. It's important that there be lost children, but the search dogs should be tired or, even better, dubious, and with no way to stop the bleeding in the region of the brain that controls our tears. The heart is a museum of stained glass, with an old-fashioned wooden boardwalk and the mindless roaring of the sea just outside. The crowd is huge but sullen, as if they know something the players down on the field don’t – that the starting pitcher will be betrayed in the late innings by the bullpen, that grass crumbles, that everything that isn’t dying is already dead.  I watched in pale silence the circle of their nest.

Where we sleep, you know, it isn't necessarily where we wake up, it all depends on what we dream, my dead mother, for example, crisscrossed by the fence, fingers hooked through the diamond-shaped links. Your mother, I say as the road disappears with a hiss behind us. The future will be just like the present – so cold it burns. We’ll rush each other and sigh as if our suitcases were packed and in the hallway and we always had someplace wonderful to go next. The lighted shop windows in the Victorian gloom of evening, or the firing squad back at the barracks listening to the ball game on the radio.

Soon he’ll be tired enough to sleep, and when she awakes before the alarm, the dawn will be full of birdsong and the birdsong, as sometimes happens, full of primitive grief.  Now the secret police know who the insomniacs are, and the insomniacs themselves just how interminable the night is. Oh, how strange to wait to be examined and not know to what extent the testimony will change in the course of transcription. I turn away before I realize, or she suspects, that that’s what I’m thinking. These days only dignitaries get to visit the basement museum, where most discover an interest in battle flags, officers’ dress swords, and, of course, the shoe full of bones. Christ, you’ll end up like me, driving slowly over a bridge of bones, your face gray with exhaustion, while along the slatternly, post-industrial river, morning birds sing in the cadaverous trees.

He’s watching me, and I wonder why and whether tomorrow is supposed to be just as nice as today. Somewhere I learned the heart is the size of a fist. Its top button loose and dangling like the head of a hanged Nazi, though others swear they’ve since seen it from behind secretly scratching obscene pictograms and a former phone number onto glum walls, notwithstanding which, I miss it, sometimes. Remain inside the train if possible, but if not, open the side door and go out, and love the truculent witnesses to ambiguous events, love witches’ gloves, dead men’s bells, bloody fingers, love the street dogs that bark dismally and the sunsets that can be beautiful if the light catches the brick dust and swirling ash just so. Know, if only for an instant when recalling the cold breath of hands on their skin, how it will end. God dangling from a broken pulley and the stars turning black.

Sentences sourced from Howie Good's Tomorrowland.

Barry Graham is the author of The National Virginity Pledge (Another Sky Press). His work can be found most recently (or forthcoming) in Smokelong Quarterly, Frigg, Elimae, and Hobart.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com