Charlie

“I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe”

-Adrienne Rich

This is not the first time I have said that 

I am going to drive east but only halfway

because halfway is where my destination lies like a 

yellow picnic blanket next to a sort of 

quaint stream where he fished and smoked and 

lectured the dog when the dog would snuffle his 

nose into the pouch of rolling tobacco

as the dog was wont to do and our dog 

was wont to do it too. 

There are some things that are so easy to know about him 

that he could not hide them even with deliberate and

meticulous effort, things like 

the color of those two stones one is a blue stone 

one is green. The color of those shoes is I suppose 

a point of some contention. The color of fifty percent 

of his hair or twenty eight percent of his mustache or, 

to diverge from this tumbling, 

the color of my hair as a child for instance was 

a very dark brown. And the color of my eyes as a child was 

a very sludgy green. And I weighed eighty pounds as a child.

And I weighed forty five pounds as a child. And I wore collared shirts

with buttons and plaid caps backward and I slept beneath Hale-Bopp 

beneath the roof of the car and I slept beneath oak trees beneath the nylon

of my father’s bike trailer and I slept in tents and 

in one little bed, dreaming the simple quilted dreams that a child dreams.

The color of my childhood for instance was the color of 

that quaint stream in Dodgeville, Wisconsin next to a yellow house 

where a dog trots along with his nose low to the dirt and tail aloft.

And an orange cat finds another orange cat, as if fated, to summon up legions 

of orange kittens. 

And my uncle died in a hospital of Pneumonia.

This is many years after he planned his escape route to Canada.

This is many years after he planned his escape route to east,

but only halfway. A handwritten note painstakingly 

cyphered read that he loved me because I said 

read read read. 

Read read read. 

And if for instance I do not read very much anymore 

because my body buzzes with fear and a little ghost won’t 

let my mind settle into that imperative groove,

and if for instance I cannot make humble head 

or tucked tail of my own teeming life, 

well then it is time perhaps to go east but only halfway, 

if only for a little moment and a very tiny paw. 

The roof and the rifle, the thunderous summers 

and steady perch of raw-bone knees