Unstable Verbal Containers by Rich Ives

I grew up where the poster-child the tourists expect wears snow-white barrettes in silky black hair, mukluks and a hooded sweatshirt over so many layers it makes you look like a polar bear. Midnight doesn’t happen the way it does in movies but takes weeks to get here and stays just as long. The path to Grandma’s house involves generations and seems to include humanity’s deepest failures, which lurk like icebergs broken loose by global warming. The buildings are green because the landscape is not. Isolation is a way of life, so we share it. We drink too much because alcohol doesn’t freeze as easily as water. We worry about the same things you do, but with a lot more space between. But even here, love seems to slip its noose and escape into the wilderness. Even here, people get lost following it. Aliens or Elvis impersonators can still happen to you, but most of us know enough to joke about it a little more seriously than they do down below. Usable space is limited, so we have rules about bragging, spitting and trying to share your loneliness, although it’s another rule not to talk about what the rules are. Monogamy is rare and beautiful, textured in lengthy reflections, and displays itself like a beautiful and fluctuating light over the vast tundra of unfaithfulness. The only remedies for depression that actually work are dancing in your own darkness and displaying a new growth of fur. Even depression is territorial here. We’re both religious and fatalistic here. When the wind stops, that’s God. We like to talk about nearly everything, including our addictions, which keep taking on new permutations, and the talk shows on the radio drink it up, while we listen, drinking up the vast distances between us in a huge land filled with tiny rooms that contain us too well, drinking in every commonplace desperate word of someone else’s despair they can spill, life not yet full enough to break but ready to announce its confusions in malnourished detail.
Every couple of weeks, there’s a hard new growth on my skin. I cut each of them off, dry them flat, and use them to glue in place the stool I have that keeps me anchored when I spill my dreams trying to stay awake for no good reason.
I am not offering a gift of tundra blossoms or enough mistaken migration dreams to nervously imitate the heavens. Nor am I offering anxious new heroes of the bright icy cellar I live in. I have no ecstatic children dancing in my wet grass. I am not offering the hidden bank accounts of green strangers. I am not offering skin brushing and whispers, rustling leaves and nuanced rivulets.
I’m not a child of any one or any thing famous, not even the more guarded variety we have here. I’m not sure there is a great deal of joy I will be required to participate in. I’m easy enough to find inside all my posturing. I’m fond of clouds that don’t gang up on me, and creatures with red fur, and especially trees –– beautiful, green, sparkling in the sun and best of all, indifferent.
Yesterday I was not really here. “Not all there,” as they say, although there always means here. It’s a confusion suitable to the condition. Someone I couldn’t remember even asked me if I had died yet. They probably thought it was a joke, but I thought about it and worried it, as many of us do here. A lot. That particular moth is not the welcome dusty brown of an innocent road to August. Neither do these words change anything you will find along the way. What light there is in the back room of these clouds only illuminates the dust that mocks our progress. And that is the tenor of the moment in which Ragnor now reclines, weeping. He has become a fixture of our sadness that we can turn over to gossip. In this version of my life, for example, there were some bees in the fountain. They were floating, but I could tell they didn’t know they were floating. The fountain has water, but it doesn’t really work. I do, but not inside all of the parts. Ragnor accepts this from me, and I can go on without it. Not a scapegoat exactly, but a collector of the unnecessary excesses that misdirect us.
Someone makes me do these things. It does not feel as if I choose them. Maybe it’s me that does this, maybe it’s not. Perhaps I just left myself a temporary heaven in the odor of a ripe meadow and tried to live there too long. I was on my way to a changed season. I was translating poems from a language I didn’t know. I could have been on the edge of melting, on the edge of my edge. I was trying to live on a diet of ram’s balls and chutney. I was carrying a pocketful of beetles to a lecture on the relativity of freedom. I thought I was developing my own territory, but I wasn’t. I just had a new way of looking at an old problem.
Now I’m carrying my inner child to safety too quickly, and I’m running into the future. It’s good to be able to say these things, I’ll agree, but it’s not enough.
My confidence has been visiting strangers.
If the sun had sunk, as it appeared to, into the ocean, the water would have quit talking the way it does, would have risen, confused, with no source in the empty sky for its ideas about levitation, and circled like a vast amorphous airplane with a destination that wasn’t there anymore, and it would have considered the moon and possibly certain stars that had been toying with its affections each night in the glassy mirrors of the few calm moments and hiding behind clouds until the mood was right for further gestures of restrained generosity and tiny bits of glitter.
Where the stars end in the sky, and the sky invites you in, there’s a cautious thread whispering you too could be left behind. Any part of you placed in that dark space might burn up there. And the remainder of that life would just wait, content with itself. Streaming out all over the darkness.
My parents have identified me now. It took 35 years. They carry swords and pens and unnecessary burdens and tiny little icicles of grief and joy, and they drink Juicy Juice and speak like dictionaries. I like to watch them and stay close enough to be confused with a real son.
You could see mountains, and you could see windmills, if you didn’t look too hard. The windmills are called turbines and replace the need for flowing water to generate electricity in a land where everything, even water, stops so long each year. But we don’t actually stop. We just try harder to discover rest. And mostly fail. Rest is not a natural state.
Our animals are not really animals but a great heavy version of swimwear. You can wear them all winter long, which is a different kind of lake we live in. Everything feels underwater for that time which is most of each year and cold, and the animals help us move through it. They offer their skins like swimsuits to keep us separate from the lake, which falls down upon us much of the time. We walk along the lake’s bottom as if we weren’t swimming, wearing their skins. No one should be expected to go on with so few indulgences, but everyone wanted the woman I wish to speak of at the bottom of the lake before fate, or carelessness, disfigured her and gave to her alone what we all had envied. This is one of several beautiful confusions I enjoy living with.
I used to live in that shirt, the one with you applied, talking the legs and cheese of it from down below, where you had fled. ‘Twas a wee misplacement indeed, but I didn’t forget it.
Or was it a beautiful disaster, an ordinary innocence complete thereafter?
I’ve been taking out my family’s trash. They will not be living here in these words any more than necessary, at least not directly, because my life doesn’t need to be about them anymore. If I’ve fallen from grace with my sources, I’ll have to drag them out of their plastic new age containers to reveal the heaven from which they came. Level their skies that I may walk upon them on the way to elsewhere.
Suddenly in the endless dusk the swallows are done weaving the air, but I am not done now with my latest fear, and night has begun to discuss my absence, as if it were only tonight’s distraction that keeps me and my absence from action.
Don’t leave your red handkerchief on the picnic table. There’s a conversation there and you can’t ignore it. It won’t save the ants from public displays of aggression, some of them bright enough to be a tiny piece of the handkerchief, which lingers at the back of your mind. It may feel like something important, if you don’t remember. Like your family.
It’s time to release the silence that’s been holding the air. What you leave behind spreads out and goes looking. It’s waiting for the moment after you reach the goat’s tether. It’s waiting for the moment you almost remember the red handkerchief. It’s waiting for the moment you think about only the ant.
Aren’t you going to relax your straw hat? Summer is a single long day. Aren’t you going to consider the absence of conversation? Aren’t you going to engage the silence with entertaining misperceptions?
The goat will listen and the ants aren’t going to stop for you anyway.
In the ditch beyond the picnic table, there’s a marsh bird standing on one leg, drawing back the distance we’ve been gazing into so often, my thoughts and I, since I accepted that my arrival here would not make him abandon his vigil. And what of mine? Can I gather in as much, hold my undisturbed place without planning the next alteration of the self-centered future?
Thoughts darting like unsuspecting minnows, I wait for his own purpose to alter him.
She turned his face towards her and caressed it. It was not an attractive thing to see. The intimacy too rich and painful. No one loved her with impunity.
This world will grow a little older while they love.
Icelandic Bagpipes:
1) a frozen Bolshevik still singing to his mother
2) the resonance created by tearing apart and melting the horn of your lover’s blue plastic tuba
3) the sudden recognition of a diplomat admiring the cockroach he just removed from your father’s ear canal
4) the burping of a baby polar bear inside a bamboo-lined echo chamber
The singing, of course, was equally unattractive, and the compliments were radically underwhelming. The guests too were delightfully false. Everything was going so well I began to think I was having a good time.
If I was not sick, I should have been.
The elders, meanwhile, were still collecting doorknobs. I see that you too are enjoying your new swimwear.
Uncle Jakov soon landed on an island of big hair named Abigail. It was inevitable. He shifted his weight to his brother’s other foot. Uncle Jakov was building a leg table and shouting for more legs. The clothes he lived in on the island had not been acquired by legitimate means. They needed to find another place to live. In tatters they carried Uncle Jakov to the next landing platform, which was strewn with wine bottles and baby cigar stubs.
Abigail was quickly ejected from the cockpit.
Jakov’s current box of words contains:
chloroform
manikin
sewing machine
Next to it, a shinier box containing:
fluorescent
caricature
incarceration
Each word was nestled in its paper wrapper like a chocolate in a gift selection, each combination of sounds ready to open on the tongue of Jakov. There are a few surprises here, like the way incarceration contains the slice of a razor and the way manikin has nearly grown breasts since it was placed in the box. There’s an odd lingering odor from the year after his mother died, a small paper room forming around it, which is not this room with the words in it, but a room within the room of the idea of the box, with a bed and some children’s books and the altered taste of something too hot that makes your taste buds scurry home as if they had been spanked for impatience.
The next box holds an undivided star left over from when the gifts had tags and someone you cared about spilled the name of each future from its wrapping.
As I was telling the impatient bees, (because the sound of a sincere voice calms them) I don’t mind if the righteous heroes die right along with the evil villains, as long as we get a little silence after the moaning and wailing, before the next bundle of indignations is trotted out of the closet and begins to fight back, demanding more heroes to make them famous. This is what causes the internal limbs to strike each other and emit bloodlike sparks that can cause blindness and an inability to comprehend sports utility vehicles.
Ragnor’s partially completed lecture on tundra frog ethics slips once more to the surface of his wandering thoughts, and a box of words all at once releases. I have to put them in order if I expect to ever leave my own thoughts about Ragnor. It must have something to do with eggs.
Let us now fly quickly to the west through several time zones so as to arrive before we left. It’s a little like the way a cow’s lunch can return after its dinner. Just as Abigail remembered somebody else and told somebody about it and they listened, but it wasn’t about her, oh no, it wasn’t about her. If you put your ear to its ear, you can hear surgeons sharpening their reports with weasel juice and it may frighten you. Or maybe instead I could open a gun store with one of those bubblegum dispensers right next to the counter and a box of erasers in the waiting area. These are but a few of the many generous examples of the ways in which science has helped to solve insurmountable problems in the far north. Now make a list of the Problems you have solved today in your own life. Try to include something coincident with Abigail’s desperate need to marry a philosopher disguised as a speech teacher.
The Ingredients in an Icelandic Thinly Sliced Carrot Casserole:
1) a cricket trying to sneak a rabbit past a coyote
2) a rumor about a movie never actually made in which children are seen creating and producing their own movie with miniature wooden animals, fanciful props, brightly costumed actors, scenes of toys coming to life, and Chaplinesque parodies of Icelandic political figures
3) the embracing of an oyster with insufficient fervor
4) foraging goats drifting like big seabirds across the snow-covered meadow
The clouds indicate the direction of the tribe’s migration only when the texture appears feather-like and can be seen to move slower than our understanding of time.
You’re here now. Next time, you leave. At this moment I intend to be elsewhere.
In the swamps lives the reliquary, a thin burrowing mammal capable of surviving long periods without breathing and highly resistant to gasses. The creature never retreats and stops its forward progress only to sleep, which it does infrequently. Recently, specimens have been discovered inside murdered tribesmen with intestinal strings, strangely coated with an organic lubricant, which appear to have been periodically knotted, perhaps for the simulation of the debilitating digestive processes sometimes described in prescriptions found tied to their simulated tails with alligator sinew by native witch doctors. Such manifestations are discovered when the (dead) patient arrives at the now relatively (an autopsy is sometimes performed) useless medical facility.
Undocumented Icelandic Sex Myths:
1) The boy’s hands were discussing cable TV with her geraniums.
2) A glacier sleeps in the pleasure pocket, secret as a snake’s feet.
3) All the way out. Let me be there. Come ‘ere, ya lug.
4) Alpha sled dogs with too many crew members.
5) Mousequilting as a native craft and not an art form.
6) The uncertain commitments of smoothly worn sled runners.
Ragnor should have told you about milk light sprawled like a deep welcome, slippery in the tempted eyes. Fresh blankets have been arriving slowly from the cloud laundry. Your three children appear to be waiting, two boys like beetles, and the rebellious one, Graciela, a potato bug.
That might have been when Jakov appeared to be a man of such greatness no one could touch him, a man who fell because no one could touch him.
So I ran up to Graciela and I punched her in the tiny eyebrow. Ah but Love, I said, didn’t you know that I am dying?
The name of Yes means turned and telling. I remembered the yet, aired the rooftops and fell upon at least one blue. Upbraided portions of her, were talking, and then below, and with talking we’d still know something about it. Impossibly, the dust clouded the hand’s voyeuristic lens. The random thoughts of a fevered mind began raining the kind of pain that ends in the mirror.
The sky was still there, trying to say something we weren’t even listening to, the clouds spitting gently, instincts reaching for a fat hat or a black wing, a stunned bat failing to close again.
Stuck with the clawed handle.
Remembering.
The Diligent Clock Only Hatches Once Per Cycle:
1) I walked with shovelfeet and fondled the load between my toes.
2) I began washing the watching stones.
3) The sun is not a country in the relative teacup.
4) A golden yellow wine with a hint of mead equals three seconds or one complete sentence.
When I remember the fever of hay, my childhood coughs. Its brief summer eyes run down to the ground by drops.
Walking her fingers across the cool rivets of his warm jeans does not immediately result in teardrops. The clairvoyant air says more. Says you’re not done yet.
The older white families were still offered the opportunity to darken their brows in the blessings exhaled through the broken windows of the smoke-filled dwellings as they purified in the night air. This allowed the family members to portray deep–thinking, hard-working ancestors in the numerous pageants of the time. Elders with darkened brows proved unexpectedly adept at marketing chewing gum. Enhancement of the darkened brows with ash from the remains of prematurely terminated plumbing reversal executives was used to signal an invitation to the ritual ceremony known as Macaroni, after the 18th century inventor of propulsive gastritis.
Funerals are still awarded, selectively, to pet-ornamented expiration performers. The awardees are stood to rest alongside poles capped by the ornaments from their performances. Vertical assignation is assisted by embalming with a fluid derived from the expulsions of sea cucumbers in a variety of colorful and highly visible hardeners that allow visitors to study the surprisingly varied circulatory systems of the chosen. Moss grows on the rear of these structures since they are traditionally mounted facing south and one may picnic by leaning against them in the warmer months, when shade is more desirable. It has been falsely rumored that these vertical assignations are currently being studied, at a great distance, by the Celestial Passions Observatory, and this has served to reduce the incidence of used birth control devices formerly found with greater frequency at this popular location.
Salted Hag, Carried About in Large Blue Palanquins:
1) In countries still governed by weather, chunks of an alien God land in the plowed fields, where broccoli and cauliflower have been planting a greener variety of takeover since the sun, once again, came up. If the natives have noticed, they’re afraid to say so. Let them live among us for a while and then we’ll see.
2) What did these feathers actually transcend?
3) Are the rabbit’s feet unworthy of its warm socks?
During the Festival of St. Wolf’s celebration dinner, the liquid bridge arrives at the throat, and the roof of one’s thinking frequently becomes a patchwork of bright new mismatched tiles. The effigies, made by a caution of disinterested carpenters, burn wildly and light the sky with an eerie glow. Unfurling pods of blackbirds seem to be attacking the flames, but this is only the escape of misperceptions, which have always arrived and departed in small darkly feathered bodies. Men have not always been frightened by them, but men have always felt their influence in their flanks. In this way, men have always been horses and have always felt like chasing the wind. The timing of the ceremony recognizes that this is particularly true as the lights to the north begin their long display of abandon and sequestered hope.
If the son knew his father was still breathing, he would try to learn not to use so much air. He would throttle his own breathing, and he would fail, sailing desire’s strange filial atmosphere, betrayed by his own gifted body.
A stack of dreams can often be found piled up like rags on the railway siding. Each summer the damaged ones, and there are many, must be removed and sent to warmer climates, where their burdens of ice dust can be lifted by offshore breezes arriving from the islands of acceptance. Since they do not know they will not be returning, they still hold inside them cold memories useful in the ponderous wealth of the tropics.
Jakov took no umbrage at the surprisingly incessant rain, and he just kept moving on. He wasn’t about to get no bugs between his toes. He used to say he was born to be lucky, but his family says it was more like lucky to be born.
Jakov stilled and took his time observing the tiny vein of ants pulsing over the dead skunk by the pathway to the river. He had just come from visiting several exhausted houses. He had a keyring larger than a jailer’s in a country without many doors. As usual, the wind had been gossiping house to house.
Delayed Adolescence Conveyor Units:
1) Young fat-embellished girls or boys, used for their increased warmth and dense cunning to protect their owners from predatory Maritals, may be applied to the underside of the tongue for enhanced absorption for nearly everything of value to the imagination.
2) The location of greatest repose, is known to hum softly if treated with great respect.
3) I tell them what I know, which is very little, much like an ear preserved in amber liquid.
4) There’s something underneath, and I go there. I always do.
I closed my eyes and said, “Don’t you want to touch me with them?” of course I did. But I didn’t.
I was in my own house. I wasn’t sleeping, but I wasn’t awake either.
I knew trouble meant me.
I knew me meant something I didn’t understand.
Symptoms of Indigenous Bulbtrotter Syndrome:
1) visions containing albino ice snakes with red eyes
2) the impulse behind Uncle Jakov’s Bastard Cathedral/Unnecessary Casket
3) little daughters little piglets little mice dolls that confuse the cat with verticality
4) the containment of the moment when a retarded fire limps across a pile of leaves and falls in a bundle and turns inward
5) suicidal genius
I go all the way and stop, not knowing if “far enough” is far enough.
Oblivious, devouring another air sandwich, the Scooter hadn’t noticed my interest. I have a license for wheels. I shake hands. I am available for weather. I read a lot. When my sense of myself becomes unhoused, I go to work more often. Sometimes I’m a perfume puffer for the holidays. I spritz the customers with the latest holiday olfactory falsifications. Because I’m nonviolent, I eat my own air sandwich with my eyes closed. When I’m done, I watch the Scooter offering excuses to the unattached. He seems to be gravitating towards the unspritzed. I have to chase him to the other side.
The Light of Day Used as an Incendiary Device:
1) the right hesitations to suggest more than progress
2) a cloth of milk unfolding
3) a failure to join the croupiers union
4) chocolate and Brazilian coffee, a red velvet cake frosted white
I was talking to a local library farmer when Ragnor’s sister, fat and groceried in a Radio Flyer, careened out of her conveyance device and toppled Jakov like he was a sack of rotting potatoes. Turned out the white dust she spilled all over him wasn’t flour, but bone dust. Finding that out scared him good until she explained it was fertilizer for her roses.
Entertaining with Synthetic Meat:
1) his lost whistle and his tawny hair askew
2) quirky in my reach and too sudden
3) a graceful shiver of mane descends
4) each moment a capsule held in his fingers refusing to swallow him
I think there is something unbelievable growing in me, but I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I taste my fingers, and they taste like I’ve been digging in the ground when I haven’t been.
One thing I’ve noticed is the impartiality of air. Sometimes I don’t know where I live, and I like it there.
Once I looked up and saw a garden of stars I just knew I couldn’t have planted. Their nipples are lies and unnecessary.
We do not approach anything of real value directly. In this we are as singular as nails, each primping for direction.
Not even God can say what God will do.
The Grass Skirt of Sir Edmund Hilary
1) There are no real mountains in Iceland.
2) The imaginary ones function as real ones.
3) The nonexistent mountains are important to commerce.
4) Commerce is important to vacationing explorers.
5) Vacationing explorers sometimes try to climb closer to God.

Estralita drove fast and the fenceposts began stuttering. Such a beautiful incongruence she was, like a glass chainsaw. The mad, round, clown-head attached to the nervous body slippering up and down, the whispers of water shifting gears. It was an answer with the teeth of a spider.
Days later my loopy pleasures drove off. Better than yes, better than I want you, it seems to say what I wanted with Estralita was so good it scared me. There wasn’t much else to say. Here and gone. Here and gone.
Now I’m not there where the heart rolls open but here where the open arrives unreturned.
The Residue of an Estralita:
1) an olfactory attraction which causes the addict to exceed his capacity for exertion, can be considered an evasion of the realignment which takes place beneath the surface of reality causing genius to suffer
2) the addition of any form of logic, fluid or gaseous, which has been known to cause an explosion
You probably already understood that Jakov and Ragnor’s sister would get together. They haven’t married, but the child’s name is something more than egg or table, something determinant, as in “potential capacity” threatening ceiling tiles. It may take some time for the child to settle.
If I say I want you to agree to tremble, it may be because the smell at the back of your neck is dangerous, and I have been too boyed under by my directional mother. I know this is not a good attitude, but it serves me well. Jakov’s brother seems exceedingly jealous, however, and I have little to say to him.
And so it had to be me that was listening, me that was suspended, me that was the darkness, me that needed the wrong answer.
I knew what to say, and I didn’t say it, and I waited for you to stop asking.
A Vacant Tendency to Sing:
1) fat little bridges all lined up like dried hot dogs
2) grandmother blooming wildly into her mumu
3) any melodic variation of blubbering like a fat monsoon
4) forklifting pallets of kim chi
5) a broad green plastic with limited adhesion
6) theoretical testicular diamonds
7) the mayor of The City of Red Balloons
8) one of several different occurrences of the desire to open one mouth without eating
In Scooterville, no one is allowed to eat in public, but defecation produces great shouts of joy. When this restriction is combined with an Estralita, the effect can be devastating, but temporary.
Members remaining flaccid were tattooed with maps of their objectives. Men attempting to exhaust their sexual interests were referred to as cartographies. Divested of garments, the vehicle was available for nautical excursions and kite training. When tethered with light–weight teasing, it becomes more affectionately attached.
Unvisited locations are rare enough to warrant special mention in the Scooterville Book of Lessons, which can be found only where the vehicle has not yet traveled. The thrusting of the vehicle’s engine must be silenced in order to discover the meaning of the lesson, which required its use. Speaking of the lesson in occupied locations generally elicits spontaneous perspiration with a slightly nutty flavor and leads to misunderstanding. Home-schooled screeners have proven ineffective in identifying the transgressors.
The unscheduled visitations of circular reasoning reported by retired cartographies have complicated the documentation of failed objectives. The principal of rotational excellence has been offered as a corollary but remains uncorroborated. Illicit vehicles with their mufflers removed have been recently located in unmapped territories by sensitized cartographers. Training continues but has been limited by the availability of unmapped centrals.
The Scooterville Institute of Blood and Copper:
1) a rental agency that rents grandparents, children, missing persons, and invalids with weekly specials
2) the way the sky was folded over and the dairy-o all aslumber with kitchen dreams
3) a cluster of aggressively clichéd gay cowboys lip-synching Broadway show tunes
4) to go this way otherwise (study of)
5) I parked the refrigerator on Jakov’s useless land, kept things cold all winter.
6) as if a mudhen and a rat had grown more than friendly (study of)
7) the artificial ever-after
There’s usually a little more than I know in what I said.
I got over it. But the idea was so tiny, every time I touched it, it jumped.
First life had a few more trick questions like, “Could I imagine wanting to?”
I didn’t know which answer was the shallow answer.
Trying Not to Wake a Dead Man (study of):
1) the chef offering hunger as an appetizer
2) a thorn, a white dress, a bare foot
3) the politics of truth, sorrow, and the loneliness of heroes
4) a theoretical discussion interrupted by domestic events
5) a moon tan
6) a time set aside for losing track of justifications
A tree, a tree, a fence, and a tree. A book with no words. Another tree.
A street like an empty shirtsleeve, where I keep finding myself looking like someone I forget. Greeting myself with a gentle viscous nod.
The color of the secret beneath my fingernail. Blue light in the misplaced mine.
A visit from the smalls, and the silence said what I wanted to hear. No one talks about it.
It happened somewhere else. It happened everywhere else. A child wading, holding her shoes as if they contained the rest of her life.
I got over it. But that idea was so tiny, every time I touched it, it jumped.

I wasn’t even there to listen to myself.
After you went home, we still talked about paradise.

[Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/ives.html ]

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