The Grain of Wood

Michael BagwellStories, Poems and Artwork by

MichaelBagwellThe Grain of Wood

Stories, Poems and Arto

Copyright © 2010 by Michael Bagwell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form orby any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and

retrieval systems, without expressed permission from the author.

First Edition

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to realpersons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publications in which some of these works have been published: “Dissipate,“ Dark Sky Magazine;“My Father,” Short, Fast and Deadly; “Boxes,” Collective Fallout; “Shadow in

the Fray,” Literati; and “Boxes,” “Carrying Things by Bicycle,” and “I Dreamedof Dreaming Life in the Grain of Wood,” Daedalus

“An Empty House” was adapted from an anonymous interview in Life Magazine, January 2008.

Cover image and design and book layout by Michael Bagwell

Printed in the United States of America

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ContentsProse

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Maligned Joints of an Infinite BeingZenoHousesA Man in Mourner’s BlackThe GardenerSnail ManCarrying Things by BicycleA MurdererTitlesMy FatherThe Difference Between a Riverbed

and the Lion’s ManeShort Story Idea 9/12Downtown NectarineShadow in the Fray

Poetry

MoldDissipateStarIslandsDid I Abandon You?TetheredAn Empty HouseCurrentsIn the BeginningWar PoemSee NowThe Shadows We ThrewIn the Macroscopic/MicroscopicAnd I Rose, the Dust of a StrangerI Buzzed My HeadI Wear these WordsAcrobatsI Dreamed of Dreaming Life

in the Grain of Wood

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Poetry Cont.

Do Not Circle Back UponOuroborusA List of NamesHomecomingHaiku IEkphrasis (Easterly)BoxesThe Quiet CityscapeHaiku IISmokeWord TornMy Piano is Getting DustySenescent StonesI am that I wasLandscapesCoffeeTwilight, ApolloPersonality TremorThe CoyAnd I Have Read BrautiganBarefoot AnarchyCarapacedDetetraMirrorsNautilusWoundless ErosionOde to a ShadowTumultuous RedHaiku IIIWhat is a Car without its Metal Skin?

Art

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The Wind AsunderCascading MasksThings That Have Come BeforeThe Feral MorningHe Left From the Cold Places (Close Up)He Left From the Cold PlacesMirrors, Is He Free?A Postmodern Idea

MAligned Joints of An infinite Being

e sAt down on the BenCh By the hydrAngeA Bushes, peering out over the rounded valley below. His shoulders gradually slanted forward into a permanent sigh, forcing

his eyes to follow the curve of his spine and stare at the leaf-scat-tered, gravel path. For years now, he had liked to stroll, or more accurately to tripod, along the city park in the early evening. His knees began to protest the moment he started each outing. They creaked in chorus to the bending wood venetianed under his nightly perch.

As the grass began to dim and his eyes took in less and less, he thought briefly about how if the universe were infinite in either space or time, there would be a locality or temporality in which the constituents that made him himself would recombine in ex-actly the same configuration, except for the damn knees. If he could traverse this distance, escape the bounds of his own years, he could erase the palimpsest drawn in asphalt scars across the child’s skin. He would make them new again, clean, untouched,

h

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unlacerated, untormented. Next, he would travel to that world he occupied with his first wife, a time defined by burning palms falling slowly into pained buckets of ice, constricting and yet driven apart. He had grown to limbs of rigid linearity and filed them into brown slacks. In the void between fabric and black-board, chalk particles fell, innocent casualties of the pushing around of numbers like dead leaves in a current. Beneath the impassive eyes of his students, he could manipulate the magic of infinity to alleviate the stiffness of his joints. Ha! He would have been able to run uninterrupted miles in some distant universe, and not look back.

Certain students of his came to his office hours to ask leading questions, navigating the threads of stilted words constantly away from his topics and towards him. They embroidered faint seeds of lasciviousness across the desk air, nearly invisible, cursive ques-tions. He gave in and dropped to his knees in front of one such student, finding a pair of legs erupting out of a short, woven skirt.

He felt something then.He chalked numbers over what he’d felt.He could peel back these white-drawn figures and in the ab-

sence of their weight, run off with this barely weathered girl, a year shy of closing her second vibrant decade. This would have been before his wife beat him to it and took his house and new-born son. He moved into an apartment alone, compartmental-ized, barricaded from human interaction.

By some hell or torture, he was confined to this narrow path, this harrowing accretion of past events. His knees caught the blunt of it. How many years had he seen pass? Remembering current pain, he shifted on the bench and moved his cane to his left hand so that he could massage his aching joints. Streetlights flickered on behind distant trees as his thumbs wandered the landscape of ligament and bone.

He mused on.Monkeys banging on a typewriter, given an infinite time,

would eventually produce a facsimile of Hamlet, perfect down to the punctuation. In the same way, random collisions of par-

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ticles would accumulate into this exact world, this exact old man, except that his knee would be rounded large enough to fill his palm. Given infinite space, it had already happened, was hap-pening now, and will happen in remote concentrations of the universe. In another reproduction, they would be the size of wa-termelons, protuberantly able to take the force of anything com-ing their way. Progressively, different versions of himself would have larger and larger knees, filling first lonely apartments, then buildings, then city blocks.

What would others think as his knees gained a significant gravitational field of their own? Maybe they would be encom-passed in awe for his gigantic joints. Perhaps they would just be frustrated with the added traffic in his wake. And maybe they would try to ponder their meaning.

He moved in with a woman because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. She scurried around the house, pressed on by his burgeoning knees like a buried thing. This was while they were still containable within rooms. A daughter came. This happened only a week after he was fired from the college, so he quickly found occupation in computer programming. The woman worked nights, he worked days. They walked their nar-row corridors of empty lives, labyrinthine and overlapping yet never coinciding for more than a glimpse around an unforeseen corner. Eventually, the woman returned from the nocturnal by opening a chain of clothing retailers for the big and tall, despite her small size, and they found themselves face-to-face for the first time. Neither had anything to say. Their divorce was laid out in gestures of indifference. Mutual custody, him at the ends of the week.

An eternity would pass before he recombined with knees the size of small asteroids, orbiting each other in the darkness of the cosmos. In time, his son could take the right-hand knee and his daughter the left. They would raise houses in the pale, dust-covered skin, homely log cabins built strong against the solar winds. Here, they would raise children of their own, isolated on the floating islands of his joints. His son would look across

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the darkness and try to remember what his father was like, as his daughter would look out and try to remember her brother. Many millennia would pass before his grandsons and grand-daughters would take a new pairing of asteroid-knees, and their offspring after them, each resting upon the last yet separating into a vast network of disparate lives, branching neurons forming the architecture of his brain.

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Black mold spreads insplotches of slow death,pooling on the tilearound my bare feet.It will climb the ladderof my Achilles tendon,stretch its atramentous fingersalong my calf, reaching,spreading acrossundecipherable days of decay.It grows, it grows,the day lingers in sunless upheaval,abandoned.And in my ear, the moldwill whisper with a voiceof thousands of beatinginsect wings.It grows,and soon,it will replace me.

Mold

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What if I do not find the mysterybefore I have my child?What right would I haveto teach him anything?

I am not ready to bestow my knowledge,for I know nothing.I am not ready, even, for death.When it comes, I will still beensnared in the ruins of my thoughts.

A veil separates me from that which I love.My fate is trapped in the hoursof forgotten starsand my tears will becomedust on my cheeks.

While everyone around megrows feathered wings,I will be pulled to the earthwith tangled rootsof my own making,my gaze lockedon the eternal constellations.

tethered

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the wind Asunder

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In the beginning,eyes rolled forth fromelectric sockets like bouldersdown the ice face,a glacier in repose.

My uncle, centered in the iris,threw a duck headlong intothe branches of a Japanese Maple.These were the starsand within his eyes,electric sockets,flowing.

in the Beginning

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CAsCAding MAsks

shAdow in the frAy

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InThe spin

Of the sun In the spuming

Cyclone of his wing For I was lost who am

Crying at the man-drenched throneIn the f i r s t fur y of hi s s t ream

And the l ightn ings o f adora t ionBack to black silence melt and mourn

For I was lost who have comeTo dumbfounding haven

And the finding oneAnd the high noon

Of his woundBlinds my

Cry.1

here wAs A tiMeless MoMent, when the shadows stretched across the land, the dark

silence melt and mourn, the begin-ning. In the dwin- dling light, they meandered across the asphalt streets, the storefronts, the doors, the blades of grass. They slowly dragged their bodies across the face of the world, dragged their black clothes and black brief-cases, black cars and black footsteps, black branches and black leaves, all in a shimmering, lengthening dance, limping. They grew, winding away from the setting sun and taking flight from the darkness that would soon envelope them. And in their fear, they collided into the darkness of others with the long, exasper-ated sigh of discontent, the hollow of the wind, the echo of the void.

A particular shadow took shape in this setting sun, took its form in this darkening world. It came screaming out of the

1. Dylan Thomas’ Prayer and Vision

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shadow of a womb. And it grew in the constricting concrete, the harshness of tumbling shadows. Teased and ridiculed, the pain became evident on his face, a terrain of constant suffering carved out by tears. He grew in the concrete, skinny and malformed, pockmarked by acne, the heartbeat of a ghost. Until the new dawn arrived, and the world realigned to shadow and light, con-trast, the boy bursting through the thin wall to the rising sun. Light, transient, but light all the same. To begin, this tale is his, the shadow in the fray.

II

the Clouds drifted in froM the eAst with their gray over-coats pulled tightly around them, preparing for rain. He had been walking home from school, standing momen-tarily at a stoplight while he waited for the traffic to part. The clouds broke for an instant, allowing a beam of sunshine to hit his back and pool around his feet. A girl’s voice from around the corner called out, “Ooh, I wonder who that could be,” as she laughed to her friends. He looked up, but a stone wall with a thick, green bush planted into the hill above it blocked the view to the other street. She turned the corner with a look that went straight from excitement to disgust. “Oh,” she said—or spit—as she turned away from him. The rains began. He didn’t even notice, just watched his dim shadow float on the gray, pelting waters in front of him.

The tone in the girl’s voice brought back something out of the mists and for a moment, he scoured around his memories. They gathered into clusters, pools of faded associations. He kicked at a puddle in mid-stride and felt the water soak into his socks. In the coldness, it came to him. He had been in a middle school class-room at the peak of seventh grade. The teacher had told him to sit up front that day as punishment. But from here, he had been

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continuously bombarded by paper wasps and the stifled laugh-ter of the children behind him. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. He was used to it by now. Then everything went silent for a moment, ominous. Without warning, a piece of folded pa-per lined with a sharpened paper clip smacked him in the back of the neck. He cried out and clasped his hand over the sting to feel warm blood. “Mark!” the teacher yelled at him. “Why don’t you stop making a ruckus and come up to be our first model?” He felt on the edge of tears but stood and managed a quiet “Yes ma’am,” before walking to the front of the room. She had been explaining the art of silhouette tracing from an overhead and he knew to stand in front of it, turn perpendicular, and wait for her to turn on the light. When she did, she let out a little, “Oh!” and then cleared her throat. It was a slightly shorter sound, but it was the same note, the same unplaceable tone. He had gotten beaten up after class for being first, for thinking he could be the model.

The memory, or his wet sock, brought a chill through his spine and he picked up the pace a little, keeping his head down to watch his shadow jogging in front of him.

III

it wAsn’t A grAduAl ProCess, A slow MetAMorPhosis, a matu-ration, as one might expect. It came suddenly and unexpectedly, as a summer rain or a paper wasp. He awoke one day, late as usual, and rushed out the door without showering or getting anything to eat. He caught the bus at the last minute and quietly sat down in front without anyone noticing. After staring out the window for a moment, he opened his bag and began digging through his things for a pair of headphones. They would block out the rickety sounds of the bus as it struggled through its route. His mom had given them to him for his sixteenth birthday a few days ago and, so far, they worked well to dampen the barrage of

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noise in the mornings even if they couldn’t stop the bullying on the afternoon rides. It was the nicest thing she had ever done for him.

He stepped off the bus through a thin wall into a tense si-lence. It was spun so thickly that he was dragged to a stop af-ter a few beleaguered steps, dense spider webs holding him in place. Everyone was staring at him, perfectly still. Silent. A mil-lion eyes boring holes through his skin. The entire mass of stu-dents, just staring. He took off his headphones and met the void, the stare, the silence. Frantically, he swept his view across each of the arachnid’s eyes. The movement twitched the web, pulled time into flow again, and the bodies began whispering to each other. He ventured a step forward. Each pair of eyes followed him, the hissing whisper grew louder. What the hell was go-ing on? Had he actually come to school naked? He looked down quickly but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Did he have something stuck to him? Writ- ten on him? He kept looking, lifting each arm in turn, but again found nothing. He con-tinued walking, al- ternatively looking around and tucking his head down in em-barrassment. Each foot- step created a ripple out into the crowd, a pulsating hiss and a movement reflecting his.

Then he realized, as he entered the hallways and the bodies crowded closer, that they were not looking at him, but beyond, in front, or off to the sides. They were looking at his shadow. And whispering with their hands to their mouths.

IV

things esCAlAted After thAt. A sudden and intense storm of adoration and light fell upon his beautiful shadow and he caught the lightning with a smile on his face, simply happy to be noticed. He smiled as they swarmed around him and told him how beautiful it was. He smiled as the cameras appeared and

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as possible. He never speaks. He reentered the waking day for the world itself, to remember shape and color. More years pass.

In the warmth of an early summer morning, he walks down the street of an unfamiliar town. The shadows shorten in the spin of the sun, sliding backwards into their source with exuber-ant cries, the brilliant scintillation join and exult. Timeless, light floods around him, cascading against his shadow in a continuous waterfall. It bounds across the breadth of the sidewalk, across the cracks in the concrete, across the blades of grass, and lands in a vibrant pool circling the feet of another. In the chaotic flow, her shadow is thrown outwards for him to see, and it is hideous, a shadow grown in concrete. Yet her beauty draws the light from the sun, embraces it with the might of the world. It is for this embrace that so little can become of her shadow. He is drawn to her, himself reflected in the pools of light dancing through her eyes, his own dark beauty ap-proaching, and sud- denly, he feels like running.

How could he even think about it? After how the world of light had seared his skin… He wanted to slip back into the shadows and haunt the night once more. The torrid thorn dug into his side, a silent moan, fear, the shadowed head of pain, all curled into a barb cut-ting at the lining of his stomach. He takes a step in retreat, but as he moves, he sees the same hesitation in her eyes, the same disillusion pulling at the corners of her lips. Sadness, the juxta-position of black night and a hint of the early dawn, appeared in her movements. He could see her pain, her torrid thorn, clearly in her hesitation, her single stepped retreat. Her shadow was the reflection of his form.

She smiled. A slight, shy, unsure smile at first, but it blossomed. Blossomed into white light. The day shown through her lips. His heart raced and tried to pull his limbs into its center. Now, slowly, unsure and nervous, he approached again and their shad-ows mingled in the light.

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ymbols and metaphors weave through these works as if tracing the grain

of wood, repeating in patterns to form a cohesive spiral out of the

separate, surreal narratives and images. Of these

themes, the most pervasive is the play between

darkness and light, of opposite but interlock-

ing shapes. From the sheer black of the first

page to the interlocking patterns of the wood

grain, to the alternating dark and light forms

in “Shadow in the Fray,” and even to the work’s

awareness of its composition as positive and negative

spaceas black letters floating over a white void, this theme finds visual

representation throught the book, often alluding to the spiral form.

S

The stories, poems and works of art framing this spiral

range from magical realism to the dark surreal, from

playful experiments with the infinite to absurd dream-

scapes, touching a setimental core within the irrational.

the grain of wood

by michael bagwell