Archive for August, 2007 Page 2 of 2
I had been considering the strange angle of her will since I met her. Where was this woman coming from? Where was she going? She seemed to have the most erratic route. She burdened herself with unreasonable impediments.
She wanted me close and then far. She wanted to touch me and she wanted to run away. She wanted me to do something for her, something she wouldn’t say. If I could not leave her be, then she would come to me. But then she would escape.
She was always escaping from something she hadn’t even yet had a taste of, always asking and cursing, falling down in the leaves, rising again a little more disheveled. She was growing wilder every moment, her clothing falling away, cuts bleeding through the cloth. She was like a tiny blue sun glowing on the forest floor.
I held her hand as we crossed the stream. I led her to the trailer.
I don’t know what she wanted. She just collapsed in the chair and slept a long time.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI tried to explain to him that a rapist is someone who forces another to have certain intimacies against their will. I wanted him to understand clearly that the paths of intention are sacred. When they conflict, there must be quick resolution or there will be all manner of danger.
He asked me how that could be changed. It was a reasonable question and I was quite proud of him under the circumstances. I told him:
A woman must be wooed. Her path must be brought in line with your own. She must come to share essential things with you, but in her own time.
He asked me how this is done. I thought for a long while, pacing, flipping my light on and off.
How is it done?
Find the complement. Be the one thing together, going the same place, the same direction. Offer endearing glimpses of yourself,
(I was thinking of his circumstance)
clown a bit, make her smile. If you have her smile and her laugh, then tell her a secret thing from your childhood.
He said he had already done all this.
Then you must invite her to go with you some place very convenient.
He said he had done this.
I asked if she had agreed.
He said he could not be certain.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill
I was in the city again and I saw the girl.
She was walking strangely, weaving and struggling on tall thin shoes. I asked her why she wore them. She asked me to take her home.
I wasn’t sure what she meant, so I didn’t say anything. She pushed against my chest and fell down. She was dressed in a way that I found quite appealing. She lay on the concrete and wept.
I picked her up and she held me. She gripped me loosely and then, as if recalling me, she touched me with more certainty. She felt along my hairy back. She touched my spine and it was electricity.
She whispered in my ear: “Take me home with you.” I thought this was a good idea and it didn’t seem far to me. We started walking.
She took her shoes off. She lagged behind me. I offered to carry her. She climbed on my back. She laid her head on the hump atop my shoulders. She held me like that and fell asleep.
I walked out of the city on the railroad tracks over the river. The wind blew across us and I felt electricity all along my back where her body pressed to mine. I didn’t want to change the rhythm of my walking and risk waking her.
It couldn’t have been more than half a sun and part of the moon (which hung over the trees and tempted).
I was sure of nothing. Our bodies had pressed into one. If she would have only slept on, I would have carried her forever. We were like one thing, her speaking in an anxious thrust from the depths of some dream, calling a name, maybe crying hot tears on my shoulder. I thought of the blue-robed people in the river, wetting themselves in the tears of their God.
She woke up. We were in the dark, in the forest.
She jumped off my back and screamed.
She was just scared. She ran among the trees. The darkness broke her stride. She had lost a shoe. She threw the other at me so I kept some distance.
She called me a cocksucker. She called me a son of a bitch. A rapist.
I am not a cocksucker. I suppose I am a son of a bitch of sorts. I am like a dog in some ways. But I don’t like dogs. They have learned all the wrong things from men. They worship men. I had carried her on my back awhile. I am no different.
But rapist I could not understand. I asked the electric man what it meant and he grew very nervous. He asked me where I’d heard it and so I told him all this:
I followed her. It was easy to follow her. She was like the moon, glowing with a bluish light. Slow steps. She circled and crossed back. Stumbled. The lightning bugs pulsed. The frogs cried out with the heat.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillHe told me of those first peoples who feared us and left us in peace; how man had tricked them of their land with new fancy ways of being. The new men told them their place was the galley and this they understood, they had made other men slaves in their time. But a slave could become a man again if he learned the new way. They believed they could become new men and not die like animals.
They did not know that what was new about these new men was that they had but one leader. They called him many names. Their yankee father. A man whose emblem was golden and bore eagles with arrows in their claws.
Men with boomsticks and disease, wizards of glass, delightfully ornamented. They understood to take the enemy’s beauty. When the new men conquered, they did not take it for themselves, they threw it in the dirt and trod upon it. To them it was fill and scree. They did not take it as their own.
The first ones would not give up their beauty to the new men whose yankee father told lies. The new man was a cheat and a scoundrel, rolling over the plains, brutalizing everything.
These new men were quickly replaced by even newer men who were slower and more civilized, all of them guilty of everything. It is their constant guessing at things that leads them to ruin.
One day, I am certain, those that remain of the first ones will rise up and roam the lands again and we’ll all be a lot happier.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillMy hands are full of curses today. Handfuls of thick mud pasted over everything. I am making my own magic ink, impregnating it with colors and lights, beaming radiance into dead mud to shock it back to life, to give it tongue and purpose, old curses gone to dust, born again.
I curse myself with this burden: to always be telling every secret. Dramaturge of darkness done by a light on a hill, an angel dancing with a train, comedian to the stars, muttering a dirty lyric, a man.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI write with my fists. I’ve no other means of holding the pen. It is laborious. I have time to consider every letter.
Everything is ideas now. Nothing is in the world anymore. I must leave this place, but I have this prisoner to contend with. I have made certain obligations to him.
We talk all the time, so my mind is full up with ideas. I dream now of my distant glade and it is like walking there in my memory. I retrace every step while I sleep among the scraps on the floor.
Everything gets dirty when you stop traveling. A great dust cloud at your back settles around you and everything fails itself in isolation. It is like that with me, I slowly decay. I have acne on my back. I smell very strongly. I am more a prisoner than he is. He likes sitting anyway.
I try to satisfy myself with dreams and sweeping. I try to be courteous to my guest although he tells me I snore to shake the trees when I sleep on my back. He has not slept in days.
He insisted he will keep writing all the secrets of men into the strange bud, so I untied him. His lightning beam flashes through the trees down toward the tracks.
Perhaps he’ll tell some other story to strangers.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill