Flash Fiction

Inviting all interested in this exciting genre: stories (more or less fictional) under 1000 words for flash reading. I've just compiled a modest collection so far, if you'd like to check it out. The volume title is probably temporary, at Good, less than Grand:

https://goodlessthangrand.blogspot.com/

Merry Christmas, everyone!
Dan

Cardigans and Care

This is the 552nd post on Stillwater, and the essay below also appears with a related poem in Lost Menagerie, the 300th post on that site. I could celebrate that milestone, but the content is sombre--a need for the serene. We're looking forward to Advent, and this year we'll give prayers up for Hanukkah, especially for those in Squirrel Hill, literally Mr Rogers' neighborhood.

Cardigans and Care

            Of the eight or nine scars I have (of dozens I don’t see), the one that serves as touchstone is the tiniest, just outside my left nostril. It happened when I was four or five years old. Mom came back from checking the level of the nearby river, prone to flooding; the tv could have babysat me for those fifteen minutes, but it was off, leaving me to my imagination. I was never bored in northwest Minnesota, and what we had around the house and yard was simple, more alluring than anything on tv. Sure, watching an Apollo rocket blast off was exciting, as neighbors came over and Dad struggled to correct the contrast. But day-to-day programs didn’t mean so much to me.

            Except Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood. And when Mom announced it was starting, I sprang up from the living room carpet and bounced from armchair to sofa to the corner of the coffee table, which caught me by the nose. I can’t remember if it hurt, but the feeling of the flap was gruesome, reflected in my mother’s panicked eyes. She hadn’t yet turned on the tv, so didn’t have to turn it off as she rushed me out the door and into the car to get stitched up at a hospital I no longer remember. Memory only remains on the episode I didn’t see that day.

            I won’t pretend I loved everything Fred Rogers did. His ‘land of make believe’ had voices too contrived, and Mr McFeely’s “speedy delivery” needed to chill out. Chef Brockett was okay, but took time away from Betty Aberlin, a kind of crush, in retrospect. I enjoyed the routines: feeding fish with a couple sprinkles and a check to see that the gouramis were swimming together nicely; the singing of the intro, tossing a shoe from right hand to left, opening the closet for one of his cardigans, all of them knit by his mother. I agreed with his closing remarks—always the same, if phrased uniquely day after day: “you are special and good just the way you are.” Debater I’d become, I could have taken him to task: “what about that bully down the road who might be watching, getting your green light to be himself?” But I didn’t. Mr Rogers talked through difficulties all the time and knew they wouldn’t go away. Knew also they didn’t have to define or trump a given day.

            Because this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the program’s launch, and because documentaries are out about his legacy, I introduced my 12^th grade students to that television neighborhood. Just some clips, articles, links to civil causes and interviews. We’re studying ‘mass communication’ and the myriad manipulations that go with free speech. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to trust, when to bend or bolt, whom to share with, why to even care.

            That was August. In late October, the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, where Fred Rogers lived and worked, witnessed Hitler’s undying evil. The Tree of Life synagogue had open its Edenic doors to anyone who’d come to pray that day, risking anyone who’d alter the agenda and make those prayers cower, wail, surcease. The gunman was anyone you might imagine, and not necessarily that erstwhile bully down the road. More likely someone bullied, cowering, wailing, wanting to surcease.

            The story rarely knows itself. I imagine Fred Rogers scripted every second of his show, demanded in his gentle tone a discipline on set and duty to do things well, consistently…. No, I don’t. I imagine many ad hoc takes, listening to the banter at the coffee urn that was putting to the proof. Kids grow up and have kids; parallel lines blur with distance and blush with the generation gap. Coming of age is hard enough; coming to terms is anybody’s guess.

            I started wearing cardigans in college. They were rather available at thrift shops—grandpas die and leave this type of thread. Student teaching, I could feign a formal look to impress a principal, then shed the sweater when a lesson needed some elbow grease. In Minnesota, you dressed in layers anyway. People might have called me ‘Mr Rogers’, or more often ‘Richie Cunningham’, whom I resembled. Both satisfied, and student teaching opened many doors.

            I sometimes want to close them, retreat into my memories, even those like falling on my nose. I sometimes want to inventory what is there—count the sheep, so to speak. Spend Q-time with familiars. Zip into what my grandma knit. Walk the neighborhood through the dog that walks me. Insulate the tried-and-true of care.

            “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth says, and in another poem, “The Child is father of the Man.” Inversions happen all the time: a tree of life contributes to original, outrageous sin—unthinkable, if we stop to think. And here Fred would often say, especially to adults:

“All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. Ten seconds of silence. I’ll watch the time.”

 Ten seconds to infinity, fleeting and indelible.

            Mr Rogers was a lifelong Republican, I’ve heard, and though I’ve never voted for that party, I’ve loved a thousand people who have, and still do. Of course I wish he could have lived another quarter century and comment wisely on current events in this enclave of our universe. It’s fitting, though, that he has passed away, leaving memory, reminders, and a closetful of cardigans.

love, Dan

Minnesota minds

I'm writing a novel now--my first since Turkmenistan, 1995:)

Its topic is not so familiar to me: how internet realities might morph in 60 years or so. But good advice to writers is to 'write what you know', so I'm setting it in Minnesota and titling it Having Run.

There are two related plots in the opening chapters (they're short), so the cast of characters so far are:

Aamiina and her mother Nala, Somali emigrants living in Faribault
Patroller Pam Circe and her dauther, Gwen, also living in Faribault
Seb and Avis Carter, with their children Kay, Tim, Mia, leaving Minneapolis to 'sanctuary' in Fall Lake, near Ely.

My writers' group is offering good feedback, but none of them know much of Minnesota! I'd love more checks and balances:)

https://meta-metaphysics.blogspot.com/2018/08/having-run.html

thanks,
Dan

back from Denmark

and, necessarily, Germany--so we could frame the trip with Wittenburg and Elsinore. Other points between filled in a memorable vacation: Copenhagen a wonderful city of architecture and ideas, fjords flat and swimable, pace of life relaxed (if pricey). Our highlight, as Mom guessed, was Hamlet's castle, especially as the play went on around us, in intervals. Hamlet began by serenading Ophelia, happy from her balcony until Polonius elbowed her back to her chamber. Yorick juggled and did handstands and then--to my utter astonishment--assumed the role of Horatio for the rest of the scenes, combining clownishness and faithful reason. Here is a poem and some photos:

                  fooled

So, Yorick has a son.

I’ve seen or read this play

a hundred times or so,

and never fathomed

such a son, a jester for

the current court of Elsinore.

I brought my family here,

Kronborg castle, Helsingør,

where Shakespeare

also holidayed, perhaps

before his own son,

Hamnet, passed away.

What greeted us, in motley,

was ‘Horatio’—faithful

to the core; he led us

down a dungeoned path

where Hamlet, in our midst,

would meet his father’s ghost.

The day and play went on,

Horatio as Yorick, miching

with Polonius, Ophelia,

tourists from Japan, my wife

and kids, my mind, the King,

and seagulls swirling in.

Yorick spirited his hero

at the end, lending him his

father’s skull to talk to—

this is fiction, after all!...

Hamlet took, to be or not

to be’d the orb, then fought.

Then everyone went home,

or, in our case, to the plot

our tent was pitched.

Yorick has a son, doing

Yorick things, more than

dreamt in your philosophy.

Something to Remember

From Oceans, the song Andrea chose for her Dad's memorial service two years ago:

And I will call upon Your name
And keep my eyes above the waves

Today we worshiped at Cara's parent's church, where, surreptitiously, they had us sing that song again.  Something to remember!

When oceans rise, my soul will rest in Your embrace
For I am Yours and You are mine

Transgression

Transgression

                  “Oh, Tomas, aren’t you asleep by now?” my wife, prepping tomorrow’s snacks for backpacks, spoke slowly to this twelve-year old, a guest from France on a week of foreign-exchange. He’d come downstairs from the bedroom of our son Ben, who was away this week for a school trip of his own.

                  “I’m ahngry,” Tom said.

                  “Really? About what?”

                  “I’m ahngry,” he repeated.

                  Katerina looked at me for help. By coincidence, I was angrily keyboarding with the fickle wi-fi and my off-hours need to fill out online documents. “Honey, maybe you can take this. Tom is…”

                  “Ahngry,” he turned to me with raised eyebrows.

                  “Hmm. Was there something, Tom, that…um, happened? Today? This… jour?” I also raised my eyebrows like an empathetic emoji.

                  “Un moment,” Tom scampered to the stairwell and called to the other foreign exchange guest. “Hugo, quel est le mot pour ‘affamé’?”

                  Hugo, from the darkness, set him straight: “ahngry.”

                  Tom followed that with something, but Hugo stayed mute, as if suddenly asleep. With slightly more a skip in his step, Tom came back to the kitchen to announce: “I’m ahngry!”

                  “I’m sorry,” Katerina told him. “Maybe… you can call home? Mama? in France? I’m mama here—but your mama, I mean…or—” She was evidently having second thoughts about spreading Tom’s mysterious rage across the continent.

                  “No, no. Is fine. Okay.” Tom waved a pre-teen reassurance of some sort. He nodded a confused ‘Merci’ and backed his way out of the kitchen to go upstairs again.

                  “Odd.” Katerina waited to hear the bedroom door close. “What do you think of that?”

                  “He’ll get over it. You know these trips aren’t everybody’s fancy.” I grabbed a yogurt from the fridge as the internet stalled.

                  Minutes later, Tom bounded down with a new announcement: “feud!”

                  “With whom?” Katerina referreed, “Hugo?”

                  “No, Hugo okay. Please, feud.”

                  Katerina and I tried to read our minds, let alone his. “Let’s wake up Emma”—our daughter, who’d likely know what to do.

                  Tom waited patiently as I went up for Emma, who was wide awake and messaging friends about our French guests and theirs. “Em, you should be sleeping by now—yeah, yeah, yeah—but while you’re awake… Tom seems to be upset about something. Do you have a clue?”

                  “About what?” she was still messaging.

                  “About Tom. He’s downstairs—come talk to him, S’il vous plaît.”

                  “Dad, I don’t know French. I’ll be useless.”

                  “The whole point of this foreign exchange is to apply what you’ve been studying. How are you going to do next month, at Tom’s house?”

                  “I’ll be at Hugo’s. And his English is better.”

                  “Just come on down. Troubleshoot, for goodness sake.”

                  As we went downstairs, I thought she should be aware of his request for a feud. “He’s a rugby player, Dad. He can break my nose with a shoulder shrug.”

                  “Now, now, he’s been a perfect gentleman these past two days.” But that said, it got me thinking.

                  Emma giggled at Tom’s gesticulations, his “I’m really ahngry”, his own, machismo-challenged giggles. The dog chimed in with barks to quiet down, it’s past curfew! Eventually, we had to fetch elder brother Joey to translate the conundrum. He had taken four years of French in school.

                  “He says he’s angry,” he concluded.

                  “But why?” his mother pleaded, “what did we do?”

                  “Pourquoi?” Joey garbled.

                  Tom clenched his stomach. “He’s gonna barf,” Emma warned, to which her guest started giggling again.

                  Hugo came down to investigate his compatriot’s plight. While reticent, he read the situation instantly and felt a need to circle us together for a coming-to-terms. “Tom ahngry,” he started, and we nodded that we got that. “Me, no.” So, we knew we had an isolated situation. A lone wolf? Giggles surceased. “Vous”—shake of the head—“You… avoir—has?—feud. C’est une transgression de ne pas donner. Yes?”

                  “Erm… Joey?”

                  “‘Avoir’ means ‘have’,” he said, reaching for his phone to check even that.

                  My wife made a moue. “I heard ‘transgression’. Is that what you said, Hugo?”

                  “Oui, but… un peu.”

                  “That doesn’t sound good,” Em whispered. “What’s ‘transgression’, anyway?”

                  “No, no, sorry,” Hugo tried to clarify, sticking his index finger almost to his uvula.

                  “Now he’s gonna barf,” Joey offered. “This is like some sort of cult ritual, perhaps—”

                  “There’s no cults in France,” my wife was pretty sure.

                  “Ahngry!” Tom reiterated, pointing at Hugo’s charade. “He too ahngry.”

                  “Ahh!” I finally figured it out. “They’ve been having a feud upstairs over some transgression—crossing a line, stepping on toes, snarfing the other guy’s Snickers bar, unaware—”

                  “Yes! Yes—Snickers!” Tom exuded. Hugo removed his encaved finger, satisfied his job was done.

                  “Good—progress comes with talking things out,” I continued. “So maybe, I don’t know: Joe, would you mind taking the living room couch so Tom can sleep in your room? Kinda to let cooler heads prevail.”

                  “Prévaloir,” Hugo added, “avec Snickers!”

                  Emma was impressed. “Gosh, it’s like those guys in Les Misérables—‘Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?’”

                  “So, sing it!” I goaded, and set the key with burlesque baritone: “‘Do you hear the people sing?’ C’mon, ‘Singing the song—”

                  “Dad!” Em was mortified. Hugo clapped some approval. Tom pretended to be shot at the barricade, or else went into some rugby roll.

                  Joe, meanwhile, announced how stupid this was and led the boys upstairs to sleep in different rooms, then came back down with a blanket to claim the couch. “They were confused, but…”

                  Katerina came out of the pantry and asked Emma to trade her mobile phone for a macaroon—among the goodies the boys had given two days ago as house gifts. Em demurred but understood her need to be away from the glowing device. “Don’t want to make a transgression,” she twirled.

                  Quick study, I smiled.

Countdown / Launching

Two poems for Andrew, whose birthday is today, and who leaves for a West Coast internship next week.  Godspeed, Andrew! 


Countdown

I know exactly what to do, my son.
I've lived life and I want to say
I think I've learned a thing or two
Along the way.  I look at you
And see a little of myself.
I know exactly what to do.

But I don't know what to say, my son
To get you going on your way
Without the struggles I once knew
And know today.  I look at you
And stumble over all my words.
I don't know what to say.

It's easy to say, do as I say,
And harder to say, not as I do,
But hardest of all is to know what to do
But not how to say it to you.

19 is a brave new world...
California is hours away...
A place of your own is a sudden adventure...
The life you live is yours to discover...

I wish I could be brave for you, my son,
And present, not so far away.
I don’t know what to say to you
But I will always pray for you
(These are the best words I can give)
That you will find your way.



Launching.

Launching is what we do to rockets when
we send them up into the sky, or to boats
when we free them of their moorings.

A rocket is what you are when you have
the fuel to burn, and you set off into the
unknown like a ship at sea.

The sky is the world around you with a
sea of possibilities.  Desire is your fuel
and best intentions set you free.

I am not your rocket and I don't have the
fuel and I can't make the sky be what you
want it to be.

But I am here to cut the ropes and send
you on your way.  And someday you will
smile when you think of me.

new graces

Feeling great, literally, in the birth of our first great niece, Zoey Marie with her folks in Missoula. Baby and mother Taz and father Zach all doing great, and here is a humble poem towards that: http://lostmenagerie.blogspot.cz/2018/04/today.html

Also, I've finished a smaller play than the ones I had written last year (Codex Orange set in Golden Valley, Echo Chamber set in Billings). This one is entitled "The Bereaved" and is set in Vienna, near where I teach twice a year. Any feedback and distribution would be welcome! https://meta-metaphysics.blogspot.cz/

wishing everyone a happy Spring, now that it's here!
love,
Dan

Where Poetry Fits In

The Waste Land, Lines 60-68

Real is a city.
Poetic maps it out.
Unreal paints it with brown fog.

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Real are the people.
Poetic sees them flow.
Unreal follows them uphill and over the river.

So many ...so many.

Real are the landmarks.
Poetic calls them king and saint.
Unreal casts them as characters.

London Bridge is falling down.

Real is the time.
Poetic counts with sighs.
Unreal begins at the final bell.

Hurry up it’s time.

Real is life.
Poetic feels the seasons.
Unreal sees death undone.

In my end is my beginning.

Real feels weary.
Poetic hangs its head.
Unreal fixes eyes to the pavement.

I would that I were dead, she used to say.

We live in the life of real.
We breathe with the power of a poem.
We wonder in the realm of unreal.

In my beginning is my end.

(For the continuing series, see http://simorghpress.blogspot.com/)

the emu

Anything? about the

passing of my days,

let alone the hubris that

I own them, anyways?

Okay. I saw the emu

west of Gloriette again—

ever scoping for its mate,

a now to codify a then.

You nod in recognition

as if the bird’s a star,

strutting to indulge

a sense of who we are.

Imagine that it knew

the gleaming of my eye

from when I paused

before, flighty passerby.

To think it’s moved a

thousand miles a year

within a chainlink fence,

to wonder why it’s here.

Wait in faith until a

hard-to-figure croak,

indicating something of

an early time we spoke.

I fear a future walk

will find the emu gone—

Schönbrunn swears to

God the glory will go on.

29 palms

Time travels in odd adjuncts—

today, say, being the twenty-nineth Palm

Sunday my father would have woken

for, had he simply stayed alive.

Robert Plant sang that count of

palms, in California—as I was on my way

to Central Asia, skiffs upon those still

waters of Psalm twenty-three.

Today, as Plant would say, I’m in

the mood for a melody I’m in the mood for

a melody I’m in the mood; and format

won’t fulfill a carriage of relay.

Joshua washes feet that, as Bono

might agree, have mired through streets of

no name. He does so, naturally, for his

fathers, who relish in reunion.

I’ve poeticized about these petty

things before—how “do what Momma told

me” translates to wisdom and free will,

a blanket “way it oughta stay.”

We may read twenty-nine palms

to note what lines are scarred and tried and

true; I live in dog years, walking circles

twice a day in memory of you.

--DMVL

Full fathom five

The way I wake up

is unusual, so

it has been said;

I stretch to find the

boundaries of the bed,

and, touching them

with curves of each

appendage, I slide

in glacial shyness

toward an unassuming

floor and tumble

in the bubble

wrap of blankets.

What dreams I’ve had

while falling (to sleep

and to this wake)

are touchstones to

a life that must

exist beyond our

give and take;

I meet my father

twice a year—

about the same

amount when he

was here—and

glory in the moment.

My dog wakes more

or less the same;

his boundaries

lack the trouble

of the coming day

(no messages to check

or bills to pay),

yet satisfy a

greater sense of

who he is and why,

regardless of his

father, who may be

me, for all we fathom.

DMVL

"Full Fathom Five" by Jackson Pollock, 1947

 

Madame Sosostris

Another reading of The Waste Land, Lines 43-59

Fame catches a cold.  Fortune clears her throat.
She tells whatever can be told
From stories Waite & Rider wrote.
Wisdom deals the cards.  She plays a wicked game.
The deck is short, the rules are hard,
The names begin to sound the same.

The wheel turns.  The world walks
In circles.  Thank you everyone.
A fisherman up on the docks
Appears with extra gear at dawn.
Lady Belladonna rocks.
The one-eyed merchant carries on
His back a blank, an empty box,
And here, my dear, your card is drawn:

A sailor lost at sea.  She tells me this is me.
Drowned in the place I ought to be
The most alive and free.
Each card she flips for me is contradictory
Or worse: they're random, cryptic and
Impossible to see.

The wheel turns.  The world walks
In circles in a purple dawn.
Lady Belladonna rocks.
Right here, my dear.  Your card is drawn.

Live, she says, in fear that one day you will die
Within the stream that brought you here,
Without the time to wonder why.
Look while you still can at how your eyes will be
Like pearls buried in the sand
At the bottom of the sea.
Learn, she says, from this, and generally beware,
But as far as I can see, there is
No hangman anywhere.
Some things are forbidden.  Some things can’t be found.
The meaning of the cards are hidden,
Left for blank and turned around.

We, having our whole lives to read,
Would ask somebody blind to read us.

The wheel turns.  The world walks

In circles.  Thank you, everyone.

Metamorphoses

A reading of lines 31-42 of The Waste Land

Translation restating from watching to
waiting.  The wind blows fresh for home.

Translation substitution from dessert to
ocean.  The sea is waste and drear.

Translation swapping poison with potion
prince to flower boy to girl.  My Irish
child where tarriest thou?

Translation transition speech to silence
sight to blindness darkness to light.
Io non mori 'e non rimasi vivo.

We translate when we can't identify.
We recompose the script to comprehend.
We read to see ourselves.  We correlate

To see it through, if not to reason why;
To do or die, if not to understand.
We translate when we can't identify

But if we want to live more than to wait
Or when we wait to die but find we can't
We read to see ourselves. We correlate.

We fight against the fight, to make reply
To what we do not know.  We contemplate.
We translate when we can't identify.
We read to see ourselves.  We correlate.

(Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du?
I did not die, and I alive remain-ed not.)

Something Different

Reflections of The Waste Land, lines 19-30

And still those voices are calling from far away...

I have no answer in this place.
I’m in the irony of space
Reinventing Major Tom
Every fifty years or so.
I want to hide from the sun,
Clutch the earth and feel it under me,
The dirt from where I come
To where I go.

I want to run. I want to hide
In the shadows of my mind
Of a morning stretched before me
And an evening closing in.
I can’t understand the voice
Calling me a child of choice,
heir apparent, prince of mortals,
Son of man.

I want to understand
But I don’t know what to say.
The sun has been relentless
Planet Earth is gray
And I haven;t got a clue.
And the garden’s far away.
I don’t know what to say
And I don’t know what to do

Show me
a hard rock world
or a mote in the universe,
a resting place
or a tombstone to tip;
Show me
a shelter from the sun
or a rock to roll away,
well-weathered pavement
or a cornerstone.

I have no answer in this place
I see wasted dessert space,
Emptiness and broken images,
No hint of life, no sound
But the whisper of that voice
Showing me a fearful choice
In the shadows as they shimmer
On the ground.

The Discontent of Summer

Here, and at http://simorghpress.blogspot.com, is the second installment of my Waste Land tributes.  I also revised the first installment posted two weeks ago.  I know, it is a little gloomy, but stick with it: it learns what to say and it ends in peace.

Coming over the Starnbergersee...

A continuing tribute to The Waste Land,
Lines 8-18

And once awake we cannot help but wonder
Who we are and what we want to say.
We feel the rain before we hear the thunder
Whispering a thousand miles away.
Our points of origin are torn asunder,
Separating us from yesterday.
Behind the walls and roofs, within and under
Which we live, we don't know what to say

But on the open surfaces are stories,
Images for everyone to see:
The nakedness of all our twisted glories,
The disgrace of our identity.
We know we ought to stand up and look forward
To the tales untold of dreams to be
But here we are, ashamed of being mortal,
Suffering and wanting to be free.

     Now is the discontent of summer,
     Trying to read ourselves to sleep,

Mourning the loss of where we started from,
Starting to hear the distant thunder drum,

     Now is the discontent of summer,
     Trying to read ourselves to sleep,

Unsure we want to see what dreams may come,
Laying awake when we would rather slumber

     Now is the discontent of summer,
     Trying to read ourselves to sleep.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul.

Eightieth Year

My eightieth year started rainy and gray.
So did my spirit, with husband's greeting
That "going on eighty" commences today.
Hey, wait a minute!  What's going on?

Though my head is white, not even gray,
This special designation comes too soon.
Yet joy in the little as in mountain array
Says I'm here, here right where I belong.

Hear?  A concert of rock music, 1968
All but removed my eardrums tonight.
I'll sit this one out, better never than late
And leave Dick sitting alone for a spell.

I pondered a gallery showing abstract art,
Resisting to admire any at first.
Then, absorbing colors, layers, depth, and plan
Their glory, abandon, and stretch upon me burst.

Our world I love, all the infinite, and
Persons who excite me in daily encounters,
As chords are struck, minds are met.
Eightieth year?  Heaven-bound are these hunters.

Jaeger means hunter, and seventy-nine is on the mark!

Marilyn Jaeger, February 15, 2018

The Sweetest Dream

See http://simorghpress.blogspot.com/  for my new blog, which will include all poems and projects as I go, and, eventually, another link to one that I will get to, a publishable form of my annotated Waste Land, already fully revised and refreshed since you saw it last.  The goal (the dream?) is to have that really published before 2022, the 100th anniversary of Eliot's piece de resistance.

The Sweetest Dream

We are such stuff...
Whan that Aprill...
Winter kept us warm...

A poem in honor of the first seven lines of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

When we should sleep, perchance to dream of rest,
We wake up in the middle of a dream,
And, face to face with all our restlessness,

We realize: the more we dream the less
We sleep.  Yet in our deepest sleep we seem
To seek the sweetest dream: forgetfulness.

To let the mountain memories of yes-
terday, the pushing pulling of the stream,
The ocean of tomorrow's wantonness

Be all forgotten: sleep without the stress
Of time and place or meaningfulness, dream
Beyond the tests of schedule or address

Or past interpretations, dream the dream
Of peace and find the stream that lets you rest.

     The sweetest dreams we don't remember.
     In deepest winter we sleep the best.

A winter sleep is warm and long and safe inside.  The doors are shut, the blinds are drawn and we are undercover and immortal, but

     The sweetest dreams we don't remember.
     In deepest winter we sleep the best.

The sweetest dreams are moments of their own reality, unshaped by all that they are running from, untroubled by the great escape.

     The sweetest dreams we don't remember.
     In deepest winter we sleep the best.

But winter turns to spring, tomorrow misremembers yesterday, the morning breaks with business and all the sweetness melts away.

The Infancy of Memory

            We don’t talk too much, Winona and me. She don’t talk much to anyone, really. Winds blow through her in other ways. Her black eyes shine what she wants to say, and today that’s not too much. It’s a good day to close them for a while. Mine, too, but we’re still pretty prone to watch out for each other.

            The stove’s been working overtime; furnace has broke, and Mika’s been on the phone once, twice a day to get the Yellow Pages out here to fix it. Times are busy, they say. Extra miles costs extra time. “Heard the bison population’s on the rise,” one kidded her, “maybe you can hunt a couple hides.”

            “Did you laugh?”

            “He did. Didn’t matter what I done.”

            So maybe that’s a plan—bring my bow out to the snow-whipped coulees and let ’er rip, first kinda mastodon I see. Claim my off-season prerogative, and if somebody challenge that, take it to tribal council: fork-tongue furnaceman won’t come.

            “Pop, let’s go,” bids Winona, reading bluster in my eyes. In the next hour or so we wouldn’t be killing buffalo but tearing off usable planks for firewood from that jack pine house that burned up on account of (go figure) a furnace malfunction. Mika, waving us good luck, would hold down the fort and pretend not to drink. Touchy issue there for Winona—firstborn and only—jealous ’til she couldn’t be that anymore.

            I’m not her father for real—barely her mom’s paramour—but we get along alright as a family. Mika loved our mutual best friend growing up, like an older brother he was to both of us. He went Army Reserve to wait for her to graduate high school and then even helped pay vo-tech for her to become a beautician. He re-upped to go to Afghanistan, dying a month before Winona was born. His final letter he asked me to be there for Mika—Lamaze and all that—like he had a hunch. At the time I was on the other side of the state, studying pre-med; I guess being a doctor wasn’t in the stars—or something else was—and Mika pulled me back on her own terms, seeking him in me for as long as I could do that. Or as long as she could.

            The pickup’s half stacked with mostly fallen joists. Now we’re sifting through the carcasses of furniture, tee-shirts pulled above our nose against the lacquer toxins. Windows didn’t break enough to air out this oven, and we don’t need to salvage everything unburnt. Glancing outside, though, I’ll take that basketball hoop, hanging for dear life on a backboard of frozen ash. Didn’t come here to loot, but I could burnish that rim and put it on our own garage, teach Winona how to shoot, become a Phoenix Sun. Or ‘Mercury’, I guess they’d make her be. Fun fact, I’ll tell her: Kyrie Irving’s mom was Sioux. Or just ‘fact’—she died when he was four, the infancy of memory.

            Winona was four when I first took her spearing—just me with the spear, and she pointing at fish for the job to be done. I didn’t invite her, and her mom had second thoughts; but the girl threatened not to eat dinner unless she saw how the fish came out of the water. “Wina, it’s bloody, y’know,” and I showed her in the garage by baiting a hook with a squiggling worm. She looked intently at what I was doing and didn’t flinch a bit. Worms don’t bleed much, but, to further the point, I asked if she’d put out her palm and feel the struggle and slime. She did that, stoically, knowing from the styrofoam pail a lot of these critters would die on one outing.

            “Papa,” she said, also knowingly, “the spear never uses a worm.” She must’ve seen me practice my throws in the back yard, naturally never baiting the trident.

            “Yeah?” I had to agree, but wondered what else she meant. Can’t remember if she said anything more—just my guess, then, at her calculation that eating a fish shouldn’t mean killing more than that fish. There’s a passage in Hamlet about a king going through the guts of a beggar, via the worm that et of the king, etc. Well, I wasn’t going to bring all Hamlet up to a four-year-old—she hadn’t even seen Lion King yet!

            So we went together spearing, every year since, usually down by the culvert spilling out the grassy side of our reservoir. We ice fish there, too, on the other side of the road, but early spring was when we could spear the highest yield, pike heading inland to spawn. It the white man were there, sometimes with a megaphone and vigilantes, we’d move on to a quieter tributary, or the edge of the slough if the ice had come off. They knew we could spear before their opening date, and they hated that we had first picks. “Hey, squaw,” a drunk yelled back then (these days, he’d call her ‘Pocahontas’), “imagine you bein’ one of them pikes—you gonna let your daddy spear you like that?”

            She didn’t say nothing.

~~~

            There’s land enough on the reservation to almost disappear, months on end. Lack of internet means the WASPish world can also almost disappear. Some memories, though, are hardwired.

            Mika’s brother, Chayton, was a Division-I recruit for basketball, probably headed to Laramie to suit up for the Cowboys. It was in a summer camp for All-American prospects that we saw him on TV—satellite, so we had to go to the tavern to get the feed. First time ever he wasn’t a starter, and so we saw him just seconds here and there sitting on the bench, wrenching his hands to keep them warm and limber. Coach put him in the second half, the other team up by twenty, and Chayton made a three right away, dished out four assists, another couple mid-range shots and suddenly his team’s down by only two buckets. Other team calls a time-out, draws up a play and, wouldn’t you know, Chay picks off their pass and races down the court, defender with him stride for stride; Chay jams the ball and hangs on to the rim, hinged to take even twice that force. Instead, the backboard shatters, Darryl Dawkins’ style. Camera’s gone crazy, trying to get the grittiest angle, and the one they keep replaying was of the hoop coming down to collar Chayton, along with a shower of fiberglass shards. It was like the rim and him were intertwined, the net a wedding veil. Some trucker at the tavern burst out laughing—“he’s fucked the poor thing”—and soon after, the color commentator did the same. Chay was evidently okay, rubbing some blood from his scalp, and was about to get the hoop off by himself, but the coach had something to say that stopped him. The commentators took liberty reading his lips—‘you didn’t listen!’, it was judged—while the referees huddled to declare the game forfeit, winner being who was ahead. Chay got credit for a technical foul—‘unnecessary hanging on the rim’—and a call-out by the coach in a post-game interview: “we had ’em on the ropes, if Chief Bromden there coulda just slowed down.” Commentator asked him to clarify. “Well, he does his job okay but needs to listen—I said on their time-out that we had one left, too, and we need to call it on a rebound or turnover. I’m not saying he’s dumb, but maybe playin’ deaf.”

            Chayton didn’t go to Laramie, but he’s since turned into a decent coach for urban youth programs, another galaxy away. Maybe this netless hoop I found will lure him back a week or two, give his niece and me advice—even get his sister out to play.

~~~

            Sure, I can get despondent like anybody out there. You gotta feel something for that albino deer that crops up every so often, probably a token one for every stretch of national forest. It may know itself as special—sacred even, depending on the tribe. It was born white in a tawny world, and, wouldn’t you figure: it’s off limits for hunters. That’s not to say hunters follow a collective conscience, let alone the DNR’s rules. But the creature’s so beautiful alive. And sure, so is any northern pike.

            A kind of deer I’m talking about was Smokin’ Joe, a minister of a couple spread out chapels on our reservation. He’d come by every blue moon at least, but we’d more likely see him down at the tavern, at high school games, lobby at the clinic, wherever the wind blew him. He was actually tawny for the sake of this analogy, but albino unique, too. Well liked, he didn’t mind being lonesome—told me as much, last time we spoke. My uncle Mato was having a hell of a time with hidden problems come to light—gambling, mistress, meth, you name it—and found himself lost to humanity, a loser of a human being. “Stick with the former,” Joe told him, “and be lost—the lost will be found, eventually. But dump that latter—the loser determined by others just as lost, or more.” I wondered if that was enough for Mato to wake up to, and asked Joe if he’d check in on Mato once in a while. He said, “sure, and”, tapping ash from his Muriel air tip, “his spirit, too, can check up on mine. That’s one way to define what prayer can do.”

            Smokin’ Joe tried to kick the cigar habit several times—once when his buddy Calvin gave him a springer spaniel pup to make him walk it. He named him ‘Homer’ to be a reminder—you gotta be home pretty regular to walk your dog, or take him with wherever you go. Joe would do that sometimes in his Plymouth Reliant—bring him somewhere to run wild—but Homer needed his namesake and preferred the gravel road in front of his house. Someone else—not Calvin—gave Joe a kitten, promptly named ‘Jethro’ to keep Homer company indoors; that lasted a week—Homer played Jethro to exhaustion before extinction. Then the farmer next door came to ask Joe about some disappeared chickens, and maybe Homer had some knowledge of that. “No, no” Joe assured, retelling at the tavern, “a springer spaniel only soft mouths ducks, by instinct, and chickens—even if he got into the coop—would be the same.” On cue, Homer wobbled from behind the house and seemed to want to say something, barfing up white features and gristle to maybe get it off his chest. Farmer gave dog a small chiding and Joe a free cigarette, chuckling not to sweat an apology.

            Animals, in the end, didn’t stop Joe from smoking but got him to appreciate the breeze they shared. He died of pneumonia after setting two days in a sweat lodge, partly to honor my uncle’s invite to do so. Could’ve made him sad, Mato, to lose such a friend. But “he aint lost,” Mato said, “he’s the white deer we are lucky to sometimes find.”

~~~

            Winona likes to color, even that albino in a fog—not to change it into something else, but entertain its aura. Mika thinks she’d make a great tattoo artist, something she’s not licensed for but does for extra cash. Winona’s just fourteen—too old for coloring books, too young for Mika’s clientele. “Never too young for spearing,” I hear Mika say, and I say back, “but I don’t take her to E.R.”, where I work, driving ambulance. It’s not an argument—more an indication we don’t know what guides the way the wind blows, and how to worry about nothing.

            Her teacher called me in some time ago—called Mika first, but she got scared—and so I come in thinking they don’t like Winona’s way of keeping to herself, doodling, what-you-will. Or maybe smoking, sneaking out, something even social. Teacher’s done this all her life—you see it on her forehead, which bobs down as she pages through a notebook. “Do you know,” she starts, barely having greeted me, “what’s in my hands?”

            A test, I thought—for me. Instead of yes or no, I simulate her posture—sitting, opening my hands book-like, and read.

            She lets me do that, silence for the both of us to kind of let the afternoon have its presence felt. One of Wina’s notebooks, true, my upper eyelids reach and start to flutter. I think of her dad waking up in an Afghan valley, wondering if they’d have rain to keep the desert plans at bay. I’ve talked of him to her, of course—hours of angling lends to that. She once said “I remember”—must have been a thing I told before—I can’t keep track of all I said. “Mom, too,” she decided to reveal, grace that tends to mystify.

            “Your daughter,” teacher measures out her words like that, “Winona,” flipping to a drawing of a box turtle, “writes,” of course—we know she’s good at cursive—“what to me she does not say.” I want to burst out neither laughing nor crying, just something—and I know I’ll hide it badly. “Don’t fret,” she follows, “what she writes is,” turning to a page she’d dog-eared, “memorable.” She slides the open page toward me to take, and I read in liquid blur:

These crayons, they make them

sound like something playing

on a lonely dream. Color ‘manatee’

in ‘tumbleweed’, and see if any

body sees. I could use the paper

holding ‘indian red’—it’s more

honest than the wax that’s meant

to be my skin. Give it ‘blush’, or

maybe take that to my mom,

who beauties people as they bid

‘maroon’. Tell my dad I won’t trade

‘sunset orange’ for ‘outer space’—

next year they’ll try ‘inner space’

but fail to dream the crayon I crave

to make: ‘daybreak’—maybe in

a dozen shades, depending on the

weather, what designates a day,

and how a thing might break.

I would love that color constantly,

and share it with the sharpener.

            I forgot what else the meeting was about. Just that Winona had a voice, beyond what anyone had imagined.

~~~

            Coming back from the jack pine house, pickup starts to stall. Gas still at three-quarters, not so cold to clog the fuel line—just gotta chalk it up as an ageing vehicle. Hauling all those planks couldn’t help, and it would do no harm to jettison them, lighten the truck’s spirits. That’s at least what I propose to Wina, who doesn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter.

            Instead, we hoof it towards the tavern, knowing there’d be a phone there at least, and warmth. Wouldn’t you know, Mato’s sitting on a stool when we come in nursing a Mountain Dew and chatting with Pezi, who runs the place. “Hey,” he says when he sees us come in, shivering for effect.

            “Hokahey,” Wina hushes, somewhat to my surprise. To think that the Crazy Horse call to fight at Big Horn—hokahey, today is a good day to die—might be the utterance of a teenage girl in the twenty-first century, especially in light of yesterday… Ho! It can have no good response.

            “Amen,” Mato honors just the same. I mumble through an explanation why we’re panhandling here this time of day, giving Pezi reason to smile. He had hot chocolate brewing for us anyway—roadways in the winter have their strange predictability. I barely have to ask to use the phone.

            “Hey, Mika,” I call—she’s been worried, by the tone of her hello—“we’re just a little bit stranded. Haven’t asked yet, but Mato will give us a lift… maybe’ll run by the pickup to grab what we can… No word from furnaceman?... No, that’s okay. We don’t need his hokey sense of humor…. You okay?... That’s… yeah, Winona’s sippin’ cocoa, seems a lady Mato’s with is ordering the same…. Yeah, I’ll do that. See you in a little while.” The phone fits nicely in its brace upon the wall.

            The lady friend is Zonta—I should have picked that up from hints my uncle gave the last and last encounters at this bar. Her name in Sioux is trustworthy, and I concoct a plan to have her stay with Wina, while Mato and me try to get the pickup going, maybe tow it to the house. Why can’t Wina go as well? Well, I tell myself, I think she’s had enough. Zonta’s eyes say she would love to babysit, or teach Winona how to do the same.

            It allows my need for Mato—an hour ago I only faced the snow—to be my babysitter, ’cause I’m about to burst.

~~~

            Yesterday, as we were on the reservoir—after daybreak, it so happened, drilling through the ice of holes we’d set the day before—a group of vigilantes trudged our way. “Keep a low profile,” I told Winona, and by body language, they implied the same. We were well enough away from anything of relevance, but somehow this became their equation: they were hunting deer—as was the end of season and their right—and we were in their way, deerpaths on occasion making use of ice. Yet, the reservoir had open water not too far away—deer would know this better’n us—and so I compassed with my arm the area we would stay.

            They retreated; we reviewed our flags—one falling for a pike not big enough to keep, and two others indicating strikes. Daybreak turned to sepia, and I had names of crayons in my head, begging Wina read my mind if not sure how she’d do so. Flags fell with regularity—I’d be pulling out a perch and she’d be handling a muskie; we were well ahead of forecasts for an Alberta clipper coming through. By afternoon, we’d be home, packing these filets and celebrating graces from the lake.

            But first we had to find its mercy. Turns out a herd of deer had designs to cross, coming out a glade directly east and nosing a route halfway between us and the southern shore. In their middle, muskox style, two fawns—including an albino—picked up their pace, as nature told them not to dawdle on the ice. Winona was enamored; we both stood still to make the moment stay. It would be the memory of a lovely day.

            Until the hunters tumbled from their blind upon the shore. They couldn’t shoot from their present angle, unless they wouldn’t care to hit us in a miss. Because they made a stir, the herd halted in their tracks and froze, staring full that way and allowing Win and me to see their napes, all eight—all completely trusting we were not their fight.

            The hunters were. And they were pissed—we were screwing up their site. You could see their calculation, how to shift this way or that to have an open shot; like wolves, they slowly split to buy the time they needed—the herd would break in unison one side or the other, but which side was the question. Winona and I could only be the audience.

            Time is a product of heartbeats, even when that organ stops and is somewhat recalled in a funeral drum. I tried to think all the beings thinking right now—on the lake and under our feet, considering bait and ways to partake, or strategies how to escape. Three hunters made for their smiley face, the herd still a nose, Wina and me serving eyes below a forehead of balding ice. An eagle would see us this way.

            All broke in an instant—the face sprinting Pennywise, the deer doing basketball J-stops in efforts to get open or confuse, and us now aware that we were surrounded, one with the herd. Winona made way toward the water, just to make space, and warily I followed. A shot rang out from the eastern-most hunter, and the middle man charged to force the hunt west, but the deer scattered east, anyway—familiar more with the glade. The little albino ran toward us, causing Winona to stop it from going away from the herd. Its mama responded and charged us further to the edge of the ice, skidding when she saw it cracking and Wina going down, the fawn finally knowing it shouldn’t join us. I quickened to where Wina elbowed the unbroken ice, yelling inside for her to stay calm. She heard that, it seems, and though I also cracked in, reaching for her, we both managed to belly to safety, like seals. Maybe manatees.

            Hunters stopped to look at us, distantly, guessing what the story of the day would be. When they saw us out of water, crawling back to the flags we didn’t need to keep, they bolted back to their blind, gathered up their gear and disappeared. That left Wina and me alone—memories of deer notwithstanding—with a half-shelf life to get home and, crucially, dry.

            Mika drew the bath—water heater working fine—and Winona stayed in there an hour it seemed to get her back to lukewarm. I resorted to our stock of blankets—bison hides from IKEA. Later, I’d go back to fetch our fish and flags and use up all our wood to get the calories in us—units of heat, they taught us in school, and great with peppercorn and wild rice, we knew by instinct.  

~~~

            Mato hears all this with nods of understanding; we’re at my pickup before he’d have a chance to question. Cable now attached, it would be a glacial load for his Ford Bronco, and I would have to steer and brake this rogue tail to keep us safely on the road. Mika meets us with good news—furnace fixer here tomorrow, even an apology for letting the request linger, as nobody should be left out in the cold.

            We got wood enough for tonight, thanks to Mato, but he suggests we camp out otherwise: “You haven’t seen our new place yet—Zonta’s made a little guest room, also got a futon—make yourself at home.”

            The bar’s more abuzz than when we left it—Warriors and Thunder on tv, games of darts and billiards round out the room. Pezi makes his case that Golden State has done a subtle job of representing Indians more or less okay: “their logo is a bridge, not some Chief Wazoo—”

            “You mean Wahoo—let’s call things by their right names,” his rival jokes.

            “Wa-who cares,” Pez goes on, “I don’t want Geronimo there either, or tomahawk chops—”

            “You want a bridge.”

            “I do.”

            “A bridge for warriors to… what?”

            “To pass around and score, defend their side, and bring in customers.”

            “Fair ’nuf. And Thunder—what do you what them to do?”

            “Same. And bless the earth with rain.”

            We watch the game and gauge Winona’s smile and little things she wants to say, playing darts with Zonta and thanking Pez for the chili he had made, with shredded cheese and sage. I leave a twenty on the counter, Pezi takes it, puts it in the tip jar and slides that back to me. “For the furnace,” he deafens to my protest, “at least a dent.”

            The Bronco’s cozy with us five, spacious that it is. Like our country—vast and jealous of its space, best when neighbors sit together. Mato drives deliberately, the clipper’s brought its drifts that he has handled many times, increasingly in ways that counts him wise.

            He’s right—we haven’t seen the new place, though I have seen it old. “This was Smokin’ Joe’s! I knew you took in Homer when he died—”

            “Did that—and he ran back here several times.”

            “Thought I scared him off!” says Zonta.

            “Joe had little in his will—took a couple months for relatives to find it buried in his books and things—and though the house has some mortgage left, he shifted it to me, if I wanted.”

            “Bank agreed?”

            “Got two years, favorable rate—and I’ll retire in four.”

            Winona walks the spaniel before we all need to hit the sack. Mika runs to join her—“she forgot her stocking cap”—and I sit back remembering last I’d been in here, playing Scrabble with Joe, who wasn’t smoking at the time. Mato says the board is over there—a little spirit of the house they’ll surely keep, Zonta being the better wordsmith.

            “Now, Hon, there’s no ‘better’ when a thing needs more than one.”

            “That’s true. We’ll play a round tomorrow.”

            Tomorrow will be hard again—nice to think the furnace might get fixed, but then the pickup’s next, and maybe driving cross the county to drive again an ambulance is more road than I’m made to meet. Maybe take some cues from Mika—we can build a better shop—Winona adding color, if she wants. They come in from the cold laughing at something they had said. Hugs goodnight, and dreams of deer that also snuggle in, tumbleweed and sometimes white.

DMVL