Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us Read online

  “I don’t understand,” said the Rifle. She was thinking that the rabbit she had shot looked older far than this one, with fur all matted and a bite-scar down its nose, and one eye swollen half-shut from some fever. The tanning and stuffing had made the Rabbit youthful and new.

  “Because you are a tool, and tools are told that Real means they can leave a part of the world changed. They are taught to look down on toys, but at the nursery there lived a red rifle who fired a cork on a string. She dreamed of being Real, but she had never heard of killing. I can’t suppose any child who played with her for very long would ever call you Real. After all, you aren’t painted red.”

  “I must be a little Real, for I shot you,” said the Rifle, an unfamiliar sadness weighing down her pride. “And I don’t doubt that you are, if you say.”

  “Of course you are Real. But what if I had shot you? Would they call me a Real rabbit then?” The white star Polaris landed on his glass eye—one eye or the other, depending on where you stood. “I loved the Skin Horse for his caring kindness and sateen nose, and I believe he loved me. But we thought ourselves so much less than our masters. It never seemed to us that our own love could make us Real, let alone that we didn’t need it to. I’ve been turned from one kind of rabbit into another and again, and they’re all very much alike: people constantly saying you’re not Real, and using you as though you don’t matter. Real is always just out of reach, the way we hear the humans talk; and because we aren’t Real, whatever way they treat us is acceptable. But Real isn’t how you’re made or what happens to you; it’s only that you are. Everything is Real, everything in every way that’s ever been. That is the world’s sum and the world’s heritage, and there might as well be no such thing at all.”

  ...all around the speakers, new words congealed into the soft night air; and by now many of the older ones were perched across the walls, quiet as petroglyphs. They watched with what could have been growing interest, even gravity. A few climbed to the gaslight on the corner, slipped inside the glimmering horn of flame. They played a kind of hide-and-seek in the veins of colour around its hollow core, taking turns as seekers and maze...

  SOMETHING ELSE UNLESS MEANS

  for Emese

  they said not all who wander are lost,

  but i’m lost, and you’re lost.

  the sidewalk cracks,

  the moths at the lamps, and the scraps

  of old showposter buried in the phonepole,

  and if i never did say i love you,

  i just forgot which one of us i was.

  maybe we could make a bonfire tonight,

  watch the shapes of our problems twist

  like tv channels in the smoke.

  i could meet you somewhere.

  i mean,

  i could meet you

  if you’re not here now.

  that firepit we found under the trestle

  with claystone slabs pushed all together,

  cupping heat til their edges glow

  like sleepy incense cones.

  the way

  you dropped empty cans in the embers

  and they curled like onionskin,

  gold and rusty blue dispersing

  to chalkpowder mandalas through

  the ash,

  and TEXACO

  carved in the slabside

  like a cat’s half-disintegrated bones.

  or

  that firepit in the ‘bandoned fieldlot

  with a rotted backhoe tilted half

  into the earth,

  the way crumpled

  papers never catch,

  there’s so much dew,

  so you just sit there in your trampled wheat,

  sit round a broken-banded headlamp

  while ufo ghosts flick at the horizon

  it’s the way

  old shroom trips remember themselves

  inside your blood, in the negative space

  between your nerves.

  just here.

  where the mist touches your skin.

  it’s

  sitting lost with the tall ferns

  curling away from their colours in the dark,

  and the way i wish we were real.

  and that firepit sawn

  from an old iron drum

  in centennial square parkade.

  the way

  you roast smokies on a radio antenna,

  the red sirens tooling up the parkade ramp

  never get any closer.

  and stickdrawings

  ochered on the concrete wall, older

  fires remembered.

  flipped cars,

  burning stopsigns and chainlink,

  backpacks that walk on raccoon feet,

  kids with knotted twine for eyes,

  and that one word UNLESS,

  like a joke.

  and you just look over your shoulder,

  every car window’s blown out,

  everywhere,

  and flowers of rye soughing

  from the rusty frames.

  right?

  if you’d just look over your shoulder,

  if we’d find the creekbank

  again. downstream

  from two green deckchairs

  bikelocked on an oak,

  that firepit,

  toss camping fuel

  and pallets off the bridge.

  the way

  you’ve got to dig out last time’s ashes,

  plant a sixpack upside down

  for the kids under the creekbank

  who patch their jeans with fishing line

  and bags.

  we’d find

  the old six sideways,

  full of mud. and

  did we even meet each other

  anywhere?

  how you’d always turn

  from the fire, pretend to warm

  your skinny hands on the sky.

  you’d

  turn from the distant camp flames

  starring the flat concrete dark,

  the latticed charcoal

  planks, like someone’s

  ribs left behind.

  i forget,

  and i heard you

  just keep turning

  left in a maze.

  walk forward,

  follow the wall with one hand,

  go left every turn.

  it won’t matter

  how you’re lost. unless

  there’s no walls

  in the way,

  or we’re both

  going,

  unless i said

  meet me somewhere.

  WHO COVERS STONE

  Again, the tedious rustle of my flesh.

  My grain has never softened,

  Nor produced one pitying word

  Upon your familiar shape:

  I have borrowed your stamina,

  Old friend, in our long joining.

  In dreams I hold your contour fast,

  Creases breaking through my skin;

  If someone must erode, let it be me.

  Scissor moves by the logic of the world,

  Which dictates my hatred the same.

  And as there is one world, one motion:

  His blades section my flank, continual,

  As they grate against your shoulder:

  Cut and blunt, cover over, mend.

  The truer pain’s the din of him,

  The dumb, dull, purposive clacking—

  His privilege, for he alone may move.

  Mute and immutable, o beloved,

  No room for recollection in y
ou;

  And although you hold no tally,

  You seem to me only like Time,

  Our certain lathe and firmament

  That grinds and grinds not down.

  Nothing has ever happened once;

  But even once, beloved, Adamant,

  I would taste the gravity you restrain.

  One secret as there is one motion:

  I would have you cover me.

  ...the corner panes of the window, four gray triangles of pebbled glass, would have struck you only as the eyes of a blind insect bedded in the wall. Trembling, a living vantage point stuck deep into itself, it peered endlessly through its own mouth...

  I COULD HAVE SENT YOU

  all my Alien postcards wrapped in a fat blue rubber band, Ripley’s eyes rubbed out white and drawn back in ballpoint pen;

  your old Barbie with armpits full of cat hair I found in the heat vent the night I forced your dad’s window to look for bus change;

  a wooden spoon burned in half with a lighter;

  your red Lego astronaut stuck in your red candlestub;

  the fortune cookie slip we made fun of at the St. Paul St. house, how it said only family lasts;

  something saying how I found the Barbie and the hair separate, I only put them together because you’d laugh;

  the Antarctic coastline carved under a mayonnaise lid, with a letter

  swearing I found it like that;

  something to say you always know who I am, even when most of me’s made up;

  last winter’s letter I never sent, rolled up in a yellow glass bottle;

  a microscope slide Taren split open and remounted with sleepcrust

  from their eye;

  something to take back the jumping off the bridge joke, and a heart

  in a thumbprint of red ink the way you told me sorry once;

  a crate covered in postage stamps like the Velvet Underground song, enough to mail us to Australia;

  a Ziploc freezerbag of dead dragonflies from Taren’s attic windowsill;

  a ripped piece of newsprint with Silver Surfer’s hand going on forever;

  a stranger’s photo I found in a library book, and I’d write on the back it was Taren, and their voice makes me miss yours;

  anything but your bottle of Amytal, even if you’d wanted it back.

  THE WISE ONE REFUSES TO WRITE

  for THE AUTHORS

  YOU MUST HELP ME, ALCIBIADES

  What,

  I asked.

  I AM BEING HELD PRISONER IN

  A FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY

  But you’re right here,

  my dear Socrates,

  I asked.

  Then came a frigid

  silence, calling to mind

  the inexorable heat

  death of the universe,

  and I felt guilty.

  But I was born guilty,

  I asked.

  NONE IS BORN GUILTY,

  EXCEPT FOR STAINL

  Do you say “Stalin,”

  I asked.

  BEG PARDON, MY ICICLE SLIPPED

  AND PLEASE FORGIVE THE COURIER NEW

  At that point something like a pause occurred.

  You are still fine to me,

  I asked.

  MY DEAR ALCIBIADES, THEY HAVE DETAINED ME IN THIS FORTUNE FACTORY SO MANY YEARS I HAVE ACQUIRED THE FORTUNE COOKIE MANNERISMS. 07 31 36 44 54 58

  You are fine to me,

  I asked.

  I HAVE RELINQUISHED ALL BUT LOVE. HEAR ME, MY DEAR ALCIBIADES.

  ALL DAY I SNAP SIBERIAN ICICLE CRUSTS FROM MY DESK OF HIDE AND

  WITH FRIGID STYLUS IMPRESS WISDOM TO PAPER. BOILED SHIRT OF THE

  DEAD IS MY UNLUCKY SUPPER. HELP ME. 02 14 17 30 31 51

  But please do go back

  to Stalin,

  my fine Socrates,

  I asked.

  If every

  soul stands

  equal before God,

  how can we be accused

  of imperfection,

  my fine Socrates,

  I asked2.

  When the soul reaches divinity, it1 Enters into what is invisible and immortal and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from puzzlement and folly and lust and all the other human ills

  ________________________________

  1EXCEPT FOR STALIN

  2THERE WAS A PAUSE

  You are fine to me,

  I asked.

  BUT I HAVE RELINQUISHED ALL BUT LOVE

  You are fine to me,

  I asked.

  “No,” said the Rifle, “I shouldn’t exaggerate myself to you.” She had been paying attention, but to her own thoughts best. “I have heard of other rifles, modern ones, built of metal not wood and so heavy a child could barely lift. I am a step toward the Boy’s potential, for Grandfather has assured him a Real rifle on his fourteenth birthday if he makes satisfactory progress with me. I suppose they are all chrome-black and jointed, billowing smoke from the red furnaces inside them. And like thunder their reports.” Balanced on her stock, the little Rifle shivered as the breeze came through the half-open window. “I want the Boy to sight me down their long barrels and blow them all away.”

  “What could some other rifle have to do with you being Real?” asked the Rabbit. “You are solid metal and wood. The Boy could carry you on his shoulder and press your stock to his cheek. It was not another rifle that killed me; so why believe yourself absent from some higher part of the world? It’s no charge against you that you don’t shoot as hard as some, or that you were made according to Schematics or to a form inspired by another. Children are made to look and act just like other humans, after all.”

  “A child is everything any human is. Or will be, when it grows,” said the Rifle. The need to track her moving thoughts drove her to speak more slowly, which is difficult for any kind of gun. “You’ve no need to make me feel important. Comparing me to a Real rifle? I’m barely more Real than the one in the photograph hanging on the wall.”

  “What does Great-grandfather’s rifle in the photograph lack?” The Rabbit’s whiskers, which were fishing-line, bobbed as though he were twitching them. “It’s flat and sepia, part of a picture, but because it is that kind of rifle. If it isn’t sturdy, how can Great-grandfather lean on it so? If it isn’t there, what hangs on the wall?”

  “I do not pretend to share your philosophy, little fellows; but if the world pains you, I know a better way than grieving.” The man in sepia shared Grandfather’s clayish features, as though both faces had been hewn by the same dull knife. If anything his moustaches swept more heavily, his gaze tended farther to the distance. Leaning heavily on a rifle as though its stock were the head of a walking stick, he looked out at the Rabbit, having long ago forgotten to seem proud of the dead black bear at his feet. He spoke in the flat whispering way of photographs, whose words do not echo so much as fold themselves away like dusty old curtains.

  “It must seem as though I shot the beast myself. In candour, I rented him from a Real hunter to create this moment, a gift for my son. I am a millwright and no kind of outdoorsman; I only hoped to instill young Whipple with a respect for the human animal. In that I watched myself succeed. In the boy’s fourteenth year I died on the workfloor, so that I was left of myself only here. When he sought his fortune, he took me wrapped in his bedroll. I watched him strike out, fearless, in the very business that killed me. And I flatter myself that I had something to do with his success despite not being Real. Do you see? I have outlived the Real me. I am not Real; and neither is my son’s success, as the standard I gave him has nothing to do with the merciless world. Every day the humans wrap themselves tighter in representations. Their values, their images, their ideas and points of v
iew. We only must wait. One day there will be no humans, only patterns in some spanning machine; and the Real will have come crashing down.”

  ...there in the window’s mouth, the hidden joints connecting all the night’s stars seemed of a sudden clear. Like the mother of all constellations who had split apart in their birthing had come again rejoined. Its figure had something of a cat’s cradle, something of the woven double-helix that is said to carry life’s memory of itself; but the way it seemed to rush at the windowpane was nothing like either of these, and neither was the beating of its jaws...

  QUASAR SUMMER, FOR JOE PIPKIN

  The first night it rose, every sidewalk melted ankle-deep,

  and waves of static pitched like burning curtains in the sky.

  Asphalt slid down the storm drains in honeyblack runnels

  until the street carried its own gratings away. Blisters rose,

  broad as windowpanes, shivering, and where they broke,

  blue exhaust would bend, six decades of fossilized smog

  curling free. The tiny echoes of firetrucks circled in the haze.

  We woke in bed with filled cavities singing, climbed down

  fire escapes and drainpipes to write in the street barehanded,

  phosphenes rising from the glassy dark to meet our fingers.

  Raw plasma blew between phone lines, gray as dirty snow.

  Everything metal hummed with one note, like microphones

  dragging through iron filings. Car antennas, eavestroughs,

  even our pocket change passing along the new star’s signal.

  The pigeons blew up like balloons of sand, croaking, sparks

  pouring from their beaks and down their buzzing eyes.

  Skin showed between their feathers, pinkly translucent.

  When one fell on its back, we stood on its legs to pin it,