Arvo Pärt and circumstance are trying to tell me it’s time to talk about Him or talk about Her. I love modern recordings—the sniffles and squeaks. Little worlds like bubbles coming up from the bottom of the swimming pool. I will miss the sharks. I wonder if anyone will take to eating those bright tropical fish after the last exhausted haddock is pulled over the side and beaten to death with a baseball bat. I spent my childhood in chlorine. I used to find the bucket with the chlorine sticks. They were like radiant violations of the rules. I’d play with them in the nobody of my childhood and leave them around carelessly among sisters, cats and dogs.
I’m saying this about garages and gasoline, the gasoline I used to pour in my shoes before I went to school, the school that was a minimum security prison where one teacher had cancer and the other was wall-eyed, the seagulls who came down at lunch, our lunch in the dirt between the parking lot and the Mormon seminary like the 1st Presbyterian Sunday School fifteen miles out to sea with the fat-assed teachers finally drowned, a modicum of anarchy among the waves and the jokes of fishing for seagulls with clotheslines and fishing hooks, Alka-Seltzer breadcrumbs for mutilating birds, lunch hour gangs of fist fights and sodomy. I am telling you about the skinheads who stopped by the garage because the only way they could ask for God’s love was to ask me for weapons. I am telling about the way we would tie ourselves to plastic patio chairs and throw ourselves in the swimming pool. I am telling you about the arms on fire, the arms and legs cut open, cut into letters, the empty shotgun in your mouth that even though you know it’s empty still scares the hell out of you when you pull the trigger, nights in apartment buildings like cheap motels, the white supremacist’s Cheyenne mother working graveyard out at the airport, car busted an hour by bus through the night, stars drowned above parking lots and self-storage barbed wire halogen lights, nights getting drunk on motel televised pessimism and going out with your eyes shut to run blind across the six-lane street. I am telling you about the church of Nothing we Indians built in our parking lots, tossing off, in the House that Squaw built. I am, like Tim, a Nigger Jew Indian, and I want you to qualify me. I’m sitting here over my supper listening to the little girl screaming, Wigwam and fireworks, sucking down my curried anchovies by the tablespoon, and I beg you, I beg like a trout, like a fifteen year old girl, like the first fuzzy squirming in the Bear’s Uterus—qualify me. Please. Cause I can’t tell you unless you’re listening. It won’t be something you step across in the course of the day. It’s got to go in and plant itself in your spleen and grow in there like math music spinning outward into a complex and expanding shell. What is math anyway but math music underwater, math music with the piano submerged? Tim kept swimming down and banging his face against the bottom of the swimming pool trying to figure out where the math had gone. It was in the water! The math was the music in the water, suspended, like miracle Fibonacci fish, Fish of Math before the children of Bilateral Symmetry swam off to the House of God. Two plus two is four whether the piano is at the bottom of the swimming pool or comfortably played by a sixteen year old future Harvard alum in his mother’s living room. But Tim didn’t have the living room. He was down at the bottom of the pool trying to figure out where the math had gone until he finally had to come up for air and chose instead to breathe water. But nobody can breathe water! I told you there is nothing to write today. There was Tim breathing water at the bottom anyway, telling me Summer.
Tim was alone in the shallow end of the wave pool at the popular water park. Tim was alone at the popular water park, in the wave pool, sitting with his shirt on in the shallow end aged thirteen. Aged thirteen he rode the bus to the popular water park by himself every morning. Tim rode the bus by himself to the popular water park every morning and sat alone in the shallow end of the wave pool with his shirt on aged thirteen. Tim sat in the shallow end of the wave pool by himself at the popular water park with his shirt on everyday aged thirteen. Aged thirteen at the end of the day he took the bus home alone everyday. Everyday alone Tim took the bus home from the popular water park aged thirteen. Tim took the bus everyday to the popular water park aged thirteen and sat alone in the shallow end with his shirt on in the wave pool at the popular water park and alone everyday aged thirteen Tim took the bus home. Tim took the bus to the popular water park everyday by himself aged thirteen and by himself everyday Tim took the bus home. That was Summer aged thirteen.
Tim said to me his Jewel. You know what I mean when I say, he said to me his Jewel? I mean his Mind’s Diamond. I mean his Throne. His Mind’s Diamond, his Throne, was in the nets past Kodiak rounding the Aleutians—islands of the North Pacific unpeopled ever, islands like black emeralds in the fog of your mind, seeing the spray and twelve foot swells against the cliffs, alone in the infinite and utterly content to keep on being so: the world on the outside of your head. Try that, you denizens of upholstered libraries, you plumbers of carpeted salons, you mathematicians. Try going out past Kodiak, lying your way aboard a purse seiner age sixteen, sailing six weeks out of Homer, bound for Filipino paychecks in a one-whore town, aft in the nets with your bib down masturbating under the cliffs stoned in sea spray and solitude—the jewel of your mind outside your mind—a Magic Mountain standing contented in the sea. Unless you understand this, you will never understand what follows. The soul is outside the body. The music is in the water when the piano is in the pool. The math is in the music. The math is the music when the music is submerged. The Mountain is real.
Andrew Haley’s poems, short stories and translations have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Zone, Quarterly West, The Smoking Poet, Stop Smiling, Otis Nebula and Sugar House Review.
Editor's note: This is Part 5 of a six-part series. We'll run a section each Monday through August 23.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 6.
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