herbavore
Bluelight Crew
Traveling
I could ride this bus forever,
through villages and clouds,
through time,
neither leaving nor arriving,
slipping over the surface of the Andes
like the tiny shadow of an unseen plane
that my eyes are tracking through the smudged glass
as it flickers across the harvest stubble of terraced fields
like a frightened rabbit.
Every death is my son’s death,
like a wound halfway to healing
reopened to raw flesh:
the dog flattened in the road outside Quito,
the victims of the religious mobs in Kenya,
their hacked bodies like puzzle pieces on the TV in the bus station this morning,
the splayed body of the pig turning on the spit
in the Wednesday market.
Though my son died sitting
with his hands open in his lap,
as if in meditation,
and his ankles crossed in the relaxed pose
of someone telling a long story,
or perhaps settled in
for hearing one,
it is always the violence of that room,
the saturated silence I entered,
his whispered name dying over and over on my own lips,
that splits me open anew.
I stand accused of many things,
not the least of which is asking
that nothing ever end.
When the bus lurches around the curve and the plane
continues on its charted course
away from mine,
and I lose both the tiny shadow as well as the vast fields,
when I lose everything
except this bus,
these fellow travelers with their patient or expectant faces,
this cramped and tired body,
and my own face,
which suddenly swims up to the darkened window,
where my forehead rests against cool glass,
as if rising through deep water,
I give myself a weary smile and
close my eyes
feeling the tears well up.
The body tries to heal a wound
without will or direction from the mind.
This bus has a destination
and though I may be rocking in the arms of what seems
an endless journey
eventually I will arrive,
not unlike my son,
dazed from the ride, stiff,
alone without loneliness, without thought,
letting the body do what it does,
living or dying,
without me.
I could ride this bus forever,
through villages and clouds,
through time,
neither leaving nor arriving,
slipping over the surface of the Andes
like the tiny shadow of an unseen plane
that my eyes are tracking through the smudged glass
as it flickers across the harvest stubble of terraced fields
like a frightened rabbit.
Every death is my son’s death,
like a wound halfway to healing
reopened to raw flesh:
the dog flattened in the road outside Quito,
the victims of the religious mobs in Kenya,
their hacked bodies like puzzle pieces on the TV in the bus station this morning,
the splayed body of the pig turning on the spit
in the Wednesday market.
Though my son died sitting
with his hands open in his lap,
as if in meditation,
and his ankles crossed in the relaxed pose
of someone telling a long story,
or perhaps settled in
for hearing one,
it is always the violence of that room,
the saturated silence I entered,
his whispered name dying over and over on my own lips,
that splits me open anew.
I stand accused of many things,
not the least of which is asking
that nothing ever end.
When the bus lurches around the curve and the plane
continues on its charted course
away from mine,
and I lose both the tiny shadow as well as the vast fields,
when I lose everything
except this bus,
these fellow travelers with their patient or expectant faces,
this cramped and tired body,
and my own face,
which suddenly swims up to the darkened window,
where my forehead rests against cool glass,
as if rising through deep water,
I give myself a weary smile and
close my eyes
feeling the tears well up.
The body tries to heal a wound
without will or direction from the mind.
This bus has a destination
and though I may be rocking in the arms of what seems
an endless journey
eventually I will arrive,
not unlike my son,
dazed from the ride, stiff,
alone without loneliness, without thought,
letting the body do what it does,
living or dying,
without me.
