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Sep
2005
American Canons
Dispatches from the Political Environment
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american
canons, anonymous, matt briggs, mark flanigan, lindsay caron,
nico vassilakis, william levy and max skeans broadside, cybil
weigel, constitution of the united states of america, poetry,
broadsides posters, essay, short story |
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Matt
Briggs: A Fifth of July |
I feign clearance with my neighbor. In the manner
of a land without sidewalks, a manner I can only guess at, I whack the chain
link fence and stuff my blank note into a wad between the links. “How do?” I
call.
“We will get to it one of these days.” I
cannot fault him for discreetness.
We share a holly tree we take turns trimming or
just plain neglecting and letting the bush watch the television that is always
on through the downstairs window. This was the tack my neighbor would take while
I went out. I wanted to jog around the track at the primary school, cleared out
due to the heat. My jogging shirt still smelled earthy and salty from my last
track run. I found my jogging lawnmower. The cord needed to be crimpled. Left
loose, the engine went dead. I was left with un-powered, whirring blades. So
I left the machine in the mechanical room. I jogged from the house at a very
slow pace down the tar that had been retrofitted last year. The lane was already
worn in odd places from a parade of snow studded tires. A family stood next to
a maroon minivan as I jogged past. They took in my passage without assessing
me.
At the lip of the hill, the lawns recline under
a steady application of chemicals. Each blade of grass measures an exact value
of magenta provided you have the spectrograph to assess the plant life. The Douglas
fir in the yards stand tall enough they lost their tops and had pretty, silver
snags. The lower branches are cut, and between their thick trunks, Puget Sound
sparks. I run alongside the busy arterial on the gravel path. The median holds
a thicket of tall, yellow grasses hiding ant hills, mole holes, secrets discarded
before the honeys return home. At the school parking lot, I walk up the steep
grade, preparing myself to jog. I need to be fit for the eventual conflict with
my neighbor, with the hostile stranger, with the eventual door-to-door assailant.
The primary grounds hold long grass. The tips have
developed seeds. The wind blows the stiff, yellow stalks together making a woody
ode. Apartment dwelling boys play basketball bare chested while listening to
the low rumble of a baseline; the rap dissipates in the white noise of overhead
airplane traffic falling toward the International fairway. Shadows of the jets
flick over the buildings bending to vertical walls and slip themselves around
tetherball poles.
A young man stands on the crumpled asphalt court
writing something on one of the metal basketball posts. The paint on the posts
are scratched, dented, flecked away from use. He writes something on the post.
I should look, I realize, at his writing now, but at the time I am struck by
the movements of his body as he writes something on the post. His arms are angled
out from his body, positioned to give his hands the most leverage, and rather
than being a barbaric thing, this applications of symbols to the metal post --
I’m sure if I see the message he’s etched into the post I’ll
be less impressed -- but from a distance it seems exquisitely civilized, this
application of symbols to the metal post, an act like carving the cuneiform in
the stele for the Law Code of Hammurabi, a human act inexplicable to animals.
Termites leave etchings in wood, their trails forming intricate patterns, but
these are essentially random, recursions, and this mark making isn’t that;
this mark here is something deliberate. I will have to check what he writes when
I go back, and it will be something silly, like Woodmont Boyz Rulz or I Fucked
Doris or something equally recursive half disproving my point that it is something
deliberate. But in his defacing this object he adds deliberation on top of deliberation.
I do not live in a natural world but a world built and calculated by planners
and ordinances and a sense that each piece needs to fit with each piece and this
interlocked and constructed enactment of a world where water flows below me in
pipes and human beings flow above me in packets of aluminum bolted to burning
and refined Jurassic lawn cuttings must be protested with new, random marks declaring
that Woodmont Boyz Rulz or I Fucked Doris that I did something and that my actions
have left an indelible, uncalculated scar in the order of the city streets and
their street signs.
In the vast field next to the track and soccer
field, filled with weeds including I notice then those little yellow ball weeds
that used to grow around the washing machine in the trailer park where my mother
did her laundry in the summer months when our well went dry in the 1970s, a weed
I associate with the smell of washing machines, we would take our laundry home
wet and hang it to dry from cords in the front lawn. In the morning when it was
still damp with dew, but just damp and pretty much dry we would take them inside
and fold them on the couch and they smelled fresher than they did with the dry
machine, they smelled like wind and clouds and the pitch of the cedar trees growing
in the gully between the house and the road. These tiny little ball shaped weeds
cover the packed earth of this vast field next to the playground. I cross through
them. Fireworks have been set up here and I saw them when I sat with my daughter
and wife on the hill overlooking Puget Sound in the evening on the Fourth along
with all of the other neighbors; and here they are all spent, thousands of firecrackers
like cigarette butts only decorated with a pattern: white cherry blossoms. The
spent boxes of the big, exploding fireworks lay upturned -- Dragon Box, Tiger
Garden, Spit Fire Asylum -- their tops black and the cardboard charred from the
explosions. A boy on a bicycle wears a sport jersey that says, “Nike,” in
the Egyptian slab serif type that symbolizes college. He pokes through the rubble
looking for something maybe that was still live looking for something maybe that
would make sense to him, but I don’t think he finds any life. He glances
at me as I walked across the track up the grade to run.
I begin to jog around the track. I drag my body
heavy from inaction. I spend my days in front of computer monitors. Even at home
I work in front of these things and read in front of these things and talk to
my neighbors through these things and so to make my body move like this in the
hot sun is work. A clutch of Hispanic boys play soccer on the lush grass of the
soccer field; the field is of very short, very green natural grass. They play
and it strikes me that they move slowly. On my first movement around the track,
a boy wearing a bandana kicks the ball at the net. His kick is like a scooping
motion. The ball arcs with a precise pass just over the lip of the goal and I
think in perhaps a standard field that his placement would have been perfect,
just under the upper bar where the goalie couldn’t get it. The ball in
any case passes over the net and then rolls down the hill into the weeds and
packed earth and spent fireworks. Like a good sport he goes and gets it. Maybe
this is the rule: if you kick it, get it. This is the fabric of civilization
that is spent in my neck of the woods. I jog past them around and around the
track in the summertime and when I return home my muscles burn, my sense of body
returns to me. I breathe and live in the air. My neighbor, still breathing, too,
damn him. He sits on his deck chair in the shade of the holly tree drinking aluminum.
When he says, “Have a nice jog?” He has my note unraveled and holds
up the empty paper to show me it is blank. I know it is blank. I think about
injecting the water main to his house with a syringe of pox. I just want to be
free.
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