Authors: Kristin Naca
Bird Eating Bird (4 page)
The groove in the blue couch ticks with the reverberations of her hips.
The points in the ceiling plaster wait, patient as bear traps.
Outside, she can hear herself coming. The glassy kernels of sand, each step, grovel up her foot.
In the living room, heat plumes from the radiator’s brass ribs.
While she lies there, the ceiling clicks off the minutes, loosening its springs.
She turns the spoon-face through the coffee, and the metal post heats through, heating her hand.
Beneath the ceiling fangs. Beneath the roof. Beneath the clay shingles bearing down, red and heavy as bricks.
The spoon rings the porcelain like heat ringing the radiator’s gut.
She tries to turn it off, but the knob won’t budge, the joint sparkled with a mossy-blue patina.
Outside, a shooting star etches a blue groove into the tune of the sky.
The gasses through the heating valves clanging through the traps.
Once, she waited for a set of hips to heat the cushions, next to hers. Now, she smolders there. Now, swells.
On the clock-face, one hand laps around the dial while the other quivers still.
A cool, white pill on the counter for when her heart bells.
Beneath the blue blue sky. Beneath the vapor hoisting itself up into clouds, and spilling over, dousing the landscape like a smoothing detergent. Beneath the cool, diluted heavens beneath the stars. Beneath the random course of a satellite eeking photos out of light, shearing the distance that’s a patch of skin.
We talk on the phone.
My foot in a cast in Heather Green’s window.
A single mole climbs the eye of the big toenail.
A toenail that is porous and slick as cornea.
At night while I sleep, the mole slowly creeps
away from me, from the big toe’s lunula.
This morning, the sky is wide and translucent.
It is as blue as porcelain as a bathroom sink.
We talk on the phone. Heather Green has packed her things,
dragged them to Adam’s and left me this window.
Heather Green: her name is a cortex of modification,
a plural green followed by a veritable one.
When she leaves, I miss her intensity.
So, I sit with my foot in a cast in her window and smoke.
The window is a movie screen I compose before me.
In the proximal foreground, yes, the windowsill, the smoke.
Toes poke out of a cast set on the sill tipsy as a gift-shop Devil’s Ivy.
Behind the cast sits two trees, a street, parked cars,
a grade-school building made of brick and windowpanes.
One of the trees accumulates leaves
while the other loses them to an April frost.
We talk on the phone.
In an instant, the leaves have grown old
and their leaf veins pierce their own fragile skin,
tips of those veins now shriveled and thorny.
As he fades the old man watches his fingernails
grow backwards into his hands.
When he scratches he closes his eyes.
The horror of his horns topples the buck.
A bird bathes in dust to wash off the bugs.
We talk on the phone.
The green leaves against the sky were liquid yesterday.
I said, Yesterday, they were a suspension but still liquid, staving off grief.
Today, the curds pulled back from the whey.
We talk on the phone and just like the film,
the leaves die right before my very own eyes.
A blonde is sent to investigate.
My toes curl when the Plains wind casts dust
through the rungs of the empty tree.
Wind, the likely murderess, her blue glances distressing every branch.
Whenever we talk I remember you sat in Heather Green’s window
the days before I could stagger from bed.
I went to crutches, one leg, and stuttered before you.
The hammer of a metronome shuddering at one end.
Nights, you cast my leg in plastic bags and used a bowl to bathe me.
I watched light peal from the porcelain.
Dust spangled my reflection you bent with a fist
you made wringing the soap from the foamy washcloth.
Before there was a need for me to talk, for me to even ask,
there was the smoking afterwards of your hands.
There was a wind, there was dust,
and there was the window you had already shut.
There was sweat you drowned in the milky tub.
There was hunger, eggshells hulled-out on the sill.
I ate when you said I was hungry.
I drank because you held a glass up to my lips.
I slept because you lay down beside me.
I dreamt because you were gorgeous and I was dreamy, you said.
I cried because there was ache, and because of you
on the phone there is so much more of the gorgeous ache.
In the mornings, you dressed and redressed, knotting
the silky curtains in the windows when you finished.
When we kissed, brick-ends of the tenement started to echo.
O, we talk on the phone!
Outside a chainsaw’s teeth devour the skin
of the faded tree, the wheels of its gut, rings of moonlight.
The reappearance of Heather Green is imminent.
On the phone, she talks about orange-blossom-flavored
tarts she leaves cooling in Adam’s window.
From yolk an iodine-soaked appendage is scheduled
to be birthed from the silky insides of my cast.
Quiet as an egg we end without talking.
A new leg to grow back where the cast finally quits
and our good friends, the toes, cork off the ends.
I remember well the well where I drew water.
—
Loretta Lynn
1.
Everybody lives in a house. The same house but with different trees. Each house finishes at the roof, with a chimney, and antenna for feeding pictures into the TV. Inside is a living room with a wooden floor, or maybe some carpet. And outside, grass sits in the yard thick as carpet. Every house has two or more beds, depending on how many children, or how many relatives live there, how big the beds are. There’s also a kitchen, a bathroom, and a place beside the grass to park the car.
A house has houses all around it. You can drive on a street between the houses until you reach the highway, or into the next town Arlington, Virginia, where houses are dotted between Miller’s Music Spot and Whitey’s Broasted Chicken Restaurant. In Arlington people sit on their steps outside of their houses, or on folding chairs along their small grassy carpets. And I say, “Look at the people in those houses,” and my father says, “Those aren’t houses, Sweetie. They’re shacks.”
2.
House is a five-letter word. It is pronounced /aus/, /aüs/, or /aüz/.
Looking at these phonetic spellings, you’d probably say,
But wait! What have you done with my ‘h’? Where has that chimneystack, cleft of a letter gone to?
And,
Nowhere,
I say.
Nowhere,
trying to comfort you.
‘h’ is breathed, not said. A change of direction. A thread of air pulled up your windpipe, expulsion from the gut and lungs. Oh! Oh ‘h’!
I say,
you make health out of wealth, house of a louse, a home of Rome—just conceiving it. The heart and the earth—by the way the wind blows.
3.
I say the word
house
and a beautiful image stirs in your head. Like this,
House.
And then
poof!
The beautiful image stirring in your head. Yes, how beautiful it is with its chimney and windows and front door lowing. How wonderful to house such a beautiful house in your head. How wonderful and immaterial to be a sketch in a bubble that flutters inside you!
4.
Once the word house sentenced, “There was a brick house on Macon Avenue.” And whenever those words sentenced together, sounds soaked like a bruise, black and blue between them. And though sounds dousing one another wasn’t anything new, nor injured no word in particular, still words—as they were known to do—blamed this word and that for their ruin.
Avenue: “Macon, your ‘n’ is leaving ink clouds, my ‘A’ dyed blue.”
Macon: “Get over it, Avenue. Even capitalized you’re common.”
The two words nubbed on, ‘n’ bleeding across the dignified Avenue, while house stood silent—never mind brick leeching the space between them with color. When one day, Macon pitted them against each other.
Macon: “House, have you noticed your stomach growing wider? The round sounds of house filling the mouth whenever you two are mentioned together.”
And house was confused. Or just uncommonly distraught when she faced up to brick to ask her:
House: “Brick. Do you notice I’m hardly myself? Just a mass of round sounds. An ‘ouse when I sit to one side of you.”
Brick: “House, don’t blow your stack. Your head’s in the clouds again.”
House, yet more confused and not as well-mannered as everyone
thinks—she’s often mistaken for home, her cousin, known as a charming host who throws great parties—chewed out words she’d later regret.
House: “
Brick house,
they say about us.
Brick house
. My ‘h’ always trampled by the static ‘k’ makes grinding from the mouth.”
But brash ‘k’ shot up before ‘bri-’ could stop her.
‘k’: “Look here, /-k’ouse/. Your ‘h’ is a foolish place-holder. For ‘k’ was all friction, and knew not of the ebbs in clausal frailty.
‘k’: “You know, house, this sentence can sentence without you.” As the other sounds begged ‘k’ not to, she finished it.
‘k’: “There was a brick on Macon Avenue.”
So house was gone, a drifter blowing sentence-to-sentence, ‘k’-job to ‘k’job—her specialization. From “a trick house for catching mice and small pests,” to the first drafts of “Bleak House” before the typesetting, to odd jobs at “the smoke house,” “the break house,” “the steak house one must never return to…”
Then house, broken, wandered to other sentence, sound-combinations. “We should go to your house,” depressed ‘h’ to a gurgle, next to the rasping and passive-aggressive ‘r,’ who claimed her pal’s,’ “Does the work of you, house, and still more.” In “The green house on the left,” green was full of advice at the bar.
Green: “You know house, don’t complain about ‘n.’ You need thicker
skin. Take ‘g,’ for example. A green girl—she wouldn’t complain.”
Then a series of ‘b’-jobs, and ‘p’-jobs, and ‘s’-work that bowled the ‘h’ over. While house slept quietly, ‘z’ rang in her head.
And for the rest of her days misfortune followed her, sentence, language, country, continent. When house traipsed Europe:
Liaison, liaison, mon amis
, the French words said. In Spanish, ‘h’ suffered mistaken identity.
¿‘Hache’ o ‘ge’ o ‘equis’ o ‘jota,’ ¿cuál es su nombre, ‘h’?
The Spanish words said.
So house found a quiet spot in the country, just to the right of the silent period. House. And spent her days sounding her name to herself. And wondering if she’d ever be heard from again, started her autobiography.
“Once, there was a house with no ‘h.’”
5.
Suppose there is a bubble that flutters inside you. Or suppose it builds in the plastic air. Or the plastic that is liquid and luminous yet air. Or suppose in reverse the air plastic. And in its sloshing to-and-fro forms teacups of air unsettling its layers. In the teacups is air air not plastic. And teacups are cool and porcelain as anything that’s cool and porcelain. And suppose bubble—though never a bubble before—porcelain and cool as anything once thrown from a wheel, a fired thing, a red thing before it sits and cools on a rack thing, formed of the sloshing that makes bubbles in the plastic air. And bubble air inside of it, an echo of liquid spun into its well. And the echo of heat as liquid brews in the smile that’s the bottom of the well.
6.
Houses come in two sizes—big and bigger. Since the rich always get richer, there will always be a need for bigger, more gigantic houses. Houses big enough for all the dough they make.
It is not empirically possible to prove the existence of the rich. (So say studies funded by the rich.) Nor possible to prove the existence of the poor. (Cite similar studies.)
7.
There are purple houses in America that make a stink with their neighborhood associations. There are enormous red houses we call ‘barns’ that stand in the country, where farmers stack their feed, and tools, and sometimes chickens—but for nostalgia—no one mentions them. There are houses in the warmer states put together of hay bails and dirt and cement-like fixatives and painted the color of the land and no one, not even the shifty fox, complains. There are houses made of wood or painted to resemble wood in the deep forests. And just last summer when neighbors painted their house ‘Cape Cod Grey,’ and the rest of us snickered,
But this is not Cape Cod
, and beside the too-doo a gaggle of book-worms made over the spelling of
Grey
on a paint can, not-one, single, solitary complaint. But in America when there is a purple house, it is sure to make a stink with the neighborhood association. And as sure as it will be a stink, it will also surely become news in the town newspaper whose name has wedded and is wistful for the once, great rivalry of Sun, Star, Gazette, and Intelligencers hurrying to report of the comings and goings of the town. And the paper will re-conceptualize the engagement for a wider audience, naming it, ‘a nasty skirmish,’ and then angle it, ‘stubborn, purple home-owner’ vs. ‘determined, neighborhood association.’ And the local-color piece will play in the Metro section of the Sunday paper people reach for as if reaching for their toast. And still then, it will not be mentioned how street lamps gauze the town over in purple, when the cool, dimming light of August approaches—houses, and sidewalks, the laundry mat windows, and laundry chiming in the windows of the washing machines, and suds purpling. And no one hurries to write this, nor bangs door to door for someone else to witness the phenomena. Nor mentions, however, still, in the dimming light of August, purple cascades even from pens; so somehow—even without volition—purple poems are written, telling of the world awash in plush, August light. And of the purple music box. And stars through the lens of the periscope. And lovers soothing
against each other in the purple heat of August, leaving swatches of color on the sheets beneath them. And that, this purple light is a healing force that showers the tired townspeople, the homeowners, and all of the members of the neighborhood association, the farmers and contractors, hay-bailers and seed-handlers, newspaper reporters, and copy editors, managing editors, and publishers, layout operators, and laundry machinists, poets, and all of the readers who live in the town inside of that poem.
