Motel 6.
I’ve been wandering around this motel room unable to make a declarative statement. A last minute flight out of town & there’s a list here of things I forgot. It’s me who has to remember it. A black séance sky falling into a place I held for it in my hand. It smells like fish, ylang ylang, visions & debris. No one remembers her beginning. The trick light would sway, lose sense of itself had there been anything between us. As if what’s now exists. So I write this on the sky, a paragraph about what’s there under it, the branches nearby. It was just a moment ago something moved – a prayer or formula that keeps things standing. As if a ghost were there the whole time but now you’re here. A sky before it rises, again, either off its hinge or toward you. What’s in this sky isn’t mine but the need to take it all here is because there’s no other place to go. In a fire the whole world floats down. Another version of what can’t matter – where anything goes. We’ve all met at the place not knowing where we are. Ghost of an area. Time to leave the rest of sky to a beam shining through. If the dead are going nowhere, why wish them luck. They no longer need to prove anything to you. If they did, they’d know where to find it, this list of things they forgot.
Last Road.
494 MILES To Reno. A child stands at an edge of offramp – silver tomes of bracelets & split ends of fear. Barely signaling trucks. Cowboy hat sliding all over her narcotic hair. Bright bearded dogs notice the flesh of her- & our mother’s eyes whistle behind town car windows. Floating by. Dream figures in a place already gone. Highway at once bland & deafening. Her recurring vision she will recognize someone she knows. Where the birds vanished the first time, yet this time stayed. Skims a stone across a skyline calling all things absent. More than this body, this sky.He sees her & stops, how a cricket does when approached. A blackbird’s repetitious steps toward the rig. Last light on the last road offering its neck. Wind & dust on the radio. What she can say in starts & pieces. All our worn exodus & thin trance driving… these moments spaced out evenly among the ripped orchard. Bridges & promenades.Fruit trees in lines, veins patched together outside her body. Pomegranate seeds in her hands sewn back up. Stone certain from his having touched them. Sleep comes, the size of what it takes to surround them & these practices of dreaming. Past blue trails of cloud & what this sky will be later, birds hover in the breezeway of the next town. Wait for their presence. Having arrived from there on the last road taken.
Where the Songs Come From.
HE SAID THE hill was close, he said the sky was as close there as here. I leaned into the blue frame of his truck, the interior of its voice, where it had to drive. Time lost me or I lost time. And I assume the form of what’s in my mind. The smoky quartz windshield with nothing on it but circumstance. The sun has no features but what I hear in my mind. The lightning trees held high on a hill bent to a point. The outbound sky of hot, shivery air. The side that has all the words in store just across the ridge. The rearview with shells glued around it. A sense of the reflection instead of the image. Glancing in both directions, the currents of air hitting my skin, my soul in everything. The Philadelphia beat. I wonder where the songs come from & who put them there. I think of things to say later; to words come to me from over the hill. He knows more about language than I, but not the hill… what’s untranslatable outside the story of his truck, his werewolf smile, its narrative design. I know it’s not supposed to be a smile. He knows where in the truck I am, wordless, designless, wanting his music. The falling of the sound that’s the last song. Its slow breathing as we approach.
Cheyenne Nimes
