June 24 and John's canoes

Anyway, in the hallways, it begins wherever most narrow, our shared reluctance to speak; the sinewy fingers of baldcypress roots which pick at the meaty underbelly of John’s canoes, the inhuman horse whistles down the chute, water flow, lapping. I’d seen whitewaters, heard them from left, right, below, I’d beset louder with pressed knees — in the hallways, where bank strains its lips to press back together in silence, I fear it’ll swallow John’s canoes, fear it’ll ingest us all three. Persistent as he is, John, whistling in his tinny falsetto, laps his fingers through water as you would training a dog to swim on back, boy, swim on back to daddy. He’d said, Don’t go jumping out, he’d said, I’m serious, youse, don’t go jumping out on me. That’s when Warren started with the fingers over his eyes, pinky fingers encircling the rims of his nostrils. I couldn’t tell him to quit with the picking, then, he wouldn’t even look up at me — it was as though our power thumped to shift and my hovering hands over his shoulders saying, I’m not touching you, struck down to perfect joviality. So I shut up. I shut up even when the oar locks split at the roughhousing between Warren and June, her hair yo-yoing in clumps within his grip. I hadn’t the control to pick which ashes to preserve, the wind’d started its blowing already and I shut up. The canal hadn’t acted a directional choice this voyage, and wasn’t in so many words a mistake, but a spindly root family with a tide too low to cover for foul weather, it shifted our sleek gears and took with it the portside oars; Oh, no, Warren says, and he turns to choke at June. His tiny fingers make tiny dents in her throat, and her eyes bulge. He’s flipping his lid, he’s gonna kill me! June’s screaming. He’s gonna kill me! I let them at it while watching the two oars bob vertically, caught between rocks or roots or tidal pressure. They clang together, like ship masts, like wooden ship masts with John’s initials and faded green paint. At my wedding, the ribbons on the wrists of the flower children were sage in color, and I remembered John pulling at their arms preaching, Married in green, ashamed to be seen, plucking and tucking the sided velvet into his coat pocket. The oars bob once more in finality, crashing head-on into one another and slipping sideways into the river. I’m horrified, then, not only by the uproar of violence within the rocking boat but at the thought of those oars catching up to us and knocking the hull belly, knocking like a visitor who’d left without his keys or hat, knocking like he’d earned the right to unlock the door entirely as he’d left his extensions with a clear string running through a house not ever his. I turn toward the whistling once more, knocking the children’s heads together so their teeth crash into their tongues, and wedge one knee to my left, the other to the right, splaying my legs toward the oncoming tides and separating one iniquity from the other.

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Art;

The Water Tower, 1971

Salvador Dalí

Etching with color pochoir additions on white wove paper

318 × 490 mm (plate); 494 × 650 mm (sheet)

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/38596/the-water-tower