Field Camp
Steaming skin and little green men by the roadside
all tuckered out. All just come from marching the asphalt
road, ankles held tightly in leather corsets as black
and unyielding as the road itself. Perhaps it would be
better if we just left it at that, but by writing the
beginning we've already written the end. I can't quite
conjure it right now; I can't say for sure if my memory
serves correctly, whether or not the story I know
is exactly the same one that someone else told me before.
It feels familiar, and it must, but recollections are
flexible, like the way identical lengths of thread
unspool in different loops and patterns when tipped out of
a wicker basket, or the palimpsest pages of scribes unsure of
their words. Whatever. It isn't important. What's important was
how we trod out into the dark together, our shadows grazing
the skeletal ones of palm trees standing in planar rank, weak
starlight held snugly in their uppermost branches. We forgot
ourselves, hawked addled half-glares of narcoleptic insomniacs
with each other through vision blotted out by night and wood.
Where were we then? I remember also how tired we were,
stacking stones till the early liminal morn amid the fanfare
of rain on leaf litter, our clothes soaked through and
sunbaked in lazy spirals nobody bothered to cartograph.
Not a word was spoken. Hushed. In tongue-tied silence.
They would have heard all of us. Everyone understood
without comment, lain out upon a mattress of asymmetrical
ground and bedrock, the touch of the earth moving slowly
beneath our weary bodies. When we awoke we gathered
up the day behind us, the hours snipped into pieces like
a broken china plate, and tried to arrange them back in
the correct order the best we could manage. Only then did
any of us feel close to being real, dizzied with the heaviness
of our own lives and from sipping the well of soil with
sealed teeth and painted skin. Salt bridges across our chins.
People know how this goes; it's gone on for years. No need
for pity, just promise me that the story has an ending to it.