We Walk Left Of What Is Holy

WE WALK LEFT OF WHAT IS HOLY 

I’ve driven ten hours and thirty-one predatory roadside red-tailed hawks to talk to a man about pain, and words, and why he messaged me- a stranger- to say only that I must remain close to the birds. My world has grown progressively more southern; more salty, more sodden, slow. The urgent hum of miles under tires has drifted away on a honeyed wind that my body moves through like lovers’ time. I’ve hidden myself away in a hefty mossy oak, a tiny house built into her arms like her child, hoisted, hipped; and her herons and squirrels continue their lives as if I’m ghostly, faint, only rarely pausing if something echoes or vibrates down a pregnant branch to their wild feet and shivers to the brain.  

The tidal river surges just past the dock beneath me. I’ve read that sometimes it brings dolphins; today there are cormorants and osprey and the rising and falling of the kingfisher, blue against blue. There is no point to laying a table, or food, maybe not even the wine. He has said he will not eat and I, a votary of the feasts of Harrison and Hemingway, feel this very pointedly. It is rare that I enjoy good food without a good book propped up in front of me, more rare to open a book of mine without finding some odd stain in orange or green or purple because I was just as hungry for the next words as the next bite and unwilling to delay either. I take the small, spicy bouquet of pungent basil meant for the pasta and pose it in a wine glass but it is too large and they sprawl in some flung-out, drunken, lonely fashion that I can’t abide.  There are only two cabinets in this tiny house and in the second I find a small blue jar, faceted, that holds them tightly and upright. I’m more content to see their faces than the loose curves of their spines leaning over the edge.  

He is a poet. Not the rhyming kind, but the near-suicidal kind. The track-marked kind, dirt-under-the fingernails-not-sure-where-I'll-live next-week kind. His step is steady up the white stairs, and he rounds the corner, shakes my hand, and asks if it would be unmannerly to ask to have a shower in a house not his own, as he’d had a job that day. This was said in such a way that I understood that there was not a job every day, and I directed him to the shower and gave him a towel before retiring to the porch. The basil in its blue glass swung a bit in a barely there breeze. He had golden hair, and golden eyes. The hair was long and unkempt, but the eyes kept everything. They had seen pyramids from the sky, I suspected, and every obscene holy smoke. I do not know how else he could have found me.  

He didn’t eat. He sat on the other side of the square metal deck table and looked out over the marsh while I looked at him. He had put his dirty clothes back on and I could see where he had rubbed the sweaty palms of his hands over his chest and belly; smears of dirt and grass. There were no stains on his knees so whatever he had been doing had been upright. His short sleeves aborted amidst long track lines on both tanned arms, furled and rippled and hardened, volcanic white along the smooth muscle. I felt that he never covered them; that he sat entirely as a result, as a cumulative. Dusk did not fall so much as settle slowly like a skirt over the trees, the chorus falling progressively toward the ground birds, and then to the frogs. I moved only to light the candle which gave his hard and tired face some sort of tribal dignity.  

He finally spoke, to ask me my favorite story, and I said it was Cormac’s tale of the wolf first, and then Terry Tempest’s tale of the death of the swan. The wolf he was familiar with, the swan he asked me to read, and I did so, his eyes watching my lips so intently that they burned. He asked for the pages that I had loved and marked yet I pulled them out willingly, the ripping sound abrasive in the warm night, and he folded them in half the long way and put them in his stiff back pocket.  

He talked for four hours. We moved from the porch when the mosquitoes became more dense than the stars, and he sat in the big blue velvet chair in the kitchen wrapped in a white blanket while I sat on the arm, toes tucked under his skinny leg for warmth. His story traveled the world, over and under oceans and around family, friends, and women. People died. Wonder died. There were resurrections and reburials and rebuttals and retributions. There were ransoms. He emptied out like a wind, like a descent of winter finches, and at the end of it he looked up at me with some kind of regretful disbelief, and I knew what he was going to say. 

He asked me not to write it. He shivered beneath his white blanket, a low-country pujari, husked, and waited. I saw that his story had built his frame, braced him taut. He was not well without the full weight of it, and it was why he sent his words out the way that he did, in short poems that did not pivot his fulcrum too much at once. His poems were prayer flags, words sent to the four corners in a gust, the new hung next to the old in careful continuity.  

I told him I had learned to walk left of what is holy, and his breath caught and swelled again. No one should be left a loose curve of spine, hanging over the edge.