Gritty

I feel personally responsible
for the weathering
on benches and buildings.
like somehow the unfolding of my life
has chipped away at structure.

I am an amalgam
of splinters and lead paint.

 

The Organ Maker

Oh, you, organ-maker!
You birther of grand instruments!
How many pipe-sets does this year’s Genesis contain?
How many millions are the churches in city-states paying you
to bandage the hymns and perpetuate
the illusion of perfect eternal pitch?
I cannot tell that your hair needs combing
or offer you a piece of gum
because I fear the scales your hands can cast,
and also the music on your breath.

 

Meet Me in Dallas (Good Talking)

a man who looks like me
helped me navigate the subway
and I gave myself credit.

how funny for him to come from Seattle and
for me to come from Boston and
for us to meet in Dallas
and talk about how horrible it is here.

he has to catch a flight to his coast
and he shakes my hand and
all the while I’m trying to remember which
fly on my bedroom wall
I sent to Washington with the message:
“Meet me in Dallas.”

 

Blonde

i’m glad you know this place so well.
you can show me all the landmark scars
and where men have been murdered.

you say i shouldn’t drink in this town.
is there any reason for that
or are you just
scared to share the bars?

 

Riding Shotgun

Mostly I see people dancing.
The prevailing expression
on pedestrian faces
is a sort of terrified confusion.
I can think of no more honest moment
than the one where a person
moving very fast
is watching you
and your face
move very slow.

 

Flies

sleeplessness allows me to shamelessly spend time with flies.
before most have had their coffee,
I sit and watch the cups they’ll use.
there is no one around to expect swats,
and so I am comfortable letting them explore.

from rim to rim they float or jump or
skip-frames in quarter-inch distances,
sure that they smell sugar left by inadequate cleaning.

people start to slump by and snatch cups
in monochromatic morning light.
this stirs the fly to my shoulder and
I ask him what he smells on me,
but he is lock-eyed and consumed
as people purse lips
and gently kiss
the ground he walked on.

 

Neighbor’s Dog

you hang suggestively
your posture gestures forward
and your stiff back
counteracts this.

you are a neighbor’s dog,
kneeling and bow-headed.
you sniff the dirt beneath your nose,
though I am not standing on it.

 

You Light the Room

i want to spin you platonically.
i want to see you unhalted.
i want to see you perpetually restless,
so that when fatigue knocks
you would have me to spin you.

i would rest between revolutions.
you need only wake me
and i would move you.

i would leech off emanations
that your body would briefly host,
acting as bridge between
thickly locked depth
and breathy surface.

i would suffer to tend a source
that stillness would eliminate.

 

Bastard Fish

“Has your boy ever gutted a fish?

My father yelled, “No!” and carried the paper towels inside.

I scurried to find my rubber summer-shoes so I could cross the white gravel drive without hurting myself. I thought about how if I’d just bear the pain a while the callous would let me run on rocks. I looked back to see if I should help my father unload the truck, but he was kissing my stepmother so I went after Jake down the road. I trailed as he wobbled. His legs barely seemed to swing independently. They were fixed to his waste as if he were an action figure. I remember, in that instant, trying to decide if I’d rather have an action figure whose legs moved or one whose legs stayed straight. Sure, you could move the legs, but they never stayed lined up right did they? I’d never seen such jagged thighs rotate like that on a person who wasn’t plastic. But then again, when their legs didn’t move you had to make them walk like they had cement shoes on. Jake walked like he had cement shoes on.

I wasn’t sure Jake knew I was behind him at first. He kept his hands spaced from his hips. From the back, it looked like he was always waiting and prepared to draw a pistol from his belt. He got to his truck, though, and when he turned I saw the smile he was sporting. He was some strange mix of clown and cowboy; plastic and un-plastic. Some of the men in Boston were tanned, but still had white hair. Jake was exceptionally tan and exceptionally white-haired.

The truck was fairly new. It always struck me when old men had new trucks. It never seemed right. In my mind, the truck should match the man. He lifted a bucket out of the back, and it certainly matched him. It was metal, covered in dings, and looked like something Tom Sawyer might have carried milk in. Some lake water sloshed over and Jake laughed as it spread and stuck his shirt to his chest.

“Fresh water, boy. Don’t need nothin’ but the sun to handle it!”

He caught me off guard with that. He had been whistling some grainy folk song, and I was sure he wouldn’t be whistling if he knew I was around. I had forgotten the boisterous nature of certain older people. I was ten and if I met another ten-year-old, there was an obligation for both of us to say nothing but our names and perhaps a forced, polite “Hello,” if our mothers had their fingers in our hair. Jake skipped right to sharing his favorite songs with me. He didn’t really seem to care what my name was.

“You ever gut a fish, boy?”

My father had already answered this question. I didn’t know if he’d forgotten or just wanted to hear it from the source.

I told him, “No.”

He pointed to another, smaller bucket.

“Grab that. Throw the rest of ‘em into the river over there. I’m done with ‘em. My dock’s the one with the tiny little light-posts. People around here give me shit about having those lights on all night, but I’ve never fallen into this river once.”

I’d only ever heard my father swear a couple times. Instinctively, I obeyed and carried the bucket from Jake’s shiny blue truck over to Michigan’s Black river. Jake’s bucket matched him in size, color, and wear. Mine did, too. It was molded yellow plastic and still had a visible barcode on its side. I knelt above the knots keeping its cover on and tried to sort them out in my head before going in with my fingers. The mess looked too complex for me to mentally discern the best course of action, so I pulled the first stretch of rope my hand could find and hoped for the best. The knot held and the bucket toppled onto the wood. Its lid bounced the entire length of the decking and leapt into the water. It was still attached by sturdy knot to the bucket, though, which was quickly unleashing a heavy dose of clear water into the dark black body below.

About a dozen little grey fish made varying paths to the current. They were small enough to propel themselves through the puddle I’d produced. I watched them snap on and off the dock hoping to find deeper water. Eventually, all but one had successfully completed safe travels to the surface of the river. This was about two feet below the level of my chin, which was now resting on the backs of my hands and peeking over the end of the dock. I curled my grip around the planks to reduce my risk of joining the minnows in their turf. They were small, but I was sure they had armies waiting just below whatever level the sunlight made visible. If I fell in, they would swarm and tickle my ankles until I was laughing so hard that I drowned. I watched the minnows turn in circles and slowly regroup. They were like a tiny rag-tag group of soldiers who, against all odds, had survived a brutal onslaught. I gave them all stories. All the war movies my brothers liked gave all the soldiers their own stories. I made some of the minnows from Boston and some of them from Georgia. One of them had been born in Alaska, and never stopped complaining about how hot it was. They consulted and I could see that they were waiting for one more. I remembered.

I had never looked a minnow in the eye before. I dangled this petrified straggler in front of my nose and made a face like I was going to eat him. He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but I knew you could only hear minnows underwater. Even then, it was impossibly quiet. A minnow’s cry was about as loud as its bite was hard.  Naturally, you had to be very close, but to get that close, the minnows had to trust you. And to earn a minnow’s trust, you had to stay very still. Nobody could stay very still underwater long enough to hear a minnow’s cry, though. You would run out of breathe. I couldn’t do it, at least. My brother had explained the minnow’s cry to me the last time we drove up here, though, so I knew all about it.

I smiled, blew into his face, and threw him a few feet from his friends, who had just thought of giving up on him. I could see confusion in the blank expression of the baitfish. I imagined him back at some pebble-speckled basecamp telling his horror story to his peers. Maybe he’d even live long enough to share the memory with his grandsons.

“I thought I was a goner for sure. You both should have seen the look in those huge blue eyes. I mean I had just watched another one of them kill thirty of my brothers with hooks through the eyes. God, y’know, how could they just do that? Anyway, there I was, face-to-face with this smaller giant. He opened his mouth and I swear he could have fit a hundred of us in there. He opened his mouth, and, y’know what, I’m fish enough to admit it, I was terrified. I thought that was it. I saw my life ending, y’know? God, it was awful. But then, and I’ll never be able to explain this for as long as I live, he closed his mouth, pursed his lips, and forced air at me like I’d never felt before. Blew all the water straight off me. Needless to say, at this point I’ve got no idea what the hell is going on. I’d never been dry like that before. God, I was terrified. It was a glimpse at death, boys, and let me tell you, whatever this is, this right here, this water, well it’s about a thousand times better.”

Then he’d take a sip from some miniscule glass and sigh looking off into the lake.

I knew he spent the rest of the day thinking uneasily about me, but I was happy to have provided some entertainment for future minnow generations. I told myself my actions may have prompted the writing of a widespread and cautionary marine tale. I thought that maybe, because of what I had done that day, fewer minnows would wind up in tiny yellow buckets.

I stared down the river. We were about a fifteen minute boat ride away from Lake Michigan. There were hundreds of slips between it and us, and not very many beyond ours. We were on the very outskirts of a massive watercraft parking lot. My family had been coming here for years. It used to be just people like us; people who could afford a week of vacation at a reasonable rate once a year. As time went on, though, Chicagoans and other wealthy-types caught wind of all these tiny havens on the Michigan shoreline. Slips closest to the lake cost more than my house. My father told me that. We paid two-thousand dollars a week to park our boat a tedious distance from the water. We rented a house from Jake, who kept his boat there even when he had renters.

 The river was nice enough, though. Sometimes, if the task of readying the boat seemed too daunting, we’d just hang around the river. Eventually, I grew fond of our spot. I started to appreciate its distance from yachts. Chicagoans kept massive yachts; yachts that were far too large to take up-river. Whenever I felt dwarfed by the two-hundred foot behemoths that we passed on the way to the channel, I reminded myself that if they ever found themselves on our bend of the river, we’d have the upper hand. A boat like theirs could only enjoy the open water. It needed room to maneuver, and it needed depth. Our eighteen foot speedboat wasn’t elegant like that, but it could scuttle around that entire parking lot. There were things our boat could see that theirs never would. The open water was great and all, and part of me still wanted to feel the weight of tons of steel responding at my rotation of a wheel, but if you really wanted to experience the Black River, you had to love it as the Black River; not as your passageway to lake Michigan. You had to force yourself up where the massive lake sturgeons never go.

If you kept going, beyond even the farthest reaches of the parking spots, and far past all the signs that told you not to drive your boat too fast, you stood a chance of escaping the oppressive whirr of cigarette boats. Even at a crawl, they were louder than any engine I’d ever heard. You heard them in your chest before you heard them with your ears. My father hated them. He said rich people, the bad ones, anyway, only bought massive yachts or cigarette boats. He told me a hundred people a year died on Lake Michigan alone from flipping cigarette boats. They were built for speed, and their bows were about ten times as long as their decks. The people driving them always looked silly, especially when they were crawling to their slip back up the river, where you weren’t allowed to drive your boat too fast.

Jake told my father as one passed, “It’s like watching a man stand at one end of a banana and try to steer it. Ridiculous. All these people with their money. God, y’know, it’s hard for me to hate ‘em, though. They bring so much here, and I do love this town. They shop at our stores, eat at our restaurants, keep things moving, even if the movement gets too loud. But, y’know, I do hate ‘em. Forget their money. You know how you can tell? There never used to be a difference between the boats a few slips from the channel and the boats a couple miles up-river. Hell, it isn’t even about size anymore. In the last few years, I’ve seen fifty-footers come up as far as the second bridge. Twenty years ago, that thing woulda’ been the pride of South Haven. Now it’s just some unfortunate man’s toy.”

“Unfortunate?” my father asked, confused.

Jake looked harder into my father’s eyes, like he wasn’t sure whether or not to explain his position. He must have seen some good, though, and he went on.

“Well think about it. That thing is essentially a mansion with a propeller on its ass. It-“

“A-hem,” my father coughed, motioning to bucket-wielding me.

“What? I can’t say ass? Okay. Sorry. A propeller on its butt. Got that, boy? A propeller on its butt. Don’t say ass. Understood?”

“Yeah I know. I never swear when my dad’s around.”

My father choked a little on his vitamin water. My stepmother had gotten him addicted to them. I stole them from the fridge sometimes.

“You don’t ever swear. Period.”

His expression was a question mark, and I made a face to answer it.

 “That’s what I meant,” I told him.

Jake laughed at us. I thought it was directed at my father, but meant as a gesture for me, like Jake didn’t mind if I said ass.

“Ben,” Jake said to my father, “did you say you were headed to the store pretty soon?”

“Yeah, I wanted to pick up some limes for the Corona.”

With that, he took his keys and got into his truck. My father wouldn’t drink Corona without lime. Later, I found out that nobody would. He used to have me cut up the limes, though. I liked doing it. He’d let me drop a slice into all the bottles. I always made him wait to take the bottles to their respective drinkers so that I could watch the bubbles for a few seconds. Once I opened one of the Corona bottles and sliced a lime just to watch the bubbles go. He got sort of angry, but I think he knew I wasn’t going to drink it. At that point, my only experience with beer was the oppressively sweet smell of my hands after bringing all the empties to the redemption center for recycling. I threw up once in his truck because of it, and he used the money from the cans to buy me a six pack and a lime. We tried all different sorts of methods for combining Corona with lime. We tried squeezing all the juice in first, and we tried cutting the lime into little pieces, all in an effort to produce a maximum quantity of bubbles. I felt better after that, and he split the beer with my stepmother.

“Throw the bucket back now. I need you to come help me with something,” Jake chirped from the dock as my father drove off.

I tried to place it back into the truck’s bed, but I wasn’t tall enough to do it gently. I thought I might toss it in, but I didn’t feel right tossing something that didn’t belong to me. Once I came to terms with my height, I scaled the rear left tire, held one hand tight on the frame, and lowered the bucket down silently using its rope. When I was sure it was secure, I put my free hand next to its counterpart, looked at the ground, and jumped into the gravel.

“You shouldn’t jump in gravel, boy, your ankles are gonna hate ‘ya someday. Nice landing, though, gotta’ give it to ‘ya. Nice landing. Now look here.”

Jake showed me a bucket of yellow lake perch. Grumpy looking things.

“This is all you caught?” I asked.

“Ha! Hardly. This is just what I got to keep. See some are too small to take, and after you divide the good ones between the rest of the boys and I, I only end up with so many. Besides, some days are better than others.”

I realized then that “boy” may not have been such a derogatory term.

There were seven or eight dead-eyed, lively creatures circling around in the tiny bucket lake; each yellow, each green, and each frantically searching for the way out of the strange cove.

“They’re shiny,” I observed.

Jake nodded, “They are shiny.”

“Well, now what?”

“Now we gut ‘em, try to get most of the bones, and then we eat ‘em.”

“Most of the bones?”

“Look, I mean, if ‘ya go your whole life without a perch bone stickin’ through your tongue then you’re doin’ somethin’ wrong. Some bites got bones, y’know? If ‘ya spend your whole time makin’ sure there aren’t any bones to stick ‘ya then you’ll never get to eat the fish that ‘ya caught; that ‘ya prepared.”

I think, had there been more blood, I would have felt better about it. Its unexpected elusiveness made its appearances all the more startling. I didn’t realize how clean cleaning a fish could go. He nicked something on a couple of them, though, and ended up having to switch rags once or twice.

“You do one,” he commanded, handing me the knife.

“I don’t think I should. That knife is really huge. My dad-“

“Kid,” he turned the cutting surface toward me, “shut up.”

I’m sure he noticed a glint of immense fear and confusion in my eyes as I processed this. Quickly, though, my eyebrows relaxed and we shared a muffled laugh.

I cut along the spine of Lake Michigan’s fruit. Jake bounced at the sound of the neck breaking between the table and the blade he had given me.

“Hmm! That’s a big’n. Wish there were more like that around. There used to be.”

“What do you mean? The fish got smaller?”

Jake laughed and took the knife from me. He salvaged what he could from a mediocre cleaning.

“Look at all this meat you missed. You’ll get it. I thought for sure the blood would spook you.”

“I thought there would be more.”

“Things are never as bad as they seem. And no the fish didn’t get smaller.”

“What’d you mean then?”

“Damn Gobies.”

“What’s a Goby?”

“Tiny little bastard fish that’s what.”

“Geez.”

Jake looked at me with his jaw hanging down, as if he couldn’t even fathom the idea that I may have thought he was being too harsh on a little fish.

“Well, Hell!” he exclaimed “You go perchin’ now and half of what ya catch are Gobies. They live in the same little zone down there. Both bottom feeders. And those Gobies are quick, relentless little bastards. The perch are dyin’ ‘cause they can’t keep up. Imagine if every time you tried to eat, a tiny little fella ran out from the shadows and snatched every bite off your fork before it ever got to your mouth. You’d die, too.”

I smiled at the image, but could tell by Jake’s expression that this was not to be taken lightly.

“Well, where did they come from?” I asked.

“They think they got brought over in ballasts from Europe somewhere. Damn cargo ships. Talk about eyesores. Nothin’ like sittin’ out on a dock lookin’ over the Lake in the mornin’ and seein’ a big ship full’a stuff in your way. That’s all it is; stuff. Or stuff to build more stuff. People gotta have their stuff. People love stuff.”

Jake said the word stuff like my father said the word ass. He had neatly wrapped all but one of the perch filets and loaded them into a cooler. He grabbed the last one.

“Oh,” I said, “What’s a ballast?”

“Ballast tanks. Big ships will fill up part of the boat with water to keep ‘em weighed down or balanced or somethin’. I’m not entirely sure to be honest with you, but basically it’s a big tank of water from somewhere else that eventually gets let in to the water here. Idiots. All of ‘em. Bigger the boat, bigger the idiot, and those ships are about as big as they come. Hmph.”

“Do you have any? I wanna see what they look like.”

“Idiots?” Jake asked with a snake-eyed grin.

“No!” I laughed, “Gobies.”

“Ahh, I was just gonna tell ya’ to go hang around the center of town for a while and follow the folks with shiniest cars. You’d’a been sure to see some idiots!”

Our laughter was interrupted by gravel being displaced under rubber tires, an engine cutting off, and then the slam of a driver’s side door.

“You better go and see if your dad needs any help bringin’ stuff in. I never keep Gobies if I catch ‘em. I should probably just kill ‘em, but this old man has still got a heart. Besides, if my wife ever found out I was out there fish-murderin’ for no good reason, well I don’t think she’d like it very much. Hell, I’ll bet you throw a line off the dock here and you’re likely to snag one. Brought fishing poles from home didn’t ya’?”

“Yeah, I’ll give it a shot later tonight.”

“You let me know what ya’ think of ‘em. Now go help your father. Looks like he’s struggling with all those bags.”

He motioned to the truck with the cooler he held in his right hand.

“Hey there, stranger,” my father squeaked.

I was very short with him.

“Hey, Dad.”

He sensed that this wasn’t a curtness meant out of disrespect or of anger. This was the brief and hurried conversation of someone determined to succeed.

I piled plastic bags onto the counter. My father had picked up much more than a couple limes.

As soon I removed my hands from the peak of the grocery mountain and was convinced there would be no avalanche at least until I made it out of the kitchen (at which point, it wouldn’t be my problem), I reached into the refrigerator and fumbled in search for the tub of night-crawlers while straining every muscle in my neck to look over the door and make sure the poles were still leaned against the mantle in the “sitting room”.

I walked toward them and let the refrigerator door swing to an unhalted close. I thought I heard the sound of one tomato crashing onto the linoleum floor behind me, but I did not stop. Tunnel-vision was devouring me.

There were wooden benches built onto these docks. On mine sat the tub of night-crawlers, a plastic cup of apple juice, and a pole-wielding child whose expression added years to his face. Jake’s passion had rubbed off on me. That which was, only moments ago, a distant and dismissible issue had now become personal. I heard the whimpering between his words and colloquial contractions. I had remained still in his presence long enough to detect the fading of his vitality. I would avenge the spirit of South Haven. I would rid this proud and storied river of its invaders. I would catch the Goby. I would catch the Bastard Fish.

I sipped the juice like whiskey. My sternness masked a boyish grin. It was one of those rare and fleeting moments in which my instinct not to let my teeth see too much daylight was overwhelmed by either profound joy or gritty anticipation. However, instinct is not inalterable. My instinct fell to my concentration. I locked eyes with my reflection and remained a cement fixture to the dock. At the fraying outskirts of my vision, I watched the shadows of modest men’s boats glide from hanging slightly port to dramatically starboard to resolutely invisible. They lingered like unending shady spots blended with the impermanent gray of Michigan after-hours.

 My red bobber bounced on the elfish waves that rivers endure. Had there been a real bite, it would have sounded like shattering glass to my gaze. I was more than halfway through my tub of worms. I started asking myself if fish even swam this far up-river. Even if I did catch something, who’s to say it wouldn’t have been a sunfish or even a trout? I felt my resolve weathering. My shoulders hung a little lower each time I mistook a change of the wind for an interest in the worm. I sat like that; folding in intervals upon myself until I severed contact with the pole, wedged it between two boards, and forced all of my remaining energy to focus on watching the bobber.

In that physical disconnection, I found incredible confidence. I could watch everything. The pole was well within reach. If anything happened, I could surely grab it in time. This tense epicenter of battle had silently burst and in the resulting calm I felt sweeping comprehension. With a newly unclouded and still keenly observant mind, I readdressed the scene. I felt less like a desperate, bearded, and rain-sopped fisherman and more like a kid with a magnifying glass.

My hand was on the pole within milliseconds of it delicately tapping once against the fluid surface of the water. That was the only warning. After a very stressful moment of staring through the eyes of red-and-white plastic, it was gone. Its white underside became enveloped in a swampy green and then, however briefly, disappeared completely. A firm pull on the line brought the bobber back to the surface looking disoriented. I stared again, expecting some erupting and splashing climax. The bobber tapped again and submerged, but again returned to the surface.

“To hell with concentration!” I screamed in my head.

I allowed the spoiling feel of condensed satisfaction to take the reins on my lips. I was a few reeling seconds away from finally laying eyes on my adversary. I took the line in as far as it would come and fished through the air for it as it dangled above the river. I held the top of the hook and manipulated the fish without actually touching it.

I sensed so much in this frail creature. It was three inches of slick, pure, and glorious demonic evil. I held the king without a palace, who had been dropped into benign circumstance and slid his way into influence. I stared it in the face a while, until the water on its scales seemed less present and guilt crept over me. I took my weapon out of its mouth and gently tossed it to the river. It floated there for a short time until it regained its composure, tested each of its parts to make sure all the cylinders were firing, and then dive-bombed out of sight. I kept thinking it might resurface, sure that I saw again the glitter of its scales that taunted me after releasing it.

I saw Jake the next morning. He was coming back from the lake just as I had woken up. I was seated over a bowl of sugary cereal wearing plaid sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt. He wore jeans and an oversized t-shirt.

I wiped milk from my chin as he asked me, “Any luck last night?”

I gave him the only conclusion I had reached.

“They’re shiny,” I said very matter-of-factly.

Trailing a short moment of consideration, he shrugged in agreement.

“They are shiny,” he said raising a Vitamin Water my father had tossed him. He offered the slightest of grins, and then sauntered off with his hands spaced from his hips.

 

Patient with the faucet

My friend loves this song,
but all I hear is a talking blues.
My hair is smoking cigarettes
and has long since rolled over
and I am not bald.
 
When I leave his house,
he tells me to go slow.

The snow is playing the same three chords on guitar
that it played before freezing
and that kills me
and all I hear is a talking blues.
 
I returned a book to very quiet man on a telephone
and he smiled.

 
A man pointed out the simplicity in what I found complex,
but all I heard was a talking blues.

I gave the faucet enough time to get cold before
splashing my face,
and it felt like water always feels.

I have a bus ticket waiting somewhere.
They will hold it for me until mid-June when I leave.
 
Three days later and I’ll forget to be
patient with the faucet.

My hair will be running its thumb
across a candid photograph of me.

Snow, I have missed your
folksy G-D-C.

Tell me again, how does it go?
G-D-C?
You are a godsend.