Clear the heavens and give our eyes again to see...

I purposefully deny the more likely explanation.  Imagining instead that these animals have come to town with a traveling road show, temporarily housed in a most practical setting--the centrally located, always meant to be used, municipal tennis courts. 

Surely, whether a permanent home or a night's stay, this is not friendly to giraffes, and I don't pretend otherwise.  For whimsy's sake, however, let's overlook this feature of the story...or, even worse, take advantage of the bewitching juxtaposition made possible by this form of containment.

Forget the context, and bend in closer.

The photograph is taken through two sets of chain link fencing; crucial parts of the animals are hidden by the wire's crossbars.  One can see a crowd of onlookers across the court, faces framed by layers of countless patchwork boxes.  Faces looking.  Faces looking at giraffes, faces looking at children, faces looking somewhat dull.  Then, there's the picture taker, all alone on this side of a fence reaching even above the very tippy-top of the camera's view, looking intently upward at those giraffes. 

And, they look beautiful.  Seemingly made more elegant by the reaching metal structures hemming them in on every side and doing so in the dullest of angular ways.

The giraffes' necks parade upward; the swell of their posture can convincingly be described as proud.  Their patterned skin and directed ears look tight with the spring of internal life force.  I can almost see and hear the giraffes’ feet making strange clicking noises on the crusty court surface as they shift aimlessly in place.  I picture them moving across the court slowly, undulating about the boxed space as if nearly imperceptible tides had been left behind by the volley of balls from the morning’s match and could be transmitted through the giraffes' endlessly long legs--legs like antennae (or landslides) vulnerable to any terrestrial disturbance.  Why else would they move in this barren landscape?  Why else?

The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon...

This is a story of nothing nice. A story of human racing. 

The story,
Of the human,
Race.

(A to the the, to the unh, unh, unh.)

It’s a story of take you below.  Put you below.  Leave you below.

(Darling, speak low.)

Of ears that never stop ringing.

Of things you shouldn’t forget, but inevitably do.

(Of do diddie do dah, dang diddie doh.

Oh,

oh,

a 1, 2, 3, ohhhh…)

               (…sweet chariot. Bother me to carry me home.)

But this is someone else’s story, so you needn’t listen to it.

I’ll play the next song loud enough,
And, we'll swing, swing, swing it away.

Again, Sam.

Again!

"The city dweller rushes, the farmer moves steadily, the monk is solemn in the way he moves. Their objects are different." --J.H. van den Berg

There is a return that cannot seem to rest.   

Push, push on.   

Feet and hands treading, body surging, and the water moves with us.  Closing my eyes to each particular, smelling to find my way around.  Return now, my familiar unfamiliar.  It is new, and yet what I meant to say to you that night was: “This is what home feels like.”  The provisions are stored, and the screen door lets in enough wind, enough light, enough life.  You might have agreed with that.

Can we stop talking about this now?  

Perhaps.  

          But. 

   Then.  

Can you count the ways things are said aloud?  It's all in the listening.

And, breathing takes the form of in and out, 

a return that cannot rest.  

And we'll all fall down...

                                                Rickity splicket splat,

                              The moon spit out a bat.

                              Over the hill,

                              Under the mill,

                              Rickity splicket splat.

                                          

                                          Betimes we may,

                                          Betimes we might, 

                                          The bottle’s bold,

                                          And the nursemaid’s right.

                                              

                                                Fetter you once,

                                                Fetter you twice,

                                                Never let go,

                                                Or the boxbender’s price.

             Me daddy dug a three foot pit,

             Put in a spade and took out a fit.

             Round in the morn,

             Down in the horn,

             Me daddy dang a skim skam skit.

Now, as we wrestle our grim disease...

Look what I hold, behold, in my hands!  Wonderous.  Joy.  We’ve travelled up moist and darkened autoroads for this, this wonder that is man. 

It is slowly forming the coolest, sweetest drips.  Rivuleting down the creeks between my fingers.  A coolness I have never quite known.  When first I held her, my mouth rushed to taste and crunch and reel back from her.  My face turned quickly to my left to smile and beam in the direction of my laughing, buffling friends.  We are overwrought; we are joy. 

What is this that I hold here?  Summer’s never spoken like this.  Her cooling streams were threats, not treats.  She sheds a tear, losing her last bit of power.  

But, this, this power of ours.  Oh, what a wonder.  Let me never forget this.  Let me never become used to this.  Let me always throw my head around in simple glee at this.  Let me always ask, What, what is this?

But, already, all ready, I notice my smile’s faint smugness.  I look back at our automobile, and I know I will forget this too.  

Perhaps more than anything, Summer cries for this.  Cries for us.

In her tears, I hear faint askings:  When is the last time you stopped short?  Fallen on your face at the turn between your breaths?  For that too is a wonder.  I beseech you:  remember this.  Each step is a laying down of meaning.  How will you shape it?  Or, be you a pile of mere flesh? 

But, I make retort:  Perhaps this, this possibility, marks the greatest wonder of all:  We, the creatures who make routine out of everything once wonderful. 

Yes or no.  Water or tears.  Wonder wears wearied paths between your fingers and mine.

Don't leave you be...

 

 

Your chair next to mine next to hers next to his 

next to yours next to mine.   

We go round.  We stay still. 

There you be.  You look by and past. 

  

I see it in your back though.  Taught, well-hemmed, fair secure against this storm of our old age.  Can see it still when you turn, revolving armor, armadillo, armada.   

Your arms fly about and bother with me now.

I will hear what I want to hear, so please leave me be.  
I'm worrying myself with the nothingness before I was.  I've had it turned the other way for so long.  Friendly with my past, missing it, jelly-teared about it, shrine making.  And, this holy disregard for the every next year...months, weeks, soon be.

   

This cannot be the place for my dignified years. 

I cannot have planted for this. 

We have wronged me, myself, mine chair.  Next to yours next to hers next to his.  Wrong ways around.  This whole time.  

My lips dry and caked.  

It’s no matter.  Your arms bring me cloths to wet and quiet them. 

Armature of my old age. Mater Matuta Maturus.

I must worry about my beginnings now.  So, let me be.

But, you.  Burn out the stays that keep you always forward turned.  Shed jellied tears for the nothing from which you came. 

 

There were two halves of nothing.  This whole time.

Salty comfort for your breaths.
 

Time waits for he who listens...

Having flopped away from his family in bits and bops, our hero, at age five, wandered alone on the beach.

He found a half living fish and its punctured eyeball.

He poured sand on top of it to calm it down.  It worked.

He rushed to the sea's edge and felt a good long moment of accomplishment as it ran away.

He was spared a dashed ego when he turned around to follow a rotten wind's trail and the calls of a pile of men.

Yes, he saw a pile of men.

This was something.

He walked in weaving loops toward them...quickly, but also hesitantly...as a child can do without looking anything other than appropriately composed.

These men did indeed invite fear and interest.

So, he went near.  And, stopped.

What are they about?, he wondered in one form of thought or another.

They play with me.  They tell me something.

It seems nice to be large like that.  But, that one looks dead.  This one like the eye popped fish.  Two pretend.  Adults pretend too.  I know that. 

What do they tell me?

They ask after me.  They tell me one thing and another.  They are nice and they are not nice.  I know that too.  I would like to cover them in sand.  Like the fish.  Because they don't know what to do with themselves either, and they look cold and in need of a blanket.  Half dead.

He, our hero, decides he doesn't want to be a man.  Not an eye punctured, cold pretending, blanket-or-dead man at least.  So he turns around, and begins to work out how he can become three again.  It's not his time.