The Kingfisher

The Sinner

The green wave rolls under the wheel,
Cattle loom above the crest.
I careen around a bend
And through the open window
Spills the fertile air
Of another’s land
In a far away place someone shares
Photos of barren peaks
And snow and there is also some sort
Of aphorism attached
It hangs above me now
Blowing me home.
I would speak not of truth or the land
Because as I roll onward
It is more a matter of practical importance
That I continue moving forward.
To wallow is to drown, they say,
They being the writers of aphorisms
And fey warnings to poets lost on a road
to nowhere.
This last not being some sort of metaphor but an
Observation based firmly in reality, as the car
Tumbles down ravines and up the steep sides of
Valleys more suited to goats than small urban sedans
But a man must persevere.
He must, by the skill of his hands,
Wring some sort of victory from each modest defeat.
Or else consult the map.
Cartography rolls over my tongue and out the door
In a shambles of half-formed thoughts
And secret longings,
To be the kind of man that collects maps perhaps,
Or better yet, who fills in the edges with new lands,
The great explorer,
Destroyer of worlds.
The car ploughs on, digging furrows in this pasture
And sending up a cloud of stones and carbon
With each turn in the road.
I watch brick and tile homes
Roll past the window in thick formations,
Closing ranks as
I gather speed
Oncoming traffic sheers off to my right,
The boisterous suburbs to my left.
I find myself to be a centrist after all.
Where then will this river end?
My heart counts each broken minute,
My fingers tap out the rhythm on the steering wheel.
A steel chassis.
A cage for speed.
I whirl through a wide orbit and the arm of modernity releases me,
Flung to the heavens only to crash into
A solid wall where private meets the public sea.
Beyond the wall a garden.
The ticking engine cools in the night air.
My passage has left a hole in the world
Into which steals the chatter of birds,
A feathered parliament reaching terms
As the light dims.
Somewhere, I’ve heard,
The sun doesn’t set at this time of year.
My brow furrows as I try to wring
Meaning from this small nugget of geographical hearsay
Here your face, in contrast to the gathering dark.
Here your eyes, a vessel for my wonder.
There is a gap in the world for three heartbeats.
Then a small sigh
And God turns out the lights.

II.

Each time I hear her speak
The lines across the earth grow deeper
Sharp, red scrawls that
Denote time and space in a familiar pattern.
Don’t get up, she says,
And she bangs about the kitchen,
Stomping across the floor
As though it were a bass drum,
Each pot lid a high hat, the clatter of spoons
The refrain from a song I can no longer place.
She rummages in a cupboard and retrieves a tin of biscuits.
She’s been dead for years and when i drive past
Her place I can still taste how stale and soft they’d become
And hear her yelling down the phone
At other ghosts. Fred was deaf in at least one ear
though it was never explained whether this was cause or effect
Then he was gone and the shouting continued unabated.
It was as though he never left.
In my heart, the rhythm of her heart.
It beats out of time,
Counting the minutes to my death.

III.

A minor character in great affairs,
He said,
Playing down the momentous role of memory
And inheritance such small acts
Of courage represent.
It was just a basket of eggs,
and the people I gave it to are long since dead
He stumbles over words as though they were boulders in his way,
Spills pebbles over the ground, his mind
Scrabbling for purchase as I sit quietly
hoping to catch the rhythm as they fall
He hands me each story like
A forgotten totem of our clan,
The whiskey glass,
A blue edison record,
The notes of some forgotten song
He raises his voice and
Tries to catch the tune.
It gets away from him for a bit
And then he drags it back down.
I would try to help, i say, but I don’t know the words.
An old photograph, overexposed,
Shows us by the backdoor
One of us holds a toy sailboat
We laugh at our haircuts and tell stories
Of the night we shot peas at passing cars
The boys have gone
Too large for this place
Too boisterous for the smoke-stained walls
And the quiet that has settled here
This is the calm after the storm
He says
Now I am waiting for God to take me
You’re an atheist I remind him
At my age, he replies, it helps to have someone to blame.

IV.

This house is a skeleton of ancient trees
Mired in clay.
I dig my fingers in, hoping to feel the bones.
Above me, no magic.
I turn my ear to the ground, listening for the hoofbeats of approaching bandits
Or wondering whether the earth itself might speak
Instead it swallows me whole.
I lie at rest.