Poet in the Corpse Garden

photo by Floris van Breugel.

Tropical birds screech from behind a dense tree canopy while I sit alone on the veranda in a wicker love seat. A ceiling fan stirs the humid, fragrant air. Squirrels scavenge in the thicket, sorting leaves, patting down nuts with a dusting of dirt. I sip brandy and work on the day’s poem while my love withers away in a brass bed upstairs. The hospice nurse sits on a dining room chair beside the bed, leg crossed over knee and a murder mystery novel pried open in a single hand. Her leg bounces, like the heartbeat in the bed beside her, irregular and fading. Don’t stop.

Her parents are coming tomorrow to talk me out of custody of our little girl. I think I will give her up. Not because she reminds me of her mother, which she doesn’t, but because I want to increase my pain to match my wife’s. I want to go through what she’s going through, so that she is not alone. Or is it so that I am not alone? Of the two of us, I was always the coward. Like now, like my poems, like this fear of the tropical birds and squirrels scuttling in the brush.

Branches form bridges in the blue sky, and snifters full of brandy hang from the trees in the hidden grove. I scatter her ashes in air, gentle dance of dust through rays of sunlight. Death is all around; I count corpses down in the copse, along with all of my broken art strewn about. Sculptures with broken limbs. Portraits rendered and torn. Her dust has not even settled over the thicket before sprites emerge from the green curtain, supple limbs and untouched faces of all the pretty girls I knew before. May I come inside, I ask? Just a moment, you say? Yes, a moment is all it takes, and a moment is all we have left.

Incubator Boy

photo by Heartbeatbox.

It was what he wanted, in the end. He rode the Greyhound bus out of town to North Dakota somewhere. There was not much ahead of him, but more than enough behind him. Little boy blue, nestled in his incubator, curated by the nurses to a thing of beauty more fragile than a faberge egg. Countryside flashing past, with a steady image of his disconnected face on a palette of green. His girlfriend was back there somewhere. He couldn’t see her face. Only a smeared image now that it has begun to rain.

The bus broke down near Fargo. He stood on the side of the rode holding up an old lady that reminded him of his grandmother. Too hot in the bus. The highway shimmers and fades in the heat vapor rising off the tar. Fiberglass shattered around twisted metal frames. Covered bodies in the passing lane. Wait for the EMTs and troopers to clean up the mess, the tow truck to haul away the wreckage.

He dreamt he would have had a motorcycle by now, and not have to schlep it on an interstate bus with these people. He dreamt he would have had a lot of things by now; a place of his own, a dog, a kid or— no, no kid. Children had never been in the picture. He was too much of a kid himself, still ate Frosted Flakes for breakfast, still watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island. He had a hard enough time figuring out how to keep himself alive.

The bus pulls away from the shoulder again, the overhead air nozzle feeding a lifeline of air to his lungs. Expand, contract, expand, contract. North Dakota comes but it doesn’t take long enough, not enough distance measured in mile markers. It’s not what he wanted, in the end. Maybe he wanted mountains this stretch of his life, land masses to block part of the blue, blue sky filling the vanishing point on the horizon. Maybe he wanted straight roads replaced by switchbacks, steep descents and faulty brakes, emergency escape ramps for runaway trucks.

Skull Vacancies

photo by @Doug88888.

A human skull sits on a corner of my desk. My uncle left it to me in his will. Not his skull, but one that he had come across in his professorial days bouncing from college to college between improprieties. Why did he leave it to me? Just to make me wonder, I suppose. He liked to pose unanswerable questions to me, riddles that he would drop into my lap at family get togethers as he made his way to the food table for a second helping of mom’s potato salad.

Now, the skull spectates on my morning ritual of writing. What a heroic waste of time, it says from the vacancies that were once its eyes. The skull serves as a reminder of how quickly all of me, except my bones, will drain into the soil and transition to something else. What else? Why do I come here each morning to ? Is this merely a time killer? Do I really think I will rediscover my voice after all these years? I need to leave out crumbs of bread to attract the little bird. Or maybe more drastic action is required, a lighted torch and raised pitchfork to flush him from the ruins.

An angry mob gathers at the foot of the the hill where he is holed up, but they lack the courage to drive him from his haven. They cower in his shadow beneath the august moon, in a light that leaves blood the color of oil. He curses the stars and scribbles words into a wrinkled and muddied notebook. Children run wailing from him whenever they stumble upon his huddled form, reciting the words with a voice like a raven caw.

Whatever was meant was left behind, whatever was given was taken, whatever was foul was left to fester. I did not want it any more, could not take it any more than I could leave it, could not make do with what was left, could not eclipse what demanded to be seen. And now when the pressure lets up, nothing comes out. There is a requirement for conflict, a necessity for nihilism, a preternatural lust for the proper and prim. I did not ask for these misfits but bore them in spite; I much more preferred exposed fields and ramshackle huts sinking into the fallows. Is that a word, is that a place, is that a face familiar in the lineup of my suspects? Yes sir, right there; that word accosted me on the night of the 17th, in the cool light of day, may the titmouse be my witness.

He is grinning at me now, that skull; he is having a good ol’ time.

Shock that Draws

photo by bekon.

These images from the dark are like piercings of a needle beneath my fingernails. It is an addictive pain, a shock that draws one in, that exposes a whole other animalistic level to the self and to the dark. As a teenager, I crossed town on foot to the railroad tracks and the devil house behind the trees to seek the mystery of the unknown. Now the dark is much closer to home, small but necessary, an ebb and flow. The dichotomy of micrology versus macrology is merely due to the fact that each stares at the other through a different side of the lens.

I want to stop. I want to drop. I need to roll. Put the fire out. Crawl baby, crawl on your hands and knees. Sprawl to the needs. Drawl with the feeds coming in across this satellite haze.

Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”

Minnesota Winter of our Discontent

photo by Paul L Dineen.

I wake up now in the squall of night. Nothing stirs outside but the wind in the bows and the rush of air through barren limbs. Sounds like water rushing in to flood our streets, to pool at our back doors. One could only wish it were water that would offer some hope of draining away in a few days; anything other than this opaque northern night. It’s what makes us Minnesotan; these long winter months in a land that others cringe to see when their plane descends beneath the layer of clouds that hang over us. If they were only nice clouds, puffy like cotton; but no, they are like the dirty banks of snow, sand, and salt that line our streets. They are dirty like the fast food bags and tires and newspapers that are exposed as the snow recedes in April.

But this very trauma that is our winter makes artists of us all. What else do we have to do with our mornings and evenings than to introspect, to read a book or go down to the basement with guitar or paints? Who would want to wile aways the hours at the park or beach in a forsaken land; unless you are one of those people who skis, sleds, or skates - but those are the few of us lucky enough to have sustained a head injury during our youth, sliding into a tree trunk or having your skates sweep out from under you to crack your skull against the ice. Nobody of healthy mind would go out there. But we call it home. Minnesota nice. The land of 10,000 lakes filled with Walleye; fitting that our state fish is milky-eyed and can only see the dim depths of the deepest lake holes. Fitting that our Loon laughs like a mad hatter in those fleeting, goading days of summer.

Rev Robert Kirk - The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Faeries

Bramble and Briar

photo by zero239.

All I had really wanted to do was plant a quiet little garden in the back corner of my yard, but once I’d wandered into the wild bramble and briar, the tangled buckthorn and thistle, I felt the hairs on my neck tingle as I caught a faint whispering on the breeze. I felt as though eyes were watching me from behind every leaf, but when I’d turn to catch whoever it was, the undergrowth would bounce back into place and the sound of scurrying fell back to quiet.

I’d tried my best to ignore it, but deeply shaken, I retired for the afternoon to my den, which afforded a view of the unkempt back corner of my lot, and poured myself a brandy. Then a scotch. Then some whiskey. By the time night fell, it was either the drink or the dark, but I could distinctly see tiny little lights dancing about the brambles, and by midnight, eyes grown heavy and now on my hands and knees at the windowsill, I perceived little figures marching out of the undergrowth, across the lawns towards my house.

Then came a rap upon the door. I jumped, so startled that I knocked over a plant beside me. I opened the door. Nothing there. Closed the door. I retired to my bed, where I thought I heard raucous voices outside, but fell asleep in the stupor of the tired and drunk.

Each night thereafter we repeated the proceedings of the night before; Me, drinking desperately and rubbing my blurry eyes while on hands and knees at the window; and Them, tiny illuminated creatures, faun and faerie alike, marching out from the bramble and briar in a herald of singing and music. They were a rowdy, bawdy bunch to be sure, hacking down my newly planted posies, peeing in the bird bath, rutting in the limbs of the crab apple tree. They were more ethereal than corporeal, made more of firefly light than that of our mortal clay. The faun — half man and half goat with their ears hanging low and chin beards foamed with beer — brayed at the neighbors’ dogs to egg them on. The trooping faeries, though made of finer features and higher born, were equally full of mischief and revelry.

They had come finally for me, after all these years, to reclaim their changeling left in the bed of a kidnapped child. My parents, now dead and gone, had always suspect I was not theirs, but could they have guessed who I was? Could any of us have guessed that one day this bastard child of the Faerie King of Bramble and Briar would be called back home to his father’s court? I doubted that, as I finally answered the door on that last night and followed the hidden people across the lawn, with each step growing smaller, each step peeling away the dried out husk of my flesh, exposing the glowing light inside my chest, the tiny light to pierce the night.

Morning Siren

photo by brettanicus.

I wake up in Siren to a cold morning, window open, Meredith and I entwined like burning twigs beneath a comforter the size of a slab of whale blubber. Now with a glass of orange juice while Mary Anne tinkers in the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Pancakes and bacon, I think. Maggie comes out of the laundry room with nails clicking on hardwood and tail beating the air, a smile curled like a snarl on her lips. She likes to wrestle in the morning, and bite at my hands with the soft mouth of a bitch handling her pups. In my chest, I feel my heart expand with the feel of soft dog fur under my hands, her doe eyes and ears curled back against her head like a wet seal. It is good to love and be loved.

The Grand Tour: Conclusion

photo by iloveupstate.

The Aunt is a sister of The Uncle, not a wife. She was an amateur artist whose life and art was augmented by schizophrenia. Her art consisted entirely of crayon stylings on mail envelopes and postcards. She was middle-aged and…I can’t remember her face. Odd. Can’t remember her body or her eyes, though I held both that night. When tea was served she gracefully slipped under the table, where we joined her for a cup and a biscuit under the table cloth, while she told us about her date with a clown earlier in the day. I gathered that the clown was not metaphorical but quite real, having just returned from a child’s birthday party and still in costume. They had a picnic in a park. She spoke English as best she could, for my benefit; “There we were, laying on our plates…”

“You were lying on your plates,” asked The Uncle, “and what fine gentleman was eating you?”

She either did not catch his meaning ignored him, “…and then he asked me if I wanted to taste his Bobo? What’s his Bobo?” she asked, turning to me.

I looked to Odlef for rescue, but he only shrugged and drained his cup of tea. We crawled out from the table and moved on to wine, something from Hungary called Bulls Blood. Before opening the next bottle, The Uncle took the empty bottle by the stem and tossed it through an open window, where it cartwheeled twenty feet down and kerplunked into the mote. “Back in the day of our forebears, they always threw their empties into the mote. As a preservationist, it is my duty to uphold their customs in the highest regard. Do as they did, I say.” He laugh was more of a giggle, a bead of wine clinging to his curled mustache.

The Aunt brought our dinner, a half dozen smoked eel in butcher wrap. The Uncle smoked at the table. Odlef was a blond blur at the edge of my vision, laughing and alternating from Dutch to English, though it didn’t matter because I could understand neither. Talk led to my writing aspirations, the state of literature today, the need for a new commune of writers like the Lost Generation. Who would be our Gertrude? Was Odlef our Fitz drinking away his talent? I was none of the above, but they saw in me what they wished. When I talked about Morrison and wanting to be a visionary, and about Artaud and Rimbaud and how writing could be inspired by the unsettled mind, I forgot to whom I was talking. The Aunt cautioned me about romanticizing mental disorder. Was it worth the price, in the end? As if in explanation, she escorted me from the dinner table to the makeshift studio The Uncle had set aside for her in one of his many rooms. She opened the door to a simple room; four walls, a table, a chair, but plastered across the walls and ceiling were hundreds of envelopes, each consumed by brightly colored flames, curling at the edges, wrinkled, pressed flat again. On the floor they gathered like so many fallen leaves. Each burned and yet did not expire; they were only crayon flames, I realized, and the crayons that ignited them were scattered across the table, some snapped in half like broken fingers or rubbed down to the nubs. I looked more closely at the envelopes and found that not all were only made of colors following the folds of the envelope, but some also held stick-drawings of bicycles and trains and boats and planes, suns and flowers and sons and daughters.

It wasn’t good. I didn’t get it. I felt deflated. I wanted her to be brilliant, but she didn’t care to be, knew she was not, aspired to be nothing but who she was. At twenty I didn’t appreciate that. At forty I wonder if you grow up or grow in. At sixty I hope to understand if the evidence of that growth, the product of all my exploration, like her colored envelopes, is meant more for myself or others. Shit, who cares.

We went back upstairs and drank and smoked, stacked dishes and tried to fish empty bottles from the mote. I fell asleep on the sofa with the aunt. Awoke in a tangle of limbs and clothes in ray of blinding sun.

It was a morning of hangovers and shame, putrid cigarettes and cotton mouth, bad smells lingering in the rooms from the night before. While The Uncle brewed a pot of strong black coffee, I drew away from the group and slipped out the door to the castle grounds still wet with dew. I walked down winding cobbled paths, through a maze of wood neatly stacked in cords, through the shade of the trees spared from emperor’s ax, and by the time I made it through the maze to the mausoleum, I had in my mind the beginnings of what would be my first novel.

Odlef and I stuffed our backpacks to catch the last train home. The Aunt presented me with her latest envelope creation, which she must have colored over her morning coffee. Was it something in the image she drew in childlike crayon, or was it in the recognition of her chosen medium — an envelope? Whichever caused these chemicals to collide, I had received her message carried over a great distance, not only the very real ocean that would soon divide me from my grand tour of Europe, but also a message that bridged the space between her art and the irrational world in which she had learned to live, and with which I was only now coming to terms.

The Grand Tour pt 9: The Castle

photo by Jean-Michel Priaux.

It has been a long time since I was here last. The Grand Tour; so true, but more of a grand tour through the passing year and a half rather than through the memories of all that happened during the backpacking trip of my 20’s. Where have I been? Falling in love, getting married, settling in, and taking a shine to martinis and a movie rather than sweating out words. But even my new bride cannot completely unseat the mistress of my life — writing. She has caused as much trouble over the years, as any mistress would. Competing for attention, luring me away when inspiration heats my blood, filling me with jealous rage when she holds back the words. All of that aside, I’m back; but first, let’s finish the story of the Grand Tour of our poet maudit. Try to keep up with me now, I don’t want to linger too long over the last miles of the trip, the wrecked parapets, the supple village girls selling weaver’s wares, or the food that has gone cold in the underground bistro buried deep in the tunnels of Budapest. There are new stories to tell, so let us be done with it.

What better way to end a European trip than to stay in the servants quarters of a Netherlands’ castle? Odlef’s Uncle served as a preservationist and historian for Huis Houthakker. We called it the castle, though in truth it is a manor house built in the 1500’s, then renovated in the 1800’s with English gardens ringed by a mote, sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, cobbled paths winding through the ruins of arbor and sculptured Goths draped in lichen. A Dutch princess sold the property to an exiled emperor to take as his homestead, or more accurately, his decorative cage with guards of his former country stationed at the gate. The once great man could not sit idle for long, took up an ax and started chopping down tree after tree, splitting the logs, stacking coords of wood in the shape of a maze. He was soon known as The Woodchopper of D_. This went on for a few years until one morning, in mid swing, a bolt of lightning struck him dead and ended his exile, and incidentally, pointed the easy way out from the maze. The emperor’s faithful expats buried him on the castle grounds in a small mausoleum, built upon the very plots he cleared of trees. Rest now, rest.

We walked up the graveled drive, filthy jeans and muddied shoes, backpack slung over one shoulder, finding The Uncle sitting outside the castle gift shop, sipping a cappuccino and leafing through a stack of trade journals. He wore a pale blue linen suit with yellow bow tie, bright green socks and white leather shoes. A cane was propped against the other chair, though later I would observe no perceivable limp. He was mango shaped bordering on a pear. Smiles and handshakes, genuine excitement to hear of our travels and adventures, though his disappointment was palpable at our lack of sexual escapades to share with him: wink wink, no taste of the buttered French croissants, eh? No Italian puttanesca? You’re not holding out on me, eh? No Uncle, afraid not, though there was that Gypsy girl down by the Danube. Immediately, our mango soured - filthy things, filthy - and we moved on to our evening plans: wash up and welcome The Aunt over for dinner.

It will take me more time to linger over the memory of that dinner, and how best to capture the schizo Aunt and her tea party under the table. The mundane was put to bed that night like unwelcome children, while Netherland sprites were set loose to play. If I was an artist, what wonderful art I could put together of that night’s icons: the mote, the stone castle, postal envelopes brightly colored with crayon, smoked eels curling in and out through the windows and portcullis, and empty bottles of wine cart wheeling out of windows and kerplunking into the mote. Yes, it will take some care to capture The Aunt and her dinner, a gentle hand to catch the canary without breaking a wing.

The Grand Tour pt 8: The Apple and the Sickle

photo by torobala.

Hills, gray and raining. Deep green forests. Heavy clouds hovered only a few feet above the ground, mingling with the tree tops. Budapest is the land in the clouds, mist glistening on hillside rocks barely glimpsed through the clouds.

On our train ride from Budapest towards the Czech border, a girl and her mother rode in our compartment. The girl’s name was Regina, around sixteen or seventeen years old. Most beautiful girl in the world, sleeping next to me, pummeled in and out sleep on a rocking train.

For the second consecutive night I stayed awake, playing games of pretending to be asleep but with my eyes cracked open so as to peer unobserved on her sleeping face, cherub lips parted slightly to breathe. The mother fights sleep just as diligently, to keep watch over her gosling. I inched closer to the daughter’s side with glacial patience to obtain my objective; letting my arm fall to rest against her bare thigh, as though I simply shifted in my sleep.

In the morning, the sun rises on her face and she wakes up. Vibrant, talking to us about her favorite breeds of dogs and her home and her dreams of one day going to America. She wants to be pen pals and gives us her address. Even her mother warms to us in the morning light and invites us to stay with them should we ever find ourselves in Prague. We get off the train.

Odlef’s grandparents were wealthy and respected in this small Hungarian town. The grandfather was a respected doctor, with a hospital and a boulevard named after him.

The house is a stout stone structure, high ceilings and expansive rooms, with doors that are ten feet high. Thick stone walls keep the rooms cool during the day, and in the early evening we close the shutters over windows barred to keep out theives. Portraits hang on the walls of the family ancestry, from oils to black and white photographs of ancestors, grim and strong. A bishop stands on a balcony in a Transylvanian church. His wife, the tragedy figure, died young from tuberculosis.

There is a garden out back with cherry, nut, and plum trees, squares of flowers, isles in purple bloom, perfumed. The weeds are growing high so Odlef wanders through the garden with a sickle in hand, broad sweeping arcs sculpting the garden, chopping down what does not belong.

Look out back, past the gardens to the property beyond. See the steep roof, stained chimneys and lightning rods? This is their original mansion, taken away by communism. They are in the courts to take it back. They have plans, Odlef’s father and uncles, to reclaim that which was taken and to restore what has decayed. But some things are gone. Russian soldiers had taken the house, shit in the tub, and stolen the silver. Some spoons and knives were found later, scattered across town. But the fine china and teapots now sit in Russian cabinets.

The Grand Tour pt 7: Scarecrow Hill

photo by HORIZON.

I sit alone on the sidewalk outside of the locked house in Balassagyarmat. Mad dog howling of hunger, smaller dogs yapping a refrain, a bloodied wart seeps on my arm, sticky crimson and dirt. I practice the words in Hungarian, “Odlef K_, gone to get the key,” accompanied with gestures as though I am performing a pantomime. I can see myself through a local’s eyes; a foreign mantra of a long haired bleeding American shaman who drawls his words with a palsied tongue.

Church bells are tolling the hour: hear that cacophony of dogs?

We ride the bus from Budapest to Odlef’s house in Balassagyarmat, only a few miles from the Czech border. The bus coasts down winding hills, then chugs up the next incline, working itself to near collapse until a moment of reprieve. I knew the feeling. We pass a hillside crop of berries guarded by scarecrows draped in linen sheets. Like wraiths they are, flapping in the breeze, not just in shapes of human form, but also of underworld creatures, horse-like and spectral. What I wouldn’t give to sneak out to the hill on a moonlit night, with a light breeze bringing the celebration to life, with Bosch holding court at the center of the gathering.

As we near the smaller villages, we come across old peasant women walking along the roadside in their rapid, hunched over gaits. Widowhood veils their faces in black scarves, toothless smiles at nothing but the hot sun beating down on them, their joints creaking on the way to market, alone, only a few vegetables to buy now that the husband has died and the children left. She looks up to passengers in the windows of the bus. I search her face for self-pity but find none here, at least none detectable from the foreigner’s outside observations, wordless and passing.

The Grand Tour pt 6: Santa Croce Rain

photo by ~Essence of a Dream~.

Dark clouds gather at the end of streets and behind towers. We rush to a square outside Santa Croce and lie on our backs over the cobblestones, watching those etched clouds swirl and bulge, swell and recede. Then came the rain. I saw individual raindrops plummet from the sky and land on my cheeks. When the rain started to come too strong, we crowded into the church with the others.

A downpour and thunder fills the square, driving away the tourists that crowded beneath shop awnings. The church becomes too crowded, so we take shelter beneath a network of scaffolding used to restore the old building. I crouched among the skeletons of scaffolding and stone and sang the blues in the key of an exhaust fan humming nearby; “I’m soaked to the bone and I feel like goin’ home…”

The rain lets up and the square is like a gilded mirror. Two blond girls are the first to venture out, walking brightly across this somber space. Patches of bright blue color the sky like the first strokes of a paintbrush on old canvas.

The Grand Tour pt 5: Lamentations no. 1

photo by earthmagnified.

Lost in a hotel room that is too large for me, a high ceiling, vast tile floor and a tiny chair. Where am I? Rome, I think, a beehive of cobbled streets, twisting alleys and whirring scooters. What street is this? Foreign drawl of a street name like the last words of a villager struck down by cholera. I’m lost in a city where I am lost in the hotel where I am lost in the room and where I am lost in this chair.

Walking now, marching twenty strides behind Odlef, a clumsy limp and with each step a wince of pain from the blister on my pinky toe. This little piggy is squealing “SHIT FUCK PISS” all the way home. The sun beats on Rome, bakes the stones and I walk on the coals. Dry air sucks moisture from my eyes. Trembling, hungering, baking, I fall out of the flowing current of pedestrians to lean against a wrought iron fencepost. I try to find my happy place inside my head, but all of my memories seem far away, across the ocean. But here’s one now: childhood days sprawled on the grass with the family dog. Playing kick-the-can with Mike and Jane. First snow of the year and I’m standing at the neighbor’s door, “Can Jane come out and play?” There now, something looks familiar. I remember every detail about a split second of those days.

Sometime during these musings I have fallen back in line behind Odlef, and I fully awaken as he comes to a stop. Look up, there is a heavy solid dome stretched above our heads, an open circle at the apex, a sunbeam shining through the cool moist air onto marble floors. This is the Pantheon.

The Grand Tour pt 4: Toulon Postcard

photo by lentina_x.

Old sailors grounded in Toulon sit on doorsteps throughout the day, sipping beer in the mornings, biting their fingernails in the afternoon, tasting the dirt on their tongues. Their skin is deep brown and liver-spotted, tattoos of ships broken up on their withered arms. Cobblestone alleys lead crookedly toward the Mediterranean shore. Speakers hang over the streets, tangled in lines of wire and cable, bringing the streets alive with American sixties songs. In the farmers' market, hordes of tourists shout in broken French with the vendors, a tangle of hands shuffling honeydew melons and yellow plums and paprika. Further up the avenues, away from the shoreline, the streets grow quiet. In the squares, lovers mill about with entwined arms or sat in patio cafes waiting patiently for their drinks. A fountain stood in the center of a square, water trickling down a swell of moss and vines, dripping into a pool. A blackbird fluttered in the shallows, water beading its feathers.

We stay at the hotel Le Petit Chateau and wash our clothes in the boudoir with hand soap. Eating sandwiches of liverwurst, sardines, and tomatoes on a fresh baked baguette, Odlef sits on the windowsill looking out over the chaotic jumble of flats with red-tiled rooftops. In the afternoon we buy three bottles of chilled white wine, drink in the night and come alive; this is our daily ritual, to be followed by numb, wordless mornings. My life is something like water: without taste, bland, lacking intoxication, even here in France. That is why I reach for the wine bottle.

I write a postcard to a friend back home. There is too little space to cover everything going on, so I decide it best to describe only the items on the table in our room:
- crusts of stale French bread
- two husks of beach melon
- two plums from the farmers market (yellow)
- two half full bottles of white wine
- ashtray, filled (one pack)
- Paris guidebook (tattered)
- Rome guidebook (pristine)
- backpack strap (useful) and an American penny (useless)

I take Odlef’s spot on the windowsill and claim my perch four stories above the street. Sallows fly in circles above the fountain in the square. Church bells toll the evening vespers. Pickpockets withdraw from their day of work, street urchins laugh into the face of the coming night, and a dog kills a cardboard box.

The Grand Tour pt 3: Straw Dogs

photo by Samantha Decker.

Odlef and I follow a tour in a Paris guidebook in which you pretend you are walking through Montparnasse during the Lost Generation of the 1920’s. It is as though we are two starving nihilists who, armed with the guidebook, torch everything in the city while preserving only those great artifacts from Gertrude Stein’s Montparnasse. We see a new restaurant called the Hippo Grill; it does not exist. There is a café called Le Select, but at this hour in the tour guidebook there are no people. But I see the people, smoking, reading papers, making all of the correct motions of intellectuals, and yet we drop the curtain on their play; they do not exist.

We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.

The Grand Tour Pt2: Atlantic Crossing

photo by Just Plane Photography.

I am on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackness fills the window; I have no fear of the ocean because I cannot see it. Yet it is there, those churning depths, those sharks and whales just below my body suspended in space, but right now I feel no nearer to the ocean than when I was lying in my bed in Iowa, imagining my Atlantic crossing. In fact, I was closer then. My room was dark. This plane is filled with light, stewardesses handing out blankets, and men with their shoes off to air out their stinking feet; this is my version of the Grand Tour, 21st century style.

How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.

I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.

Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”

The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.

The Grand Tour, Pt 1

photo by klebersales.

He dropped out of the Iowa State writing program weeks into the first semester, after he started binge drinking beer, half a liter of whiskey, and then rioting across campus in a bacchanalian frenzy, diving into creeks, hanging over cliff ledges, smashing beer bottles over his forehead. Campus security picked him up, and he was assigned to a campus psychologist. The counselor sat with knees crossed, notepad at the ready. “You’re clearly exhibiting self-destructive behaviors, but we haven’t talked about what’s going on inside. Why do you want to hurt yourself?”

“I don’t know,” the young man replied. Long stringy hair hung over his face but didn’t hide the stitches sewing up the gash in his forehead from one of the broken beerbottles. “I can’t take life anymore. It’s boring. It’s mundane. It doesn’t have any of the magic from Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, and I feel cheated. There’s nothing for me to write about in this town. Worse of all, I’m freaking out. I’m nervous all of the time. I get panic attacks just walking into the classroom.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“I’m supposed to read my work in front of the class.”

“And you’re nervous they won’t like it?”

“I don’t know. They like it fine. Some of them even tell me it’s better than anything they’ve read. Other’s tell me I ripped it all off from the poet maudits, from movies I’ve never seen, or that I use too many adjectives. But that’s not it. It’s being exposed like that in front of the firing squad, all of them watching me, all of their eyes on me, all of their judgments being processed at that moment, and I see myself through their eyes. I panic.”

“Your MMPI showed you have a number of personality disorders. Four, in fact. Nothing to get overly concerned with, any person taking the test will probably have a few disorders identified. You have Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Ideation, and Social Phobia.”

“No pills.”

“But you’re already medicating yourself, and in all the wrong ways. Don’t you want to feel happy and at peace with yourself?”

“It’s not about being happy. I want to feel life, experience the full spectrum emotions. Live dangerously, sail my ships into uncharted seas. I want to open the doors of perception. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”

“Okay, now you’re just quoting directly from Nietzsche and Jim Morrison.”

“Jim who?”

“So you think the magic is ‘out there?” the counselor asked, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.

“I hope so, because it sure as hell is not in Iowa.”

“So leave.”

“Leave?”

“Go on a road trip. See the country. Take the grand tour.”

“But I can’t. I don’t have any money. I’ve got my classes—“

“You’re flunking all of your classes.” The counselor dropped the notepad in his lap and raked his fingers through his hair. “Look, you’re dying. You’re killing yourself with this behavior, and you keep putting yourself into dangerous situations where you leave the choice of life and death to chance. You are not a happy person.”

A thought came to the young writer. “There’s Odlef. He’s a friend of mine, a Dutch foreign exchange student that lived in the dorm. We used to get drunk together a lot.”

“About the drinking—you need to stop.”

“Not likely. So this grand tour thing, you mean like how the young English aristocrats would travel around Europe, visiting museums, playhouses, operas?”

“Yes, it was considered a right of passage and that their exposure to European culture, art, and history would complete their education.”

“Odlef is back home now in Amsterdam. Could you get my Mom to pay for one of those train passes?”

“The Eurorail. Yes. I mean, no. It’ll be up to your mother whether she thinks this is a good idea, but I will recommend to the dean that you take a break from school without penalty. And I would like to talk with you mother, if you approve.”

“To convince her about this trip?”

“To talk about your issues, and about what kind of therapy that I can recommend.” The crestfallen look from the student stirred up his sympathy, and he added. “This treatment just might include Gestalt therapy, which essentially focuses on the experience of life; ‘send your ships into uncharted seas,’ as you said.”

As they wrapped up their session, the counselor couldn’t help envying the student, despite his mental anguish and inner turmoil. The boy was bright, literate, creative, and he would be headed on the grand tour that the counselor had never experienced. What kind of inspiration might he find while strolling the halls of the Uffizi, gazing up to the Sistine ceiling, breathing in the Parisian night air?

Getting My Land Legs

photo by flickrzak.

I’ve been out to sea for too long, working a small fishing boat, surrounded by nothing but water and a crew of derelicts, scoundrels, swine. The Captain was not so nice of a guy, either, as he set out to rob us of our half of the profits after the catch was hauled out of the sea. His plan? To toss half the crew overboard. I complied by taking the ankles, he the shoulders, and my bargain was that I could live.

As I stepped off the boat and back on dry land, I was struck with stage fright. The spotlights of street lamps blinded me, along with the attentive stares of passers-by along the sidewalks, looking at me as though they knew I had drowned my shipmates, and that each of them had been one of their loved ones. Which they probably were.

I stumbled through shrubbery and down shady lanes of elm trees. Women were everywhere, of all shapes, sizes, and colors; I was a kid in a candy store but no money with which to buy a gumball. I could beg, bribe . . . or steal. The sea washed me of my ability to commit crimes, but did not cleanse me of my proclivity for sin.

Come now, no need to stumble down damp alleys lined with stinking dumpsters, when pretty summer lanes stretch from here to the cornfields. I’d rather use this stick in my hand to drag across white picket fences than to poke dead rats. Look at those freshly trimmed hedges, ivy covered brick homes, and white mailboxes with the red flag lifted up. A little brown dog lies unleashed in the lawn, heavy lidded eyes, panting in the sun.

Something has to happen, right? I can’t just wander around town all day without a care in the world. There’s something I must care about, someplace I belong, or somebody I’m running from. Who am I going to see? Where’s my wife, my kids, my dog? Which neighbor double crossed me, and where is my mother buried? Each time it takes a little longer to regain my land legs.