The House on Main Street

The wrought-iron gate creaks, black paint peeled through to steel
open onto the path. We sit on groaning wicker chairs on the narrow porch
as the tourists stop, the neighbours clip, the hibiscus peering over the wall.
The thin path is short concrete cracked and willful. Dirt and grass
push past and through it
to a carpenter’s house. The shutters swing out
in front of louvers, the ceiling was pitched acutely
but still inside the heat is suffocating. The living room littered
with yellowing black and whites around the tired piano
it had had years of gently played Methodist hymns,
its keys resistant to fingers.

The corridor of faces watch as the old man meanders
in the kitchen, lamenting the damage done.
‘everything is all muddled up.’
New fluorescent lights hum softly over
the cracked and stained linoleum.
They had moved the furniture to the porch,
when they painted, the dresser next to the boxes
of things to throw or give away reeks of old mahogany
and we fan ourselves silently. The hibiscus
overgrows the wall now, waiting for the passersby.

2009

Finus Ex Machina

The red sun laboured across the sky, paused to examine the bare streets of the city and then climbed back down to hide under the horizon. The Icarus was already rumbling in the muddy lot, its only company the grass and the curious rats shaken from their holes. It was one of the transports carrying miners mostly from Georgia all the way to Mercury. The figure at its base in the worn blue overalls patched with stains beckoned towards them and Marcus led the group across the marshy field to the stairs of the ship. The railroad was directly behind them as they walked, complete with rotten tracks and the memory of the night before for the future tourists. Morbid interest would be sure to draw many like minds to see for themselves the decomposition of men, city, and planet.

As he approached the Icarus, Marcus could see the loose panels on its side, the rusted hinges and bolts in the door, the shaking staircase, and could hear the tremendous rattling that the precarious bundle of steel and iron was making. The pangs rang in the air as the metal declared its unwillingness to fly, and its resistance to help. There really was not much else left to be said. They had decided to stay. Now, there was no option but to leave and there definitely was no option of another vessel.

Once inside, the cramped spaces reached out to knock elbows, shoulders and the backs of heads. Louis explained to them the processes with which they were going to begin their journey. The first being the storage of their bags and effects in the hole – a rectangular compartment the width of two people laying side to side, with similar length, but only a few feet deep. The next step was the allocation of the lockers. The lockers were just that, about six and a half feet tall slots in the wall of the main bay. They were completely fabricated with iron, rusted in some places and not at all intended for civilian use. It would be in these lockers they would be suspended for the duration of the trip. But before suspension, each person was given a suit bag, and invited for the bath in wax. Louis told them that the bath was precautionary, and the hardening layer on their bodies was meant to maintain the state of their bodies and internal functions and ensure stability during removal from suspension. After all this, the eight of them stood in their lockers, more like caterpillars in their cocoons than people, faces frozen solid.

Only Louis remained outside of a locker, strapped into his chair, all leather and heavy buckles on his chest. Grasping the throttle as the burners scorched the muck beneath them, as his junkyard of thirty years ignited, wood and iron ablaze, as Mercury spat them out having made the mouth bitter. As they hurtled toward the stars already racing towards them, Louis could see the Dreyfus Building quickly disappearing from view. This high up, where the birds have stopped flying, and the clouds have grown dense from the wispy puffs below, the tower beacon continued flickering as the shuttle rose until it grew dim under the gas and went out.

Scaffolding

I

The rubber soles of my favourite sneakers are Iago’s hands
letting the cold and wet in to surprise my socked toes.
Only my left foot falls victim to this transgression
- it is well enough for my right supports my weight
on a plank split down the middle and christened.
Far below me, the streetwalkers clutch their own elbows
and shiver, they may glance up if spurred by a loose chip or pebble
tumbling off the many steel beams that prop up
the loose boards. Trust always sounds hollow when you test it
- as does the torso when the wind pushes against it.
No one builds scaffolding just to build it
but the rods never bolt the same way as before
the ply can only be used but so many times
before they must be made new again – the rust scraped off or painted over.
No one builds scaffolding just to take it down.


II

This high up, with the wind spitting in my face
I chip at the concrete but the mind sputters.
You could bolt the rods, beams and boards
in exact requisite order and combination
yet it never feels the same.
Far below me, the streetwalkers come and go
and all I hear them speak about is the cold.
I freeze on these ladders of steel, my senses appalled
– I see how my purpose could be misconstrued.
I’ll let it be known, that’s not what I meant at all.
Shall I promise to touch His hands?
The rods are hollow – yet this sound is different
– I feel the creak of the planks in my left foot
I do not know the sound the chest makes –
as the scaffolding falls away