this was a good christmas

Grandmother Jobes

Grandmother Jobes, ninety and tiny, lived alone and knew no medicine beyond occasional rose hips and balanced meals. Alongside her upright piano that had not known a proper tune for decades, she would sit cutting coupons and fastidiously knitting to keep some semblance of posture in her already arthritic hands. Curiously strong, they'd not cease until evening rest at best. Although, if one might pray the rosary in their sleep, bead after worn plastic bead, it would be her. She needed to keep busy to keep the ghosts of solitude at bay. One quarter century had passed since her John L. had passed. She had not much longer to wait to see him again and have her words of undying finally spoken to her in return once more.

Funerals had become her weekly service, but were finally quieting. Though tedious, her attendances, even for those only as distant acquaintances in life, were hatch marks on a prison cell wall or torn rings of a paper advent chain. Each had brought her closer to her own rest of permanence.

There weren't any more pieces of furniture, colored glass, or items left smelling of sweet mildew, whose undersides had not been marked with a piece of masking tape and a name. Her frame could not grow much smaller within its latex glove-thin skin. All those who knew her, loved her for her unbounded generosity and biblical selflessness. Though tiny, she had nothing and everything left to give.

As we pulled away from her quaint white post-war ranch, this December 26th in the rain, dad would honk per usual, and she would return with cursory waves, half-paying attention to us, half to her plants needing tending to.

BEST OF 2006

1. Joanna Newsom "Ys"
2. Beirut "The Gulag Orkestar"
3. Mogwai "Mr. Beast"
4. The Mars Volta "Amputechture"
5. Sunset Rubdown "Shut Up I Am Dreaming"
6. The Decemberists "The Crane Wife"
7. Yo La Tengo "I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass!"
8. Comets On Fire "Avatar"
9. Bonnie Prince Billy "The Letting Go"
10. Thomas Dybdahl "One day you will dance for me, New York City."

Black Water

I wanted to show you how I'd taste the ocean on your skin under the searchlight moon and pinhole stars and upon the soft shore of sweet North Carolina blackwater. But instead we would sit silent wanting to hold hands. We'd trade affection for eyes cast upward.

Here the eastern sky would be sliced by a sliver of persimmon. Its hairline crack would open the darkness beneath the patient moon, beckoning it to drop as a silver dollar might disappear from magician's hand to chest pocket.

We'd sit and fathom the G-forces reshaping the astronaut's bodies flat, like gravity and limestone, as they outrocketed every sonic boom. Yet the moon stayed put while the ribbon of light faded until its burned ghost upon my lost eyes was all that remained.

We, the white devils, have rehewn these quiet marshes for three centuries past while our ghost piers and flaking whitewash of fence and house seem to be forgetting our father's names.

The Chowan once paddled these shallow inlets, stacking their middens ashore after endless bountiful feasts. The cypress grew taller. The heron flew thicker. The stars burned brighter in a time when there was no need to dream up beauty and life that never was.

"Okisko had told him about the Chowan, a broad river from the north that divided the Chowanook Indians, who gave it their name. Here was a good country where crops were heavier, forests deeper and trees taller. In the spring the herring and greater fish also swam up in schools to spawn. There were small creeks of sweet black water, which drained the heavy swamps of cypress and hardwoods."

– Roanoke Hundred

The butterflies have long flown away
leaving my stomach an empty calm
and longing for the time I knew no better–
When diving head first and blind into love had no option;
When I’d always have Robert Smith with whom I’d wrung the misery;
When tears could find me.

Now I ride bikes alone and silent
across leaf-caked concrete
past the hum of metal halide streetlamps and yellow blinking signals
and rally comfort in just that my heart still beats.

Life is beautiful. But it is more beautiful to be shared.