REMINGTON GRAVES

Let the lulling beckon and sing, O Death-thy sword aflame, the screeching echoes of a hungry night scale the walls that flatten under foot; Mounted on horseback my gaze in a daze amid slightly shifting pine trees inclining at the back of a slumbering lion, star-arrayed and in full display, a nocturnal ballet whilst a thousand organs play- their mouths covered by hands who sternly demand reverence unstained. The heavens sway to my horse’s neigh and the creaking of the saddle and its tack, anchors me aback-resisting the vulgar desire of the vacuum’s witching attire. The sound of its mouth ajar, its scent of blood and honey-bees and wolves, foxes, coyotes, cicada roads of ants aplenty.  Calling this cowboy to a land-one far too far from infernal and heavenly paradigms to understand.

The cold of Forge’s breath, coils upwards, ascending its way into the mountain depths; Sweat dripping down his heaving chest. Blood reins held upon my left, and right hand rests upon the horn with palm and fingers enthroned upon the crest. He snorts and bellows as the late hour spell goes. And we sit in magic company, perfumed with nature’s reverie, with ardent thoughts adrift-the revenant-a man who took flesh and carved his mark bit by bit. But now here he sits-atop a Quarterhorse -the cowboy’s war machine, the vessel of Indian fever dreams, the missing half of my heart’s moaning aches.

With three fractured nagging ribs, I resist…the singing of temptation’s urge to send me in a gallop. And I cannot help but notice how the more things change, the more they truly stay the same; Bakersfield and it’s streets did allow me to retreat in many ways, of one discreet, and hide the face of better days as its natives turned a cold and bitter cheek.

C’mon, ol’ boy, stay straight and through

Find your feet-firm agrip the avenue

Let the fangs of feral hills find you fondly

Of this thrashing and bruised lessons foreshadowed I do concede

To wrangle death-baroqued dragon upon my chest-breastplate beaming

Let any Cayuse come forth with challenge of abuse

And let her whisper somewhere far beyond the trees

‘L’appel du vide’

∞

REMINGTON GRAVES

The paper soaked the afternoon sun as it hovered gently on the oak table adjacent to the window facing the mountains; a seraphic zephyr with a childlike temperament flirted with the tattered curtains-spinning-swinging-almost forming a beckoning of the hands of the perfume outside-a call from atop the golden slumbering lions that laid still under a foggy blanket. The last few words still wet…the fountain pen rolling apprehensively toward the edge of the table. And the whistle and the roll and the thin guttural language of the sheet as it tapped at the table as it hovered and shifted to the right, entered the restroom where he shaved his face with his grandfather’s razor. The complicity of this symphony brought a smile to his face, which is why he opened the window and left it so since dawn.

His grandfather was the veritable man. Stoic and stubborn, the perfect pugilist-both in the ring and out, a ‘self made son of a bitch’, he once heard his grandmother muddle quietly under her panting biting breath. He had witnessed a myriad of atrocities back in his home town somewhere in Italy. Scars on his face, the nascent nihility of a driven devil determined, aseptic and banal. They spoke once. About something on television. Superman or some other such nonsense.

The facial hair added to the melody as the razor removed swaths of peppered foam. The words waited. The curtains wraithed. The pen rolled from side to side, possessed by the madness of the man shaving-eagerly awaiting the wielder. And he smiled with his eyes as he recalled his grandmother beating him for opening animals so he may explore their inner workings. ‘I could’ve been a surgeon,’ he thought.

The sun finally imposed its bright face in and began to read:

Vengeance is a marriage-of patience and commitment. One must not allow time to dissuade your duty. Words or deeds shall not pull you from the road that leads the way. If one has promised to deliver in serious or in just, the bond was spoken, the deed to be done, shall be the ebbing wave right before the crimson tide. Genius is eternal patience. A year is child’s play. Let two, maybe three go by, and never let your mark know it was you. Let them assume, in the puddle of their blood, it was merely bad luck, it could’ve happened to anybody, a series of events that let to this misfortune. Allow yourself the pleasure of forgetting the fire you once lit that took so long to roar like slumbering lions who were awoken by betraying lambs.

∞