It All Comes Together Outside a Restroom in Hogansville
By James Seay
It was the hole for looking in
only I looked out
into daylight that broadened
as I brought my eye closer.
First there was a '55 Chevy
shaved and decked like old times
but waiting on high-jacker shocks.
Then a sign that said J.D. Hine's Garage.
In JD's door was an empty Plymouth
with the windows down and the radio on.
A black woman was singing in Detroit
in a voice that brushed against the face
like a scarf
turning up in the wrong suitcase
after everything came to grief.
What was inside we can only imagine:
men, I guess, trying to figure
what would make it work again. Beyond them,
pistons, beyond the oil on the ground,
beyond the mobile homes all over
Hogansville, beyond the failed,
restrooms etched with our acids,
beyond our longing,
all Georgia was green. I'd had two for the road,
a cheap enough thrill,
and I wanted to think I could take
anything that aroused me.
The interstate to Atlanta was wide open.
I wanted a different life.
So did J.D. Hines.
So did the voice on the radio.
The way it works is this:
we devote ourselves to an image of a life
we cannot live with
and try to kill anything
that suggests it could be otherwise.
Incident at Eagle's Peak
By Bruce Weigl
All morning long in the rain,
I drove through the streets of my boyhood
past the falling-down houses,
with my friend from my boyhood
who is a man now, like me, or
who lives inside of a man's body.
And after the rain stopped
we parked the car
at the edge of a woods
that had been our
secret place,
but where now
the country had constructed
an asphalt trail,
wound like a scar
through what had been our perfect world,
undisturbed by adults,
ordered peacefully by a code
that children had made up
through all the years of children.
We walked down the asphalt trail
no longer sure of our way
until it curved toward the river
and crossed an old path
still visible in the tangle of years,
and without speaking
we climbed under the fence
and followed the path to the river,
that's called the Black River,
where we swam without our clothes
in the long summers of our spirit bodies,
and not out of nowhere exactly,
but more out of the river,
I heard my friend's voice
rise up above the wind
and say that his life had come to nothing.
His sadness filled the air around us.
It rose up and filled the branches.
It floated along the river like a mist,
so I wanted to find a way
to tell him that he was wrong.
I wanted to make a story for him
that could be alive in the place
he had come to imagine was nothing,
but there was no use for words there,
and when he had finished
telling his long sadness,
he breathed deeply,
and he shook his head
no to the river,
or to the wind in the trees
that makes a sound like all of memory,
or to the life he felt strangled by.
In the distance that our eyes found together,
just at a bend in the river,
two great blue herons
lifted and then settled again,
like silk scarves
among the rocks in the fast water.
I wanted to believe that the beauty
meant something to my friend
in a way that could
ease the sharp hurt of his knowing.
I wanted to believe
that he had not wasted his life,
that there was something
just in the living of it,
hard and with some
simple human grace
that had to make it matter,
but I didn't know
if the moment meant anything at all,
and I had to stand very still
to try to gain my balance,
to find the rope of words that,
real or not,
binds us to the world
and blesses us
with that sense of being
we may imagine is a life.
And then we were walking away,
in the rain that had started again.
We could still hear the water
rush over rocks
that had been big enough once
to lay our bodies out across
those years ago in the sun,
and the sound the water made for us
as we turned off the path for home
was like a promise
I remembered form before.
You can tear the life our of a man
with only a few wrong words.
You can break a man's life down
as if it were nothing,
just by turning away.
The Decade: Music
5 days ago
