Entanglements, a collection of short works, arriving soonish. Here’s a short sample:

Winds

A change, shock, zig and zag, then over the ridge that defines the hollow kernel, down along the spines littered with ossified vegetative remains baked by two decades of raging sun, then out through the basin. The wind moves in a roll and pitch, carving into itself, boiling against eddies, temporarily subsuming into the evacuated cave left by its endless predecessors, and they are all an enduring chain, pulsing with the heat of the morning, craning through the galena wisps like a fan over these craggy peaks.

Across and above, passing in a trance of action, an outstretched hand reaches in petrified impotence from sand while the wind shifts around and through, a chasm through the adductor becomes a funnel and there is a spiraling motion down and across the craqueleur landscape of the palm. A blued barrel lurks powerless below. The wind shifts a few orthorhombic grains into the steel tunnel.

It will soon be buried completely, and no one will remember this ridge, the last stand, held out against inevitability as no war came, no dogs chased the quarry down, and the only evil was suppressing the vastness of loss. The wind was the endless enemy, and the heat that drives it, and the dying of the grasses, the forests—even the cacti—until Mars finally emerged, trapped as it had been beneath the carpet of life.

There will be a pause as evening rolls in, as shadows coil into the canyons, reaching in a crawl up the sandstone and granite walls, and the bubbling congregations of the wind settle into wisps and slow finally into the entropic well of night. There they will wait above a concrete dome encapsulating some latent power of the universe, a missile that will never rust in the mummified air of its silo. Never used, never applied in the defense against some raging human menace, the device is all imaginary potential. There was no application in the slow boil of the landscape, no way to leverage it against the slow shift into doom.

At morning the rays speak to the bluffs first, and the air shifts in the thin cirrus. There is movement again. Heat pours down against the dome and the molecules oscillate to action, carrying the energy, transferring it, transforming it, and the stillness becomes a ripple, then a wave, and the wind moves on again, slithering at first, then riding, then rushing, shedding energy into sound as it collapses in layers and pirouettes in imperfect motion.

Across the basin that once was a lake and over the coastal range to where the consistent tides and waves once carved into the land, breaking stone and timber alike, the wind moves freely and without impediment, swirling in through a rusty smokestack, the reaches of a ship that moved the materials of the world, pounding down the waters, churning them in angry foams. There it lay and the wind passes through and above, catching a funnel of salted sand into a cloud, transforming from shape to shape, with no one to imagine the forms as dragons, or whales, or hiding faces.

In hours the wind swirls again up to where the land once began. There is a cliff of broken teeth. The skeletal lumps of buildings, crumbled facades, brick, block, beams, exposed conduits—all the resting emptiness of the passage of people into obscurity. The wind is in exodus, in a privation without personification, without stories, banished of postmodern ironies, social inequities, left with only hulls of cramped, folded plastic trapped in a turmoil of bricks. All the jargon and laughter that ruled this place, all the scourging churn of water bending the land, pulling and returning the sands, continents of algae and sopping forests, all that clockwork of life is now gone, passed over by the flowering winds, branching and cascading over these designs, through these gaps, inveigling into the seams of the dead world.

***

You claim I carry on far too long, that I waste time and lightness by expanding the joke until it is ugly and fierce. I claim that unregulated creativity needs expansiveness, like an indulgent stretch after rising from bed, and that I just might pull a fantastical rabbit from the hat of bleak commentary.

“Do you think of me as an objectionable successor to incorrigible punctuations?”

Neat, flat: “No, never.”

“Do you think of me as your hound dog of possibility?”

“Maybe a hang dog of ineluctable boorishness.”

There again, that wry smile, that encouragement. Were we to fail in this banter, were we to gel into engagements of pure materialism, complete instrumentalities, how we would fall away from hope. Amidst rolling trials of medicine and anxiety, astride the intricacies of decades of relocations, of new drives in foreign hills, sloppily learning the layout of shopping centers and grocery stores, there is always this unquenchable realization that we are absurd actors selecting our organic black beans. But there we are again, a cylinder rolling to and fro in our hand, and there is nothing that can stop the intrigue from slipping through.

“Will you call me Legumia, the Legend?”

“Of course. But I am White Feather Tabasco.”

“Agreed, W.F.”

“No, you can’t just minimize me through abbreviation like that. There is a journey to abbreviation.”

Lackadaisical summer nights, trailing in slowly from steely twilight, that rustle of the brush in this desert town. Where did I leave my drink? How can it be so scorching and what is that persistently empty odor? This is the background throb of a creative life, the minuscule punctuations for the echoes of a few grand achievements, many more steady thrums of completion, this incremental building of small human contraptions. The infinite constraints of next decisions.

I steady against the plaster, any ingenious thoughts interrupted by the entropy pulling cool along my arm. We raced for the bathroom, challenged each other on the level of our needs. You won and are farting into the toilet. A blaster number twenty-three. We never made that coffee table catalog of human gas we once discussed. It was the perfect gag gift for dads, we hypothesized, but then the internet. There are only blank-spined coffee table books in furniture catalogs now. Physicality has become a prop.

So there is the wind again. Susurrate the fan cowling, understand none of our irrelevancies. Can a laugh really be carried on a breeze? Can it enliven the dead rush of air like these irruptions into the marble and porcelain?

White Feather Tabasco, I know only laughter.