Not in a place considered a place. Farther out. On the road nowhere. Where a place had been. There was a smokestack. Not a place on the map. To get there, keep going. Kept going and missed it. Missed it but kept going. There was a water tower not considered a water tower. In a place once considered a place.
*
Forecasters conjure a shape with pictures of what it means and how it will affect movements and how out the window today won’t look like out the window tomorrow. A deep blue latitudinal mass is the shape of an incipient feeling moving across Indiana. Patches here and there in higher elevations will get it first. Valleys won’t notice anything for hours. But while crossing bridges, a development will be glimpsed, a new system emergent. In the south and west, before daylight vanishes, sits a dark outline of what could be next. What will be felt won’t be felt all the way right away.
*
We thought there’d be more than there was. Simply: it’s raining on a field. But never my field. What exactly was it that you started off doing? Was there an idea behind this fiddle or just a field you took off running across when the rain rolled in? I’m not at liberty to say. And if questioned, I don’t know who you are. I’ve saved an enormous cache of deposit bottles for a rainy day—a great deal of effort, I suspect, for a puny reward.
*
German hillwalkers rounded a little rock last I heard. Good night, summer. My cloud diary looks like something else, a whole bunch of boats with men hunched over, drowning worms. The grass also was different then. Cliffs, sandwiches, a portable record player, essentials in a cozy getaway with a high suicide rate. I wore your pink glasses. As a filter, I don’t know how effective they were. I can’t vouch for what got left out. I saw a bear and a North Atlantic storm no one’s ever corroborated. And when a single wave approached, that raised the game for everybody. All was the sea, the sea. Monopoly smelled like salt.
*
It was the smallest saddest guitar I’d ever heard, or an oscillating fan. Something is at home, something else. Gus splayed on bare flooring, barely breathing. Gus as a dog is a fact nevertheless that unleashes the human in humans. A close one, that was. And the air has thickened up some. A rainless rainbow emerged suddenly the other evening. Lonesome cardinal on a wire, big doings unfolding behind your back, stuff like that—saddle up the pony, the sandman’s here.
*
Hubbub, hummus, hobnail. Some gee-gaws might come in handy, in a pinch. Humdrum. Seagulls bomb the be-limed dock with clams. Homunculus. Which reminds us. Ferryman could peg this mug any day. Hobnob, hoi polloi. It’s time, Wilmer, back the Packard out slowly. I’ll fold my visage in yesterday’s racing form. Heed the scuttlebutt.
*
Turns out I was right. Running barefoot is better for your memory than combat boots, for the first two days, at least, then all things become equal. Candidate fatigue more quickly sets in, in summer, stalled on the tarmac. How’d we get here? The senator waits again while crews ease away the picnic table. I don’t know what to expect from tonight’s speech, nothing unexpected, to be sure, otherwise you can expect to forget most of it, unless you’re standing there, apart from your shoes, in which event, expect every square burning detail to haunt you the rest of your days. Looks to be a pleasant enough evening, if the radio flatlines, the kind of weather porches were built for.
*
Something won’t scan, smudged barcode, a function down. With hand soap the cashier brings it back to life. Bastille Day arrives. Seems like only yesterday it was Bloomsday. No one’s backing down. Who can trust that woman? It’s hard not to go forward without mixed feelings. Best to leave history alone, said Susannah Garrett, granddaughter of Pat. There were battlements, or a bunker, I’m not good with this. The big guns were gone. Down long dank tunnels one heard footsteps. Fortifying, too, it was to see daylight as a little square at the end, though who knew what getting there might entail. This is where there seems to be now. Hold on while I get this—drought alert continues.
*
This is where a chair had been, near a window. When the wall fell away, so the window. A window unframed in a field, a field I’m permitted to return to. A window makes a room. A wall makes a window. I’m standing around with my hammer in a room I’m thinking of. This is where a chair had been. Morning light renews the chair, where once a person rested, someone with a job to do, cold coffee in a cup.
*
I arrived at a city of chairs. Elsewhere I’ve provided a record of my travels, the furniture I’d seen, a living room in the woods. Then another field appeared, somehow breaking the picture plane. A file cabinet stood there, in a there of my own, to which I return and from which I never left. There an office chair was covered with rain, facing a field of hay, a window you’ll recall where a room had been. Between one place and another place is also a place. A wall had fallen away, in a distant city, a chair twenty feet off the ground. Thus, the air.
*
A cloud was on mute, a muted cloud. A cloud crawled over the mountain. A cloud swallowed a grain elevator. A cloud had an appointment with another cloud. Two clouds missed each other above a parking lot. A newborn cloud dissolved. A very old cloud thought it was a twelve-year old cloud, a haunted cloud. A cloud of thirteen blackbirds emerged from a low-hanging cumulus cloud. A cloud unpacked its bags. Another cloud left town, a cloud named Lester.
*
Stopped in the Badlands. Sunday morning and nowhere to eat. A renegade thought tumbled across a big empty view with nothing to stop it. We didn’t ask directions. In Montana cars were distant and small; they let us pass. Towns passed. At a garage sale we bought tin forks with Bakelite handles. Storms blackened the mirrors. We drove miles thinking about wrong turns without ever turning around. Outside Interior, we pulled over and swapped a camera back and forth. Camera was our favorite word.
*
The first step was Lulu’s. Therefore, I was bummed. In tinny toy cars, yokels roamed Tinyville. Micro-Alphonse offered the world’s tiniest haircut. Come spring, before the historic preservation committee, he enumerated fortunes unlikely to last. It was something to do, temporary employment, and that couldn’t last. It had been my displeasure always to dread the prospect of good news, since good news forever goes south. Take midnight at the South Pole, darker then darker, darkest before dawn, which arrives around lunchtime, by hook or by crook—
*
Tried Cambridge. Then the bus broke down. I was in the bathroom then it was night. Tried Lowell. Tried Revere. Where I was was a floor missing the floor. My aim is to go as far off as possible. Washed hands in Worcester. Then it was night. They stole my guitar. I can’t sing a thing and tried Montpelier and forgot. I make wallets for a living, then it was night. I, too, am someone’s dog. I get in line for chow. My family’s from all over. We cut hair for a living. My people are short and territorial. I need money to get as far from them as possible. It’s weird how far money makes me go away. I’ve hit on a plan I don’t understand. Tried Portsmouth, then it was an old guitar, then it was night. I was sent forth. Run Joey, they said. Tried New Haven. Applied the tools of my trade and got as far as possible. I need cash to buy a wallet.
*
Letters posted from former villagers catalogued forgotten weather, and burros. Someone played piano twice on Sunday. There was only so much to say and lots of time to say it. Everyone else survived as friends. A bread truck faded into a cloud. The driver leaned down like a king asking, Did we see eohippus? Everybody lied. Makeshift replicas of the Flood sprang up, inverted craters. Nobody said no. For heat waves they drew the shades. Poor Richard saw a lull with gumption, the warmest wind in one thousand years, facts they’d have to take on faith. A handshake at midnight, and, with luck, a fellow’d live long enough to regret it. Maybe he invented a new kind of nail and got hammered by the local press. Who could resist a romance of failure? A little history clung downstairs where the corporal slouched in the foyer. Shovels bit a path to the sea. There were tools for understanding other tools, an atmosphere of settling, a gilded maple shining like a match, mansions of tarpaper, and tenpennies, a full deck with the jokers thrown in. John Henry Benson stood at eighteen hands, clear cutter, shouldering a double blade, abetted by the boys Jerome and Heck, aided, too, by their bullmastiff, Oil Can, whose choke was a rope of stars.
*
One sees cows by the river and they’re a better person. A herd of clouds peripherally coast by, like out-of-town floaters. An oval face in the screen watches what we’re saying. How many big books can you read in ninety-four days? I mean really fat translations. Up north, adjuncts are loaded for bear. Then we’ll cook us something light. No heavy lifting—we got our own dirt patch to circumnavigate. Who goes there?
*
Two convicts show up by the river. They sit down, sharing a rock. Wherever they go, they seem always to return to the same spot. A frog sitting on its own rock, watching the river, addresses the convicts. The river looks easygoing but don’t let it fool you, says the frog. There’s serious turmoil down there, toxic eddies of silt, leaches, ugly prehistoric blind fish with sharp bony spikes sticking out, swirling microbial villages, rotting shingles of long-ago houses swallowed up by floods. A talking toad . . . think the convicts. It looks placid, the frog goes on, the river, like you could just sit here and reflect, and it won’t cost you a thing, but the river doesn’t forget, it’s the composite of everything that’s ever happened to it, and everything that’s happened to it is just going to keep on happening to it, and happening to it, till Kingdom come. Grab the toad, they say.
*
The anole is among the most common of lizards on the island. Considered iguanian, it’s often called a chameleon because of its quick color changes when alarmed. This applies to the green anole specifically, which is small, sleek, and distinguished by a bright red wattle. On a palm frond the green anole is green. On a palm trunk it goes pale gray. On a rubber accelerator pedal it turns burnt umber. The green anole was here first and must never be confused with the brown anole. The brown anole is always brown. Aggressive, opportunistic, patterned with faint stripes and diamonds, it came hitching rides on potted plants from the Caribbean and can be found in large numbers hanging around garden centers in America. The brown anole is responsible for the rapid disappearance of the green anole. In backyards of American cities, cities such as Houston, it was custom to let a green anole clamp down on one’s ear lobe with its strong harmless jaws, an impromptu earring. With a brown anole, this is not advised.
*
I don’t know, I might browse paperbacks without knowing French. I’ll be Dutch. Look—my shoes are brown. I have a mild outlook and the Tribune. A rock is flying toward me. I’m doubtful. I’ll leave my pocketknife in Paris—it’ll never clear security. I’ll stick it in a young tree. After years, possibly I’ll come back for it. Me, a smaller Dutchman, possibly Danish. In a cab at midnight I’ll tremble with fever, like Stan Getz.
*
In the middle years I came upon a village of rag people, each one long and thin, like a single rag hanging from a nail. Feral lapdogs ranged the streets, robust and eager, square built, hurling themselves always at the laps of the lapless rag people, who folded on contact, grey ghosts of ghosts. It was there a guide adopted me. Never did I feel less lost. We walked among the rag people from house to house, rearranging furniture, imagining the views at sunset. We lost a kite beyond the trees and drank in the afternoon. There was a gulch that flooded violently every day at lunchtime. And each day my guide, after handing me his penknife and money clip, dove repeatedly into the tumbling floodwaters, dragging waterlogged rag people to shore three at a time. What drove my guide, I can’t say. And I can’t speak for the dogs either. They were the last good thing the rag people had possessed, like a shaggy remnant of human rags. And to this day I don’t know what island the absurd dogs sailed from, nor if they ever returned, or who, if anyone, they took with them.
*
No other ghost system like this. Like they’re in the room. Very three-dimensional. Trick or treat, pal. When an owl leaps from the gutter, it’s a gutter owl. When a flame finishes a candle, it’s guttered. In a year of fourteen moons, I lose track but not of Jupiter. Singer on the highway, too many ghosts. Man without a broom gives a wave. Tell the geese. No ragman here.