She looked out across the water, her head tipped and her eyes narrowed.  All she could see were tight crests, one after another, small collapsing pyramids of slate gray water pitching in the wind and the buoyed gusts of rain.  She was sitting on the sun-beaten bench, clutching a dock pole.  She shivered evenly as the rain hit the water.  She had a cigarette clutched in her right hand, soaked through and rat hair brown.  The water spiked and danced along the rain-punctured plane for as far as she could see.  She shook, battered by rain.  Finally, she made fists as she shivered and the cigarette was crushed.  It could have been dried out.  She felt it slip softly away in the rain as she let her fingers open her palm to the sky.  Lightning struck far away along the dome of the sky and she bolted for the house.  Across the grass and up the hill, down the dirt road, then left at the first mailbox, a homemade box with peeling green paint, skewered there like a fool in a pillory. 

            On the road the trees hung like an ancient tunnel, runged, intestinal.  She walked quietly, drumming up body heat by rubbing her arms rhythmically around her torso, her elbows strumming her numb ribs.  When the rain stopped, everything was quiet for a moment.  She could just hear the distant highway over the sounds of her bare feet planting and unpeeling on the saturated gravel.  She walked carefully, watching for sharp rocks and tending to the driven-in ruts.  She saw the house and started into a limp jog, her water-logged feet striking the road numbly as she climbed the small slippery hill up to the front yard. 

                     

      

Vern moved slowly

Like something half broken and made of wood

And he smelled of used sandpaper

But there was a whorl in him

A knot in the woodenness of Vern

Interpolated

More by insertion

Than by hernia

He was evil

Exactly

But evil like a snake

With basic drives

That fell comatose

In the cold

He looked like he was in pain

Like he’d been folded up in a drawer

With the peanut shells

And greasy handwritten receipts

Single serving boxes of Frosted Flakes

And the accumulation of sand

From before the internet

Vern is the evil Yoda of white trash

Talking like his face doesn’t work

Hunched and covered in cement dust

I’d like to kick his head off

Like in the movies

Clean off

Sailing away like a soccer ball

But today he brings in a check

So I sell him the dirt

Because a check is at least

Evidence

Rumors of strange rituals

Had piqued our curiosity

And it was early in June

When Karen and I decided to visit the island

Out of a shared curiosity

For primitive things

And vacationing

In warm places

Suitcases in the foyer

And cab called

I stood in the doorway the day we were leaving

And watched her spray her hair

Narrowing her eyes with her head tilted

Jogging the bottle side to side

As she watched herself in the mirror

And started in on her face

Lipstick

Then mascara

Over a tasteful slash of eye shadow

And I stood wondering

Why is Karen getting made up

To visit an island

Full of savages

Who worship the sun

And eat nothing but insects

And rigid island-yams

Cooked over open fires, no doubt

And as we got closer

I became doubtful and pessimistic

Karen noticed and grew sullen herself

Resentful of my withdrawal

But the sand was hot when we hit the shore

And it immediately filled my shoes with hot grit

But Karen slipped gracefully

All but tossing her things on the beach

As her dress billowed perfectly

In the warm wind

That peeled the surf away

Like ripe pear skin

The already distant ferry

Trailing smoke like blackened cotton

We gather

Stunned and awfully helpless

At the news

Of a coworker’s death

In the open parking lot

Of the office complex

The breeze

And the cold exposure

Of careless daylight

Feel remote

And our ties

And high heels

Seem compulsory

Unbidden

Someone

Will have to clear his desk

And I suppose bring the box
To his widow

Or was Tim a bachelor?

I can't remember 

We huddle closer

As the tow truck takes his car

Disappearing beyond the gate

And it’s gone

So quickly

That we get a head start

At putting other things and people
in the spaces
he has left

You stare into the enormity of
Each tiny space
Between the parts of us
And you think
As your coffee brews
Drop by drop

You wait with bare legs
Your sour map of the stars
Crisscrossing the floor
Marking ellipses
For previous and patterned mornings
of cold white sky

Smoke from your cigarette
Moves in frigid heavy air
And nearly brims the room
Where the table has been folded
And set against the wall
As it is now

The floor is older still
And peeled away in spots
And you think
Slouching in your socks
The ones that snag sometimes
On the uneven floor

Where spots of spilled coffee
Fall in places and into constellated shapes
To lead your way
Through the last of
Night's shy iridescence
While outside the clouds gather

At the assisted living home where my grandmother lives I watch the bobbing birdy heads, the grinding and cycling rhythms of their tremors. Parkinson’s, Essential Tremor, Huntington’s. All grave conductors of a rhythmic bodily noise. The ladies at St. Ann’s walk with a lithe labor; they look hung on hangers and lift each foot with patience and care, shaking all the while, strumming prayers, heads stuck in saintly bobbing, strumming a prayerful rhythm of staccatos that swarm the simple movements of looking left and right, up and down. The eyes hover amid the vibration and compose a mighty dignity, eyes of gentle and stricken lionesses. There are the non-shakers, usually nattering, living a necessarily self-centered lifestyle with nothing but their particularities to guide them in the discontinuity of a purely continuous life on six identical floors all drawn in a time and space that seems to shift and lag. I get lost nearly every time I visit St. Anns. Once inside the building I’m thrown off kilter in the font of sanitary smells and the fluorescent washes of bleak, memorial familiarity. Grandma laughs when I arrive at her door on the fourth floor panting and flustered. Grandma has no disease but the left side of her body is stitled and compressed from a stroke she suffered. She is a tiny woman, small enough that I pick her up like a baby and place her in the backseat of the car rather than patiently guiding her in. I spend more and more time at St. Anns. I slowly absorb and adopt the tight swinging motions of the tremor and the ladies don’t seem to notice. In fact it feels as if we’ve come into mutual focus, we’ve all surrendered and now drift in the same bobbing current together. Grandma runs the till at a little store housed on the first floor known as The Little Shoppe. Grandma is seventy-nine, one of the younger women in the building. She works two-hour shifts three times a week and I sit on a stool next to her behind the counter studying the gyrations of her customers. There is a strict center of gravity to each woman. She knows them all by name and the women are curt but polite, mildly competitive in the recounting of their woes. A round little woman with a walker that has two wheels in the front scoots around the counter and begins showing me a pair of three by five photos of her grandson. Identical shots of the boy from two different angles, his arms in front of him, blue casts from knuckles to elbows and she explains how he fell head over heels from an ATV. He had to wear the casts on graduation day, accepting his diploma with shattered bones struck in place by stiff blue orthopedic plaster. She bobs and yammers, repeating bits of the story in a sort of cycle until she is content that I’ve understood and when she tells me he’s in his thirties now I realize she’s been carrying these two photos around for twelve years or more, telling anyone who will listen about how happy the boy is, even when both arms were in casts and his mother had to help him shower. He looks happy in the photos and I imagine him walking home with two broken arms, the capsized ATV lying somewhere in a field waiting to be hoisted back to its four wheels, a monster turtle stuck on its back. By the end of her story we are nodding and bobbing in a perfect spasmodic polyphony and she seems comfortable with me, like we’re speaking the same chattering language. She wears a cropped wig pinned a bit too high and in an improbable frosted light brown color, the sheen of it’s acrylic mange. Her face is round and tight, drawn in toward a center, her little nose like a pinion point. Her navel is the other pinion, drawing her into a tight hunch, her spine curved like a warped spring. A symptom is like an expression, the way the disease expresses itself. Different diseases can express in similar ways, such that the tremor is a common language, a bridging cognate for universal communication among sufferers. The ladies at St. Anns don’t question my authenticity so much as they simply find it easier to understand me in our drifting language of ticking clocks and humidifiers, beanies babies and tuna fish sandwiches. A new acceptance of gravity and cycles and sameness, bobbing, marking time as you go.

The silence and the anticipation danced over the flames and everyone waited, now and again someone glancing toward Rodney as if they could activate his response by staring and waiting. But he sat perched, knees up, sneaker soles flat down on the face of the rock, and he thought. He cradled his can of beer absently. Finally he said, ”Never have I ever licked someone’s armpit in full, bottom to top,” and in the silence no one moved. No one laughed. The fire licked around but was free now from hesitation and seemed oddly naïve, like a child playing in dirty water. Rodney looked around and then took a long drink, leaning back to empty the can. “Rodney…I don’t think you understand the rules quite,” Janine spoke up and was joined around the fire by nods of agreement. “Rodney, you’re supposed to say something you’ve never done. Then if anyone around the fire has done that thing, then they drink,” Janine explained, pointing around the circle and then tipping back an invisible beer, “see?” Rodney sat there and thought about it, “the thing that don’t make sense, ok, is that the game sort of supposes that drinking is a bad thing. Like if you lose you drink. But I wanna drink. Far as I can reckon, that’s what we’re here doin’,” “Rodney it’s like a fun way to drink and interact ok? We all want to drink, ok? If you don’t want to play you can just watch.” “No, I wanna play. I’ll play it right. Ok. Never have I ever…”

“Want some?” He asked, holding his pint of tequila up with a grin and raised eyebrows, one strap of his overalls dangling, his narrow chest exposed. “I’m good.” I held up my can, rocking on my heels. We stood in the backyard, drunk in the heat of the afternoon. The yard was strewn with stray piles of patio furniture reduced to kindling and shattered plastic, and near the fence piles of compost and trash, and little keepsakes from the street. There was an aluminum swing-set from another time, two forgotten swings hanging on chains. I was well into a twelve pack and he was nursing his tequila, the cheapest he could find, just the smell making my stomach turn. Flies buzzed around the untended compost heaps that threatened to overtake the yard, some in trash cans, most piled thoughtlessly, rotting in the dry Western heat. “Just take a slurp.” He said, grinning, holding the open bottle up and swirling the contents. “I puke every time.  Especially that cheap shit.” I said, nauseous at the smell of his tequila in it's little plastic pint bottle.  He looked at it, peered into its mouth, then took another long pull. I killed my beer and tossed the can into the yard where it fell amongst others and a punctured plastic kite and some pizza boxes. I cracked another beer and peered into the hastily torn hole at the top of the box to gauge how many I had left. The trick was to drink the first twelve quick so that they hit you only as you left the liquor store with the second twelve-pack in hand. A case or two twelve packs at once only resulted in the same second trip to the liquor store in about the same time, but in a dangerously more drunken state. My strategy centered on pacing myself as well as attempting to make only two or three trips in a day. We were both 86ed for life from half of the bars and liquor stores in town. I had negated many supposed lifelong expulsions with simple early afternoon sober apologies granted to bartenders and the owners of liquor stores. The difficulty was in remembering the offense so as to appropriately tailor the apology. I once blacked out in a bar on a quiet Tuesday night and decided to use the table I was sitting at as a battering ram. It was directed forcefully and repetitively at a table nearby where other more peace-loving patrons were seated. I was ejected with physical force and wasn’t allowed back until several apologies had been made and an entire campaign of good words put in, which of course held their own debts to be repaid somehow. The social debt of being a drunk reverberated this way, penetrating everything. “Almost gone.” He said in a singsong voice, dangling the bottle in front of my face, the last swallow splashing around feebly. Ignoring him, I gulped down my beer, tossed the can and cracked another, leaning into a long belch, my head back, triumphant. He killed the bottle and reached in the back pocket of his overalls, producing another. “Jesus Christ man. Have a beer.” I made to hand him a beer and swiftly pulled back when he reached for it, then cracked and drained it in several large gulps, gasping through my nose and tossing the can aside. “Fucker,” he murmured, lightly kicking the cardboard pack, a single can shifting as the box tilted in its place on the grass, “I’ll fight you for the last one.” “My beer. Mine,” I said as I reached in for the beer, shaking the box loose as it clung around my wrist, suddenly light without the other cans to provide ballast. I looked at the beer with a mock quizzical expression, then cracked it and guzzled it, handing him the empty can as I belched into the approach of evening, holding my hands out in the air in an operatic gesture. He tossed the can at the pile of others in front of us in the grass. “Now you have to take a pull. In penance for your drinking crime,” he offered the small bottle of piss yellow tequila. My eyes watering from chugged beer, I swiped the bottle from his hand and pitched the cap as I gulped the tequila. I pivoted to take a step toward him, grabbed him hard by both ears and vomited with the full pressure of twelve beers into his balding forehead and full into his face, gripping his ears as hard as I could, the spray splashing in all directions as he swung and kicked, briefly holding onto my forearms as the still cold and carbonated beer soaked his face and ran down the front of his overalls and his bare chest. I let go and stepped back, laughing in a wane high-pitch, as he stood with his shoulders drawn up and his hands dangling limp.  He was soaked with beer that had shot down to my stomach, touched the wall and sprinted back out again faster than a swimmer in a sprint. He reached for his face, sputtering, his laughter punctuated by a blunt moan as he scooped the liquid away from his eyes and shook it from his hands, stepping around in a small circle then leaning forward and shaking the clasped strap of his overalls and mashing his other hand over his groin where apparently the puked up beer had found a resting place in the crop of his pubic hair. He opened his eyes to look at me and we burst into drunken laughter.  He reached for his scalp and slicked the wet stringy wad into a Mohawk shape with a single upward motion of his clasped hands.  His hair stood straight up and we let out a duet of hyena squeals and giggles, falling all over ourselves, our boots kicking up dust and empties all over the yard. I fell weakly to the ground, my stomach wrenching from the effect of expulsion followed by uncontrollable laughter and saw him begin to come to, to realize he was covered in vomit, his laughter giving way to deep spasms. He suppressed some small gags as he lunged for me but I rolled onto my stomach and got to my feet and stumbled out of the way as he expelled a thick spray of vomit into the yard, hunched over and clutching his knees. I got to my feet, laughing hard and out of breath as I planted my boot at his hip and toppled him onto the grass and dirt, the cans and bottles and scraps of a life surrendered to chaos and sacrificed to a shapeless deity that shared our ambivalence for decency and was also drunk, wrecked on our mindless offerings.