Cheyenne Nimes
2 poems
**
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…
1.
Settled down with our backs to wind and watched. It’s where we’re looking at, it’s just that, the sky. Tied up with a big yellow silk bow. Bathed in a halo of light. Parasol. Long-handled pruning shears. Thank-you note. Copulations. Like so many sleeping drunks. Mill slowly. We’re dressed in their living best, all held together by mutual gravitational forces, gently feeling the curvature of the earth. They say they don’t know what it is and cannot see it. So even wild beasts could not see or smell him squirming around on its big yolk sac. The first postulate the most important one: make no assumptions about anything. Fringed with false-fronted buildings.
2.
To find any of these, you must know where in the sky to look- at the place no one ever thinks to look. Faint streaks of light in a long telescopic exposure… one glowing speck at the inside edge of the film. Like a knife fallen to the ground, or a sparrow, following light. Disappeared before she ever appeared. Like a child on an Easter egg hunt. The obvious places to expect. He was still standing there, smiling at the spacious sky. Children led us to still more eggs. Some in the light, some in the dark.
3.
Thoughts that creep up and are quickly dismissed before we even allow ourselves to think the thought fully. Its blade worn to little more than a sliver. Beautiful rock till it gets down here. Smiling and thrusts out her breasts. Slow stevedore. She has other things she wants to do. But I had a feeling and pointed. Émigré.
4.
Something like a stiff wind passed through the numbers of low probability. Flare of sun color, the weak glint of the tail. “We’ll keep an eye on it.” Doll clutched in one hand, she can feel it falling. A series of relations, a straggle of thunder sounding long after you thought it was gone. Particles in the ionosphere light up. Before hardening into fixed meaning. A single point on the sky. Looking for a way into this dimension. No bright rock had been there before. Was it real? He walked outside. It was.
5.
Something sensed for the first time. Prowling. At large. Asteroid swarm. Like an ever increasing flock of exhausted birds. Crosses mark their positions on images. Close shave. Vicinal. They could see what looks like a hand, but of course, they didn’t say that. However, you are left to draw your own conclusions. A flare on the rise. More substantial than light. Open sore that grows. Images appear, new meanings occur. She is well along in years but there is something about the way she moves. Boils down to luck, luck, luck.
6.
It begins to go wrong. “The sky is low.” Built like a wrecking ball. Started to answer to a different god. He hurried to a back room and shrank. Each breath more labored than the one before. Places the picture face down. A red beam crawled to the edge of it. Light goes all the way up then all the way down. Moving faster than my eye could follow. Watching a ball game- and the large black smudge of the ball itself. With growing fear that darkness would catch us still out in the countryside. Needing definitions now. Target plane: A plane defined as passing through the Earth's center.
7.
Testy. Red lithium flame. Firing range lights. Brightened to the threshold of human vision. Coagulating blood into a clot. A crystal globe as it breaks, shattering so continents are still recognizable? “It won’t really happen.” Sometimes the atmosphere temporarily steadies. Then comes screaming back. Long melancholy howl of a wolf. “Poorly constrained, uncertain orbit.”
8.
Deep sense of something gone wrong in the air. “My god, it’s enormous.” There is no brighter object. Slanted at a precise angle. Close to touching. Can see the occipital ridge of us, footprints left in primordial mud. Kind of like returning to the scene of the crime. The last woolly mammoth. Then necklaces of primate teeth. Blood called to blood for blood down the ages. Bowing toward earth. Mountains are young in earth time, still forming as recently as 70 million years ago. There was a time before human time. Lateral gill slits. A new story is emerging but we don’t have a new word for it; the universal score is the same.
9.
Suddenly, the whole world wants to be someplace other than Earth, or this Earth. We are here, nowhere else. Firebird. It’s not going to stop for anything. The President speaks slowly. Visibly uncomfortable. Everything that is moving comes to stillness except that rock. We were encouraged to turn our attention to God during the day by reciting short, even one-word prayers. Full blackout wartime regulations in effect. It’s practically in the backyard. And the question is not only when, but how. The earliest possible date it could arrive. Waiting room of the dead. Out-and-out. At some point these words ceased to have meaning: the future, next Christmas, safety. Someone is still selling tickets to something. Jersey Gumbo Draw. Protection schemes. To go off somewhere, can then be enclosed in a shroud preventing contact. Or chanting songs in a secret language, shaking coconut-shell rattles, to save your soul in another world. Those who are terrified and those who are dead from suicide.
10.
Has grown more and dramatically empty. Not quite yet, not quite yet, not quite yet. It is a given that it is between noon and midnight. A shadow of a stick; crude sundial. Even as you watch a second tick away, it’s gone. Last minute shotgun weddings. White of the gown, dark of the cast shadow. The distance turning into a blue shadow. “Why us?” What we call ourselves now. Kind of a deliverance, in a way. Strange reports, underground news, fragments of a word or two. I think we’re hearing the other side. “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river….”
11.
We stepped out onto the top of the world. Done for. Turned the radio on and off quickly; we can last for just a sentence. Into the glowing cave of its wide open mouth. Shocked forward into the cloud of dust. Fleshy hands flew apart. Leftover hands. Sprawled facedown, hands and feet askew. Their last words. The dead zone.
**
Movie Cowboys
**
return to sawbuck 4.4
**
Cheyenne Nimes just graduated from the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow & recipient of the Piper Scholar Award. Recent work can be found in Killauthor, Abjective, Calamity Jane, Sonora Review, Nano Fiction & other places. She was the 2009 winner of DIAGRAM's hybrid essay contest for a piece on the Santa Cruz River from her thesis on the
world water crisis.
**
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi…
1.
Settled down with our backs to wind and watched. It’s where we’re looking at, it’s just that, the sky. Tied up with a big yellow silk bow. Bathed in a halo of light. Parasol. Long-handled pruning shears. Thank-you note. Copulations. Like so many sleeping drunks. Mill slowly. We’re dressed in their living best, all held together by mutual gravitational forces, gently feeling the curvature of the earth. They say they don’t know what it is and cannot see it. So even wild beasts could not see or smell him squirming around on its big yolk sac. The first postulate the most important one: make no assumptions about anything. Fringed with false-fronted buildings.
2.
To find any of these, you must know where in the sky to look- at the place no one ever thinks to look. Faint streaks of light in a long telescopic exposure… one glowing speck at the inside edge of the film. Like a knife fallen to the ground, or a sparrow, following light. Disappeared before she ever appeared. Like a child on an Easter egg hunt. The obvious places to expect. He was still standing there, smiling at the spacious sky. Children led us to still more eggs. Some in the light, some in the dark.
3.
Thoughts that creep up and are quickly dismissed before we even allow ourselves to think the thought fully. Its blade worn to little more than a sliver. Beautiful rock till it gets down here. Smiling and thrusts out her breasts. Slow stevedore. She has other things she wants to do. But I had a feeling and pointed. Émigré.
4.
Something like a stiff wind passed through the numbers of low probability. Flare of sun color, the weak glint of the tail. “We’ll keep an eye on it.” Doll clutched in one hand, she can feel it falling. A series of relations, a straggle of thunder sounding long after you thought it was gone. Particles in the ionosphere light up. Before hardening into fixed meaning. A single point on the sky. Looking for a way into this dimension. No bright rock had been there before. Was it real? He walked outside. It was.
5.
Something sensed for the first time. Prowling. At large. Asteroid swarm. Like an ever increasing flock of exhausted birds. Crosses mark their positions on images. Close shave. Vicinal. They could see what looks like a hand, but of course, they didn’t say that. However, you are left to draw your own conclusions. A flare on the rise. More substantial than light. Open sore that grows. Images appear, new meanings occur. She is well along in years but there is something about the way she moves. Boils down to luck, luck, luck.
6.
It begins to go wrong. “The sky is low.” Built like a wrecking ball. Started to answer to a different god. He hurried to a back room and shrank. Each breath more labored than the one before. Places the picture face down. A red beam crawled to the edge of it. Light goes all the way up then all the way down. Moving faster than my eye could follow. Watching a ball game- and the large black smudge of the ball itself. With growing fear that darkness would catch us still out in the countryside. Needing definitions now. Target plane: A plane defined as passing through the Earth's center.
7.
Testy. Red lithium flame. Firing range lights. Brightened to the threshold of human vision. Coagulating blood into a clot. A crystal globe as it breaks, shattering so continents are still recognizable? “It won’t really happen.” Sometimes the atmosphere temporarily steadies. Then comes screaming back. Long melancholy howl of a wolf. “Poorly constrained, uncertain orbit.”
8.
Deep sense of something gone wrong in the air. “My god, it’s enormous.” There is no brighter object. Slanted at a precise angle. Close to touching. Can see the occipital ridge of us, footprints left in primordial mud. Kind of like returning to the scene of the crime. The last woolly mammoth. Then necklaces of primate teeth. Blood called to blood for blood down the ages. Bowing toward earth. Mountains are young in earth time, still forming as recently as 70 million years ago. There was a time before human time. Lateral gill slits. A new story is emerging but we don’t have a new word for it; the universal score is the same.
9.
Suddenly, the whole world wants to be someplace other than Earth, or this Earth. We are here, nowhere else. Firebird. It’s not going to stop for anything. The President speaks slowly. Visibly uncomfortable. Everything that is moving comes to stillness except that rock. We were encouraged to turn our attention to God during the day by reciting short, even one-word prayers. Full blackout wartime regulations in effect. It’s practically in the backyard. And the question is not only when, but how. The earliest possible date it could arrive. Waiting room of the dead. Out-and-out. At some point these words ceased to have meaning: the future, next Christmas, safety. Someone is still selling tickets to something. Jersey Gumbo Draw. Protection schemes. To go off somewhere, can then be enclosed in a shroud preventing contact. Or chanting songs in a secret language, shaking coconut-shell rattles, to save your soul in another world. Those who are terrified and those who are dead from suicide.
10.
Has grown more and dramatically empty. Not quite yet, not quite yet, not quite yet. It is a given that it is between noon and midnight. A shadow of a stick; crude sundial. Even as you watch a second tick away, it’s gone. Last minute shotgun weddings. White of the gown, dark of the cast shadow. The distance turning into a blue shadow. “Why us?” What we call ourselves now. Kind of a deliverance, in a way. Strange reports, underground news, fragments of a word or two. I think we’re hearing the other side. “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river….”
11.
We stepped out onto the top of the world. Done for. Turned the radio on and off quickly; we can last for just a sentence. Into the glowing cave of its wide open mouth. Shocked forward into the cloud of dust. Fleshy hands flew apart. Leftover hands. Sprawled facedown, hands and feet askew. Their last words. The dead zone.
**
Movie Cowboys
Camera tripod rests on the desert. Motion blur: There is something under our feet moving. Changes in the earth’s tilt in space. Tectonic motion. A sudden river rise. Froze and watched the water. Underexpose if the ice is dark blue, overexpose if the ice is white–we knew that-- but you wouldn’t believe something that big could come in that close and be so quiet. Melting at both ends of the Earth. Carried to the ends of the Earth. Normally straight sane people are hearing voices out their air conditioners. Though I write this in the dark I know what I’m saying. Everyone in town headed down-valley, flammable objects. He made it plain from the podium, from the deadly backlighting, he’s going to be talking about the end of the world. Air of someone tired of pretending. Declaring it “No longer necessary.” Two gold tablets the size of a man’s hand. Don’t ask me that. Placing assault rifle in the blood. Paired with distinctive glossy red and black images. The iron in our blood. Double cross. These aren’t the same people I knew from earlier. Now I don’t believe anything. Churches burned down from the sun, things glittered like I’d never seen them. The cranium is more like a ball than anything else. Reflects light and heat. Salatorial. No one ever told me that. A slot machine’s gold sparkle were it it. The lower jaw falling. The tourists return to their country. After they say the iron in our blood comes from supernovas. That we’re not alone – thousands of other universes may exist. The light was going down but the screen stayed blue long before going white… A sideways light and subjects moving toward or away from the camera without more reference than themselves. Fire spread and carried everything down. Most of the city was finally abandoned. “Bleached.” You’ve only seen the beginning. It’s better to understand that from the beginning. Heat and naked. A dead hand reaches from. Final world. The last god. You must know what was before to have a feeling of what will be coming. There, in an instant, was the mouth. Whoever’s going to die is going to die, and whoever isn’t, isn’t. We will pass the night in the first village to which we come. Like movie cowboys in a deserted carved light, thick layers of sand and debris built up over the centuries. Crawl along the ground, a large flightless bird, as they slowly wave their arms two short rows of fires- I was going to shoot, but then you waved-. South of the world’s dividing line a remote tropical town. Big eyes, Big belly. A Gulf Stream offshoot. Stones coexist with bills and coins. The image merges in the original. They never saw us. Dark green fruit weighing several pounds apiece. The painted faces. Intrinsicality. People were in the area longer than previously thought. Is there someone I forgot I wanted to be? Some sudden drum beat. We were here first. Just that. The last flare fell behind. Burned down all the surfaces that are facing up. The waters? A blood bank. Sci-fi movie insects. Serrated teeth. An ending, a beginning, still going. Ain’t nothing here that won’t be revealed.
**
return to sawbuck 4.4
**
Cheyenne Nimes just graduated from the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow & recipient of the Piper Scholar Award. Recent work can be found in Killauthor, Abjective, Calamity Jane, Sonora Review, Nano Fiction & other places. She was the 2009 winner of DIAGRAM's hybrid essay contest for a piece on the Santa Cruz River from her thesis on the
world water crisis.
Labels: 4.4, cheyenne nimes, winter 2010/2011
