Chris Sylvester

Herb Chambers (Any %)

…

It is June, in one week it will also be June; I try to tell William how

important he is before bed and he asks Can we stop talking about this

Dad. He’d rather discuss Mr. Gary’s visit next door, come in with

season’s first ditch-lilly, how he crosses his legs at the hairless glisten of

diabetic ankle, rings the doorbell of his mind, etc, but it’s locked from

the outside, etc, says to his host (Mr. Rick), Weeds all over the shop;

you’ll be one soon enough. What he doesn’t know is that somewhere

there is a man extremely frightened of his own shed, that someone or

something is living in his shed, and he’s posting videos about his shed

daily, strange sounds, doors opening and closing on their own with lights

flickering, basketballs falling off high shelves, which do prove that

something definitely isn’t right about the shed. I believe him. Not even

allowed to write something wrong now in this perfect world sorry to all

the perfect brothers and sisters out there. Louisa wakes up before it all

turns into what it’s about, reports that she’s awake for no reason and that

she’s crying, wants to know what’s going on (nothing), wants to

understand why this is happening, maybe, she proposes, it’s the second

blanket, entailing as it does no appreciable good or ill. Today is Joey’s

birthday. It is 6:30 in the morning and he’s whispering in my ear: To

master believing, all you have to do is tip the balance of your thoughts,

words, and actions from ‘not believing’ to ‘believing’. I do not believe

him. Tells me Franky drinks the air like chameleons do and in the

foreground there is a terrace or strip of ground strewn with shrubs and

undergrowth which contemplates resemblance, panorama with dominant

vertical. Update from home: spider, protein in the pool. Just how black

can an animal be—chewables or just the juice. Where my beasts without

my Will or Knowledge, and so on. Louisa asks me to wheel her outside

so she can be alone but the mosquitos are waiting to perform a sort of

non-consensual company (in the sense that they are already visiting).

Says she doesn’t care but she will, which is what a parent is. In and out

of wood, it’s gotta go somewhere. Trapped inside Herb Chambers with

the used and new vehicles and the everlasting deals, thinking about

sealing foam, draino, about how you’ll have to pick up the fertilizing

liquid and bring it to me, conjure your past, how once you were, when

fear was yet foreign to ye. Dog academy (sludge is everywhere), dog

academy (sludge is taking over), which makes the night hideous with its

howls, and which the court severs. Sowbread or swinebread. Dad’s

friend, Donny, used to say, Speak, O Toothless Wonder when talking

about his asshole, should’ve asked What is the event frequency of lake,

of hedgerow. Oriole on the lawn, time on device, disorder under heaven;

simple things, simple places, people. William announces the song is

called Bubbles, into corals into others, says he likes the taste of tears and

would punch himself a thousand times in the eye, geogony, to taste them

again. One big hole in the middle of the month that tasks crawl out of,

assign themselves to you via irregular mesh of milestones, small apes to

the sapling. Dirty Baby, in the felt, finds his rightful place at the brace of

the tree of the heart, beside, perhaps, a negative snake. Tobin’s hand on

my back reassures itself in the dark. There used to be more options

presented, too many to be honest, so that it felt like a casino sometimes

or pleasure park, now you get the one line if you’re lucky and better

follow it to the break in the metals if you want, to come anywhere near,

pin close to finding out. The trunk diverges from itself, makes a crook,

and so there’s an oak right where Nick puts the rubber worm, rendered

‘perfect spot’, underdefined until, and the whole fish with twitch from

gill to tail tip become one mouth entire, can do nothing but bite, and it

does, and in that way Nick gets to spend time with a fish, some few

minutes, call it patience, like there is night and there is day, night is

night, day is day, unbothered by dispute, girdles the entire whirl. At the

same moment, Scott writes that he’s very disappointed in our WEAK

showing. Front is Hawaiin shirt, under is work—dream of quiet:

Equally, radishes will never show their shoulders, flowers instead and

are excused, inexorably, from the arrangement. Cucumber’s however

come true, find their way to the door. Celebrating 14th Anniversry of my

Special Healing, William hunts the bugs and his uncle scoops them with

a purpose-made net, grafted to adequate, collects blacks, greens.

Yesterday a playful fish playfully shamed me. All it takes is a shake of

the head—forgiveness—rote. Did you bring the multi-knuckle is my

dad’s question, does he mean lift system, lawn flame. Nick wants to talk

Family Memories, tries repeatedly, but I find it impossible to participate,

however benign the exercise, lights in the trees in the dark floating out

past the Polaris Machine, the skimmer-gulp, come lower, closer, are

green blinks somewhere between embarrassment and forgetting. Plants

not burn; Fluvial Drumlins of the Soul, knitted world, TV turns on by

itself (This Old House) frightens both Will and I. At first, in our mutual

innocence, we blame each other, then the dog, but the truth is that no one

was in the room. Outside, above Stop and Shop hangs the sun,

unpleasantest red, orb, reduced to complete and painless visibility by

smoke from wild fires apparently, some half a continent away. Weeks

later the nurse confesses she scolded her granddaughter for staring too

long, What we don’t need is burnt retina. Under its baleful influence the

customers glare, snarl at their counterparts in the aisles, occurred these

horrid transactions, the cashiers on purpose break eggs at check out. The

parking lot fronts on our highly compact field of nightmare. Yellow; two

days. Might as well say The Plan is the Baby with Joey and leave it at

that, at most nod to the old man out on his walk, exercising those

faculties at large. Broad green across green water makes for further

shore except one dead tree there, another, closer’s the Queen Anne’s

lace which a lady is picking, up to her knees in poison ivy. I seen it,

Sky’s, the very air, gone milky, insistent, peradventure to press. If I

could give that to the birds I would, but I can’t, wouldn’t take it, forever

from the tawdriness. Louisa announces The Pump in the Rock from back

seat, draws water from same. Similarly, Tobin recalls, Isn’t these weeds

are forever, never, in any sense, to explain, only that there are no

flowers. Like in the Dream, shows a dog-sized mouse as author and

source of our recent haze, brown with a black stripe down the back and

white feet, must to kennel, ignores our traps, rattles cabinets with its

passage, somehow squeezes behind the fridge; or, as William contends,

he doesn’t want to pick, Babies can write that but sometimes regular

humans can too, and thereby lets the leak in. Otherwise, it is an extended

instance of clover, white and purple and busied about its length with

bees, run hard against whatever bitter edge, original bound, the world

then manages by all earthly effort to present or exhibit. Can’t force it,

tell yourself, have to accept, whether it’s shapes of spruce and bayberry

gardens or the new style of swimming Louisa’s invented, accommodates

her useless leg. Not that it would matter, but I’ve secretly named the

effort Mallard’s Burp. A forkful of vegetal mush partly contained by its

fibrous tube—July 26th, 2026 8:26pm, things get pleasantly flat,

interlinked, somehow lack discernment. Don’t know how to talk about

what one has done, even if, persons, an actual earth of value, like Louisa

with her leg up reduces the swelling. Pronounces a hard C in the middle

of ancient, like me, so that it’s ank-shent, incorrectly I’m told; as if

anybody required further proof just from looking at her, heredonymic

undervault, which flashing sign alleviates its native gloom. Similarly,

Franky’s ump ump ump pulses along, depicts a dog, until she’s left alone

in the dark and then it’s all One Scream with Hell over her head, the Exit

also, the texture and condition of love. Crab apple then, sunflower,

sequenced, obdurate, at turns break their way in, which I’m sure Franky

would prefer, back there, to sleep. Like cleaning the pool opens a

window, christens it unswimmable. Since I’ve been here or since I

remember being here, that one divot by weather’s consistent application

transformed into a hole. Ducks eat gravel under absolutely still

windmill, turbine into sea mist attended by flashing of leaves of bushes,

sparrow’s plip plop, at the very median of things, where heart’s the

marsh view. Englobed in Orb of Great Interest. When, unbidden, Skip’s

two dalmatians, deaf as posts, spring to my memory, they’d come

running when they saw the door open, spots, thankless teeth, uninspired

barking because deaf and could not hear themselves. Singing all

morning, regular bog person with his dirty, unhappy children, goes,

Picker’s chit O picker’s chit / Can’t forget my picker’s chit / Picked

twenty bushels for my picker’s chit / Less meat for it than a chicken’s lip

/ Picker’s chit O picker’s chit. More Deserving varietals all throughout

the maze, aching in the land of plenty, like cormorants together, out

beyond the line of swimmers, of stretched wings to wing-tips, watch

children from jetty rocks with ungenerous and yellowrimmed eye.

Nothing at all like that video of a bird falling in love with a woman,

lonesome as the word owl is. Non-trivial wallpaper job amounts to

repeating fruit or moth’s erratic solution to the garden, those swallows,

staggered and ramshackle, returning home. Louisa come downstairs,

says, I saw a heron that looked like a hunched over old woman out

there, over the marsh, the water. Something about jealousy presiding,

yellow with bunchgrasses, summer bridge activities thrown across self-

funding loops and/or elusive internal waves, about the soul is a friendly

weasel, a ten minute montage of cool and funny moments, my

suspicious lack of preoccupation, several cankers, ends with thanks for

watching which flashes on the screen three, four times. William, now

aware he is a figure here, asks that his accomplishments be

acknowledged and recorded, doesn’t understand Dad’s not in charge,

does not advance, is only better preserved, sport solely in the sense of

sudden and unexpected anachronism. Anyway, just to put it down, calls

this evening of the very pink wind Queen Mermaid’s Magic Hour, asks

why it has to be a poem and why I like poems so much. According to a

recent message, it doesn’t matter where you live—the same people

occur, like wild servers in the woods or flaws in foreign lens, this is

parent with child image, the very navel, ruint dome of the world. Next to

that is doves, two of them, folded together, from below on a wire, white

flowers festooned by accident to the struggling lawnmower, which

probably wants oil as much as she wanted, at all points, an audience.

Too bad pizza is a pancake with sauce and cheese on top. Birdie comes

running anyway, sore at her chines, proof that immortality is but

ubiquity in time. Dear Dad, Louisa writes, Through these long 11 years

and short few days, you have supported me. What, other than the

obvious, could it mean. The smaller the engine, the sooner its shadow is

cast. It’s unfortunate. Whither leads the shaft and all that, weird things

happening again, with seagulls and the moon.

…