The Giant of Juno Falls (part 1)

Jesse S. Mitchell

The television set was on in the last house on the edge of Heart Attack Valley, it was on and silent, flickering between dimensions, the rough rhino hide growl of the morning news, grit and grimy concrete, busted rock and Nagasaki-bloom, and the smooth silk of corporate-caste sales, the siren calls, the soft soft tones.
So, Noah looked back and forth and at times, behind himself, at the wall and out the window.  He watched the whole world unravel, confident though that he would never see the end of it, the weave and tangle too intense, the ball of string far too large.  He was in no danger of oblivion.  And that is precious knowledge, reassurance to a young boy, and sometimes even he speculated that perhaps the world really was a beautiful place, sometimes he was absolutely sure of it.
But mostly his doubts on the matter were as dark and thick and shadowy as the coal dust grunge that covered over everything in the hill country where he lived.
He knew that usually things were harsh and mostly people had to work hard and had short miserable lives.  He was no romantic.  Ten years old and already the world had gnawed this skin thick.  He understood things about life.  He understood things about death.  And he knew that the place for stories and wonder and joy was a very small one, a dip or crack in the hard mantle of planet Earth.  But still, that tiny divot is what most occupied Noah’s mind, that is where he liked to live.  He was blessed.  That feeling is a blessing.  A miracle.  And he thought, maybe he would just stay there forever, in that niche market for beautiful things, just stay there surrounded, preoccupied and never need another anything ever.
The TV continued to buzz back and forth and sometimes the sound would come back, screamingly, punctuating the quiet trembling in the valley.  Been a lot of tremors lately, falling rocks, slides, the reception is never good with all the quivering, no radio or TV at all for days usually, best enjoy what you can get.  All kinds of theories, all sorts of stories as to why.  A lot of answers for everything around this part of the country, depending on who you asked, you get a different one.

Probably too much dynamiting, maybe the tunnels crumbling a bit.  But Noah had his own answers to the tremors and the rock-slide shivering. And his answer was different than all the rest especially.  But one thing is certain: the mines are always trouble, tragedy everywhere.  Best enjoy what you can get, live the day.

Noah’s father came clopping in the backdoor, loud heavy feet nearly stomping through the floor before he got the boots off, dusty dark, muddy, awful thick soled, steel toed, frayed ugly boots.  The man sat on a bench beside the door and perfectly arranged the boots and their long tattered laces, took off his big coat, rubbed his face.  Noah looked back away from the TV screen.

“Morning, Dad.”

His father nodded.  His eyes were all red and raw.  They always were, every morning, burning out of his tired face, and after all, it is the washed out yellow of pale early dawn that burns eyes the most.  Imagine the worst, most violent light, imagine a lifetime underground in the purple veins of darkness black-gold mining for the bright shine of stars, imagine the lungs choked and full of smoke and dust, imagine the busted knuckles and the whole long nights of mile deep hard work.  Imagine that and imagine the light of morning or afternoon, the sun shining daytime, and imagine the paycheck folded in your pocket, the paycheck that never goes anywhere and never, never ever, covers all seven days of the week.  

Imagine the raw eyes.  Noah’s father’s eyes were raw but not as raw as that, but they should have been, but no, a little light, right there in the middle in the big wide pupils, a tiny little candle flicker still jumped.  Noah saw it.  That is a blessing.  That feeling is a blessing.  A miracle.  He turned back to the television as his father made his way through the house, patted Noah on the shoulder and made his way to the bedroom and the bed for some well earned sleep.  

(part of) part 1 from "a rough country"

Jesse S. Mitchell

1.  Spirits in the trees.  Spirits in the streets. Spirit in the moon.  Spirit in the train station.  Maybe Battery Park will still be there when I open my eyes.  Ho Chi Minh like vapor, and fog, fog, fog, peasant revolt against the colonization of dreams.
But what can be imagined to be good, immaculate.
Can be imagined evil, injured.
And this is a rough country.  The waves and waves, apocalyptic surf that foams and surrounds, the end of the world that ebbs in, hems in, straightens us around to look at that reflection, tintype, ferrotype, the shimmer though is golden, the shimmer shadow though is silver.
We live here.
We live here.  Our hearts beat here.  Our eyes see here.  This is the cliff that we inhabit, safely perched above the abyss, and we are groaning, and we are unsteady/shaking, insecure and ever-wasting, looking down and effecting our balance.  Cassandra.  We tell ourselves our own futures, dooms, fates, all these things and then, we live them, we make them happen.  Two long legs to hold up us, so that we believe erroneously, that we are creatures of the air, and we spurn the earth.  We the earth.  The red red clay.  The red red for our maws.
Every word
Every breath
Is ours
We said/breathed them all. And we will more.  And we will more.  And we will hear those echoes, those reflections and we will be confused. Scared. Alone on the precipice, hearing into the void.  It speaks.
It speaks.
At us.
Spirits in the void.  Spirits in the air.  Spirits in the traffic lights.  Be alive.  Shine bright and favor us. Amen.
And this is a rough country.
Rough.
And to have to dig at the earth, the dusty ground, to eek out from out of the dried roots, the bitter tubers, the sand and callused hands. This is the story so far, as to relate, to see again, remade as I wake from the sleep, cosmopolitan, all of creation unfairly recreated for me, agrarian.    

MineTown

Jesse S. Mitchell



My great-grandmother was Cheyenne
Red speaker
My great-grandmother was Ashkenazy
Odessa farm breezes
My great-grandmother was Pembrokeshire
My grandfather was Mississippi mud
My grandmother was pots and pans
My father had boned-out rabbit in his blood.
I am
Coal-dust choked, whiskey pink stained, black

Lungs.    

Kremlin Square

Jesse S. Mitchell



All boxed up, Kremlin square.  Every single word was there
Any utterance at all, everything you could consider,
And they twirled together  (here and there)
Like temple bells and fog and feathers
(and spider webs caught in hair)
And we moved through them thick, like newborn gusts

But we were breaths not yet possessed.             

Petra Ewe, Alongtimeinthefuture. while McKenzie lives.

Jesse S. Mitchell

this part from in between parts one & two

She was surrounded by stars.  Bright yellow stars, everywhere, copious and impenetrable, a cloud blanket of total and pure color.  Her eyes hurt as they tried to focus, to try and see the field behind, to pick up patches or fragments of green or tan behind them, her glass windshield in front of her was dirty, smeared, it was hard to concentrate.  There were no stars at all in fact.  It was a solidly brilliant sunny day, hot, humid, and it made her hair frizz a bit more and uncontrollably.  She felt sweat collecting on her brow as she sat in the steel and glass reinforced pod in the middle of  a meadow in Gloucestershire.  It was late spring and all the stars were really just clutches and bunches of golden wildflowers.  A perfect little field.  A perfect little day.  Under a perfect little sky.
Behind her were the last rows of houses of the village and to the side was the trickling Slaughter Brook.  The pod she sat in was attached to a huge and long expandable metal arm apparatus, thousands of cables and lights, wires and routers, electronic devices far beyond the comprehension of the average living human.  Even years beyond us now, still amazing technology.  The best that money can buy.  Or could buy.  Before the funding stopped, the government all but pulled the plug, but the project limps on, basically on love, fed with good intentions.
Inside a small grey cinder block building directly in front of the pod and the wires and lights and arm, sat the only other person on site at the facility today…or any other day, a blonde woman with a serious face, so serious, it never appears to move or to have moved.  Nearing forty-five and tired, with nothing to spend energy on but this moribund project.  She is sitting at the controls, but isn’t attentive, busy reading, headlines, stories, news, fake, manufactured and real.  She knows she is being lied to when she reads the news updates, in fact she counts on it, factors that in.
“Come on.  Hurry up.  It’s hot in here.  I’m sweating.” Petra Ewe sits in the pod, at the piloting controls, and checks and double checks everything, clicking the tab to communicate with the master board in the control building.
“It won’t hurt you for a bit.”
“It’s humid too, making my hair frizz.”
“So, what’s new?”
“What’s new?  Well, for one, our starvation if we don’t get this thing working.  Some results.  Not to mention our reputations.”
“Our reputations?”  The blonde woman chuckles as she keeps reading, absent-mindedly flicking the tab on and off to continue the conversation.
“The Celtic Union is far in front of us with this research.”
“The Celtic Union doesn’t stand a chance.  They simply don’t have the tech that we have, we’ll be fine, keep your pants on.”
“The Celtic Union is taking this seriously.  They are putting in the work.”
As she said it, the machine under her began to growl and lurch slightly forward.
“here we go.”  Petra breathed out, a tiny whisper, giving up on being heard.
And she sat perfectly still, her hands gripping the control bars tighter and tighter, grinding her teeth, and waited.  Waited for the insurmountable force that mysteriously was pooling beneath her and beginning to swell, she knew it would hit soon and then up up up, she would be rocketed up high into the atmosphere on a long almost infinitely expanding steel lattice work of arms and wrenches and hydraulic hisses and hoses.  Another force would then take over, a multicolored intangible gust of energy that would sweep her off the tall sky-scraping pedestal and force her beyond the troposphere and deep into space.  Deeper than anyone has gone before.  (or would, if this wasn’t all a simulation.  Everything preparation).
She waited.  And imagined the blue sky over her head and prepared herself for the cracking away and the way the blue would slide to violet and then to purple. All the colors bleeding through the busted sky as she would rocket up and to the shell thin fabric of atmosphere before breaking out, tearing apart the egg and albumin and hatching out spectacularly in deep dark distant space.  Cosmic child.
She breathed hard.   And she waited.  Not more than two seconds past and the countdown barely moved.
“This thing is still in simulation mode, right?”
“Uh huh.”  came the disinterested and raspy reply over the module’s intercom.
“Because I’m not ready for deep space yet.”  she touched the dark bronze coil of hair on top of her head, gently expanding, effervescently frizzed in the hot humid air.  Everything pregnant.  Everything heavy.  Soaked through with moisture and quivering moments waiting to likewise expand, expand and pop.
New realities.  Answers to old realities.  Able to more easily understand the old and more readily birth the new.   

McKenzie, still in the modernage

Jesse S. Mitchell

more here session Santiago

On the edges of the photograph on the postcard, you can clearly see shadows and other wide-eyed buildings, super-gray and concrete, trying hard to peek into the frame, blend in and get noticed, New York City with a spoiled child syndrome, midtown, great big neo-gothic castle-cathedral standing straight up and down like a Yew tree, maybe an Ash. Yggdrasil, something dragonous gnawing at the roots, bitter herb-roots.  The very center of the universe. Been lots of centers of the universe, Persia, the river Nile, Ur, Paris, London, Zeigler IL., Harappa.
My eyes try to focus on the picture but, I’m just too tired, too blind, all I ever see anymore are the blurs, the blurs and trailing off smears that the blurs leave as they fade away, blurry.
I had a dream once where I saw the end of the universe.  All chaos and fire and uproar and commotion.  There was no center of anything.  

 the old postcard, swinging on the wall, barely noticing its horrific pin.  The stickpoint prison.  A moment in time, both the picture and the card, unable to communicate more than the strength of that particular moment, and the strength it has to live on in memory or else to die away.  To leave a hole, noticeable or otherwise, is still an expression of strength, of vitality. 

And beneath that, under all that memorial detention and sophisms  

A flat table.  A table I got purposely after a long week of long nights reading ’the problem of philosophy’.  Russell used a table just like this one to illustrate a hundred thousand points.  It lifted off the top of my head, like poetry.  Dickenson would be proud.   

On top of the flat table is a mess.  A woven mess and mass of chaos and narrow string all strung together.  Falling off the sides, bundled up in places, mounds, several strands thick here and there. 

And over the cluster of string and strands, is a clock.  A very plain clock, stock black and high contrast white, bright red second hand.  And I watch it.   My eyes naturally focus on it.  The hands swinging and spinning around the wide face, orbiting, ticking off time.  We tell time in orbits, sun dials and clock towers, because that is how we decay, one spin after the next around the big blazing yellow sun.  

The numbers printed on the face are meaningless.  They can’t tell you anything.  It is the movement that is crucial. What we get from clocks is sensational and not material, time absolutely abstract.  

The moon in the corner of my window is all I need to know that it is night.  Shining gibbous, great modern witch face, an ocean wave, ghostlight, raising from off the deepest floor, the sea arm, diffusedlight, tsunami coming up, washing away the color

But only for a little bit

Just to replace the copperlight with purplenight and trade one source of all light for a sky of two million, three hundred billion.  Churning stars.  Everything palemoonlight.

The hash dealer that reminds me of Oliver Reed is outside, down the block, sitting inside a car.  Waiting on me.  Me, trying to get up the strength to get up and out the door, if even for a few minutes.  Nothing ever goes quickly enough.    

McKenzie contemplates St. Patrick's day.

Jesse S. Mitchell

thumb tacked to the wall in a rusty corner, thin pale yellow outline on the discolored paint, a postcard of St. Patrick’s.  the edges so ragged, chipped and pulled, almost fuzzy in spots, the paper coming undone, untangled, returning to the earth in the form of tiny flecks of decaying dust.  Let it rain.  Here it pours and I can’t take my eyes off the picture, still glossy, still slick after all these years of dangerous pulling apart, falling apart, tearing and tearing, crumbling.
Wonder what the namesake would think of the cathedral.  Not really a monument to him at all but to us, we like to think of the name, makes us feel ways about ourselves and our pasts.  Good ways.  Fun ways.  Wholesome and complete.
Nothing is really further from the truth.
Ol’ Patrick was just a rich colonial kid walking the Bristol beaches when he got Shanghaied and tossed in chains, made to row fields for his Celtic masters.  Boy escaped and got back home, probably sweating it at first but then fuming, angry.  They said he got religious.  I think he got brave, mad and brave, and decided to go back and teach those slave drivers a lesson.  He drove the snakes out of Ireland.  The great snakedriver.  Now, when you piece it together, you realize snakes means pagan and pagan means Irish and Irish means guffawing whipping kidnapping monster…at least, to the dear old patron saint’s mind.  And so the rich Roman kid, living it up villa style in Britain, went back one day and taught those fuckers a lesson that we’ve never forgot.  Never forgot but have since gotten completely wrong.  Totally wrong.  The Irish and the Irish inspired, all love this guy.  After a while, we always seem to lose our minds, Stockholm syndrome writ large and we start building snakedrivers cathedrals, pirates get mansions, and murders get to be on t-shirts and coinages.  Columbus days and first-born-massacre-Passover days.  Celebrate.
 Happy St. Patrick’s day!
Shamrocks and green beer.  New York City parades.  Goddamn leprechauns.
Brutal life is two seconds from a charming story, always.
And so we tend to sit in the middle of the hot ashes and watch the cinders fall and pretend they are stars and we are caught in their orbits.
I would take the postcard down but I’m afraid of leaving the clean stain on the wall.  It would look naked.  And it would make me feel guilty.
And feeling guilty makes me sick.