This an Animal Dream

[  I  ]

He tried to perfect the inside world.

He went to claim the forest, all the trees and the stones and the river that ran through it. He went to lay hands on the seasons, mark them down, pin the woods to their chests. He went to chalk its outline and smother it to their ground, all these lovely trees.

The outside world provoked these nightmares. The outside world, it hung all the children from the trees, bright colored twine and the varied shades of their smooth bruised skin. When the wind blew then the forest was a creak of knots tied by outside world hands, all dirtied in blood and grease, the rainbow hued ropes their laughter hung in the boughs.

These the days.  

He cut the umbilical cord and wrapped a piece in a thin white cloth and placed the folded square into his shirt pocket, against his heart, the yellow rubber deflated and drying, until it would go jerky hard on his chest.

He blotted her forehead, the sweat cold and her eyes closed and the screaming baby un-warmed on a bed of pine needles and yellow leaves. It had been fall and the outside world had come for her, his eyes focused on the baby and the head opening out, his hands guiding the purpled body from her wide open legs and the outside world hands laying fractures to the rest of her. His wife’s chest and his wife’s mouth and his wife’s heart. In her chest they planted a barrel-full of tumbleweeds and in her mouth handfuls of thistle seeds and in her heart a tiny shard of pottery shattered. Their creeping upturned lips, their new home inside of a dead wife, the dead mother of a baby new and spoiling on the floor.

He chased them down hallways and out doors but they were gone across the river and into their own outside world. And the baby called, the baby screamed and beat its tiny fists on the drum of the ground. The baby curled its toes and pretended running through the outside world’s mind, wandering in and through all their doors, breaking exit signs and extinguishing candles, making of the outside world a darkness.

The outside world had a prayer and the prayer when they spoke it, went: Blessed be all of us in this world, our wives and our mothers and our daughters, all except those who choose to squirrel away life in the inside world, where the forest runs deeper and the chimneys smoke clean, where war is untouched and the children they grow tall and covered in sun-skinned bark while we sit jealous and loathing.

When they pray this prayer it sends rain and snow and wind to the inside world, this their god in favor of all that is bitter.

He sat holding a motherless baby and hearing over his shoulders this the prayer of the outside world.

He splayed open his toes and showed his baby that there was nothing between them except a web of more skin. He broke open a lamp and explained that inside was only air and that the light from the bulb was just a smaller version of a candle’s flame. He smiled at the baby and showed his smile and spoke about how teeth were bone and wasn’t this their inside world a beautiful place to be, even as his baby daughter was without a mother and nursed only by the touch of tree-sap on her father’s fingers.

Tonight the outside world took all the sheep from the fields and stretched them to taffy and wrapped their bodies around the trees, turning bark to wool.

This morning the outside world erased all of their faces and redrew their lips and eyes and nostrils with anger and stationed themselves in a line on the outside world bank of the river and glared to the forest until the piles of leaves were smoking, the inside world set to fire.

Yesterday the outside world, during a moment of inside world sleep, they cut off one ear from every inside world person and floated them down the midnight black river, the inside world heads static humming until their one ears grew back and all of the screaming stopped.

His wife, before the tearing and the split of her frame and the baby coming out, she made a coffee held on strands of cinnamon and washed in nutmeg, mornings when rocking chairs, the curved skids, waved delicious moans from the center of the inside world.

His wife, before all the outside world hands laid into her and whispered dirty things to her bursting lungs, she shaped pancakes into stars and drowned the two of them in syrup.

His wife, before she learned of the baby and felt its fisted feet kicking on the shell of her body, she watched every morning the sun rise over the outside world and into their own, begging the wars and the bloody tangles to unwind.

He went in search of a stop to dying and a forever forest, because he wanted this baby without a mother to at least know the shade of trees, the feel of dirt, and the belief in a  life without end.

Long ago the outside world made a bomb. The outside world made a bomb and took it to the sky and rained it down and the land split wide. Long ago the outside world used its outside hands to make ten million bombs and plant them in the ground and water them into soldiers. Long ago the outside world took every sheet of paper and cut them into snowflakes. Long ago the outside world piled all this papered ice on the streets and around the houses and in the trees and set fire to it, smiling as their homemade winter burned.

The inside world and the outside world were never attached. They have no umbilical past, are not conjoined twins. They have no brother sister handshake. The outside world is outside. The inside world is the backside of a flipped coin. The hands in both worlds are hands reaching in.

He tastes hot cocoa, tastes marshmallows. He wraps his hands around this baby girl and rocks her to sleep singing: In this the wind, In this the wind.

Watching her eyes closed, the thin pink veins of her eyelids, the upturn of her slim nose, the sleek curve of her ears, he waits for the sound of a name and hears only ocean waves and sand on sand and the birds in the forest branches that he is trying to protect. This a man with a baby with no name.

There will be no name for his girl. He dips his feet in the river, dreaming of an inside world sealed up and perfected, a well- within solid reins.

He remembers when the outside world severed fingers from the women washing their laundry in the river, dove under with masks and breathing tubes, pulled their hands down and under and cut the knuckles from their soak-wrinkled palms. He remembers when the outside world dug holes like gophers in all the ground, the inside world feet becoming twisted or broken or stretched, the inside world limping its legs, no running away anymore.

His idea was to perform a ceiling in the forest. For this he needed extension cords. He pulled them from the town all strung to lines and spidered them out in the forest. The ends he plugged into the clouds, he dangled in the river, he ran through and under the stacks of pine needles. Orange rays of electricity lighting up the tree trunks, lighting up the leaves, lighting up the branches.

He laid out the cords and lit up the forest and prayed. His  prayer was a dissonance:

Let there be above us this forest a ceiling holding our inside world down.

Let this not be wishful thinking.

Let the outside world stay outside of us and their hands not on our throats and their feet not on our forest floor.

Let the ceiling that we hope for have a jaw wide open for us.

Let what we know as stars be the nails painting this ceiling on over our heads.

When the egg was broken open, a sun was coming over a hill. When that egg was changing to cells the forest was dressed in a short skirt and the wind that was blowing was blowing warm.

In a winter once the outside world bred an army of pure white horses. The outside world manufactured thousands of white parkas with white fur hoods. The outside world placed these people in their white coats with their white hoods atop the flanks of these all those white horses and rode them into the inside world, into the powder white snow, into invisibility.

This was a time when babies were lost. The mouths of wolves, funs, flash fire and all white. This was when the inside world it bent to the outside world screams.

When his wife died, he thought of this. When his baby was born, he thought of this. When it came time for him to move on with the inside world, he didn’t. He stopped. He made a list. He said a prayer and the prayer, it was a list spoken out loud:

Let my baby know the trees, the forest.

Let my baby know a life without death.

Let my baby know peace, a moment without blood.

And let my baby too have a name that sings, a name that means the inside world will have children again, will make and raise and keep children again, will grow again, will live again, will be alive again.

She had a baby and the outside world they filled a pink balloon with helium and tied a white ribbon to its end and handed it to her baby in a field when no one was watching, and the balloon giant and filled, it carried her baby right up into the sun.

She had a baby and the outside world they took clouds from the sky and shaped them with their hands into a monster and brought it to her baby and that baby she leapt on the outside world’s clouds, shaped with hands into a cumulous beast, and was carried screeching skyward.

She had a baby and the outside world took and turned its pacifier into asbestos and its mobile into arrow tips falling and its teething rings into arsenic coated steel and the outside world made its pajamas into asbestos and its drinking water into raw sewage and its toys into loaded guns.

He wanted the forest locked down, wanted to prison away death. He was working on a name for this his motherless baby, her cries in a crib made of maple leaves and elm branches, cottonwood pillows.

Sometimes the rain is metal washers and nuts and bolts and nails. Sometimes the rain is copper screws. Sometimes the rain is galvanized buckets, filled with spent ammo, spattering the ground.

The outside world hates the inside world. The outside world is jealous of the inside world. The outside world loathes the inside world.

Dig down in the inside world and there is spring water, light rain and colors. Dig down in the outside world and the hole pools with blood, the daggers pinch out, and our stomachs feel like they always are, forever pitted and empty.

All there is, is the naming of the baby.