Warm and Clear, the Night

1. Constellation Albert

The name his mother gave him formed the only fixed position in a passing sky, the connecting points given but the boundaries between merely suggested.

A rope of sleep, the silence in the anticipation of knowledge, and the oars of impatient delight; his transient universe constructed.

It’s an experiment. It’s possible. It’s Albert intentional. Albert trajectory. Albert social. It’s the median Albert plucked, bursting.

And it’s a cluster of Alberts; Alberts clumsily daybreaking and night-time Alberts pinned to the firmament. Mapped. A pattern created by the confluence of smaller patterns. Oh, who shall discover the mistake? Sudden, Albert removed from the unreliable heavens and replaced by more perfect stars? Sun-glassed and sun-creamed Albert dismissed from the crowded beach of possibilities?

And still no explanation for the alternative path of his sleeping mind, the mind descended from drifting clouds, the mind you can’t touch, the part that can’t last.

Then Albert visible in the fat languid last of August. Because Albert’s assumed body appears for a while to be Albert. Because in our bodies we must contain our ideas. Because the earth turns more than one direction, all at once, just like our bodies. Because the future is presently a theory. Because every trajectory, celestial or earthbound, reaches farther than its creator.

 

2. A First Promise

Like this:

 

There is only one shadow, very large and very intricate.

 

But not like this:

 

They had horses and pigs. Attics and closets. No place to keep great hearty moans. And no way to separate the pleasure from the pain.

 

Like this:

 

The taste of him lingers, her thoughts playing with it, trying to place it into one of the categories of desire.

It’s new so it won’t fit.

She wants to try again.

The shadow is warm and does not threaten her.

 

But not like this:

 

Tiny boxes full of restless anticipation.

 

Perhaps like this:

 

No one who knows them is listening and inside was another man named Albert who spoke softly and gestured wildly with his thumbs, indicating either the way to heaven or a severe disturbance somewhere between impulse and delivery.

Albert drew a map of the decent portion of an orange. As his author, I offered to carry his tiny shovel.

 

3. Subplot to Authorial Intrusion

Albert’s acceptance of antique individualism had gone bad. That’s not all there is to it. I was planning (inserted rebellious Albert) to go hiking off the coast of Nantucket. But Albert glued his thumb and forefinger together to indicate his separation from the mysterious absence he had perceived in his universe as a result of his sarcastic suggestion, and I laughed at myself because I felt foolish, not because I had considered doing anything I might later regret.

 

4. Albert Aflutter

Nor was Albert digressed, unrelented, or merely expected to fail. Albert was available. He was immediate.

And so it came as a true surprise when false Alberts began appearing nearly everywhere. Counterfeit Alberts escalating. Incorrect Alberts blossoming. Deceptively ordinary in disguise, they were being given opportunities.

Alberts pollinating.

 

And following thereupon: Albert errors. General discontent with Albert and Albert and Albert. An Albert avoidance explosion. Warnings everywhere. “Do not mistake these imitations for the real thing.” Albert test kits offered at a discount. Pseudo-Alberts already admitting their failures as you meet them. Albert failures advertising for other Albert failures. Illegitimate Alberts deeply astir.

 

Original Albert listening, paying attention.

A clue without a witness.

 

Alberts unraveling.

 

O Albert, what stained and misplaced window of perception has horizoned the ocean you’ve become?

 

Albert restless. Albert outside. Albert not Albert.

And in this way more Albert-like.

 

Briefly, that portion of the sun which is earthbound visits Albert, leaves a stain. He wavers, interrupts his progress, if it was progress. Sheds Albert.

Still Albert.

 

Most humans, Albert discovers, are progressive, which usually means “false.”

Albert grows definite. Becomes contained. Albert is Albert.

Albert a sampling, not a meal.

Albert sifting the contents.

 

Albert’s clothing encouraged to drift. All Albert ablaze with uncommunicated essence. Albert lights the grand hall of his future life, shared now, so soon, with her.

 

And she finds the Albert she wants surrounded by less desirable Alberts. Skilled at paring away the Alberts.

 

5. Unselected Alberts, Lurking

Unlike Albert the Essence, other Alberts are never absent of Albert. Alberts unabashedly, relentlessly and merely Albertlike. Alberts illuminated with further Albert. Alberts composed of only Albert light. Which, it must be said, fails us. Albert, sweet Albert the Unmolded Childman, carousing deliciously in soap-drenched bathtub adventures. Adolescent Albert advancing. Young Albert dockside in the bathtub with a not-yet-fully-comprehended representative of the confusing childhood of Albert innocence. Could “She” really be just the neighbor girl playing with Albert toys?

Soon, Albert confessing his imagination’s voyages. And soon as well, Albert seeking farther unrepentent voyages. Witness anticipatory Albert, dancing on the tousled bed in his flannel trapdoor pajamas. And yet on the outside, in the public eye, coming-of-age Alberts in cufflinks. Alberts in first lust and newly, tentatively cultured. Alberts at the billiards table. Alberts choosing the correct fork. Alberts spit-shining the new Albert lustbus.

 

An Albert reclining. Another Albert smoking. Experimental Alberts unrepentant. Alberts devolved.

 

More than a few Alberts wrong and a whole bundle of Alberts simply waiting.

 

6. An Albert Flashback with Recurring Thematic Content

The chicken appears substantially taller than Cowboy Albert, if “tall” applies to a large gawky chicken consisting mostly of legs. Cowboy Albert models a horse-bedecked flannel shirt, soft and loose-fitting, like pajamas, a shirt which may even be pajamas, because the cowboy is still a boy. Lassoes and spurs and yellow horses that are probably supposed to be golden like Trigger are dancing and rearing back all over the boy’s chest as he approaches the strangely subdued giant chicken, which is wearing a saddle and a bridle and is not necessarily filled with respect for the heroic man Cowboy Albert has quickly become and perhaps is not ready to follow the boy’s commands and chase down the obvious villains or come galloping at the boy’s whistle when a narrow escape becomes imminent.

 

In the next scene, the boy’s unreliable memory enters, in the middle of the scene, after the action has taken over from the beautiful and evocative landscape and before the establishment of the hero’s soft spot for underprivileged older women (who are not old, but merely older, and strikingly endowed with innocent farm-girl-come-to-town eagerness), large hairy big-eyed dogs and horses with a streak of independence, horses which have not been “broken” but merely “restrained” for the introduction of a worthy companion who knows when to ride hard and when to rest.

The bank has just been robbed and the dark double wooden doors spring open. Just as the boy rides up on his giant chicken, the robbers begin pouring from the bank, themselves chickens, fluffy and small, baby chicken after baby chicken after baby chicken, running in every direction as baby chickens do, currency spilling from their beaks as they stop, jerky and distraught, for a piece of gravel that looks like corn, before pecking the bills back up again. Again and again they turn and dart quickly in the opposite direction, pecking and picking.

The boy hero reaches for his gun, ignoring the fluttering clusters of escaped currency, and the side of the gun falls open, revealing a roll of caps. The hero dismounts the giant chicken and begins chasing the bank robbers on foot, discharging his cap-gun ineffectively and then throwing his cap-gun at the escaping baby chickens, picking it up and throwing it again, and shouting, “Bang. Bang. Bang.” The chickens are too fast, too erratic, too unpredictable, but the boy hero does not stop trying.

 

Even before the dream has ended, another dream has begun.

 

And again, action is required of the hero. Get his sister away from the bank table, yes, that’s what he must do because he understands that the table is going to explode. He knows that he can do this, but he also knows how hard it is to get sisters to believe they are ever in any real danger because there have been many previous narrow escapes and sisters have not learned anything from them.

If the boy hero is not in time, he will have to live with the results for the rest of his life. Then again, if he is in time, he will have to live with the results for the rest of his life. He does not even suspect how clearly he will remember the moment before the table does or does not explode, he cannot remember which, though the results will be everlasting.

 

Something very very bad must be lurking there because lurking is characteristic of the behavior of very very bad things. It’s a mode in which they are stored for later use or are remembered as a kind of indulgence. It doesn’t matter what’s normal. Normal isn’t going to save anyone.

 

The boy hero didn’t really find any of this disturbing but felt he should attempt to explain himself anyway. As if he were on trial for allowing himself to be on trial.

 

7. Tentative Embodiment of the Love Fixation

Too many lamb’s tails were shaking in the distance. Back from the past, his innocence unredeemed. A long time away.

He seemed to be flashing a reader-board across his ample green adult-like sports jacket with the flexed pseudo-confident hunker he had attached to his upper torso. No one even skimmed it.

 

Out of nowhere, of course, she just appeared. Hair so big it had to be blonde. Any bigger it would have to be red.

 

Certainly he wasn’t ready, wasn’t ready for her at all, but he found something available in his need.

 

And she was surprised by him. Offered him one of the river’s tender blades. Offered the fog.

Both cut him deeply.

He hadn’t given enough away yet to know what he was taking.

 

And that moment was lying there, chitinous, transparent and frail, an abandoned carapace of sluffed pretensions.

 

The sleep of accidents. Two spikes of imaginary jade protruding from its nostrils like tusks.

 

Their words danced like gyrating couples at the home for wayward children locked in adult bodies.

Her underwear was already pinned to the dart-board.

He couldn't understand the meaning of "avocado lips" in the profile.

He wanted to make her happy.

He was crude and sensitive and hers for the asking. Hers for a caress. Damp and warm and recent.

 

8. Concerning the Nature of Albert’s Tentative Maturity

It was a nervous jubilance. Swollen fire-babies. Great beasts of them.

A fleshy presence dripping like a pleasurable wound. Elevated, nocturnal.

 

Intellectuals with fat hands tried to understand it. Highbrows with very low brows. Condensed like the movie version.

 

And so the observers sat in the boat cracking nuts, populating the lily pads with little half-shells and describing ovals in the dense air the size of the beautiful monster they were trying to attract.

Smiles to pollinate an army.

That sloppy encampment was terrible, a real floppy bone, but not guilty of him.

 

There are two things we don’t know about Albert. One of them is how much there is to know about him and the other tends to wander off alone.

 

Don’t. Just don’t. (He was merely holding his spherical interpretation of her wingéd beauty for him. He wasn’t about to die like somebody’s goddamn fucking eternal flame.)

 

It appeared, therefore, that he was offering a tiny lace flower that looked like it had been spattered with tooth enamel. The only guest appeared to be The Dangerous and Deceptive Moral Lesson, but it was difficult to see past his green bunny shorts.

 

We can never be simply ourselves, but if we try hard enough, we can be ourselves, simply. The bunny shorts refused to quit complicating the temporary closure.

 

9. Anticipations of Albert

Albert refreshingly befuddled. Albert open and Albert hungry. Albert relentless.

 

Heaven’s udders aching with Alberts. Departed.

 

Inside one envelope, another. You didn’t get the prize, but you have to give the envelope back anyway.

 

The unwitting surrender of a slowly raised curtain.

 

10. Unsubstantiated Sightings of Departing Alberts

Someone is downstairs and Albert doesn’t want to meet him. Albert’s parents are gone. He has no brothers or sisters. His friends are home alone where they belong. Albert is home alone and Albert does not want to meet Albert. How long will it be before Albert knows if Albert is sleeping?

 

Every time Albert puts his hand into a glove he wonders if he might not pull off the glove and find nothing there.

 

Of course Albert hears the voices.

 

The odor of pineapple and urine. Hung in the air as if you could see it.

 

Three lizards clutched to the afternoon warmth of the red clay tennis court.

 

A reddening row of thorn scars where Albert searches in the deep brush, tracking the transgressions of blackberry snipers in glossy feathers who release dark excretions from the mossy limbs of the ancient sprawling oak where they perch, the sweet fruit plucked from thorny veins of thickly proliferating vines covered with ripening berries, harvested in their clacking black beaks, thrown back into throats like so many shots of a dark absinthe, rumbling along the narrow path down bird intestines to the now purple anus, squirting the juice-bloody gel warmly down from above as the birds take flight over intruder Albert, staining deeply, falling on him from the innocent sky.

 

As if everything were taking place underneath a great weight.

 

11. Albert Suspended

The Albert heart’s sweet pepper fire, the lungs’ collections of salty tides. If only we could stop now.

 

A different note from every stone.

 

The almonds lined up on the wooden table begin to whisper, one after another. They think Albert is sleeping. They rise and fall and rise again while Albert listens. They shine past the dust-laden stream of window light Albert has failed to adequately surrender to, at once purposeful and hesitant, falling through his skin.

 

12. Further Embodiments of the Love Fixation

A barely surrounded spilling exuberance of intention.

A fat sack of it.

A nearly tuberous cataract spreading out to squander the generosity of nervous sparrows.

 

A lost river, a misplaced lake or two.

 

The iceblue fjords of Albert thoughts.

 

The lifting waterchurch of Albert eyes.

 

13. Albert In the Museum of Morning till Night

I’ve written you frequently; my letters, like nature, secretly formed and slow to complete their character. Sadly, it’s our ideas, not our bodies, that have been hung out like meat.

 

Snow like silence in a dream. It waits for you.

Snow coming down so softly it goes up and then rests a moment before deciding to breathe again and continue the journey.

 

Says Albert unaware of his own transportation.

 

14. The Love Fixation Further Defined by Natural Elements

Pinholes in their skin like the bites of stars.

 

The almond moons of her deep territorial eyes.

 

Bobble me tiggly, sweetmeat.

 

The aged amber temple bells of the heart’s columbine.

 

Like one more beast breathing soft and foul above their sleep.

 

The voluptuous soft kick of a sudden rain.

 

All that green breathing takes the breath away.

 

15. Further Authorial Intrusions Disguised as Thematic Development

Something moving between the evergreens like breath, the sound of woodwhisper lifting like wings.

Am I the owl or the mouse?

 

I’m gone.

What does it mean when the darkness doesn’t arrive?

 

It’s your caution I recognize, the way it spreads the sound of your steps out across the broader path, as if to claim more of the journey, a kind of authority without the aggression.

 

A list of stars arranged by what need, and you, trembling against the skin of one word and one word.

A shadowlump wrenched from the side of the night.

Fat little cherubim with honey-assed bottoms dragging across the embarrassed horizon.

Bundles of possible Alberts.

 

16. Some Considerations Concerning Her Departure

As if tiny silver flutes were not failing to hide between the trampled grass blades. As if the mangoes in the guest room were not even watching. As if the hurt, as if the flight, as if the strained play. All leading already away.

As if, making damp eyes for each other, they had begun watering down the tears.

 

The obvious isn’t obvious to her who has barely been here.

Albert seems to have altered the altar.

 

I ask for your love like a train, but you’ve stationed me. The whistle’s for me, yes, it is. No one’s leaving. Smoke scheduled the departure. Says Albert perplexed.

 

An entire cathedral of need.

 

17. Delayed Considerations

Gravity lets Albert down. It hurts big.

 

It’s the story of my head, says Albert, which is full. And of my heart, he wants to say, which is fuller.

Which is not. Which was once bigger. Enshrined.

 

And as the net rises in the roiling water, for a fleeting moment you can see the moon roll, flop and leap free until once more the water settles, inviting reflection on the reflection that contains all Alberts.

And eats at the surface of its world.

 

And the thieving moon falling through the river’s skylight grabs Albert heart from its wrapped jewelry box, replaces it and slides silently off the roof and between the negligent seaweed trees.

How does he know what’s been replaced?

 

Just as her smile detonates, exploding Nature’s indifferent loitering. Albert’s never been able to wait like that. He carries his sorrows in a basket.

 

18. Absence Coda

Towering catalpa, white poplar, mountain peppers and mulberry and Albert’s gullet full of minnows. It’s the thing inside, see, that feels like silver babies darting in and out of the stomach.

Cinnamon-downed breast, chestnut ears.

 

It’s not the mountain but the cloud above that’s glass, stained milky and slipped sideways like some child’s gigantic silly grin.

And the only other cloud in the sky seems Italian and rising like bread before the golden skin of morning’s warmth slips a calloused hand beneath the wide empty throat of the love that is leaving, leavening the act of it, a salt-breasted mare climbing the swollen sea air.

 

So blooms the wounded face, human and useless but for the explanation of lines cutting across the forehead’s early aging meadow, a kind of browsing in which the animals drifting do not settle on any one taste or run, fleet, to the foot of the mountain we have carried here in our eyes.

Does Albert offer the useless tender of a man’s fallen heart, dusting up the redundant melodrama which is his life and not his direction? Shall we not go to him in his solitary cell and release him and sigh with him and whisper to the angry stretch of river swollen with the continual falling of its star tears?

Albert begins setting his eyes upon the newly sprouted stalks, his new thoughts climbing across the riverbottom. He’s offered himself a choice, oiled wooden boards dropped down like ancient panels, screens presented to the emperor before the lapse of powers.

Acknowledge.

Even the hint of absence we seek. The other side of the footprint.

A life in the mountain monastery. Three donkeys and a mule.

It’s the kind of madness with a rock in it, a hardness at the core that keeps the swelling focused.

The leaftalk of sunstruck branches.

 

And it’s all here in Albert’s potatosack overcoat. Unpublishable thorns pierce the deep themes of his regret. A lapis-coloured butterfly pulses phosphorescent wings, delighted with its discoveries. It trembles with anticipation as it clings to a fat marmot’s warm turd.

 

19. Abandonment of Artifice, a Confession

Albert once again takes his place in the sky, points of light like moments of understanding, here one evening and gone another.

 

Rain falling lightly, the boat drifting.

 

Did you?

Yes.

Go home now, someone’s waiting.

 

O Albert, It’s not because I miss you that I sing.