THE CALAMITOUS ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH MUFFIN

How wise was this? It was not wise at all.
We did not know what we were making
when we made the English muffin.
How cold its crags and valleys,
like arctic mountainscapes,
more fit for wolves
than for butter or for jam.
Out of the oven it went a-conquering,
trampling breakfast tables,
waving its spears and guns overhead, and
none of us had foreseen
the monstrosity of its crimes.
Mothers laid their dead children at our feet.
Unblinking we shook our heads
in meager consolation
but our hands were dusted
with flour and with dust.
They wailed and railed and we said nothing.
After the crowds had gone away,
we shuffled into our bakers’ shop.
Bent over our ovens we wept and
still are weeping now,
kneading our broken hearts into
the infinite folds of dough.

I WILL BELIEVE IN YOU

We walked across the Spanish tile,
beneath the trees shaped like gentlemen from a previous time,
backs bowed and hats tipped and cigars loose-lipped,
and we passed a wooden bench
upon which sat three children of staggered ages.
All enamored of the sparrows at their feet
and in the boughs of the gentlemen trees,
they were too young to know
that sparrows destroy by partition
and trees bear witness to your wounds.
We were too young as well
for sparrows, for trees,
for the helicopters and the rafts.
We can spare them that.
I will believe in you
if you believe in me.

STAIRS MADE FROM STONE

The young academic scraped at the corners of his eyes with the heels of his hands and stared out at the patio where there was fire, where there was ash. He closed the patio door and padded across the tile floor of the kitchen, across the carpeted floor of the living room, and into the bathroom. He looked into the mirror and he could not tell what time it was. To his left his reflection in the medicine cabinet glanced sidelong at him: moderately tousled black hair, and brown eyes, and ash in his eyebrows. He opened the medicine cabinet and retrieved the toothpaste tube and twisted off the cap and removed the electric toothbrush from its charging cradle. Without looking at anything he squeezed some toothpaste onto the head of the electric toothbrush and replaced the toothpaste in the medicine cabinet. He had purchased this particular electric toothbrush because it reminded him of his last trip to the dentist wherein he received a thorough teeth-cleaning. The dental hygienist had told him that everything was in remarkably good condition then had proceeded to lecture him on the daily rituals necessary for proper tooth care. He had been informed of the value of keeping his mouth closed while brushing the teeth in the back of his mouth. He had been told that plaque was soft and would disintegrate easily, and at the time he had thought of hot rice porridge rinsed down the drain.

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IT WAS WORTH ALL THE ANGER OF AUSTRALIA

I went fishing for a whale.
My reasons were entirely scientific.
I wanted to know why they built families
when families are like sticks
braced against each other.
The harpoon pierced the whale
and I dragged it onto shore.
I climbed inside its mouth
and examined its mythologies.
There I found sticks, twigs,
and a raft bound with rope and twine.

REGRETFULLY I FOUND THE HAWK

When I came upon the hawk she was trapped
between the screen door and the front door.
Her left wing was broken in two places
and she was bleeding from her chest.
Due to the unique colorations of her feathers
she resembled a master’s painting viewed
from behind a double-thick glass enclosure.
I picked her up as gingerly as rice-and-curry
from the small, clean Thai restaurant just
down the street by five minutes or fifteen,
contingent entirely on the traffic.
I should have worn a leather glove.
I did not expect to be torn in that way,
neither by her talons, nor by the broken
bottles in her slender throat.

via tweenbots.com

WAR-TIME ALLIANCES

At the dinner-table, in the little French restaurant near the shore, she declared the terms of agreement by which we must abide. Should either of us trespass upon the terms then we were to never speak to each other again. There was steak tartare and then there were allusions to our pasts and all their variegated traumas, which in retrospect seemed small and inconsequential, conquests and battles fought before the time of Christ. They went well with the white wine from the decade prior. We checked our numbered lists against one another and we understood the diminishing returns in scale. The duo of Kobe beef rib-eye and short rib bore witness to our crimes and associated confessions. The waitress did not care but waitresses ought never to care at all. Neither should I, in that place, but I had to consider the chocolate coulant.

MIGRATORY PATTERNS

After she walked away I remained standing on the beach next to the towel and the empty bottle of wine. There was a full moon but I did not enjoy the sight of it. Some time after dawn, the full moon disappeared. It was there one moment and then it wasn’t there. Eventually I lay down on the towel and closed my eyes. It was a mediocre sunlight that strained against the darkness. It stung, at first, but then I fell asleep. It was a cool day.

When I woke up it must have been close to noon, or shortly after. I sat up and blinked two or three times. The beach was as empty as it had been last night. No, not at all, I was wrong. There was a whale lying on its side about thirty or forty yards down the beach. I stood up and brushed sand from my jeans and walked over to the whale until I could feel the quiet force of his exhalations. He was silent, blue and gray like the sky, and he was not struggling. I had watched someone in the process of dying slowly before and the whale did not resemble that person at all. He was noble and I expected a distinguished British narration to inform me about what was happening now, as well as the circumstances that had brought this whale here.

Instead, the whale spoke to me in a deep voice that was not tinged with accent or dialect.

“My mother died in front of me when I was a child and all I can remember is the harpoon, and the blood. From then on I roamed the water. When other whales were learning to waltz at the autumn ball I was marked by scientists in diving suits. I had never had an audience and so I sang for them, and every once in a while, they sang back to me through their machines.”

I held my hand out in front of the whale’s eye. I waved my hand back and forth and the whale followed the movement of my hand, watching. I wondered how much time he had left.

“One day I heard a song that was not artificial. It was the most beautiful song I had ever heard. Before I heard the song I roamed without purpose but after the song I was always hunting. For you, as well as us, this is the way of things, with music, there is always one song that will wrap your heart in a cocoon. I searched for the song without tiring. I barely ate, just enough to keep myself alive, because what use is sustenance to a hungry heart? And I was singing my song, calling out to her, and sometimes, when the moon was full and the waves were still, I heard her singing back to me.”

I looked over my shoulder at the towel and empty bottle of wine. No one had stolen the towel. There was no one else on the beach. I wished I had brought another bottle of wine. It was an affordable Riesling of above-average quality. We had shared it, passing the bottle back and forth without words. I looked back at the whale.

“But now I am here, and she isn’t here, and neither is her song, and so what has it all come to? Better to have ended with the harpoon, and the blood. No one will remember me, and if any of the other whales have heard her song, they will eventually forget it, and we will become memories engraved in audio recordings, archived in university libraries, and then our songs will become dust. But that is all right. It was enough to have heard the song in the first place. I loved her. And that was enough, as well.”

The whale closed his eyes. I waited until he stopped breathing and then I touched his cheek. It was surprisingly warm.

Special thanks to the cat-owners I consulted during the writing of this story: Bonnie and Colby. Approximately 5,600 words.

KING ARTHUR AT THE EDGE OF A CLIFF

—

FRIDAY, EVENING

We climbed for a very long time. Actually it was only ten or fifteen minutes and it was mostly stairs but it felt like a very long time on account of the weather: cold enough to snow without any snow. It wasn’t raining, either. It wasn’t even cloudy. There was no rational explanation for the cold other than its own existence. I said this, out loud, to her. She did not respond. She scratched her ear so I assumed she was carefully considering the philosophical ramifications of the temperature. In fact she was not.

She pulled herself over the top of the ladder with some measure, some grace, and rubbed her palms together. One of the reasons why I loved her was because her palms had very few lines on them, much to the chagrin of every single palm-reader and fortuneteller she had displayed them to (usually accompanied by a scarlet grin, the sort of grin I imagined cats would wear if their faces were suited for it). I firmly believed that palm-readers and fortunetellers were the third greatest group of improvisational artists in the world, just behind taxi drivers and elementary school teachers. But a nearly-blank palm doesn’t give a palm-reader much to work with. Michelangelo probably wouldn’t have done such a bang-up job if he had to paint the ceiling of a run-down village chapel instead of the Sistine. Anyway, that wasn’t the main reason I loved her. It wasn’t even a highly-ranked one, in the grand scheme of things. But it was something. And every something counts.

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