By J. Michael Kulyk
Excerpts:
Anabasis
&
Chapter 8 "The Fledged"
�2002
Sting Of Time
(Hunger And The Infinite Moment)
-Painted life, written love, and concrete will- the Infinite Moment and the Sting of Time, all the flanks of life whispering in the night, on the palate of the tongue, on the concrete breath of winter's bite. In the silent violence of Dawn, in the dusky sweeps of twilight on the roofs. In the eyes of a brother, some conjecture- home- change, a staggering awareness. In a sister's voice, ululation of secrets confound, and strings of musical thought, in laps of revelation and rejoice.
Genuflections on the Ocean of spermy life. Full and plump with the ripeness of earth, as she lets ride the tide on her milky breast, and casts a sigh aloft in the thunderheads of rapturous T-cells, grown fat with storm. Dig, dig, dig, a thousand black doves drove and mill, drove and mill, up over yonder the cloud enfolded hill.
Be free Child of The Rise.
-painted life, written love, and concrete will- horizons of fleeting Suns, and illusory flame-light, candelabra, a thousand seductions of the moon, in millions of crystal notes, in song, on brows, in tears, juicy by kisses, on closed eye-lids, Venus' fly-trap, lashed in the glorious seasons, spat Green, Gold, Brown and White! Dig, dig, dig, a thousand black doves drove and mill, drove and mill, up over yonder the cloud enfolded hill.
All within the painted life, written love, and concrete will- a faun grunt in the dewy night- the Infinite Moment, the Sting of Time- .
Chapter Eight: The Fledged
Gwen, looked up from her shoelaces, scanned the opening between the streets, upward to the sky, "Lucien... What do you 'spose heaven's like?"
Lucien's gray eyes, unflinching, he smiled and responded, "Gwen, if there is a heaven. . . it's this. . . sitting on the back stoop."
The two breathed the cool, salubrious, air.
Lucien thought about how exceptional his grandmother's house was. Burrowed communally tight as most northern houses were, much different than the charted, spacious, sprawl of Piedmont North Carolina. This was the land of his Mother, and his Mother's Mother, and it henceforth produced great impressions on him. He loved the dead, stale, odors of this old steel town.
Once great floods fell upon the valley, and he still heard the rabid screams and moans of the city's ghosts as they were carried away by the tremendous wall of water. He imagined how the ominous, unsuspecting, wave of death must have been minutes, even moments, building up to the great Flood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889. He imagined the lost sadness in the eyes of the morbid, death-shrouded, mothers as they tended to their everyday tasks. He wondered what the sky must have looked like with sheets of rain that pelted away at the soft folds of earth as it did for days at a time. The taverns stuffed with the workmen's cheer. Steelers talking of the rain, the curs�ed rain, which just up the valley was beginning to spring holes in the dam.
"It's a crying shame I say, this rain, here! Good God, have mercy!" Steven cried as he swigged his draught and wiped away the sweat that teemed upon his brow. His hair mopped up in the same sweat looking as if he had just walked out of the rain himself, but was merely hot with an unconscious compulsion to escape an unforeseen torrential doom.
"Had to move all the stuff up to the attic. The damn river is risin'. Always happens in rains like this. We'll just have to ride it out like we always do. Ain't no strangers to flood here in Johnstown, eh?" Steven spoke into the dead air. His hand mounted upon his brow that refilled with sweat once again.
Not one eye in the tavern blinked, as they sprawled down the dusty wooden bar, and gazed into their golden beers as if genuflecting to some lost thought- cursing in the antediluvian night-cloaked afternoon, as if it were their last quasi-night, the shadow in which the earth was to swallow them up, and slake them into her lifting, swollen, breast.
Jonsey looked up into Steven's listless eyes, his Greco-Roman nose held strong like the steel he helped to forge.
"In the damn mill, brother, there's leaks all over. They had to shut the thing down, I tell you. I had to swallow three days work." Jonsey said, a grimace molded onto his stony face.
"Swallow six days with that there drinkin' of yours, Jonsey," replied Steven who was the only of the gloomy bar to laugh.
Silence swallowed the atmosphere again, and Jonsey remarked casually, as if not so surprised, "It's about 3:00. Look at it outside. . . Might as well be 3:00 in the morning."
Steven was the only one to observe the darkness of the day. He looked out the window and spied a silhouette.
Outside the tavern, walked Mrs. Margaret Schmitsky soaked by the rain, and a lightening stroke strewn brilliant upon her weather beaten brow. Her eyes pinned in a squint upon the road, she peered into the tavern window, and felt the cold complacency ooze from out of the usually loud and brawly bar. She shook her head and wondered why in the world those men could be drinking away the afternoon when, "if they were good Christians", they should be at home with their families. She thought of Steven's three sons, and Jonsey's wife, who he had just married two months before. Then, she flashed in a hot thought- thankful for the safety of her husband out of town in Pittsburgh making a supply pick up.
She walked past the steel mill, and saw the frozen train, blurred through the thick haze of rain. She felt the paper bag in her arms begin to soften. She prayed she could carry her groceries the next five blocks to her hungry kids. Her son Jason, she left in the care of her daughter Debbie, must have been rolling his only toy, the red fire-wagon, around on the carpet. She imagined his joyous smile as it glowed in his mental dramas of heroics enough to match those of a Greek Epic. Margaret thought of how Debbie would skip around the house, riding like a cowboy her only broomstick. Margaret would then tell her daughter, who frightened like a doe, the story of the Salem Witches, and Debbie crying in grief when she got to the part where all the witches were hanged. Margaret warned her daughter never to ride a broomstick "'lest their neighbors think they were witches".
She still stared at the train as it stood at rest at this hour. Though it seemed the town was immersed in darkness, she had trouble believing it was only 3:03 pm. Usually, in the afternoon, the steam would be rising, and the train would be a serpent at writhe. The river's water was already submerging the tracks. Now the mighty machine lay still, and a growing pain filled Mrs. Margaret Schmitsky.
"My, the end of the world is at hand, I can just feel it. When I get home, I'm gonna hold my sweet babies to my breast, and squeeze as tight as I can. Who knows, if this keeps up-" she closed her eyes and ejected in a sigh, "will tomorrow ever come?"
Willie Farmaker, 69, sat on his front porch, forgotten by the world, and saw Mrs. Margaret Schmitsky walking up the road, with the soggy bag of groceries in her arms. He knew she would never see him- no one ever did, but he loved that fact. He loved to be the one aloof- unseen.
Willie was old, and he relished being so. He twirled his pocket watch, his most prized possession, around his arthritic large finger. His hands were huge. It was "from cutting wire" he would tell his grandsons who would come up every year from Kentucky. He mused they were supposed to be there in Johnstown that night, but knew they were probably held up by the rain.
They weren't letting any trains in or out because of it. He thought, perhaps, that it was absurd. But whatever he thought, never mattered. All his life he figured they knew best. He wasn't the type to make opinions. His whole lost life was a series of servitudes, whether for the Lord, for the foreman, or even for his most oppressive master- Time.
He stopped the copter-like motion of his watch, and dangled it like a pendulum before his face. He grabbed it up in his free hand, and held it fast to his gargantuan palm. He let it rest there, and Willie watched, intently, the second hand ticking ever so rhythmically. The world melted. He was consumed by Time. It pulled him closer and closer. He was a ball of yarn that was becoming unwound, as the very watch that sucked his thoughts, his moments, from his sad and banal life. His life's work, cutting wire- he was now deemed obsolete due to Time, yet he loved his killer. And he, tenderly, with pride, looked at his golden pocket watch as it ticked, tic, ticked away into nonexistence. In tandem with the rain, his own weak heartbeat, the pitter-pat of life, raced away, and far, and distant, then close- the noose of Time pulled tight about his own fate, the sadness, the loneliness of his own desolation. There, on the front porch, sat Willie Farmaker, who, when his watch hit 3:05 pm, was turned over to his 70th year on earth.
So were the displaced citizens of Johnstown. Not unlike citizens of other American boom towns. When the work was there, there was work to be done. Nothing could stop progress, as more and more people heeded the great throaty call of "Toil", families could eat. And the American dream- to eat like kings, but most of all to live like men. Every face, every head, holds those tender pockets of thoughts, a million universes race, and cry for life- for breath, for freedom, but are we chained to this earth? Shall the earth take us to her breasts, and embrace us with her mighty soil? Suck us back up into her own hips, to lay like frightened children, like cowering, yet courageous infants, from the time of our births to that of our deaths?
As Willie Farmaker sat in the vacuous state of his past, the cat perched on his porch moved stealthily away from the wake. She moved and writhed in a peculiar manner- stalking in and out of waterlogged shrubs. The town seemed dead. Everything alive, anything huntable hid. The feline was malnourished, and extremely desperate. She stealthily slithered past Mrs. Margaret Schmitsky, who, by now, gathered the groceries falling out of her disintegrating bag.
The cat attempted to seize the opportunity to eat, but not without a shoddy kick from Mrs. Margaret's ragged shoe, which sent the cat into a terrible cry. It pranced away, walking through the pouring rain. As soon as she was out of Mrs. Margaret's eyeshot, the feline's nose and head, in attempt to hide the pain, pulled close to the puddled ground.
The cat prowled to a house a few blocks up the road, where there were lights on. She fumbled onto the porch, and sprawled out lazily under the awning. The house was large, a couple stories in height, and gaslights illumed within. A flash of lightening crackled in the front yard. The cat flinched, and rubbed her face through the parted door. She slinked in, only to be scooped up in the arms of Helen, a constituent of the house.
Within the house were elaborate banisters that swirled up to a large stairwell. The stairwell at the top, spiraled, and then leveled out into a sort of indoor balcony, with beautiful balustrades, lined by closed doors to numerous rooms.
On the first floor spread multitudes of defeated workmen. They were all wet, and imbibed hard liquor. There was an equal, if not greater, ratio of girls, who scantily clad, sauntered about the lodging.
Helen, held up the cat, her large bust lifting and pluming out from her low cut bustier, and her tousled hair curled around, framing her doll-like rouged face, said through her cherry lips and rosy cheeks, "Hey, everyone. Look who decided to stop by. Perhaps this one's a real man!" She failed to notice the cat's gender.
The gloomy men cast her remark off by batting their hands.
She laughed and said, "On nights like tonight, guys, we should be celebrating. Why can't we live it up?" She then downed a shot of brown whiskey, as her knees slightly buckled, turning her feet together.
A gaunt looking man, with thin cheeks, and a bone-like arm raised up out of his chair, disrupting a scantily clad woman who was stroking his thigh, and said, "Easy for you to say, Helen. Some of us have to do real work for a living. You just keep your trap shut! Besides, you got enough of that carpe diem crap for this whole godforsaken steel town."
"I do real work!" Helen said.
Then the skeletal man replied, as he saw a young man descend the stairs, his eyes on the distraught Helen, "Lookie here, Bob," he said to the young man, "Your Mother here, says she does 'real work'. Get a load of that! Helen, you ain't nottin' but a penny whore!" The men in the parlor erupted into thunderous laughter as Bob's face changed hues.
"Listen to you! You should be one to talk! Go back to your poor wife, Schmitsky!" Bob indemnified, his fist curled, shaking his arm.
Bob, walked tenderly up to his now crying Mother and embraced her, and they retired to the porch outside. The rain had drastically increased.
"Mom, don't listen to those bastards," Bob said to his Mother.
Through her tears, she still appeared beautiful, and youthful.
"Bobby, I feed you don't I?" she was stroking the purring cat, "I put food on the table? I'm a good Mother, right?"
Bobby palmed the back of his Mother's shapely head, he felt the softness, and the silkiness of her luxurious mane, and pulled her to his adolescent chest, the squirming cat sandwiched between them.
"Yes Mother. You're wonderful. I wouldn't want it any other way. It's like you told me Mother. . . remember. . . You gotta do, what you gotta do."
She lifted her make-uped running face from his now stained shirt, and smiled.
"That's right, Bobby. I love you. Don't you ever forget what your Mother says. You're such a good boy. I just wanted so much more for you. It'll all be over soon. We're gonna make a real life for us. The one we deserve."
The rain roared and lightening snap-flashed from behind Helen's shapely figure.
Mr. Schmitsky shot out the door parted the two, and stumbled drunk out into the road. He slipped in a patch of mud, and lay prostrate in the ditch. He rolled around onto his thin back and let the rain pummel his face. The stinging velocity of the rain disguised his anger. His hands reached toward the sky, and moaning like a child, he said, "O, what has become of love? Why are we here? Who am I? Christ, who am I?"
A wall of light appeared over the rooftops. Mr. Schmitsky, managed to stand, and with an awe struck face observed the wall of light roll into a mushroom of fire and explosion. Lumber and wood tumbled over the houses across the street, smashing them, and hit right in front of where he stood. He voicelessly wailed, and as he swiveled, he heard the loud, hot, throttle of what sounded like an out of control locomotive, powered by a low grumbling of divine pistons. The sound filled all emptiness. It expanded, then eclipsed the ticking slaps of rain, and accumulated into magnificent grandeur, and unimaginable force, bellowing forth a towering tidal wall of water, spangled with giant girths of flame, pushing with impunity at its crest, twisting, as if a play-toy, the steam locomotive and the rest of the train that had been at rest by the steel mill. A massive severed hand, palming a golden watch, reading in that singular moment, 3:09, was the first item Mr. Schmitsky sighted in the immense wave. Next, came Margaret Schmitsky, in a cold stare, positioned in the crux of the surge. Her pale, impassive, death-gaze stabbed her husband. Judgment published upon him as the pelvis of his dismembered wife instantly crushed his skull.
Lucien's head reeled as he and Gwen entered the house for dinner. They locked down on the aroma of the meal. Lucien gazed down at the table-clothed spread, and rested his eyes on glistening stuffed cabbage, cottony mashed potatoes, spicy tomato salad, and his grandfather's masterpiece, his own personal favorite, soupie-pasta.
As they sat down at the dining table, Lucien looked at his grandfather. His mighty form, not yet defeated by age. His mighty hands, as large as Farmaker's, if not, larger, rested, circling his dish. His eyes, beady and blissful, majestic and dignified, looked at his family as they sat in communion around the grand table. It was how his Grandfather had always imagined it. As a child, to his now aged existence. He was sampling from the unread pages of Olympus.
The family said grace.
Lucien recalled his reverie on the porch. He looked at his grandmother, who was still bringing to the table dinner rolls, garlic bread, and filling glasses with water, tea, and milk. Her smile was broad and proud. She lived for moments such as these. Her entire dynasty gathered together at their own house, which they spent their entire lives making ready to bring home their daughters, and their grandchildren.
Lucien cast a sigh into the atmosphere, where the only sounds presiding over the scene were clangs of silverware, gentle suctions, and slaps of food being portioned. Ravenous voices saying, "Could you please pass the potatoes?", "Can you pass the tomato salad?", and "Mmm, these Halupkies are good".
Lucien felt, and imagined them just sitting there as they were, eating, and then hearing the hissing sound of water in the distance, growing more and more deep, and loud. Until a roaring tirade of water enveloped them into the earth from which they arrived. But he cast away the fantasy, and ate with voracity.
Lucien never looked at Johnstown the same after that solemn dinner. Instead he took to the streets with a vengeance every chance he got, for the rest of his stay. He cursed the concrete; he scoured the playgrounds with seething thirst and morbid curiosity. He imagined how many bones he walked over as he stalked the sidewalks. With an adolescent fervor burning within him, he was awed at the town as it was. How was it possible they could build over such an elaborate destruction? How was it they endured several other floods after the big one? How was it the people in this northern town still wanted to live there? After all the hot death, and the raw suffering- with the innate knowledge that this place was once destined to be destroyed? Humanity, at its most sullen, suffered through, and then deciding to stay it through, defied Mother Nature herself.
But with some fascination, he understood. The pride in the stone eyes of the citizens. The connection with the earth from which they were born. For some reason he noticed that very few people actually entered the town, and those who lived there found it practically impossible to leave- to abandon their homeland. Lucien began, in some tragic manner, to fall in love with the romanticism of the town's history. His spirit filled as if a cup of holy wine, and overflowed in the complacent acceptance of this defeated town. Where strangers could never cast a curious eye, where townsfolk would always go this way and that, but never leave the confines of the city. Lucien adored the freedom of this savage city-life where he could walk, just for a day, as one of the survivors. One who has withstood the rain. One who has stood on his feet and remained, despite the countless circadian corruptions of man's folly, of man's greed, and of man's gluttony. He felt as if one of America's new resilient children- a Son of Man at his most arrogant and obstinate. A town that was once buried, battered, beneath fire and debris, he remained just as his brothers and sisters did, alive and fondling the moment- the moment eternal. The prison of life of which we can never escape. The present ablaze, awake, the union of past and future, whereupon the crux of life takes shape in experience- painted life, written love, and concrete will.
Lucien carried, as his feet kept him perambulating that night, farther and deeper into existence, everything that had come to pass, everything that he was breathing, soaking, and living; he even took his walk into what he never would know, hand in hand with the locomotive of Time, which gave way to his communion with timelessness and the incorrigible future. His youth, his unending machine of energy that burned furiously like a flaming candelabra in his soul, immersed in the infinite trials of life, and beleaguered with an epidemic of questions, motley with the few illuminating answers- Lucien was the fledged of unslakable thirst.