ascention

by Darren Bauler

Tue, 1 Jul 1997 06:23:35 -0400 (EDT)

and they would take the bones they would squeeze the bones out of their fingers through the tips and set them in a pile and mix them and then close their eyes and pick up bones with their good hand and push them back into their fingertips. this is how we made friends when we were small. the bones in my hands are still, to this day, not my own. there is something calming about this, something which tells me that i am not alone. it is through such childhood rituals i approach my halfassed understanding of god. when i was seven i got married to a girl i kindasorta knew from the neighborhood, from summers at the public pool, we had a ceremony in the back of the playground before classes one morning, flowers and everything. it was forever. the last i heard she was going to school somewhere in wisconsin. i imagine she still has the ring i gave her, and i still have the ring she gave to me. sometimes i wear it, and people look at me strange, the purple plastic band giving off a soft faded glow, but i don't explain. someday i'll bump into her, and we'll both be wearing our rings, just an impulse we had that morning, and we'll be together forever. near-asleep, i will feed her on opiated milk-sugar and she will feed me on scotch and black honey and we will make a home in the caves beneath the surface of the lake behind my house. the gods we chose as children shall watch over us in the end times, and will cast fates across the waters. as we slept on our mats and rugs, our teacher taught us in whispers how to form symbols and shapes out of snow. the nights brought a wind so fierce it would life you from the ground if you didn't keep rocks in your keds. she baked me a bread made from stones and when we ate it i could see energy coming off her body and was afraid. we slept on dishtowels and newspaper and after climbing down into sleep we were hung by the laces in our shoes from hooks she stored behind the blackboard. we all flew kites that year and left them tethered to poles when we went inside, each pole having our name and coloured pattern on it. jimmy was elected to be the historykeeper and we made him to sleep and set him in a hole a couple feet beneath the flagpole so 25 years later children just like us could dig him up and ask him what it was like for us, then. there was a graveyard across the street from our school and at night, sometimes, we would lay spread-eagle atop fresh mounds and try to talk with the dead. i was told you could see the devil if you stared long enough into mirrors. we all got free combs on picture day. for a long time i remember being afraid of certain furniture in my house, intentions i did not understand. something i could not see nor touch seemed to nest inside and there is a hum there is the sound of chanting but there is no source there is a light which falls out of the sky and flaps a crater around itself and inside that light there is a hole and if you look into that hole you will be pulled into that hole and if you enter there you will find others who grew to be lost like you and the light will leave you but you will remain marked in such a way as to say 'these, understand, are the sort of people who stare into strange lights.'

(phase phase conjugal phase shift phase conjugal phase shift phase conjugal phase i am so clustered: "i guess there's still a bit of, erm, weirdness there, between-")

sometimes, atop the grays of suburban nightlit and winterwhite streets, we would create vast armies of wind-up dolls and bears and soldiers each with banners bearing our names and we would march up and down the street with our mechanical enterouge celebrating our very being alive, the king and queen of this world.

(when you stop paying attention i steal the food from your mouth)

dreamlike and broken-up and adverse and sickly and coming back to the cults horses form in which they worship the moon, just like children. the use of dancing monsters as a means of teaching us that decay is an aesthetic. painting cracks in the canvas. when our teacher grew ill they rushed us through so each could kiss her hands and head before she left and went to god. no class that day; instead we watched a filmstrip about the way oysters tell their children of the messiah, the chosen one, from which would come not the prophet's pearl but a venus, astride the waves, there are those who have seen such in vision and in the real and know it to be true. my grandfater visited me in a dream that night and told me the dead were upset at our modern obscession with the reclamation of history. "leave the history to the dead," he told me, "it's the only thing they have." the collected history of each person coud fit in a shoebox, if we had that many shoeboxes. your imaginary friends continue on without you, a process you never thought to stop. my bride's father had a small statue made from tin foil which he kept in a freezer in the basement. he considered this statue to be the body of an alien. at night he would take the alien from the freezer and pray to it, ask its advice, wipe the condensation from its antennae. world of mercy. the birds must have been diseased that summer because the world was filled with feathers; we ran from yard to yard collecting them, sewn to our jackets by our mothers, tucked behind our ears. out by the lake, where the year before we built boats of paper and balsa wood and then sank them with rocks, we floated naked at night, lwtting the psychosis of the cranes into our small heads. we were only just beginning to see shapes in clouds. i remember being afraid of the cranes because the cranes were crazy.

understand, leaving messages, state-specific.

when the ascention took us, none of us children were suprised.