Distances

Distances

I wave hello to my neighbor in his hut…hello neighbor. It’s quiet out

here on the peninsula. Hardly see a soul. Be still, retreat, isolate down

to the fraught night. The rich have fled to their homes in the country.

And when I drive, the roads are nearly empty. Hardly a plane goes by.

Black spots in the cityscape where industry lights used to be. I drive

to the south end across the river. Everything seems grey, blue-grey.

And out there, a barely discernible island. Wave to the woman high

on the list. Catch the scent of ocean. An empty road, empty baseball

field, springtime blossom. The ones who live are the ones who move.

You forget, and that’s your blessing. The low tide slides out, and shore

rocks glisten. Waves talk in the language of hiss. You forget who

you are in the big reveal. Look me in the eye, gull, show me your bliss.

Twice now I’ve driven down First Avenue and seen the same train

coming north, same triple headlights, same brakeman swinging

from the last car to hunt down stragglers looking to ride free.

There’s no wind to speak of, so these kids will never launch their kite.

The air and the water tremble with a digital glitch. It’s a simulation

walking from here to there. It’s a triangle that looks a lot like a square.

It’s a rendition of street names that code to the past. It’s a gym

basement with weights and gloves made by Everlast. Try it again,

try every sickening step, every school, all the ten thousand versions.

An angel whispered into my ear. Wave yourself on. Wave to the smoke-

borne souls. Wave to the ghost in the mirror, on the deck of the boat.

Wave to the man in Muslim robes. Wave to the one you are up ahead.

Wave at the fly that lands in your beer. Wave it away. Wave like you

mean it. Like it matters. And don’t hold your breath. Wave in

arriving stars, the dark, your fear. An angel whispered into my ear.

Again, it came on ships. Hands and faces pressed to portholes.

No land will take them. Dead overboard and dead in the hold.

Go away, go away…music and voices coming over the water.

And then it arrives. How did you get in here? The supervillain turns

into smoke and slides through keyholes, through open windows,

through half-cracked doors and the speaker holes in your phone.

Nobody move. No one leaves the city. You arrived mid-March or

earlier, lying low and hiding. How much Bonanza have we binge-

watched? I really can’t drink like that anymore. What a blackout.

You see there’s a wire that runs through my eye and that fake banana-

flavored medicine that didn’t work, that time on Benvenue I melted

windows with fever touch (I still have hearing loss from that one).

Numbers rising. Stay put. Even in your head. Drink hot liquids. Focus

on the ceiling crack. See the split, golden light pouring through?

Don’t you want it? Don’t you want to pick at the plaster and let it in?

Strange night broadcast. Who’s in charge of the station? Anyone?

Voices. We are voices in the void. I bet ten thousand quatloos

they can’t be trained. Change the channel! I’ve seen this one already.

Watched After Hours, World’s End, Snatch, comedy routines, Russian

Doll, Philadelphia Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, Apocalypse Now,

Sherlock Holmes, Sunset Boulevard, 8½, 400 Blows, Pedro Paramo.

I’ve got the theater all to myself. I can watch all night. I can drive down

Fifth Avenue at seventy five. I can stand on the pier block here,

seagulls clustering, bell buoys ringing, the ship out there still circling.

Hazy night. Is this illegal? I tell you this guy has the good stuff. Dogs

barking in back yards. Let’s go. Why even try? He’s got a sponge mat

outside his door soaked in bleach. He calls it the sole disinfection area.

Hit him with the raygun! Does he check out? Yeah, he seems okay.

Hot red paper lanterns. Rainwater in pools on the black cement.

Is that all there is? Cause if that’s all there is. Then try the pangolin.

A truck waiting. Sometimes I’m just suddenly somewhere else.

Tent flap back, still under the moon. Silver plain, middle of nowhere.

Pack it all up. We’ll head that way. Light in the haze, blue, blue-grey.

A man appears. What, hey, where are you coming from? Blaine,

I was in Blaine. You came all this way on foot? On my old reliables!

You’re on this road alone? How do you think I made it this far?

And back that way, where you come from? Rough, he said. They have

the sickness there. And beyond that? The same. It’s all the same.

And where you come from? he asked. I said, there, too, the same.

Everything seems grey, blue-grey. Sad professor in the alleyway.

Sad professor at the door of the cabaret, waiting for the blue angel.

Sad professor with papers on Melville, Aquinas, and de Tocqueville.

A lightbulb, an egg, an inspiration. Wake up! Wake up! Change

the channel. Isolation chamber, altered state, magician in a box

making a miraculous bus escape on a one-lane mountain road.

Everything is grey, blue-grey. Triple headlights coming, yard bull

jumping at the slow turn, Doyle looking down from a pullman car,

Kinglsey in the mist. We are in new relations with the unseen.

Quiet dark night, I am sitting in the dim-lit kitchen, back door open,

no sound from the world but gentle rain, gate locked. Is that the ocean

or an explosion? White fire of a star magnolia in the grey, blue-grey.

Our dreams keep us alive. The spirit of Yaa may just grant your wish.

The transient ringing tinnitus. The distressed crying bird. The Imaginos.

The kingdom of mist, fly buzzing in a room, ship horn in the distance.

See the festive lights above the cliffs? Hear the music? Come. Come

to our electric circus. What have you got to lose?  Go into the belly

of the beast. Retreat. Smoke. Study McKenna on language. Listen.

From the back porch I stretch these arms across the liquid sky.

Language talks. Falling stars pop on your skin. You’re an angel

on the head of a pin. Hear what I’m saying, says the informing voice.

Imagine someone behind everything you see saying light, saying cloud

shaped like a whale, saying thin poplar branches, rooftop, sleeping dog,

Matthew’s Beach, and the train coming ‘round the north end of the lake.

While you’re at it, imagine a voice like your own voice saying

everything you remember, saying what you read in a voice rising

from the printed page, asking, is this the face before you were born?

Do you like it here at the center of your own disorder? I’m restless.

Always been restless. I drive and drive and get nowhere, every day.

I sit in one room. I sit in another. Once, I made myself presentable.

I wash my face. I make food. I look out a window. Time is very slow.

Winter extends itself. I lift weights, think and read. Spring is under

glass. And if you read much further, you become part of the tale.

And that sound? Caveat lector. Hear it? That sound inside your head?

That tone? I think you can touch it. Lapiz in hand, the wave, because

I’ve always heard that being a little beat-up is a normal way of life.

I keep thinking something wonderful is about to happen. I hear

“And She Was,” a ghost-goddess in the illness air. Like stepping out

of the shower, cool morning, steam coiling, blooming, we are mist.

Looking inward on a swampy day, the first self, the flower of Abaddon,

something moving just below the surface of the skin. I try to push it out

through the black hole where it got in, its tail slithering down my arm.

Heat. Heat and hot drinks. Keep moving. Kill it. Keep moving. Keep

temperature up. Kill it with heat. Fly into the sun. Ahhhh. Settle down.

Let it pass. Stay open inside terror. We each have our own observer.

Eat an edible. Continue “Theory and Practice of Rivers.” Sleep when

needed. Watch documentaries on New York. Speak as little as possible.

Say goodbye to Max Von Sydow. Mind-read an old stack of journals. 

Imagine you are the artisan. Is the world ready for the new work?

Wish well to children who want their stories spoon-fed. Enjoy

your mystery. Read. Thoughts settling like dust in an empty room.

Stare at the wall in a fever dream rolling with all its hidden things.

Keep your head to the south. Spot the roman à clef like this,

a where’s waldo of prestidigitation. Follow random electronic leads.

Mystery theater, flea play, boy under water. The signal hiccups come,

look the other way. So dependent on air. Sit through the windstorm.

Sit through the rain, the gentle rain. Sleepless night. Walls of flame.

When the drugs wear off, feel the poison smoke, the sleeping body

near, lives lived and lost, ripples on the surface. Spirit is bombarded

by thinking: one who constructs the maze and then is lost within it.

Slide into the deep rhythm. Come up for air. Press through the door.

Smell the beach fires. A man walks the beachside park. I’ve never

seen him before. When he passes, grass blackens and flowers curl.

The tanker circles the harbor but never lands. Crows move on.

Many of our old ones are gone. The gull says, come on, come on.

A ringing in the ears. Disequilibrium. Days that feel like a dream.

This is raw data from the epicenter. Day zero. Wave zero. Who dares

appear at the masquerade dressed like that? Count backwards

from one hundred. Tides rising higher. The cure is a message in code.

Women dressed as death pass by, and as their fingers brush my chest

I feel a rise. Knock or none I hear knocking, music from another room

when there is no other room. Man in boat offers fish to the moon bear.

I am walking through walls, yards, glittering streets and dead ends,

through squatter camps to the steps down to the alleyway and out

through the grey, through spitting rain, the spray of caustic waves.

I bushwhacked my way into The Lost Son, then on into The Brothers.

I chiseled away at The Bright Angel. The White Field was born in

a flash. Put them here, lash them together like a raft to float away on.

Hike up over Duwamish Head, then down to the sound to the mouth

of the river. Is somebody following me? Shake it off. Seems like another

normal day. Can’t tell if those are gulls or buzzards circling up above.

The dead walk in our shadows, and then they walk up ahead. Here come

the fierce invalids. It’s in the air, so there’s nothing you can do about it.

Make no mistake. Post-war asbestos houses shimmer on the sunset hill.

Lobster metaphysics, a grain of sand, the center of a nesting doll, a black

hole, heads or tails, quantity null, void, void, nothing, never was yet still,

then what good are words like “future” or “past” in this constant instant?

I am walking through an open desert, a coastline field, a trail into a red

canyon, and down through the sun-blasted, searing, keening, canyon

silence where everything old is new, everywhere, and then the sea again.

The mother falls sick, and the sickness enters the land, enters us all.

Pray, pray for the mother, arrive with your dreams like the cavalry,

drivers refusing to enter the city, barricades, patrols, searchlights, pray.

Keep the fire going, throw everything we have in the pot, cook it up.

Count backwards from one hundred. Who parked that hearse out front?

Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, this way through mystery air.

People and places lose their charm, the clouds float so low you can

almost touch them. Touching a person is like touching a cloud. Listen

to the shift-creak of the house around you. Every room is empty space.

Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four, feels like we’ve been here before.

Bass-beat of the luxury liner, glimpse of shadowless things on deck.

Ninety-three, ninety-two, cellars deep enough to get us through.

The master investigator spots the connections. Everything is a clue.

Scrutiny reveals parts of a larger case. Victorian domes o’erlooking

the sea. What do the clouds say? We’ve always known everything.

Artist Statement

I was sitting at the kitchen counter, the back door open, and a light rain falling. Like a lot of people, I was wondering, “What’s happening? Where is everybody?” Well, I kind of knew where everybody was, but when you can’t see them, the mind plays tricks on you. Poetry is a place for tricks. And that’s where the title comes from.

So, I was also out filming vacant city streets, empty playgrounds, and quiet neighborhoods with hardly an echo. Distances all around. The images of the video footage began talking to the poem, so the poem began to adjust itself, to make room. Then it wanted its own territory, distance, and things that would, could never show up in the film version without a different kind of animation.  I was creating without set-building or actor-hiring. (On the set of Kimi, where I worked as an extra, we kept a significant distance from each other.)

The reader may remember, the poem might remind the reader, of those moments you call and call and no answer comes. It’s like you’re wandering in a dream, but it’s not a dream. It’s the real world. Then you shake your head and say, no, it’s a poem. You watch the video and wonder, who is that on the motorcycle up ahead? I thought everyone was gone.

Douglas Cole has published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review, and Two Hawks Quarterly; as well anthologies such as Bully Anthology (Hopewell), Coming Off The Line (Main Street Rag Publishing), the Bindweed Anthology, and Work (Unleash Press).

He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician. He also edits the American writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia.

In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival and was twice selected as a finalist in the New York Metropolitan Screenwriting Contest. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, first prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize and seven times for Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, WA. His website is DouglasTCole.com.