Issue #20 (2011) PDF - myweb - Long Island University

FIELD RECORDINGS
No pronunciation of native names could stop bulldozers. There was no sense that anyone was doing
any wrong, just that changing was wearing her make up and eating less and less. Now as guitars from
Agadez chime in on daytime sunshine over tenement trees, I‘m looking through the crosshatched
grid of fire escape and box fan, red and white and colorless autumn light. A certain balance in
electric riffs delivered from the North African desert flying like sand in kinetic onslaught. Someone
threw me into the bushes outside the school because because. A field turning from green to red dirt,
then onwards to steel skeletons and conveyor belt insomnia. Then onwards, a reason to lash out, a
rash rising on memories. At night after homework I watched tornadoes on TV, convinced myself
that they would come unglued from that glass and spiral away with the house. Loose-leaf paper.
Write what you know. What you don‘t know too. A staircase zigzagging down from a highway.
Cornfields wove snakes into their folds and we ran through sometimes until there were none. Until
an aisle: hand soap, cheerios, cold milk perspiring in fluorescence, sponges, bleach, dog food, chips,
soda. The air tasted the same, or did it. Because he knew where to get them and I didn‘t, he put
cigarettes in the jacket that was hanging in my locker. On the old stone bridge over the swamp I
coughed and woke up the geese. The dog named Kevin snapped one of their necks with his jaws.
Virginia summer walked us and the grass towards dumpsters and what there was or wasn‘t to be
found, though we could always find it at home. If you had a car, you had a car. You‘ve probably
wrecked a car. It was enough to drive home and lie to the mechanics later. He had blood on his
dress shirt, so I lied to the cop and said we were going to the hospital, please let us go. The aisles
rattled and the lights went out, I got a tornado for my birthday. Big wanting was an elixir for not
knowing a thing about wanting, she took me to the barn, I slept in her bed. Shopping cart theft,
always a shopping cart in every clearing in the woods. Chains of airplanes in Brooklyn look like
lightning bugs in daytime clouds, which move in opposite directions, clouds, planes, bugs. The
Tuareg people staged an uprising in the year 2008, according to the notes on the CD case. This next
song is called Tenere Etran. The men cover their faces and ride horses and sing about independence
while the women dance and sing along from the crowd so loudly that the microphones pick them
up, them whose voices crash louder than the cymbals. In 2004 Aaron went to prison for three years,
the FBI had gotten involved. The night before he left, we smoked a joint on a dock over James
River rapids. In January I returned to the dock, wrote a poem and threw it in the water at 2 a.m. As
the parking lots began to crack, all my friends moved into old buildings by the university. I went
where there were no billboards. Aisles of radio hits, every look on every face an apology, a word
shattering into many or a word never uttered. A drop of coffee on my shirt, a yawn. Shopping or
shoplifting, two words. A house that was never finished on a hill by the river, by the highway
running through the sleep-breaths in the one room in the one house in the whole neighborhood
where someone lived. Prices of homes went down slowly. Our feet smelled like gasoline. At the top
of the hill next to the Burger King, you could see the Federal Reserve building ten miles away. Its
basement dives deep into the earth‘s rocks, maybe there are billions in there, maybe I can have five
dollars to buy enough gas to get back to the farm. The first half of the album is acoustic, the guitars
are not in standard tuning, a tuning I don‘t recognize, there is clapping, no drums. Between tracks, a
camel groans and someone shouts. Field recordings. Despite sub-prime everything, it is happening
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