Simpatico by Keith Pearson

“I see something moving in the trees across the river…” Brandon Shimoda “Rest House”

1

Does it matter if that poem is truth? I ran that cat over so many times nobody would know his face. Or what he said forty years ago that has stuck in my head all this time. Or why today was the day I finally had to let it out then polish it for hours like some ancient gem, or a golden turd. 

2

Go kneel by a clear stream and thank your makers for another day. Nobody truly wants to die, especially the dead. You may think of it as upstream, but it is really the past. Those whispers you hear are really the echo of those gone before urging you on. ‘Keep going, keep going. It’s okay to drink the water here.’

3

Three locals thought enough of him to kick him in the stomach and not the face. They did it over and over until they got it just right, then, satisfied with their work, cracked open their last can of Pabst and poured it over his dirty face. No beer ever tasted so sweet. 

4

He told me when he was dying how he would dream of his death, that it was like a motorcycle ride on a straight desert road but in slow motion, slowing gently until he could no longer feel himself move, as if death had come for him like a hand reached down from heaven, how even the wind stopped, and it no longer felt like a dream.

5

I am old enough to wonder what terrible things will haunt me in my final dreams, what I will throw curses at in that dying light, as I saw my father and his father before him do. I hope I have been good enough to merely dream of reaching for an apple high in some great tree and just out of reach, but I doubt it.

6

Flowers bloom, then after you have forgotten how beautiful they were, the petals fall away at your slightest touch. ’Kind of like love’ she says. No, nothing like love at all, with love, time freezes when I touch the dying petals, or maybe that’s just me. I see no reason to piss in the garden, so I smile and nod and simply turn away.

7

I want to sleep in the pines tonight. Just carry me out in an old wagon, wheels creaking, in the day’s dying light. Any place out there will do. The bugs won’t matter.

“How many lives do you think a man can live… how many lives within this one?” Sam Shepard, Simpatico

8

He told me about a dream he had, stranded on a spit of soft sand slowly disappearing under rising water, and how no matter what direction he searched, there was no sign of land, nothing but only the dark roiling water, and how it all reminded him of some old blues song and in the dream he began to sing, not much more than a moan at first, then singing and singing louder, and somehow he knew it would be alright, he would be okay, and how when he woke how pissed he was he could not remember the song, not even the slightest bit of it. 

9

I spooked a rattlesnake in a cemetery in Burns, Wyoming, ran through the tall grass to the car and locked the door, as though to keep out my fear. Later that day I went into a rundown diner in a town in western Nebraska, a town so derelict Town Hall was in a burned out Sinclair station, and saw silent folks eating their mac and cheese and fish sticks, their faces gray and empty, and understood in that moment how I would rather live among the dangerous snakes in the world than among the dead, or those merely waiting to die.

10

How does light translate into language? What is the color of innocence? If life was fiction I’d be at the window half-cocked and screaming, about baseball, or the government. Instead I am watching a young boy nibble at a bagel, maybe his first, and wonder what it feels like to have a whole world ahead on the distant horizon. The mountains I see in the distance are bathed in a purple light and only a day’s walk ahead, or so it feels on this hot June afternoon.

11

There are fireworks tonight down the grove and I am alone here with these words, pieces I have stolen from dreams. One of the cats rests in the open window sill and stares at me as though I am to blame. Perchance I am. This world is of my creation, folded and blended and honed into something real, or as real as something from a boy’s dream. The fireworks cease and the cat curls herself at my side, and soon the words stop as well, and there is only the purr of the sleeping cat and the beat of my own heart in the silent night.

Epilog

Of this I am certain. Even when we lived in caves and slept beneath freshly killed animal skins, when fire was only something a thousand years in our future, still we dreamt of flying, and held our last breath until we couldn’t, praying it all ended in song.

 Keith Pearson

I live in southern New Hampshire and works with special ed students at a local high school.