Death and The Maiden. Townsend Road Revisited
Where the double-helix histories of love collide. Years of not setting foot in this place conspire to make all the handles groan to be touched. I know it like a blind man. The watering bucket for the chickens is where I set it, some accidental evening long ago neither of us understood would be the last. Or the January morning after hell froze over and the heat lamp blew. When the whole flock died. At first there was nothing. Then I saw traces of them in the humus of the coop floor: tail feathers: a leg. They’d dug down, buried themselves alive, a last-gasp effort to find heat. Now they were wood. I walked away. Until, realising I couldn’t just leave them there, I turned back. That time-release horror; their slow, collective understanding of my betrayal – ‘You did not come. You did not come’ – meant facing up to it. I couldn’t make this unhappen by just walking away. ‘That tears shall drown the wind’. I tossed them. One at a time. Araucanas, Barred Rocks, Silver-Laced Wyandottes, Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds. All named by the kids. All raised by hand in the bathtub in the downstairs bedroom, sheltered from cats, then dogs, foxes, weasels, coyotes. Held, fed, watered. I tossed them by their frozen legs into the field. Like lawn darts.
It’s not the liquid spreading on the floor,
A half a minute’s labor with the mop;
It’s everything you’ve ever spilled, and more.
That place. Where the narrow, bottomless gulf that separates indifference from despair is just a shrug. ‘Between the essence and the descent falls the shadow’. And now, maybe eight, nine years on, it all aches with the latent energy of bewilderment. As if one touch could wake it. But no; this is what death looks like, glimpsed peripherally across diverging escalators of a parallel reality. And I know the narrow hips of that little dog too.
For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.
And so we linger one last time, suspended in the raw air of incomprehension. And then we move on. There’s nothing to see here except everything; and everything is a raveled sleeve, is nothing. This is the way out, all too familiar by now; the shot umbilical flopping about the bathroom floor like an angry hosepipe while the baby is cradled over the toilet. Just another episode in the soap opera, watching the flailing of good hearts come to nothing, the forced bonhomie, the suffering in the face of the woman, thirty good years wasted on that slobbering, drunken fool. Beneath the cheap, wet-lipped flattery gutter catacombs of unending boredom. Mose Allison is murmuring between my ears. You’re always laughing when things ain’t funny. If we anoint the slack-jawed, the mealy-mouthed and the man-breasted our princes, I guess we deserve what we get. Our hunting fathers told the story of the sadness of the creatures. It’s time again to be gone.
Circling back around, we hover with old friends in a holding pattern over Shelburne Falls, where Arcadia purrs untroubled by fiefdoms, gnashing teeth and sundry forms of twattery. We watch the play, eat late bucatini with garden sungolds, basil, and sleep soundly, lately untented. Running water. Toilets that flush. As we drive to the pond for a parting swim, I’m able to reflect that the mistake, that almost decade ago, was to engage. The product of having been broken. The secret in these places is to jump in, a few brisk strokes, climb out. Dive too deep into the dark currents and weeds, risk disturbing the mire where the bottom-feeders and snouting things with barbels dwell. We dry off, all smiles, and slip west.
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