We jammed beer cans
down on the ends of branches, dead pines, young spruces, spread them in a wide
arc in front of her old tree fort. There was deer shit everywhere coming down
here through the woods, easy to spot on the electric green moss spreading crazy
over each small slope, covering the rotting wood that crumbled underfoot,
sponging down around my shoes and springing back up, even greener. The night before
we took the ferry across the harbour, fog like an open mouth, to a basement
country blowout and danced hopping circles ducking under low ceilings, choked
on twang. The little rifle’s up over my shoulder when we jump the creek. “Aim
high,” she tells me, “like one circle above the scope.” The cans spin when we
shoot clean through, cracking the barrel down again and again braced on our
hips, fingers going black at the tips from reloading. Smoke curls out of the
nozzle and goes off in the wind. The platform shifts along with the narrow
pines it’s jammed between, half of it is scavenged plywood the other birch
branches. The thick nail points, driven through at all angles, worn smooth from
feet and hands and legs for years. Out in the home-woods of a near perfect
stranger, our territories get so fluid the farther from our fixed points. The
echoes of these places call back the quick yelps and short, wild bursts of your
own kid-shadow tearing through low branches, slapping them aside, howling after
the friends you’ve marked as it, howling after chase.
Four baby raccoons
fell out of the ceiling into mounds of old insulation piled on the floor while
the mother yowled from the newly bared beams and the swells of the Atlantic
grew huge behind us. I wasn’t dressed for a demo but still, I held a
sledgehammer. Punching out support beams at their base so they swung, like those
narrow padded punching bags in a funhouse, from the ceiling. We yanked them
down and threw them from the second storey deck, sawed them, hauled them down to
the cliff with the tractor and set them on fire. The sky the kind of overcast
that goes out for hours your eyes can’t differentiate. He was so proud, his
chest stuck out amidst the rubble we were making. Smile under his dust mask so
big it made the edges ride up to his eyes, the blue of them showing in slits,
the blue of them the same colour as the barn he now owned, so lopsided we had
to stay out of the one side of it or it’d tip. Your heart rate slows near the
ocean, there’s proof. It sits back on it’s haunches and gets humbled, same as
you. It’s roar-turned-tremor and moors of the moans it lashes tight cast off
into the swell. I took an axe, I drove the tractor, I pumped the keg and ripped
out walls with my bare hands and thought here, to own land at the very edge of
all east, at least there was one place we could all wash up. The barn stood
shoddy and I knew we stood the same and like everything, our foundation was
shifting into the sea.
Wandering their house
like a love sick ghost, trailing the cats, pacing the painted wood floors.
Meeting every morning square on at 6am on the wrong side of having slept yet.
Fog comes through the window with the fog horns from the harbour trailing. Low
slow notes that amble and bump their way around the dense vapoured air. I coil
low in the blankets and feel the start of their lives together spreading out
around me from every corner in this old house. Too big to take in my lungs.
Noting how the room on the plank wood shelf within arm’s length from the shower
fits a beer perfect and how many times I knocked the fucking cactus over off
the night-table. How their clothes go together on the rack 7ft above the floor
cause they are both giants, pulling them down and wearing them all at once,
rolling around on the living room floor. The sense of your loyalty taking a
rest under this roof and a deep breath instead. After these months it seems the
hardest thing to do but you feel your body settle and your teeth part to a
slowed pulse, your flag that’s been snapping for so long folds and you get your
colours back from the wind. You wake in the dark from dreams where you’re
there, snores from the body beside you, awake and asleep to the same sounds and
the safety net of this place wraps the ragged tight out of you. There are times
you need to feel your own power as hectic and loose as it can get, slamming the
boat to all sides, hard to asunder. If you’ve lost the sense of what it means
to go out at all angles and breathe jagged you lose the assurances of a feral
capacity rooted down, shaking in your center, coiled and ready to spring at the
word. We’re all teeth in the dark.
The promise here,
your friends and how they are. Thinking of all the nights our last words ended
up in the Atlantic. Howling through the fog, the space between piers, time
between beers, all the ways we’ve broken down and come back to the Citadel,
it’s prodding soft slope lurching over the city. Our bold soft hearts like
sponges in this dense wet air, salt rimmed and reeling. True to each other’s
forms, tangled around and haunting these bright clapboard houses. All the blood
we’ve left smeared mixing with the salt in the air, grey days we took for
fortitude or just learning to make our own fun. Not many cities slope so sharp
you can roll through downtown and end up in the ocean but then not many cities
are like this one. I loved them all here first, gape-jawed and understanding
the type of burn that takes up through you for good. Flinging their finally
warm August bodies into Tea Lake, lagging behind to watch as they hopped rocks
at low tide out to the ocean, the setting sun pummeling around their soft
bodies and clear through your own back to the Crab Shack and thinking we are so
young we are so goddamn young, while they feint the light getting burned in
your brain as shadows you’ll remember well past when some looming dark scraps
what good sense of memory you rattled around with as long as you could. We took
blood here, we were all together. You can talk of coasts as defining but this
one is ours.
