The You The Me The Sudden Elsewhere

By Jonathan Hartt I Isla De La Luna The longboats were being launched. Women were mending nets. But that was a village away and I saw only fires. We ran the beach as crabs rose and scattered before us: under us the polished distance of stars some people pretend burn silently. Breathing heavily the boy beside me stopped. I said maybe we will be caught. He asked for the brick. I hesitated. A wave fell in the dark. He said maybe I am getting weak. That I should just watch. I said I am fine. Here it is. For a moment he smiled to feel its weight. Then he was gone. I could hear him running. Behind me a wave broke quietly and whispered its withdrawal. It will be like this always and always between us, and I have warned you about the nature of things, I thought. At least I wish I had. Instead I turned to follow and laugh at a large dead crab: even crushed the pincers opened once more. A gesture that seemed to say it will be like this in the end, and I have warned you. So beneath my laughter I was afraid. II Upon Arrival An egret is crying in a papaya tree, in a salt marsh, in the world’s name. You will see such things: cacao seeds arranged in squares on the road to dry. The farmers’ wives naked to the waist, slapping rocks with their garments. Lovely and grim at the river. Under the swaying papaya, now a vulture stands over a nestling. Anything to declare. The man asks from his counter. Only then I recall the rows of palm fronds folded down like vultures’ wings. So silent. III The Time Comes When The wind shifts west. No sound before the curtain falls, sending its endless idea of hail bursting over riverrock and roofs. Tell me little ones what string wore thin. You jump as if something has been traded. Will you join us we each throw ourselves down. No I have finished with falling objects. I longer speak the language. Once as a boy I climbed to watch the sun drop behind a crater’s rim. Shadows went before me over the shale. I wondered why I had come to depend upon the sulfurous moon. That night I waited while the mountain slept. From my bunk I watched my father dress. I pulled my blankets higher in that small Andean refuge and pictured ice flows with deep unspoken chasms each foot closer to the sky. Soon the men tethered to my father would each nod like paratroopers before an open door and duck out into the dark. IV Interjecting with a Line by Muir Sometimes through wavering light and shadow an albatross called. Sometimes it was nothing, or the creaking rafters of night. Sometimes breeze. He was sometimes shirtless on the porch, sometimes heeding black waters. Beyond the breakers, buoy lights on the horizon marked the shrimp cages. His stilted shack sometimes smelled of coco, or ceviche or hermit crabs— they scratched sometimes the insides of a steel pail. He would sometimes need bait to cast into dawn, and sometimes he set the planetary drag. V A Gesture, Lastly There is Only This And if you want I will in the open field of farewell call out, ripples rounding out like hills and some sea falling in the long grass now like that hoped for something— it quivers quivers and still this breath at life’s breakwall, the sudden elsewhere no one really deserves. If you’d like try this sometime. Try standing in place. There is a great field that runs the sunned length and breadth of sanity where even the edges you cannot be ready for. So faint this field it might be blinked away. You might be the flax that bows its head. Soon small birds pass over. There is only this quiet, this flesh and dust and backward looking. They say the rose is hard to kill. So too memories of peaks: distant, distended, inverted blooms. I haven’t forgotten their names. But in the end snow caps melt, this new laid bed of hail melts. Only the moment remains. O bird on the wire, I’m told so many things. Love some claim replaced religion and I am a private spectacle. You seem to have heard this too. Your beak turns gold, then black. Tell me do you wait for words behind the seedling sky. Maybe you listen. Maybe you lift those clouds across the eye of heaven.