Notes Towards a Post-Avant Pastoral Language
The first imperative was this: Always to remain
skeptical of narrative. February is the worst month.
The early joy of winter gone, the barren cold remains.
Small businesses are universally held
as preferable to large ones, yet towers continue
to dominate skylines. Elsewhere, more crises
of the spirit abound. When will the golden age of
Hollywood return? It said it was going out
for cigarettes, and that was years ago.
All attendees are in agreement: the tolerances
will need to be revised. This is too much. One factor
beyond the pale of consideration. Better that fish,
no longer trapped beneath frozen lakes, should leap
right into the nets, without need for bait, hook, line, or sinker.
Of course, the party grinds to a screeching
and aggravated halt. Someone, who shall remain nameless,
has managed to leave open the door to the spare
first-floor bedroom, where the coats are piled,
and the forest has gotten in. There’s a bevy
of miniature creatures sprawled out around
a tiny pond, a small stand of pine trees
growing from the dense mountain of tweeds,
and storm cells spread across the ceiling.
Slowly, the party comes to realize the nature of
the predicament. Contractors are already
drawing up plans for condominiums and phoning in
requests for environmental impact reports. A faun
emerges from the bathroom and scrapes his hooves
clean on the edge of the carpet and the tile. Fixing you
with his eyes as deep and absolute as cosmos, his voice rich
and mellifluous, the purest embodiment of cable news, he intones:
“Your breakfast was dictated by the need of a man to sell bacon,
your daily rituals of cleanliness by a surplus of bath soap and shampoo,
your war by the need of your nation to be at war.”
It was with such genuinely helpful advice that he unlatched
the small window at the top of the room and crawled backward
into night, into the blast of wind and leaves,
which fill the forest and the floor. The party ended,
the lights gone out, obscuring the wreckage. The pillows
upturned, the couches disheveled, half-empty bottles
abandoned on stair-landings, the sheets of the master
bedroom in suspicious disarray, the odor of sex emerging
from behind the mask of air freshener, the yeasty tang
of beer. Outside, faint whispers on the sidewalk seal
a kind of doom in the perceptibly warming air which fails,
as ever, to bring us the comfort we had expected.
We were a cross between a cowboy and a knight-errant
in gleaming plate, at least that was the image, a real buckaroo,
dragging the great bear behind us, mouth tied, claws clipped
(we thought) and given a bath. We were prepared to help it with
financing, loans with reasonable terms, just sign here, please and thank you.
These were the games we played in yards while adults consulted
over deals and affairs, dry martinis sweating on side tables.
Whole symphonies of the imagination scored in grass stains
and decomposed granite. Not yet aware our thoughts
were not our own, colonized by signals carried in delicate
and imperceptible interlacing overhead, while helicopters
scanned the places they were assigned to hover.
William Youngblood
William Youngblood was born near Los Angeles, CA, and lives in St. Louis, MO, where he received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis before serving as the 2018-2019 Poetry Junior Teaching Fellow. His work has appeared in Passages North.