Fables: Bruce Bond
Fable 1
There will be days every journey is a journey to a home we lost for good, and so the man in the last pew fingers the map in the back of scripture, or a blind hand reads the face of a stranger and sees the features of a father no hand has seen. There will be days every room becomes that boat afloat a city whose winds took the power out. Stars will be sharper then. The knives of paradise will glisten in the meat of constellations. Hunger will be a feature of the sky. We were born to belong, to withhold what we must to let the conversation trickle down the mountain of all we cannot say. Our affinities depend on it. Especially now. As the storefronts close their eyes for good, and people vanish. One promise fails. Another comes along. I too was no one once. And when my mother left the room, I crawled through a hole in air. I was born again into the world where everything was talking, every block and candle, every kettle with its tiny scream. Every little miracle desperate to be heard.
Fable 6
The cry in the instrumental break will one day take the breath from our words and let the winds sweep them to the wings. The dancers on the dance floor look more and more beautiful and desperate, now that we have broken out the lead guitar. Ever seen the hallelujah of glass, when the bottle in your crosshairs shatters. The wordless measure can be that good. It can knock on your door after a long journey, and you want to take care of it. You treat it as your own. You want to howl some sweet nothing, and the cry returns. The river surface rumors of some loss so quietly enormous, it could gather water for miles and none would know. You find yourself so happy you weep. And as the music fades, the weeping gets a bit more serious. As the happiness was just moments ago.
Fable 8
The heroin that runs the street, unseen, took a neighbor, a stranger, from an apartment across the river, and friends held vigil behind the theater whose voices haunt the garden. I know nothing of the matter, but a flower-eater told me, the Christ-hearts of solitaires who share, who take each other in their sleepy arms, understand those who suffer. Sure, the skirts of petals, their drunken gestures in the sun, the bulb that weeps sap down the long, curved blade, they figure in the shameless propaganda that whispers, We move now to a place that no one leaves, no one enters. Yes, the news on the phone makes us all a little nervous But then the junkie whose lonely music you love sings, Look out of any window, and you look out at the homes of neighbors, and the yard sign for the candidate who lost, and sure, it hurts, the vague menace of that, but tonight the body needs to rattle the heart from its stupor. It needs the kind of song that drifts from yard to yard. like the smell of burning leaves. It needs to forgive. Tonight, you walk the cold, small hour that numbs your troubled joints, and you say to each dark home, goodnight. You bundle it in darkness, far from harm.
Fable 11
The wall spoke ever so kindly of the wind, but in the end they parted. So says the wall with its quarantine of hooks and portraits, its view of the wind. Once I locked a wind behind a wall and never lived to forget. I could not sleep for weeks, and the force grew stronger. The walls collapsed. They crumpled into cinder blocks and let the machinery of waves roll over. Plumes of smoke pierced the ocean floor, lifting banners no darker than the sea. I might have died. I am not sure. But slowly I muscled out of the shallows. I collapsed against the sand at my back, my body a door across the face of earth. Thank you, earth, I whispered. I wheezed, as doors do on their hinges. Or was that wind that breathed. Was it the scent of salt I never knew I needed. Was it me, more or less, who blessed the waters of the open air.
I shined the bloodred searchlight of a laser down my ear in hopes the beam would mend the wound. I let it through the chamber, conch, and bone, closed doors of witnesses in custody or shock, to where the flesh that listens glows. It wept pure light beneath the starless vault of the skull, and as the tenderness subsided, it sighed out a final hiss. Then a silence. Smooth as rock. Polished by the waves. There must be other lesions, I know, but the mind goes just so far. And where it goes, the tissues that respond get more and more obscure. Atoms of the cortex, we know, draw us pictures of who they are, whom science reimagines. They are ghosts who stare at ghosts a quantum part of them does not believe in. For the new cosmology says nothing has mass. Mass is energy. Desert manikins bear witness. And the ghosts who glow on the sleepless shoreline of Japan. Thank heavens for the god particle that holds the broken bones of stars together. Thank the million tiny brains of matter with a measure of the chaos you find in dreams. Like the one where a calm face rises in a pool of water. And as you kneel, a scar comes into focus, floating through. Just below the eye, slow as emulsion in a developing pan. You know that face and cannot place it. You know the way hands know the space beneath your pillow. When it sinks, it blurs. It takes the red beam of the laser deeper into all the nights you refuse to remember. And you wake to a fine crackle of rain. You shrink to a candle in the cavernous dark.
Fable 16
The unknown caller calls so often, I am never home. Never the ghost in the face of a million phones, having lost the voice for one. I have talked so long, I lost mine. But then one day the invisible calls to tell me that I am miserable and pretty, and did I know, had I, survivor of a thousand bolted rooms, heard the story of the man with a radio in his tooth, how gold made him a hole in air. It made the news a constant whisper. Whatever law or levy broke, it broke again each hour and turned his breathing black. Can you blame me if I check my mouth, each night, for a listening device. It is in there. I can feel it. Beneath the grind. Dear Lord, dear unknown caller. Dear ache beneath the molar. Nameless and afraid.
Fable 17
Been decades since he left us, and still, when I hear him sing,Walk me out in the morning Dew, I hear the news. All the people in the city gone. All but two, a love song. Thank heaven the words unravel into solos. Every story of the end should be so fortunate. So touched. To rise alive inside a Fender Twin with a cavernous decay, a fat humbucker with the clarity of wood. You hear the tree in there, where no one lives, where goliaths of the forest fall and fall. You hear the wild heap shadow over shadow. And it is here, unburdened by the knowledge of how it all turns out, here in the call and response between the angels and the fathomless, that one man ends. Up in a story. In time, the erasure of that story, and no less providential. Each live version of his lament an homage to the unforeseen. And for those who visit the graves of cities and men, a nod to the bone that is their cradle, the blood-worn eyes that narrow into smiles, chills, cold measures in the lyric where people disappear. You are looking for a ship. You, the music says to the beat-up instrument of the physical heart. As if the two might be company enough. You there with your head drawn back. Your body a bell on the open sea.
Fable 20
That was the month our newspapers caught fire as they scraped across the drive, and what we read was ashes, no matter the column, local, international, even the funnies that had hints of color where fire gave up or refused. So we deciphered every scrap we could. It had been that long. We missed the world that much. The power was out, cell phones down, our block in quarantine, and I thought about a friend who owes me money, a lot. His last words were, I am not holding out on you, it is coming, soon, and that was years ago. Surely, I would give it all away to have my friend back, though he lives across the ocean now. Come morning, he reads a different pile of ashes. He scours the soot each day for a letter here or there. I can see him turn to his infant daughter and smile. Look, it’s your initial, he says. Then, poof, a cloud of laughter turns to water, passing through their eyes.
Fable 21
The child in my phone tells me he was robbed. Phones these days. The louder the voice, the harder to hear. They are stealing the nation, he says. But all I hear is hello, hello, is anyone there. I have weathered this abuse so long, it has become a silence, beneath all things, the ice in a pool with the face of Narcissus. Pity the children of tycoons in movies of the fifties. Their homes are tedious and lavish, where all the murders are investigated, the tables long, their stifled conversations on the cutting floor. An ocean sobs in the bedrooms of America tonight. A larger sun goes down on a nation of cartoons. Diamonds flicker out in a pawn shop with one button at the till. Every afterimage of pendants in the window written across the brittle and cold. Once there was the boy who burned his fingers on a glass pipe. He felt pain. But he did not think of it as his. It could have been anyone’s. Aka, no one’s. When he called emergency, a woman asked, who is this talking. He froze thinking about glass. Then the flesh turned green, then black; a train moaned in the fog of the Baltic. The smell of hair powdered the room.
Fable 22
Once there was a tabloid that longed to be major network. It said the republic has gone to hell and a luxury vacation. Good news is. Blood is money. The quieter sadness. Like a funeral reception where no one knows the woman in tears. She turns into a pile of glass. I knew a man who chewed glass. He longed to be a major network. If he had your ear, he chewed the gravel on the road to a house where children are not welcome. But hey. The target eye suffers far too many arrows any given day. Attention is a dying resource. The soul selects whatever, and sometimes enough with all those choices. So I take a walk. I say, hi, to neighbors in the park. Some of whom watch the tabloids on TV. Then one whispers, do not trust the flowers of the cameras. They will eat your every move.
Fable 23
When I was small, the books I loved were large and growing smaller as I grew. I took to bed a fable about a ball that bounces twice the height of the bounce before, then twice that, and so on, saved only by the familiar touch to calm the little manic wonder. I have known a season like this. A fear of nothing turns to panic and breathing in a bag. Then my father led me to the basement and said, do not worry, our family will be fine, here with our old fridge, our cots, new storm glass to break the fall of nuclear winter. What did we know of the boy reporter who screwed a sunlight filter to his camera. What would we reclaim. I looked for the book about the ball, years later, but never found it, never knew just how it ends. I told myself the story is out there, somewhere, passed from child to child, like faith in a father who comes home, mixes a drink, closes his door to watch the news. Perhaps I made it up, the book. Either way, I wake up still in a desert motel. A radio crackles, glasses shiver; in the distance, a magic ball raises a column of dust through the contrail of the dust before. It tears a shaft into the cloud, and people wander from their rooms like a shy question from the back of the hall. Strangers, gawkers, spill into the parking lot in undershorts and robes, seeing in each other their own bewildered stature, their place below a monolith that never falls completely, as it falls.
Fable 33
I give my last match to the alley, where wind blows bits of trash into an O. Even an ecstasy of small proportions shatters as it falls. A television burns all night in a window. A little something to help a soul sleep. Or wake. Or fall into a space between, lonely for both regions. Stare long enough, and you see. The stagehands are high, all of them, and they need to get involved. They need to put an end to our misery. A better hero. A scar. A lonely temper to remind us of an uncle who lost his speech in the war. The beloved is everywhere, now that we watch the offerings worth believing, outside of whom our jahrzeit candles crumple, kneel, or otherwise go nameless. Their shadows trickle down the walls. So when I breathe, smoke appears like everything I meant to say. Everyone I meant to comfort. I blow a deeper thank you to the silence of the world.