IOWA
It happens that way sometimes, a brisk wind all it takes to light half the world ablaze, to throw us into perpetual night, everything choking on itself like that great snake swallowing its own tail. I had not seen you in days, the month the ash covered us over, took into itself mountain and city and sickly, drying river, and though I felt need of your company, how could I have known? through the haze, the lowering yellow cloud of so many things burnt and burning, I could no longer tell: you may have been across the street, behind that smoke so thick I could not see but a foot ahead. You may have been silent, standing right beside me.
And some days we talk about Iowa, the flatness, the silk of corn tassels carpeting the horizon, how it smells of loam and sometimes of baking bread, and then one of us jumps, shudders a little with the memory of cicadas, their creaky high violin-noise throughout the night. We remember the dried husks they make while dying, that litter the sidewalks, that you can stuff with tissue paper: dignified museum displays, no longer insect but the thought of insects, wisps for legs, empty eyes, the thorax flaking off in pieces like old varnished wood, a detritus of once-life that reminds what we lose daily, that reminds us we have a skin at all.
One night when I thought that at least the sleeplessness would take me, I heard your buoyant footstep on the steps, and your voice, and the crystal clanking of the cheap wine glasses being pulled from their shelf, and my sleeplessness evaporated while we sat on the carpet consuming a bottle of red, blinking downy dog hairs from our eyelashes, the walls populated by your books leaning down on us benevolently, the woods outside humming with mosquitoes and bees and what sounded like bloom and bud and leaf, all venturing forth under cover of dark.
MICHELE HARMELING
CREAMER’S FIELD, FAIRBANKS, ALASKA
And Snyder’s been speaking to me all day, about ‘wild’ and what it means and how its only voice is ours, stilted with long un-greenness, a young raven calling like a cracked brass bell out across the snow, and there you are in that small town, and here I am in mine, no wilder today than when we first met, talking endlessly of the long way out, sustenance for our mutual loneliness abundant but parched, like crowberries shriveled and dried over winter, like the liquid sieved from the moss.
In seven hours, it’s easy to say that one’s done nothing, and that we did, winding driving through your favorite canyon, as if we moved through time and space like the stars do, hurtling past one another, stopping finally for black coffee at the diner, where, slowed to our real speed, the snow ceased to slant and fell straight down instead, a white curtain, lines of flakes like bits of data on a screen, dates, times, speed limits, our need to stay together one hour more, overnight, into the next day.
I hurry up and wait: for the ice surrounding the lakes to melt, for the sodden ground to dry, for wild things hibernating to rise and stretch and begin to eat, tearing down the new grass, the blossoms on the willows, the sharp shoots of fireweed that rush up the hillsides. I hurry up and wait: the days are not yet long enough, and the mated pair of eagles, snowy heads and black, black wings, rest hours at a time in the tree across the street. I wait for the hurry to begin, for the frenzy of dinners and drinks and the rush of melting snow, the newborn rivers and streams, the smell of glacier and silt and movement rising out of water that will someday chill, will soon enough freeze, will force us all into slumber, to wait out the perpetual night, wait for the blessed thaw.
MICHELE HARMELING
SO COMPLICATED
You look out the window, but there’s so much you don’t see—the mouse being eaten by a hawk in the high grass; the groundhog digging a tunnel between those trees; a squirrel sitting in an empty bird’s nest in the tall maple. It’s the same when you speak, using words to make sentences but there’s more happening in between the letters, underneath the words. Sometimes what you really mean is stuck there, hiding behind a common phrase.
So you and I look out the same window and you see hope while I see the end of summer. You see the sun breaking through some heavy clouds; I see night crawling in slowly from a distance, a cold wind tied to its feet. And there’s the rub: life happens even when you can’t see or hear or smell everything, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change that.
DAVID JAMES
Inside
Inside every drawing is another drawing the way inside every painting is a smaller painting, more complex, less clear. This may be true for all things—inside that tulip, another tulip; inside her grief lives a smaller grief; inside my love is another love that may not be visible, even to me. It’s safe to say we look around with eyes that stick to the surface of the world, but rarely, if ever, sink beneath the grass or into the trees, dive under the pond, stare through the call of a young hawk.
Inside the sidewalk is another sidewalk that leads to your house in which there is another house. You live in one of them, I’m certain, but I want to touch the heart that beats inside your fleshy heart, the one that no one hears or sees, that tiny one that spins the earth with its right index finger.
DAVID JAMES
MATINEE
An afternoon movie plays on a television screen. A woman in a lavender Victorian dress holds a man’s head, which is not attached to a man, though how it was severed remains unclear, at least to you. The man, you can see, wore a mustache and parted his dark brown hair on the left side. There’s no blood on his neck or face. Apart from the absence of a body, the only evidence that something’s wrong is the man’s facial expression, which betrays moderate to severe shock—understandable given the circumstances. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth open, his lips slightly extended, as if he died in the midst of pronouncing a long “o.” The woman’s interlaced fingers form a cradle beneath the back of the head, which she carries face up. As she begins to run down a grassy slope, heavy wind blows from the right side of the frame to the left. Rain is falling, though not heavily. Over her shoulder, you can see an open umbrella cartwheeling across the grass. She might have dropped it to pick up the head, you can’t tell. In any event, she’s prioritizing the head, which, of course, precludes the use of an umbrella. She comes to a footbridge, where she tosses the head into a narrow but deep river far below. A friend tells you that the movie you saw that afternoon might be Toby Dammit. You didn’t see the whole movie, just a scene, you remind the friend, who laughs at your insistence on this point but recommends that you watch it nonetheless. You do. Promisingly, you see Terence Stamp’s head come free from his body. But no one runs anywhere with it, not to mention that Stamp drives a convertible sports car, so we’re definitely not in Victorian England. The friend then recommends The Pit and the Pendulum, your viewing of which yields the same result. You spend some time searching for answers online, but you soon stop. You realize that you don’t want to know what movie you saw a snippet of those many years ago, or if such a movie exists at all. Not knowing is good, it’s natural, it’s the only way, really, to carry on.
KEVIN CANFIELD
OUTDOORSMAN
My friend M— told me he’ll probably never make it as a nature poet. I didn’t argue with him. He’s bad at describing the sinewy deer that loiter near his neighbor’s vegetable garden, and too many of his sunsets are “beautiful.” He claims to like birds, but ever since I got him a second-hand Audubon Society field guide at Goodwill he’s been using it as a coaster. How would you know? I asked him. How would I know what? he said. Me: How would you know you’ve “made it” as a nature poet? Him: I wouldn’t because I haven’t. He told me that everything he’s written is drivel, tapping a spiral notebook that sat on a table between us. He flipped to a page with a recent draft and slid it to me. See for yourself, he said. It was one of those “After” poems, where the poet writes about another, better poem, acknowledging the earlier, better writer in the title. This one, in what he admitted was an act of breathtaking pretentiousness, was titled “After G.M. Hopkins’ Kestrels.” It was a hundred words, tops, so I read it twice, hoping that M— would see how hard I was concentrating. I like the imagery here, I said, pointing to a line near the end, the one about moss growing on the pews of a crumbling church. I was about to offer some more feedback, because there was another line—something about his mom’s leather jacket smelling like butterscotch—that was interesting, even if it stood out like a fugitive from another poem. But he interrupted: I almost killed my grandfather. Where did this come from? Was it a confession? He continued: When I was a kid, he gave me his .22. He was cutting firewood, and I guess I was in the way, because he told me to go shoot some chipmunks. I missed a bunch of them, but I shot his chainsaw, right on the bar—right through the second “e” in Jonsered! I asked if he’d done it on purpose. He shook his head. We talked some more, and we agreed that he should continue writing, but maybe nature poems weren’t for him.
KEVIN CANFIELD
Michele Harmeling is a poet, writer, and forager based out of Alaska.
Born and raised on the third coast, Michigan, David James has published eight books and has had over thirty one-act plays produced. After working for forty-five years in higher education, he retired and is loving it.
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.