Second Coming
The train is late and that is the greatest of my worries in Galway. I check my watch and look to the darkening horizon. It is clear tonight. These last hours were spent quietly by the fire making talk with the Innkeeper’s niece, while we watched the cats lap up buttermilk and I laughed as they licked each other for the dribbles they lost on themselves. She tells me when they were kittens everything was too rich, but now they can keep it down. Now they can enjoy it. Tomorrow will be spent looking at a plot, not a grave by any means, but a foundation for something to come. I’ve gotten a good price and the people seem honest and the neighborhood will be fashionable from what I can tell. Most nights the one I love, she sleeps peacefully and I watch her for a while until I turn my attention out the window back to our horizon. It is clear those nights. One of the workers brings me back and his face moves and I hear him ask for a light. And he is alive, so I oblige.
What is it you were saying? I remember it like an old aunt long gone. Unlike the worker I can not see her face until a smell finds me, not her smell. But something like it. There is no aunt until there is smell, and I remember her sometimes. But not always. My sister would pinch me under the table as she told her stories again again and again and the same. My lost aunt was convinced she was right and we told her she was right, because we knew she was a dancer once and nothing can stop the past. Like the day we put her in a box, I find that box in my memories and open it to that familiar smell. That smell of her mimeograph jowls and those stories that now seem as an inviting coat that was so itchy to begin with.
I put it on and look in the pockets and find ticket stubs and tokens and a five piece. But most of all lint. She was young when you died, but she remembered and she told us over and over and the same. We read you and saw your face on stamps, but she read you and stopped her lessons the day you were put in a box. I wonder what the teacher thought when the piano started and the mirror beside your shadow was empty. Would she chalk it up to gyres? No, and the music went on and they lost themselves without you.
A shape forms at the blackening edge and I feel a pinch that is not there from a sister far gone away. It grows and roars as the worker puts out his fag with his shoe and pockets his empty hands. With the wind comes new smells, new birds, and this, our train. I can make out the driver’s head, it is the face of a man, and it is alive too. I can make out the dining cart with warm windows, and etched underneath are words from an old tongue, but not your words. Not Albion’s either. The driver makes eye contact as the beast slouches into the station and for an instant we both know that all is well in Galway, and in the previous town, and in the places to come.
An intellectual delve into the visceral, if that makes any sense at all. It was narrative and yet, metaphorical. I liked it. Don't use as. Peace, baby!
ReplyDeleteI've edited this so much since I first wrote it. I think this is the original. There was a Irish poet who came as the Ellison speaker and her imagery was so basic it was refreshing. Lots of weather, and nature, and stuff you would find in a 1950s rural household. As crap as HC is they do get relatively good writers to come. Did you happen to catch Brad Watson? Dude was brilliant.
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