“What We Found While Following the Floe”

ice barb

 

This week’s poems are inspired by a story of a teenage boy who survives the ruining of his village by hiding in a refrigerator for two days. It is a story about an idea that the world would be a better place without such boys. It is the journey of a sad clown who attends a summer camp. It is an ill-fated attempt to cross the ocean with nothing to bring back but the devil himself in ice. It is a story of a melting man who wears kitchen timers on his ears so that he does not have to hear the din of–or from–any source. It is about a dark-spirited bird who invites the world who will listen. . .”to punch the clown.”

I write these poems this week for Andrew.

In another time. . .when I were reading stories and not books, I should not have known him.

The smart kids might have read Andrew, his books piled up next to fanned-out LP jackets. These smart kids would listen to The Talking Heads or The Smiths (and they would believe that Andrew was one of them because of the reference to the refrigerator in “There is a Light That Never Goes Out”). They would compare him to Vonnegut. And then go back to their own left-handed, self-congratulating behaviors. After you’ve punched the clown, you never stay to see it pop back up again reading for another strike.

Smart kids.

His name would appear on the bindings of books facing outward from a shelve somewhere. You might find them half-priced at the Goodwill on a Sunday afternoon. Your uncle may have had one on the coffee table of the living room, a gift from some girl he has already forgotten.

They might have been books donated to the boys who lived in barracks. Both of them the target for criticism of the gatling nature. Both of them growing older with each passing year. The way they open–and close–changing as they stand guard over the sages. . .and the ages.

Sentries and centuries are the best watch guards. We shake our fists and wrinkle our faces at both, hoping to distract either from their duties. We take our pictures with them. We nod our heads to our friends and nudge them with our shoulder. We claim to have gotten to them this time. Selfies. Selfish. Self-ism.

It’s the “ish” and “ism” that makes it a physical impossibility to ever really hold a book.

I should not have known him–this Andrew–except that I might have borrowed the books bearing his name for an extended period of time. . .until they could be considered my own. I’d probably write my own name on the outer pages.

I claim this book.

Stolen?

You cannot steal what has been donated. And if you pass it to another, it more than payment. It’s a sacrament. It’s the book thief’s absolution to pass a story to another reader. We do not enter into the ritual lightly. Our palms are bruised for days from the carrying of tomes to other hands. We are often turned away.

It is the privilege of the critic to have put stickers upon them and then to have given them away. Steal them from their sense of story to place them on high where the general public might assume that the book’s every page is filled with a two-word query:

“Why bother?”

The interrogatives of this life are just too damn hard to ponder the essence of bothering and why one might.

I might have given them to some reader just coming of story age. I might have influenced that young man to read about losses and lenses. . .about thin boys longing for brothers. . .about scrums. . .about lemur masks and bowling. . .about the passing of time and how it can be kept on ice if you have a box suited for the purpose.

Ahhhh. . .I might have shared all of this. I should not have known him if this were another time for story. But this is a time for books. Boxes and boxes of books and they spill out all over the place and it’s getting harder and harder to tell one from another.

And. . .now. . .this man whose stories I have stolen. Stolen from this very moment in which we find ourselves. . .ha. . .we think we are nailed to the wall. . .we think we are secure upon the branch upon which we have made a nest? We are floating. Due north.

Ice floes. Like blood in the stream.

 

Ice dams. And blocks the would-be discourse.

 

Ice stream.

 

Ice stream.

 

We all scream. . .

 

And a man I shouldn’t have known–in another time–for stories goes back into the refrigerator.

 

The light never goes out.

 

I want to tell him. I found this white suit by the side of the information highway. It has been roughed-up a bit. It does not look like it would fit anyone else I know. I doubt anyone else would even put it on given its condition and how it got to be this way.

 

Few of our paths progress in front of bulldozers. We do not spend our days bowing in an effort to keep our gowns from going under the blade.

 

Sticks and stones are no way what-so-ever to launder our work clothes.

 

It is still a serviceable suit, sir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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