Across the Fields

posted Oct 27, 2009

One

Someone said: the dead have something to say
and they are saying it. So we draw
some lots and the loser—or the winner,
depending on how you look at this sort of thing—
is provided with a map of the old cemetery
and a speech and a pack of smokes
and a pat on the back. He goes off and
when he comes back he won’t tell us about anything
that he might have heard. He is eyed
suspiciously thereafter as someone who is probably
dead himself in some way. Have you ever seen someone
with such empty eyes? What an oddity
he has turned out to be, after all.
What a fool.
Hah!

Two

He would not stay in the ground.
At dinnertime,
there he was, waiting at the table,
looking down at his empty plate,
knife and fork in hand, trying
to make himself inconspicuous. Well,
he wasn’t inconspicuous and we had to drag him
out by the shoulders and put him
back down in the dirt again.
He was stubborn, that way.
You had to allow him the ancient virtue
of pig-headedness, such as it is.
He tried to lose himself in crowds
but the pallor of his face
gave him away every time.
As did his old-fashioned clothes
and his excessive politeness.
Nobody living bows
to complete strangers anymore!

Three

And here he comes again,
tramping across the fields,
carrying a change of clothes
in an iron bucket. The bucket knocks
like a bell against his leg. His eyes
are big and his face is big and
the ends of coat trail over the mud.
He offers us cigarettes and chocolate
even though he has none left to give.
He tells us he was once a sailor.
He winks and describes his many adventures
in many ports of call: he knew the Siren of Havana
who in certain moments of passion
spoke in terza rima about a sad apocalypse
that everyone has thankfully forgotten.
And the Mendicant of Malabar who had a weakness for
candied fruit and who thus agreed
to fulfill every dream. And the Butcher of Naples
and the Serpent of Gotham
and the Blind Girl of Amsterdam
and the Laughing Patriarch in the Sun:
good friends, every one, he says.
Good friends, all.
He asks for something to eat and somewhere to sleep.
We give him a bowl of old apples and carry him to the loft in the barn
as he curses, like an old, barking dog,
at an indifferent canopy of stars.
During the night, demons burn the barn down.
In the morning: he is gone, his clothes are gone,
all is gone, all is burned away, everything is gone,
but for the iron bucket, still here, tipped on its side
in front of the stable, an afterthought.
I promise: someone like him—
someone who was a big sailor once, now dead by fire—
will make you wonder
about what the next messenger might have to say.

Four

The skeleton sits on a bench,
head in his hands, elbows on his knees,
poppies falling from his eyes. He rides
the elevated train through the city at night,
standing beside the driver, watching billboards
fly past. Dressed in a nightshirt, top hat, and spectacles
stolen from a rooftop clothesline, he lingers
at a table of a sidewalk café, talking at streetlamps.
Hoping to create a scene he strides into an expensive restaurant where crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling, where waiters hurry, and he lifts plates from table, lifts lids off tureens,
lifts glasses in the air, using the tablecloth as a napkin
he tries to stuff himself with roast pork, éclairs and apple tarts
making a show of himself he pours other people’s champagne
through his jaws until he is shooed away and chased out through the spinning glass doors.
At the cinema he sits in the balcony with a sparkler burning in each hand.
In an alley he is knocked to the ground by hooligans
who kick him and kick him. His cries are met by the old sound of windows sliding shut. Climbing a tree in the cemetery, he listens to the angels whirring overhead. Stairs lead into the night sky and he climbs them. A ladder leads into the night sky and he climbs it, higher. A rope leads into the night sky and he climbs it,
even higher. With the city below him he drives a trolley car through the clouds, ringing its bells, laughing the laugh of someone who has forgotten how to cower, how to beg, how to lie, how to fear.

Craig Awmiller lives in Los Angeles. He has been published in The Quarterly and online in elimae, Oranges and Sardines, and Word Riot.

We published Awmiller’s poem “Apprenticeship” in Issue 35.