The Moody Historian
Brett Clay Miller
The Moody Historian
By Brett Clay Miller
Copyright 2011 Brett Clay Miller
Contents
Seasonal Reflective Disorder
The Benevolent Timekeeper
Dodging Raindrops
Trail Map
Silent Partner
A Question of Time
Sandia
Rural Perspective
Home Alone
An End to All Expletives
Drawing Nye
Fringe Runners
Please Remove Your Hands from My Neck of the Woods
Gag Reflex
Partners in Crime
Unlikely Companions
Naming Day
Phase Two
The Twenty-Six Cent Sketchbook
Survivalist's Creed
Cedar Ridge Revisited
Unspoken
Wings and Thumbs
Boxcar
We Only Talk When You're Sleeping
Common Ground
The Politics of Leaving
Selling the Truth
Seven Days down the Tracks
Soul Squeak
Enigma
Dancing with One Foot
Cat's Eye
Mile-High
Moss Grows Fat
Retreating from Plaid
Preparing to Junct
Verscosity
Sabbatical
Exorcising Liberties
Ignoring the Recipe
About The Author
* * *
Seasonal Reflective Disorder
This unexpected micro-adventure has awakened with autumn breath, sporting a glorious and somehow tactile azure that can no longer be constrained to the edges. In residence for not yet a week, it will surely understay its welcome.
Today, we cross the line from gray to silver; from yellow to lemon. We play tag in the mist and accomplish variables. It is warm for the season, and our blood quickens at the thought of it. The wind is full of its own smell, simultaneously fickle and perfect; it sings in our lungs while the season nips at our heels, and we thrill in the chase. Though our colors will pale in the final run, our golds will shine and coppers blush in a month of such Octobers.
The first scouts of fall have truly arrived, flying gold and crimson pennants. As sure as if God has placed a pen in my hand and gently closed my fingers around it, I search for words that I haven’t used at this season seventeen times before, like friends you only invite to parties. These runners have no legs or motives of their own but move with the swiftness and beauty of the breath that carries them. They appear at random gatherings, throw themselves under cars, and spontaneously incite chaos. Most will leave without ceremony, and those that remain will quietly feed the next generation, so that children will continue to laugh and point, and adults will recall when once they laughed and pointed.
The Benevolent Timekeeper
Morning finds the world with one eye open, fixed on the kinder light of dawn. It is from this point that the day knits itself together with threads of hope, excitement, and dread, salvaged in equal spools from the discarded robes of the blackest night, the resulting garment now gaily dyed and boldly arrayed.
Afternoon adopts an interim twinge that fills my lungs with memories and dreams: of brashness the crimson of seven maples down; of directions less hastily chosen. Sunlight beads on my skin, as if I am saturated with the benevolence of May and not encumbered by autumnal tendencies. While I concern myself with errands of motion, planning archaeological digs for the ruins of my memory and yearning for a thought even mildly provocative, God speaks colors in the sky that my lips could never touch. During this private sojourn, I choose and traverse a patch of emerald in an otherwise asphalt sea. It is in this place that peace rediscovers me and curls up at my feet. I witness mothers captivating their children with fantastic tales as I root for small bits of public knowledge. When it is time to reverse the trajectory, I seek out the same green and find that it not only forgives but embraces my transgression with the grace and beauty of its creator.
Evening is a fleeting but magical study in smoked amber, wherein the very young and otherwise fortunate are playfully burnished in the gaze of twilight. Youthful shouts and barefoot opportunities resound in the distance as the day surrenders to violet: almost sullen, as if petitioning for an alternate ending. It becomes apparent that what the cicadas can only guess, the crickets have always known. For a moment, the world slips away, the clouds release the moon (swollen with its best orange), and I know my place, like a pushpin knows Brazil, or the Galapagos. Tonight, we put on a grin, and it fits like new cotton.
Dodging Raindrops
A miniature spider blazes a trail through the hair on my arm, and I remove him with an easy breath, a study in nonchalance. As if to avenge my insolence, the wind picks up around me, and the clouds begin to boil. The afternoon folds over on itself to land and spits promises of a thorough dousing. The moment has no ready words, and I can imagine nothing more beautiful by virtue of its resistance. We move through these hours as we do a rainstorm: heads down; rushing; trying not to get wet. Even so, we are perplexed when the days become dry and move behind us. We can only hope to be doused like the muddy children we once were, splashing in the yard at the height of tornado season, when smells belonged to those who wore them first.
Trail Map
What speaks to me that has no mouth is sure to have my ear. In this land of heavy walkers, when it is the trees that draw me, how am I to render the trees? It is infinitely easier to smile when I can breathe, and breath comes more readily when it is being taken from me in the heights, where time, if and when it is measured, is gauged in distance to and from the treeline.
Silent Partner
He only speaks when the wind blows. But when he talks, his brothers and sisters across the region give song. Summer knows his voice most intimately and begs into the night for tale after tale. Winter finds him stark and barren, collecting his thoughts in relative silence. But today the sun shines, and the wheat grows. He is content to close his eyes, dig his toes into the soil, and. Just. Breathe.
A Question of Time
When these woods first began to breathe, the soil was something more than 'undeveloped'. This village knows and keeps its place, for ours is a cold that that cannot be painted, and the wind speaks most frankly at dusk. Twilight casts its eyes low, depicting runs of fallen gold that rustle in the hush, while hickoried smoke plays silent tag with our nostrils. It is only here that we all are children; caught in the thrill; out after dark. We inhale each other, run the bases, and learn of stories best told at arm's length. We take nothing but time and pictures: images that care little of what the years will say; whether we will honor this place when faced with gray and barely breathing.
Sandia
The trees turn to glass and kiss the ground, hard. We cook pasta on gas stoves in the dark, abandon our homes and gather wide-eyed in the theatre. We become trained to spot power company trucks, the drivers of which become overnight heroes. Ice rains loudly from the heights, and tree-bones bristle by the curb. We are habitually thick and fundamentally unchanged, but we begin to sense an underlying theme: what cannot rest on the bough of a pine without displacing the white breath of winter is of little use when all is ash and rubble that was formed by the hands of men.
Rural Perspective
My awakening was painful, though not without beauty; a clumsy and protracted season of rusty-sharp detail recalled from a hands-and-knees vantage. Even still, my eyes are a bad habit, drawn by the parts instead of the prophesy. At times like these, the breeze is sudden and newly foreign. I pull it into my mouth when I stub my toe on his words. I test its agenda with a swollen tongue and taste familiarity in my f
orgetfulness. I know I am wrong and not wrong, such that my head aches from the bowing and the holding high. But I've learned about choices and the capacity to choose; about who's in charge (and that he's taller than me); that it must not be flying if your belly scrapes the gravel; that you can be brought to your knees, or you can kneel. Now, more than ever, I thank him for the long in longsuffering.
Home Alone
An out-loud God lives inside me, but today he seems under his breath. I seek him with the heart of a boy, who sometimes hears the birds and finds them beautiful and at other times ignores them completely; who loses interest when the one he is chasing takes flight. What better authority on human nature than the man who was also God? What better partner with whom to explore the bleeding edge than the God who was cut for man? We unwittingly seek his peace and adventure in places that will never know him. It's time to attribute the creation to the creator and move on in peace.
An End to All Expletives
“I was up for days that night,” he says, reinforcing his stench with a fresh blanket of cigarette smoke. "Lovers stretched and stroked their hair and laughed about last Tuesday, while the natives delved in daresays, staging postural coups and ubiquitous upheavals in ink." He's referring to his uncle's wedding, or a festival on the beach, or some other celebration relevant only by virtue of its capacity for disaster and endangerment of random passers-by. Truth tumbles easily from his lips, self-annotating as it chooses a trajectory, parting flesh and all intentions with heat-seeking accuracy. Poised on the front end of a rare show of interest, he speaks the extra mile with his brow, erecting a spontaneous arch under which the world where such things occur may or may not change, and may or may not need to.
Drawing Nye
I wonder how she would feel to see her words next to his. A comparison would be unconscionable; still, she has made her way to my breakfast table.
Fringe Runners
She must have forgotten her lips were moving when she invoked the label in my direction: of those whose decimals are early; whose plan is unpublished. Her words are seedlings in a plastic cup, sprouting in a preschool classroom on a rainy night.
Please Remove Your Hands from My Neck of the Woods
The blur of this city and her people about me is a distortion I encourage. Her gifts come wrapped in dialogue, loosely tied with sentence fragments, given for little or no reason. But in a city so full of lights, why is it so hard to see? Because the generation has long died that would speak it to my mouth, will I turn a blind ear? Here in the clutch, the city breathes from the hip. Posture is a tool, and words can make it storm or shine. As such, I want the trail I lay on paper to be the path to your back door; something substantial that you can put a match to on Friday and still dress your wounds with on Sunday.
Gag Reflex
Will an urban coffee-shop thirst proceed from this uninvited drought, or will a bolstered resolve lurch forward, embracing its underdog legacy in true hero fashion? Self-inflicted mega-doses of input have apparently smothered my output, reducing it to occasional drips. Words fail me. I am in desperate need of a drink, and it may well be that I need only swallow.
Partners in Crime
What can be done when songs best heard at dusk jump their cue, or, conversely, refuse to get out of bed? Mobility is the secret. When happenstance snippets become workaday stalkers, I quietly take them captive. We spend the day tallying firsts and naming things. By the time they are free to go, they have forgotten we were not always friends.
Unlikely Companions
You already know that my words are not butter knives, but neither are they always razor-sharp. Too often, the blade is nicked, bedecked with random shreds of flesh. I am not discouraged. The stone that dulls my knife has the capacity to sharpen it, and hunger keeps me on the sniff. Theoretical edges are of little use. If I am to work, and thus to play, it will be with knives.
Naming Day
It was a fat August afternoon, ninety degrees and unlike any other. It took thirty-plus hours to convince you to join us. You strained. You arched your neck. You were immediately a star. After, I stood outside by the newspaper box, wherein the facts and figures sat their nests like chocolates, waiting for a George and a Franklin to set them free. I sucked on a habit I would later give up, feeling suddenly and completely whole. Much later we would take you home in the blue wagon (it had good, cold air and one bum wheel) and wonder what next. Hands that once could scarcely open and close quickly learned to change radio stations and write in cursive. Even today, you perfect yourself as April in the eyes of the sun.
Phase Two
Four middles make a first for the one who's been hungry since birth. Second to him and third to the first comes the hayhead, his easy laugh belying matters of sequence. My clock rests dazedly at three, where once it knew only 1. Welcome to the world, boys. Remind me to tell you what comes after.
The Twenty-Six Cent Sketchbook
Memories, like postcards, seldom arrive intact. Somewhere in the postman’s bag, they silently incubate; warming to the idea of their eventual fame; concocting olfactory memorials; covertly lobbying for exaggerated or reduced significance. The solution, I think, is not to avoid the mail, but to open it more carefully.
Survivalist's Creed
The touch of the sun has stripped me of reason and left me with its plural as recompense. The shape of the wind delivers a flurry of bad advice in strident half-whispers, urging me to pack a bag. But I seem to remember that night falls and winter schemes, so I hold my breath for another day, telling myself that though I smell yesterday, I need not become yesterday. Today may delight in drawing itself out, but a month of Wednesdays down the page, when unexpected memory-kites begin to flutter in the breeze, a martyr's grace will be achieved. I must remember that retrospect is a moody historian, who wears glasses only for reading and driving.
Cedar Ridge Revisited
I have forgotten more than I can chew, and what I remember is a mixed plate of greens (the bitter closer to tongue than the sweet), but it is with what remembers me that I must contend. I was once a boy who colored on his wall; then a man who colored on his skin; now a wretch relearning the wear of his flesh. It’s been a few miles since the storm, but I’m only inches from it, wrestling with the imprints of a much younger man: the smell of bubblegum from a freshly opened package of baseball cards; the mournful birdcall that once woke a lakeside child. Such songs cannot be unsung once they have found their voice. Still, in the end, as it was in the middle, our peace is only as real as the methods by which we seek it. In the end, though there is much yet to say, though the wind plucks from my hand what I would not give, it is good to be on this side of the fence.
Unspoken
It was a cruel needle that drew her forehead together just so, fashioning a creased flag atop a singularly beautiful pole. She carries her blonde close to the nape and watches her food like a strange movie. A woman with a strong nose and a soft mouth, she sheds dreams from her eyes, and her hair dances with an undisguised penchant for the smell of sunlight. He knows himself as far as the door, but her perhaps only halfway. She is not his, still he is tempted to bite as she tumbles from the tree like fruit in a rainstorm, parting the air with an economy glide, putting a name to her limbs and a face to his desire. They send each other looks like standard mail (slow and mostly unnoticed). Hers is the dusk on his lips, yet he lets it fall without a lick. He is trying not to appear rehearsed; checking his watch; grateful for a face with no eyes to accuse him; thankful for hands that have no sex.
Wings and Thumbs
As the crows begin to gather both up- and downtown, the working man begins his exodus, white-knuckled grip on the wheel. Between the metal and the man simmers a tenuous accord. Their pecking order a mystery, the birds oblige and take their cue, perching in neat rows on the wires and shifting in time to private rhythms. Many years of watching have taught them well: trees give shade, but men cast shadows.
Boxcar
The no
t-so-stranger interrupts our urban face-off, pushing through in all his garish clamor. He dispenses news of characters we can barely imagine, and we secretly admire the art of the dare before turning back on ourselves, shaking off momentary notions of otherwise, snubbing what-ifs like a one-night stand.
We Only Talk When You're Sleeping
He’s behind the wheel when KXEW hits the air every Sunday at 7 p.m., painfully aware that free time, in truth, can be quite costly. At the market, he draws a straight bead to the aisle where his love waits, ignoring girls without glasses in the freezer section and oblivious of cashiers named Stacy with “1 years of service”. He is home within the hour with everything he needs, fed and asleep by the time the signal fades. How can someone that I've stared at for hours, whose intermittent calls have comforted me from a distance, become such a stranger? Having called the bluff between tasting and devouring, he can no longer spell the noises that escape him, and his arrivals are but prerequisite to departure. Today, he materialized again after lunch, perched atop the fence as per his custom. He is no longer concerned with attorneys, or neighbors, or developers with papers. Pressing past the silence in his eyes, I launch into the usual query. He is gone by the time I reach the question mark, and I must shift my hopes to the morrow.
