Scriptor Press - The ElectroLounge

How does the soul persevere after the battle has been lost? Become a bunker-besieged
despot, ordering non-existent batters of troops to defend key city positions long ago bombed
into rubble?
Franny, I was wrong & I lost you. I was so damned wrong & you are so damned lost
to me. But here I am.
I’d found your mother, living in Macon, Georgia, & she told me you were dead but
of course I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t true even if it did happen. Your death was going to be
as temporary as I could make it.
Long ago, well maybe not that long ago, Gretta had warned me that pursuing you
would put my world in danger. Even Merry Muse grew sober when I confronted her about
you.
Rebecca believed in me, I knew that, & I had Soulard’s strong, if strange
endorsement.
I’d been dead, too, Franny, years ago. I could go back, die again, & find you &
retrieve you.
There’s always a tradeoff, of course. I didn’t know what it would be.
I know now.
I’ll never be real. I’ll live always on paper, embodied in words. As vulnerable to
annihilation as paper to fire, memories to evanescence.
But not just me. My whole world. Fixtion. All of us. No more. No less.
Soulard agreed to this, too. He agreed to it & it caused him to end the Cement Park
stories.
I still don’t know what it really means, all this. Soulard doesn’t either. But this was
how I got Franny back. He’ll write up the story, the poetry, but I’m testifying the truth here.
We’ll never live. We’ll never die.
I have Franny back. She was worth this.
There’s more to it, Americus. To reveal it, I have to “write up” the story, the poetry.
Today everything seems possible. Reflections, refractions, no malice. Much woodenness.
Much softness. Trees, more than ever. Without you, I travel faster but carom off the ground more
often.
Abstract patterns read as benign language, & ignored, & forgotten.
Constantly arriving, nearing home. Home a process. Home a verb.
A bearded soldier named Spike, smiling among his answers.
More reflections. More refractions. Faith a ground of facts set on fire. Faith the signals of
meaning & direction carved from smoke.
Spike & his cache of pamphlet ammunition just outside the rocknroll show. Spike
testifying on a winter’s night, near a craggy ground mound of black snow. Spike talking to my
head of pretty musical notes, my body danced into weary gentleness.
Spike, I’ll not be be joining you in your Bellows Falls, Mass. assemblage. Your faith that
Godd needs, & awaits, his shining people willing to undo their mail & their will.
No, Spike, I am occupied with the Eternal Note, with the desire of blankness for form &
color. The universe not defined as a petty battle between warring achetypes. The universe allowed
to be unknowably grand & complex & eternal & home to humanity without belonging to us.
Spike, brother, & your weathered smile, you pain, your traveling bag of answers. Our
moment locked together while friends awaited me, snickering, thinking I was haggling over the
price of check-25 or puffing nuggets.
7
The Cenacle / 54 / April 2005