Little Blue Heron

When I got home I did exactly as I was told. I did not pass go, did not collect two hundred dollars, I sat down on the large paper spread out on my living room floor and set to it. With the back of my hand I brushed away the layer of dust, grit and hair and began searching among the fifty or more sharpies scattered around for a blue that still had some life left. 

After weeks of standing over the thing, I began making marks again, cross-hatching at first, figuring in the slight muscle along the back of the bird’s neck. I’d been at it long enough I didn’t even need to look at the book for reference anymore. The geography of the drawing was well known to me.  The little blue heron had finally begun to emerge from the stand of reeds, except at five foot by seven, it consumed my living room easily. 

There was no other proper marker besides blue in the sets I brought home from Wal-Greens. Not even in the pastel twelve pack I’d experimented with one time. The only way to go was blue upon blue, more blue for shadows, maybe some black along the outer perimeter to set down hard lines.  Thousands of marks laid down finally achieved a solid layer of color. It had formed something that resembled feathers covering its thorax. The fine plumes wisping from its neck like a beard almost swayed with the wind coming up from the bend in the great river below. 

I drew until my back was ruined and my knees ached and then I kept drawing. I poured everything I had into it, layering until the cobalt beneath me acquired a depth I could peer into, teasing out blue with hundreds of marks. Like a thousand cuts into flesh, or a thousand arrows falling from the sky to pierce me, I drew until everything fell away.  I was a diver above the impossible sapphire expanse of the Gulf Stream, almost tumbling into the abyss. I carved Xs into the breast of the bird, crosshatching or scribbles writhing across the landscape of its wings like a new language. An insane person outlining the figure of God, I was a broken vessel made whole again, and being filled from heaven, it was all I could do to lay my art down on paper.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,

Out of black bean and wet slate bread,

Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,

Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,

They Lion grow.

                        Out of the gray hills

Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,   

They Lion grow.

                        Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,

“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,

From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

From the furred ear and the full jowl come

The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose

They Lion grow.

                        From the sweet glues of the trotters

Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower

Of the hams the thorax of caves,

From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”

Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,

The grained arm that pulls the hands,

They Lion grow.

                        From my five arms and all my hands,

From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,

From my car passing under the stars,

They Lion, from my children inherit,

From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,

From they sack and they belly opened

And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth

They feed they Lion and he comes.

--Philip Levine, Detroit 1968

An Earwigs' Guide to Travelling

Natasha

96 tears in 96 eyes

Los Angeles

YOB - "Kosmos" Live in Los Angeles 9-20-12 from DAVID BECKER on Vimeo.

Solace

Billy Joe rose with the sun. It was an old habit. They had made a sort of nest in the back seat of the Toronado and made love long into the night. She had fallen asleep in his arms, breathing lightly onto his chest. With his mouth he nuzzled the thin covering of hair she had grown in the last week. As the back seat filled with cool blue light of morning, he decided he wasn't sure if he had slept or not. Slowly pulling out from under her, then lifting his feet and then his ass, he slid his jeans over his naked form, zipped and buckled and got out the door to go piss. The cold grass was almost welcome under his feet. He spat and looked around, it was the same stupid cold-ass morning as any other farm he'd ever known. He knew it and hated it intimately. A fog had covered the stars near morning and had settled itself into the thousand acres of corn surrounding them. As he neared the edge of the field and relieved himself, he smelled something hot and new, a musk. Not the same smell of the woman he wore on his mouth, hands and chest, something more primal. To the right of him was a patch of matted, tall grass that looked as though it had bedded some kind of animal recently. He zipped up and knelt down, almost crawling on all fours, peering around in the grass. After a minute he found what he was looking for, and wasn't surprised by it, the scat of a coyote, maybe several. They were less than twenty feet from the car. He wondered what had drawn them so close. Maybe it was the sound of them in the car. It was a hard cold world out there and you gathered close together around whatever solace you could find.

He padded quietly back to the car, and as he got around to the drivers side, noticed she was awake. Her large eyes watching him intently, like a cat. Everything about her was like a cat, he decided, the way she moved, the heavy lids of her eyes and the slowness with which they moved. He got in the back seat and laid down with her, her arms enveloping him along with her warmth and smell and everything else.

Blake