Lithium for Medea

25

Going, yes, past gray blocks of stone chips called Civic Center rising like cliffs. I tunnel through narrow channels, through sunswirls, liquid yellow whirlpools. I am blurfast past tortuous thin cement gorges, pale scars between concrete slabs and starched hiss of bombardments, asphalt, Minotaurs, cancer, futility. Green chambers scrubbed and waiting for death, human aquariums, fluids oozing, humming. And I am plunging beyond intricacies into the unknown, unpolished, undiminished, also nameless. I am driving. It slips behind me. Cloverleaf interchange of alternative poisonous hissing deadend pathways behind me. Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and went blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs senseless and rotting behind me. Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.

I will awaken.

I will awaken. I will begin again. Anything can be a mantra. Awaken. Begin again. There are precedents: Creation from nothing, water, fire, visionary quests, human sacrifice. I will pick one, invent one. In the beginning, lightning striking a primeval soup and forging amino acids, the original alphabet. In the beginning, black volcanic rock, gneiss, basalt. In the beginning, a Polish village. And out of chaos, ignorance, gangbang lame street follies and ceiling falling down, mice scampering. Something. An inspiration tattooed by lacerations self-inflicted. And Francine, I’m talking about you. Magna Marta, the original, celestial goddess of childbirth and weaving, burials, the unconscious and ancestors. I am surrendering my rage, my sins, contempt and grief. I am beyond and into a greater, older, an impulse, the lashed faces of certain rocks.

I am streaking past pastel boxes, squashed streets with raised chicken feet of television antennas, poultry scratches, sky mutilated by black electronic webs. I am a somnambulist stretching, trying to find the right distance, pushing beyond foundations, the hard evidence. I am released from the familiar grooves and black metal tracks of parallel worlds, insanity, desperation, numb and hot and gutted. And Jason, I tried to make myself small enough for you, kept hobbling and hacking off my limbs, but they kept growing back, growing back. And I am moving, strings cut and winds blowing and going, going. I had a kite in a bird’s shape. It upended in a tree stump and I forgive, I forgive. I am the kite now and terrified as road reaches out fat and gray into a muted unforeseeable distance. Cars weave around me, bumperstickers of CARLSBADCAVERNSPETRIFIEDFORESTSGATORGROVESMAGICMOUNTAINSCRYSTALCAVES. And I am aiming for the arched spine, the fundamental, the bone cradle. Before bedrock and reference points. Before prime and evil. I am windsong, glistening, talking in tongues. The road curves into raw desert, how it stretches, stretches. I am drilling past sand, skimming rocks, gray scorpions and bleached gravel. Yucca waving puffs of white fists. Joshua tree with arms spread in supplication, a sunblinded demented pilgrim.

I will shed intricacies.

I will shed intricacies for the not yet known. I am grace in action and moving fast. I am twenty-seven and a pine tree my age knows more. Rushing into and casting off. I will become lighter, naked. Stone canyons of useless winding steep-sided monster face of ambivalence and indecision behind me. White haze hissing in the city of snakeskin, the rattle at my back, behind me. I am plunging in windtime, bending into the road, the rhythm, the asphalt glistening. Are you listening, Daddy? Clock these times. Inches separate the hero from the bum. I keep going, the heat terrible, scratching my face with fingers of wiry brush. Sure there will be long brutal nights alone, blind into blind and dangerous. But already I sense an other, a morning punctuated by wormsong, ecstatic, exalted. I will run a mile and an eighth. A mile and a half, goddamn it.

Rushing into afternoon, the Mohave opening slightly purple. I will have drums. Boom! Boom! Into black hawks and out the needle’s eye. How I burrowed covert, curled and unnatural. I am shedding the shell, oyster grays and stinging silences, the jars of dried blood unnecessary. I am transformation from molesmall cowering into wind currents, rockchimes, cactus blossoms red and hard and memory is painful. I am streaking through Victorville and I am crazy. I am red driving into walls of red, daze of red. I am Rose. There was struggle, disgrace, failure. I will shed this. I am windborne into airtight crosshatch of coming night, into big feet and drumbeat. Boom! Boom! I will go mad, then, but keep going. I will shed all I have ever known for what is not, what may never. And the sunswirl is behind me. Savage spent hideous sunsore of greed and ruin, Los Angeles most damned. I will shed this. Seventy-three miles from Barstow, last outpost. I won’t stop the car. The road is mine. The wind is mine. I will let it tumble from my lips. I will have cymbals and drums.

I can almost remember.

I was younger. I said this is mine. Big Sur. Berkeley. Mine. Aspen. Mine. I can almost remember. It was before the bayonets and war. Mendocino and Laguna Beach were a strand of exploding jewels I wore. I said this is my town, my land, my country. And I am going, gripping the wheel and not stopping, not stopping. Nineteen miles from Barstow, last littered urban beacon. Clouddance in desert sky, white wings flapping. Hello, clouds. Where are you going? West? Forget it. I’m rushing past Barstow and going. Pass go and keep going. No two hundred? Fuck it. I don’t need it.

I can almost remember.

I was dormant, numb and stupid. I said I never tried to stop a war. I said if it was me, it was some other me, irrelevant. I said I subscribed to absolutely nothing. I said I accepted, submitted, was beaten, utterly broken, willing to slide into the white haze and long white siesta of a race. And I lied. Lied on purpose, yes. Hush of windbreath that I might become and aming, unfamiliar, severed, unique, cut out of time, both the first and the last of the line.

Rushing into slow falling tentative web of fragile velvety darkness halfway to the Arizona border, the possibilities, the fundamental and starwhirl. I am going farther. I will say it out loud and let it pour from my mouth. I am taking the goddamn bricks and thorns and plaster out. I remember when the world was mine. North to Mendocino, redwoods with a tapestry of moss and pine cone spokes at their feet. Holy. The path south a sacred gash into the liquid face, white tequila sun. Holy. The Arizona border at nightfall. Holy. I can say it. I can take the stinking bricks out of my mouth and say Salt Lake, say Taos. The earth shakes. It is mine. I will not tremble. I will grip the wheel and go the distance. I am driving, my face widening with the dusk coming down in sheets between spokes of sagebrush layered in dark chalks. Pale hills inching purple into night. Stubborn rocks curled tight while winds whip and ride.

Daddy, I’m afraid. The world is a six-thousand-dollar claimer for cripples who can’t find the wire. But I can barely see straight. A wind is blowing cold and hot. I’m shaking, trembling, spinning and needing a shot. Soon I enter Navaho lands. They thought the hills carcasses of slain monsters and the black spongy-looking lavaflow cliffs to be congealed monster blood. I sense a certain residue, a part of a process. The stones have faces. Is that what you meant to tell me, Daddy? Then won’t you be with me always, your face and torso chiseled into hills? In the beginning, the father. In the beginning, gneiss, granite, storm-clouds, steam, lightning. A sudden invention. And you are the father, fire. You made the stars from quartz chips. You hollowed abalone shells for the sky. It is your face in the lavaflow.

I will awaken.

I will begin again.

I will shed intricacies for the not yet known.

Last vestiges of sun hanging above me, a clean dry pink, chalk soft and possible. The blackpure desert, concrete stopped. And flametips of stars, rings within rings, the glorious eyes of frenzied prophets. Possibilities, quartz chips a canopy blazing, dazzling and not turning back. Out of fire and bloodnights into black night surging forward lit by twin globe automobile eyes. Silvery arcs, channels into scorpions and small things that scurry and glow. Some other time, maybe. But I’ve got to keep going, cross the Arizona border, an edge clearly marked, symbolic. South the white sands spread into Mexico, into waterfalls moss smooth and choked with ferns above warm harbors. Tequila sun, absinthe and mescal sun and sand crabs, coconuts, Bogotá, Lima. And east is the painted desert and mesas, lands of sheer purples and magentas, fathers carved into plateaus. And north is the Grand Canyon, solved equation of windlash, water and time. And somewhere the great mountains where forests branch infinite fir and evergreens, alwaysgreens piercing granite, the spine, substantial and possible, possible.