Sea of Glass 

ByPaul Scallan

 “I who know only the one city And by touch in my sleep I could find it…                 

…Whose secret chorus swirls around my head And possibly one day will stifle me I know the beginnings and the ends of things And life after the end”    

Anna Akhmatova 

For Finn, Flannery & Gillian

Till time means Nothing -

I will love you 

Copyright 2022

 Knowledge of Bodies   

There were times, long, flat, unbearable hours that I wished none of this was so, I wished it in nights of fighting, in the twilight when my hands hurt from the plow handles that watered pecan trees … I wished it hard when I saw sadness on faces that could not be washed off,  I wished it when the hands of those who loved me flew against their will towards me, their very will denied by forces of history more powerful than love in their hearts . But the miracle came

Unintended roses bloomed on my back from the bullwhip and my hands were swollen from the marks of the wooden plow handles. Usually, on the way home I just lay on the steel life-preserver box of the Ascentionville Ferry, smelling the water, cooling my skin, rubbing my back on the steel because it was hot and itchy from my brace made of whalebones wrapped in white cloth, yet looking with deliberateness, attempting angles of seeing, a constant geometrizing of forgetting. Exactly in between the grain elevators, the perfect sight for superfluous viewing, They told me the brace would help me grow up tall and unbent over, for I was born with a bowed back, so curved I could shoot an arrow with my body if I stood still long enough. But I didn’t. I thought it was my fault for how I was born, and I could not forgive myself. And my very body was curved like a question mark and I became a kind of walking question.  

After I leaped from the life preserver box off the ferry, just as the first bounce boomed off the old tires that spread along the dock and looked like donuts from the middle of the river, before the chains were locked round the steel jutting, right before the wailing of the Ferryman's’ horn, and just as he yelled, “ Gripper Ouber don’t you dare”! I was in the air and off. I had the edge on him. I had leaned to time it perfect, I watched Moti’s right arm and as soon as the tattoo on his bicep of a a lady in a martini glass blowing bubbles bulged, just as the her face went from celebration to a warped deformity from the massing his huge muscle, right as Moti prepared to lasso the ferry to the dock to keep it from slipping back into downstream rush, I was in the air…. and off in the driftwood fields. The ferry was empty most days when I came back from singing the star spangled banner at the leprosarium, except for a few old cars filled with people staring out with exhaustion and puzzlement at their own worn down-ness. Sometimes, tractors pulling a tilted flatbed with piles of wood or cane were allowed to drive on, as long as they swept up the fallen pieces because they were in a slant so sharp they could puncture a tire, or a man, cut at angles, if your hands grabbed them on regular basis and you are too young, it may fell your spirit. For the past year I cut through the Blind River Park to get home because I wanted to avoid the construction of the grain elevators. Most days the park was empty except for a tall terracotta Buddha stolen from across the world during some civil wars, always sitting with a blank stare, mute and quiet his gaze tumbling onto the understanding eyes of another statue on the other side of the shelled lot which was painted in gold leaf of a woman on a horse holding a lance to the sky, her face looking back over her left shoulder back to the glass house covered in moss where Buddha held court. The space between them, people were living themselves out in slow motion, as if these people were boiled down to a thick honey, fighting some force that was around here, something that sounded in the air, the feeling of slow sticky stuckness of yellow molasses light. I fought it by running fast, zig zagging across the white-shelled parking lot. But the day I found the man in the reeds was different; it was the Blue Point Festival and the park on the salt dome was filled with people. There were duck callers on one knee, taking turns at wildness, who were watched by groups of Morganza spillway girls with beehive hair and painted eyelids who sat smoking in lawn chairs, swinging one leg over the other, sucking lemon drops with a certain color of red lips that I had never seen anywhere in the world of man nor in nature. As they batted their eyes at strangers walking by, sniffing out their private zephyr of fortune, or personal war. Still others, the ones who seemed to be deciding something, looked at the duck callers, taking long disgusted drags and shaking their heads. While a few occasionally turned back in wonder at one of the statues on either side of the park. The older women with see-through moustaches spoke sadly of the expense of saffron strings from Spain and why now they had no choice, shamefully but to use tomatoes instead. Wifeless, racooned-eyed men with sparkling eyes, taking a break from casting their trojan horsed traps in the water, leaned on cars in unfitting clothes, drinking beer, hoping one or the other might take them soon, a statue or a woman, and some whispered to fluorescent high-yellows (who were decedents of a large whorehouse inviting the lonely that traveled the reconstruction road not far from here; its night-windows once spread squares on liquid fields,) or children that heaven is like morning in boats without noise.  

He told me that I’m not like most white people, he told me that I ain’t a regula black dude, me, I ain’t a yellow one like him or a black one or even a mocha one. I’m a white-trash and I don’t like most white people who aint. So when I was running through the park that day, one of them regular white people was yelling something at me about a ticket and I just ignored him. I dodged in and out of the mud muddles and the people and saw at the edges of the park a group of retarded men with nice two-toned shoes climbing by a van parked on the white-shelled lot. One of them was looking at me, already seated, through a window with a stick twirling between his fingers waving his baton at me like I was a trick in the circus. He seemed to know what I was thinking. So I turned around and decided to take the other way.  

As I ran I thought how I did not have good shoes and the sound of shame scraping shells was ringing in my ears. I still hear it, I do and I still smell the brine that the rains lifted from the whiteness of the shells and I think of the night shift men dredging them up. My tutor taught me many things…   making me smear Leomon jam on her wounds. She fussed at me for saying” Jam”, that was for the uneducated…. But to say  “marmalade” while I rubbed her back.  We laid in the stables and we talked all night watching the flames blow from towers . We smoked old cigars that Totoot gave me. She rubbed the scars on my back with whiskey, mud and willow leaves… rubbed it, tiny things were coming out of my back , a fluid ....a liquid was covering her hands…  I was infected    Anyway, it was there under the spinning umbrellas and a frozen Ferris wheel being fixed , during all of this right during a midpoint of a jump across a mud muddle that I saw him. He lay by the side of a canal. Red-eared turtles bobbed up and down at his twisted feet and he, seeming helpless, lay dreaming in the tall-uninterrupted grass. He stuttered when he spoke, but I understood all he said, and his foul breathed words reached me more than anything I had ever heard. I sat, looking at him before we spoke.

 I asked him “ What is it hobo man?” Or something like that, and then, I felt seen, looked at in way I never had, which allowed me to begin. I still do not know how it all started; it could have begun a number of ways, the journey, but this day, was the day that I always live out unfinished. He grabbed me and told me he was my father…  From out of nowhere, from under his coat, he pulled out a cup made of a stone; it was see through yet was the color of tearing apart, of crushed cherries, blood bitten lips, the tint of the circumference’s of eyes after nights of crying, the tint mistaken animals at night in the light of the bull eye, the color of the ripping apart of lives, of breaking up of families, the color of the cry of people thrown away who believe that they are nothing because they have nothing. This color would be the cup, made of one stone and he would pull it out of an invisible place and he would give it to me to drink. When I finished a long delirious pull, the tissue of my outline would fold inward, the reverse volcano, I would turn into nothing, I would now be transparent and the sun and night would filter through me, for I would be empty.  Then he reached deep to the bottom of his pocket, and found under bits paper, under instructions for things never used, under all of the useless things, the would reach deep into the very bottom of his pocket, and pullout a dirty rag to wipe my forehead.  He then told me that I was my brother’s keeper. He said I would now be used to separate coffee from water, and then, be tossed aside. I knew it is what I have wanted and feared all of my life. I was to give love yeah. But maybe I will never get it back…. So I ran through the reeds, screaming out in protest….I would not look back,  branded, yet in a different color and I would belong to an ancient pull . I ran far from the shelter with less sun of his loving eyes, and no shadow would come on my blistering face. 

Now, driving home after 30 years Tonight, while the neon pink glimmer of the faded city splashed in my car window, it seemed to highlight the hushes of the dejected bottle-cap-feet dancers and to awaken my own sense of failure. Their lost looks, mixing with the cries from the strip club Barkers excitement, opened my very own false river, the paths of lies, and struggle, broke forth. I thought I had buried it deep. But now the reminisce is coming on me hard, of the time in the very beginning, when it all started to fall apart, when I first heard the whispers soothing the unintended roses on my bullwhipped back that later bloomed into shabby wings which allowed me to see the world upside down.