My father takes me to the open field where he forces me into the sunlight. The sky is big and empty before us, America stretching out in fields of white clouds in all directions. My father shoves me into the open field and the tall grass. My father directs me to move like a train along lines painted with white in the tick infested grass and teaches me about geometry and dull ritualisms this way. The sunlight is hot and my skin breaks open in blisters and sores. The life of my being spills in boiling melt upon the dry ground, I scream and look up and there’s no answer beyond my father’s stern gaze. I can think less and less upon the dull blunting of the light.
The sun and moon are married. The Sun returns home to the cave of reception in the bays of Northeastern Canada, from his dominion over the distant shores that departed across the Atlantic. The Sun is angry at the Moon’s misuse of his funds in their windowless cavehome and slams her bloody against the grey and brown wooden interior, clattering trinkets that adorn every last inch of the walls, her pale white light thrown across curving geometries of toys aligning shelves, maps and sextants glittering, potatoes on the counter for dinner future, liquor in the bottle.
In scratchy fabric I sit awake at night listening to my father beat on wood in the silence of the wilderness. He brought us here to be alone, without the tedious supervision provided by the European communities we had fled from. From our native land through Quebec and then inland until we came south to Minnesota where he staked out a fiefdom he could call his own, his two daughters the subjects as he once was. He kept track of axes and little wood pallets the way a lord would his expenses and outputs. We tilled his fields and ate gruelish foods yoked from a barren desert never meant for a non-nomadic people. I’m scratchy and alone below the indifferent stars in clothes that tear my skin, under blankets only fit as rat food. Softness is for them, those we flee from, the soft people of the city my father says life in sin in their comfort. My father enjoys pain, the dull enduring of grinding tedium. He derives his satisfaction from starvation.
In a cave in Northeastern Canada, the Moon is wearing a silk nightgown in the upper floor of an incandescent lit bar. Potato jazz plays on the band below her as another drunken man strips off his suit and thrusts his five o’clock stubble and cigarette stained body into her. The light in the town is yellow, until it turns ice for the sailors who depart every morning. The jazz is always quieter than it should, she lives on snails and mushrooms and fish-laced gin. The Sun is sleeping off tin-gin from the metal mines farther West, towards America. The Moon sleeps off the infertile cum of a sailor. They won’t meet for several days.
Back home, there’s a fear of the Lodge, where it opens up in oily puddles around Jackrabbit’s Palace, where only the elect dare to tread. We came to escape the wilderness, to find purity underneath the blinding heat of the Dakota sky, the doldrum seasickness of ships and whales. Chaos, a continent of chaos, where no order structures this world from the outside astral, and all we found is the same thing we had run from within us. The forces once restricted to kings given to common men and the doors once open in sacred groves now so tread-upon as to be highways. The Sun will entomb himself by his own decisions and his soul will be crushed to dust. The Moon will live on forever, though her flight away into nothingness looks so much like death in the Sun’s dying breath.
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