Dear Denver,

Push out blossoms from your filthy frosty fingers.
Roll a big rowdy sun up from the plains.
Leave off stacking snow for a minute.
Come out, my mountain city loves,
come out! It's almost spring,
and I
am coming
back.

Account of the Murder of Isaac Kountz, 1876, Kimble Co., Texas

The hooves of the comanche horses strike even to the roots of the grass, crunching the water hidden there. At the western edge of the yellow fields of the air, the sun pauses in its rush for night. Isaac and Sebastian watch the men come up the ridge. Their sheep drift. They tuck their dingy tails between their legs and skulk into the junipers. No one will come for them.

Isaac and Sebastian climb a stone to see. Isaac's eyes, blue as the prussian army, flash their signals down below. The wind which has blown across the plains all the way from the ice nation dies and the brothers lose their balance in the stillness. The riders have read the signal. Sadly, Sebastian puts his new hat on. They jump down and Isaac looks back in time to see the last of the sheep vanish.

"Sheep are gone," murmurs Isaac.

The comanches are beautiful. Their arms and necks are like stones that lie under the river and their hair shines blue with oil. Their smell rises up as sweet as the skin of horses with the freshness of living organs and the bite of juniper berries. They advance in a constellation, knotted to the sun and the going of the sun, sweeping over the ridge and over the fixed elements of life.

The riders stop in front of them. Down below in the arms of the river Isaac and Sebastian see the house, resourceful and brittle like the castings of caddis fly larvae; but the shape, almost square, suggests a wound on the world, a forecast of something inevitable and painful. They are filled with sadness because they do not think they will walk through that door again. Nostalgia for this ridge, the last ridge, and this last evening of eleven years, overcomes the child Sebastian. The tears run down his face and he does not hang his head to hide them from his brother; the dry air licks them up. Fletched grass quivers in the last light, and the stones soften and turn sweet like the german marzipan Isaac only just remembers, but his eyes look to that single cloud hung like a mask over the mountain across the valley, and he wrinkles his forehead, trying to remember a name of it he never heard. Tomorrow is Christmas.

The first man aligns the rifle with his black fringed eye on one end and Isaac's grass-gold head on the other and joins them with a blast. Sebastian sighs. He kneels slowly, hands, right knee, left knee, to the magnetic earth. A shadow falls across his face. The comanche reaches down from his saddle and takes the hat from his head, and the riders follow the ancient day west, throwing their shadows back.

[Note: This was the last recorded Comanche conflict in Kimble County, Texas.]

Trials of the Vagabond-King

There were many years of preparation for the act. Many years of hearing the stories told and telling them back correctly, of affirming that I did understand, did believe, had indeed invited the sweet bearded vagabond-king into my heart and only him. It was after the otherwise ordinary crackers and juice had been spiced with the unique terror of ritual, the necessity of the true-heart's test, "Be sure! If you doubt, you will die," that I took communion.

The lights were dim and pearly. My head did not yet reach over the seats. The blood and body came on silver trays, borne by ordinary ladies I had seen on other days in ordinary places. I wondered if the grown-ups were afraid for me. I was not afraid for myself, having that certitude children have of passing all trials of purity of heart. I picked the biggest piece of Saltine cracker and the fullest thimble of Welch's grape juice. The room was silent. The blood lipped the lily cup, blue-sheened, lights on it. The body brown, salty. A tiny amount. No feast. A modicum of meat and moisture, an inoculation.

I had found, creeping around the church on Wednesday evenings with my best friend the pastor's daughter the boxes of Saltines and jugs of Welch's kept in a cabinet under the sink for this occasion. We helped ourselves. At home my parents called it grape juice and crackers. So the fact was no scandal. The realities of the juice & crackers and body & blood existed beside or upon or within each other. It was the mystery of the single object that draws to itself by its power a number of stories which move through it without tyranny, a mystery I recognized from a game I played with my mother in which we listened to wordless music with our eyes closed and told each other what we saw, and also from this fresh, cryptic realm of letters, whereby marks represented sounds which referred to things. Later I would learn one of its names: metaphor.

I was a great lover of science in those days. I passionately declared my intention to be a scientist and deal in mysteries. Likewise I was a great lover of the divine, and declared with equal passion my intention to run after the vagabond-king with white lilies, cup of blood, and dust in my shoes forever.

Science lost me first, sometime in late junior high, when it wedded itself to strangling, monochratic mathematics, which quietly squeezed mysteries into hypotheses and sieved the still slightly warm hypotheses through the seven severe layers of interrogation which were supposed to produce, through repeated refinement, a lump of pure truth. I could not believe it any more than I could master the alchemy. Christianity, though, with its dark capacity for transmutation, god to man, water to wine, wine to blood, retained my ardor for a long time. It lost me only when its grip tightened, when it demanded certainty instead of curiosity, when it had more answers than mysteries, and a dearth of silence and simple terror.

When the multiplicities that must move are fixed, the vivifying, electric, scandalous, mystery-cult collision of unlike substances proceeds elsewhere. Walk on, vagabond-king.

Do Not Interrogate the Heart

Last night I cut my heart out with a knife at a public pool. I was under the impression that it was something everyone tried at some point, like meditation or reading Ulysses. It was unwaveringly painful, in the way it hurts when someone dies or leaves you forever. I held it in my hands. It was white and still. My limbs grew heavy with that sinking that happens before a faint, but I didn't faint. It wasn't enough to hold it. I couldn't see the problem. So I slit it open like a peach, just to peek inside, but the knife was sharper than I'd thought, or the heart was softer, and the blade slipped straight through. The halves fell open. It was hollow and cool. Vertigo swamped me. I thought it was time to put it back, but I couldn't get it in straight. It was so delicate it kept tearing, and the most alarming thing was the way it was drying, so that the cut edges turned hard, curled in, and didn't fit together anymore.
My aunt found me. "You are going to die," she said coldly.
"No, no I'm not," I said. "A doctor could put it back."
"Put THAT back? No. That is ruined. They might be able to save you with some other heart, but, THAT..." and she stalked away to find a doctor. I watched a diving contest, feeling my vitality sink and sink gently down.
Later some kind stranger gave me a briny, clotted cow's heart swimming in blood in a plastic bag. My aunt approached with a surgeon. The new heart was going to be too big, but at least I might live. I kept the shriveled, yellowish pieces in my hands.

If you're viewing this from anywhere in the Southern Appalachian region, you'd best come.

I dreamed that Puck came back. He had lost his leg, so I made him one from my own hair. I fitted tiny thorns in for the claws. I tucked it up under the feathers, against the bone. Then he jumped up on my shoulder, and never left me again.

Birth of a Flyer

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