Red,
We’re tired of descending city bridges. Idling in the apexes, wanting so anxiously to predict tomorrow’s weather. Our death professor says how many priests landed in the river on black tuesday, how our collapse will be darker, how hell is what usually follows death.
We long for a simple ride, Red, a flat one, so we return to Seagate with our basket full of candles and blankets and rope. We’re hoping the ocean sound will ebb the pain a little, that we’ll find some relief in a landscape void of spires and conical shapes.
It’s working, we think, aside from the pale empty in this light. Makes us miss caribbean winters, or Greece, and you can still buy a cold beer on the boardwalk.
Old men dance behind us, unmasked and drinking and speaking fluent Russian, and the sand is grey. We lay down Davvy’s blanket, make a little castle. We read a poem about camellias, another about beams and motes. They read,
In the case of lost cabin pressure, apply your own mask before assisting your brother.
There’s a liner on the horizon, Red, a haze, and the shape of it reminds us of Pyramid Lake. How our brother took us there once to teach us the power of removal, to show how thirst is so suddenly moved by water.
Like how our grandpa painted scenes with absence, he said, how he reinvented the primary colors of hunger. Designs like what rain does to desert sand.
Our brother shot at those summer stars like they were birds, man, drove his truck blindly into the nothing. The lake bed was barren so we slept in its center, woke dry mouthed to morning rain.
This is bad, he repeated. Real bad, like moon sand becoming mud, man, like sinking sand. This is bad.
That’s real terror, Red. A dead lake becoming lake again. Our brother threw the whole of our camp into his truck bed, no time to put out the fire. He drove us like hell to the desert’s edge.
Then the sky opened like a sail, just in time, and we discovered a hot spring shaded by birds’ nests and lemon trees. We drank whiskey there for four days laughing, slept naked in the shelter of the water and told stories about our ancestral home.
Caught falling flowers on our tongues for breakfast, little white ones.
I still smell the lawn clippings, our brother said, can you? I still hear the cathedral bells.
These gloves are blue, Red, this mask is. Davvy’s poem book and blanket are blue, and we feel the city hunger deepen as the sea blues to white against these shoreline rocks. Anger at these unmasked men on the boardwalk, how they’ve chosen to kill and be killed so mundanely.
Dad says we’re descending, how the city’s worst is over. But we remind him how many crashes happen while riding downhill, how he once collapsed a lung cruising through mountain shade. We ask him to remember how bad that hurt.
And it’s not all bad, Red, we’re alright. Home safe now, having mimosas and cantaloupe with Dolly. Forgot to celebrate Easter so we wake for it today, put on the blue suit we wore to our brother’s wedding in the red woods. Hair tied up nice and tight, it’s raining, and we pull a flower from the window to pin to our lapel.
He is risen, Red. He is risen indeed. Let’s just not forget that he died.
Dyl