“If you practice writing constantly, you can start to speak in poetry form and so whenever you feel like writing something, all you have to do is immediately write what you’re thinking. John Ashbery says that poetry is like a stream that’s always running and whenever he wants to, he can dip into it and take a little ladleful and have a poem. If I hadn’t devoted my life to poetry, then I’d have to sit down and struggle with the page. That seems torturous to me.”
— Bernadette Mayer
The birds are singing loud now in the morning. Before the first weak light breaks the horizon, I hear them in the yard. I set a dog loose on the long line out there and pause to listen as he disappears into the dark. Birds being loud. Birds waking up. Birds saying their thing to other birds. And maybe to other creatures too. Maybe they speak to me. Birds talking to me.
What’s up, guy?
Morning, lad.
Chin up, fella.
Listen and learn, cowboy.
Over beyond Elk Creek the familiar darkish blue of the old eastern sky is uncasing itself. The treetops on the hill beyond the rushing stream reveal silhouettes. I hear Malcolm fart out on the lawn. I can’t see him but there is no mistaking it. The line he is attached to clinks a bit when he wanders and I hear that too. He is sniffing. He is breathing this morning in. I wonder what it smells like to him. His nose is so much more advanced than mine. He is informed by scents I never sense, whispered at by whiffs I never whiff. I try to imagine it. I try so hard: with a few deep breaths and a concentrated mind, I try to pick up on the wet musk of the sticky white pine in the middle of the yard.
It doesn’t work. Nothing works really. I cannot ever smell like a dog. Or like any animal. Years of cigarette smoke and dirty cities and power-sanding paint off of old kitchen cabinets has caught up with me. I can’t smell that great anymore. I miss most things. You would have to burn toast bad for me to understand the situation. You might even have to set it on fire outright. So I can grasp the reality.
Upstairs in the house everyone else is asleep. I call for Malcolm and he comes back slowly, uninspired by my presence. I guess he was hoping for a little alone time, but no dice. I’ve got a whole goddamn day to get ready for. Malcolm will just be hauling his ass to a couch or a bed to sleep away the hours when there are no humans around to cramp his style. I look up at the bathroom window and it’s all muted orange from Dollar Store Halloween string lights.
Within me, out of nowhere, I understand I cannot stay forever.
The sun’s first streaks lift up over the tree line, heavy and dramatic, like Nam choppers. I feel no warmth from them as Malcolm sops water from his metal dish. Most of it hits the stones of the rough patio. Most of his drinks end up on the ground. The sun is new. The sun is old. I got six and half hours sleep and I’m still tired as fuck.
I know my life won’t go on and on. I wonder what I’m doing here anyways. What was my point? What purpose is there in all of this/ in all of these birds singing through broken darkness/ in each of these morning stars pulsating above me/ in this giant dog who I’ve never quite understood/ in this grass turning green after another long winter.
Where do I go to ask about my days? Who would be able to tell me anything about how I was perceived and what the truth of me really was?
Inside the house, I know the coffee is ready now. I know it is sitting there in the glass pot waiting for me. I ought to take the whole thing and dump it all over my scalp. Drip hot lava down my neck and chest. Feel the morning burn. Like gym rats. Like meth heads on a ledge. Like tiny strange songbirds who only exist in auras of sound, never to bee seen by natural eyes, because they are not visible. They are merely songs from the Earth warning me not to forget what I mustn’t forget.
Just then, Malcolm throws up water mixed with mucus all over the cold morning stones right by my Vans. I watch him quietly. The day is breaking. There appears to be more to come.
At the school I ring the buzzer and look into the camera. There is the sound of a phone ringing and then the lady in the office comes on. She knows me, says hi. She says that they will bring Violet out in a minute.
Last week at another meeting at the school everyone decided that Violet should have another couple weeks for adjusting to the meds. Taking this stuff can make a kid tired or wound-up or almost anything, I guess. In Violet’s case, they make her sleepy more than active, but they also seem to make her less edgy, less overwhelmed by the thoughts in her head.
For this, I am grateful. It is not easy to watch your own child suffer. I would kill anyone to make it go away. I would place my own head on the railroad tracks and let the next train crush my face if there was a deal you could make that would free the kid from the pain in exchange for my soul. My soul is nothing next to hers.
You know what I’m saying?
Would you cut out your own tongue with a knife if you were certain it would heal your baby?
Would you?
Would I?
I think I would. I think I know I would. But then again, what do we know? What do we even know at all about who we are/ what we are made of? Everybody is an expert on everybody else. Yet, when it comes to the deep peer into our own lives, I mean, goddamn. What a shit show. What a clown car of catastrophes we all turned out to be.
Violet comes out and throws her backpack in my backseat. She smiles and checks my eyes to gauge my mood. Eye locking is not her everyday thing, but when she does it she does it because she is moving in for a reading. Autistic kids are more in tune to the world around them than a lot of neurotypicals are. Violet can seize the vibe of a room simply by moving through it briskly/ her hands stimming in the air in front of her.
At quick glance, most would see a rushing teenager shooting for the wings/ a bit player absorbed in their own world and obliviously uninterested in the characters, like me and you, stood there upon the stage. But time reveals the truth. Every time, if I may say so myself. And so it goes with Violet. She blurs across an evening rug and we all look up from the TV just long enough to watch her go. Yet we have missed the big stuff. The fact that she has taken our mental temperatures, gauged our fluctuating demeanors, and quite possibly decided: in that blink of an eye: if or when she intends to bother with us at all tonight. Or if she will let her people/ her flesh and blood people/ long for her attention but receive literally none of it.
We talk in the car. I want to tell her certain things but I don’t. I want to mention that I have had a shit morning. I want to tell her that I sat down to write this essay before I left to come grab her from school, but I don’t. I want to say how I only wrote a few paragraphs before I literally fell asleep on my desk. I’ve been so stressed out with work. With writing. With trying to wrap my head around a they/them/dude/girl who means the world to me but who I struggle to understand so often. So many days.
I don’t say it though because I don’t want her to feel like a “burden”, which is something she has said a lot recently. A burden. My own kid. My super slice motherfucker radical eagle of sweet, sweet life. The human with the laugh that moves me. The witchy kid with Tarot cards and jars of herbs and Homer Simpson in her headphones and there she goes/ in a flash/ down the steps and out the door. Bears in the Night. Everyone all at once.
Instead, we talk about a wand. She wants to head to the witch store in Lewistown and hold the wands so she can see which one feels right. This makes me happy, because I think that is the correct way to go about shopping for a wand. Either that or you make one yourself with a stick you found in the forest that vibrates with beautiful energy, you know?
She tells me about a Wiccan holiday coming up. I forget the name of it. Something with trees. You go to the forest and you offer a small gift to the natural universe by tying it up in a tree. Like a little burlap sack of dried flowers or maybe a tiny jar of rose water or something. I don’t know the specifics yet, but I say yeah. That sounds very cool to me.
She mentions candles. You need candles and probably some sort of altar thing for the actual ceremony. I hedge at the candles and she senses it right away. Like a fucking witch!
When will I be old enough to do candles on my own?, she asks me.
I don’t say anything at first.
Grrr.
I watch our house going up in flames. I watch myself burning up in me and Arle’s bed in the middle of the night as everyone else escapes with their life. The dogs included. But not me. I see the wall of hell closing in on me and all of my Gettsyburg books at my bedside, oh dude. Tinder. The only Tinder action I ever got. They torque up and bluish gas ghosts of long dead soldiers and generals and horses and rabbits from the country hedgerows where small fights too place — and big fights too — they come running over my body in the panic of the screaming moment. I hear the sky whistling shells and I can taste the chalky hot smoke of the cannons as they blow up right next to my face. I scream with everything inside me but obviously nothing comes out. True terror eats your voice box first, amigo. Everyone knows that.
I am trampled by the antiquated, moldy corpse soldiers of long ago regiments and I lay there fascinated, trying (pathetically) to salute them as they go, but it’s hard. I’m on fire, you see. My hair is on fire and so is my sleeveless t-shirt and my blankets and all of my pillows and my throat and my eyes.
My eyes are sizzling in their sockets when I finally manage to tell Violet I will think about the candle thing. Not so much in the woods as in the house. If she burns down the mountain, that will suck and all, but still. If she burns down my Civil War town, I will be brokenhearted.
After a while she loses interest in telling me about spells and Ouija boards and all. Then she just does what she always does. She Irish exits the conversation/ touches her phone a few times/ adjusts the headphones that never leave her head/ and she is gone. Off into a song. Deep into the Spotify woods where no one can find her.
I drive us down the valley/ my hair on fire/ Confederate General William Barksdale sitting in my lap/ grabbing at the wheel/ his long greasy silver locks slapping my face in this early spring rush of wind. Mississippi Medusa. Garden of metal snakes.
I go to goosebumps when I hear his southern madness rooster crow.
Maybe because he’s drunk?
Or maybe because he knows deep down that he can only ever die that once, on the field.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
