a Dream in the Witch House
or
The Death of Christ Wolejko
For my sister Kayla on her 23rd Birthday, with love and terror
and truth.
We
can’t save the kid. That’s what this is
about, it’s what I should say. It never
developed a sense of comedy though to say it, to trivialize weeks of terror with sentences, short ones even to try to give the unnamable euphoria of
dread and failure and hope some farther reach, you would think it would have. And the kid somehow was like a Jesus to us,
to me. Some kid killed though through a
kind of inverted failure of the non-divine, the unguided hand, the soul without
god, us. Truth even could say he was not
that thing I made him, probably would become a drunk, a wild man by civilized
definition, a worker, only if worker meant socialist or sub human or something
worth disregarding. And to me, that
could never close the door on the idea, the idea that god can grow behind doors
shut by industry, chance, and the cool ideations of great daring giants, of
stark withering giants, of ingenuous damning men. And he could stand a king but live a
degenerate in a cage with no crown but lust, but gods he could yearn for it, if
only gutturally as another hunger, or that same rage that drives fist
towards wife, daughter, mother. He was
no less my god though he always died before his third birthday. The ideas never cross for me, talent, meaning. A man in heaven could lean down
from things right and proved saying, “Son” he could say.. “Son, the road
to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Would he think I was lying if I said “God built that road and I see more
of him in it than in you.” Would he think it was meant to provoke him, would he
think it wasn’t a prayer that I said? We
never save the kid. We do not try a
tenth time. We watch the sacrificed
become more important than the thing that dictates the gift and more even then
the thing receiving it. We, I, watch the
child become the sacrifice, that is what our hammers rang to destroy. What is that?
As I said, we may have been buying pennies with gold coins. It has been the thing I have embraced this
shade of their evil for. To kill someone
for what you have determined they mean to you can be nothing but evil and I
wear it and who is to say that those things are two different things. We sit for hours and I believe we think about him, my sister and I, though to remember how Fava told us before, and so
acutely, that it is wrong to think someone as wise as yourself, wrong to think their silence
a deep thought, wrong to think the pause of wind is anything else. I take exception with my sister, I know
she struggled more than myself with it.
There was nothing to do with the rat each time but kill it; what else was there to be done? I am glad you agree, I knew you would. And who was the witch really. It would be like accusing a man of the
earth’s gravity. In the end, we kill her
together, each finding a better reason than all the etcetera’s of evil. And who are we to deny gods, but we did, and
the blood and the diaspora and the tears we discovered, and the light-years and
the instances and the cadavers of our plans, our genius, our elaborate plans
but none of it bought him never once even one more day and each time he dies in
the end and the wind misses not a leaf and the storms roll knowing and though
rivers may come by him eventually and walkers fake a kind of brief shade, I still
see from the helm of the wreck of this ship our lives have become, mass and light and I think of him and build with breath this failing
altar and know, alone, for sweet minutes, that this is the truth, that for me
it is all there can be, and this my sweet sister, is the end.
It
isn’t though, of course. We come back
for Joseph’s prayers, his shaking hands, his faith, though we, neither one of
us believe, or hope, or even seek the same sanctuary he offers us with those unsteady hands. His eyes remove a pain born here
that we have carried so far Kayla, that we carry still. And we sit and smoke on the side of that
house and the place is much different, the whole place like stones on some road,
a perfidy, all of it. It is a world only because he is there. We stay for days when we come.
We sit in seats of stars. Our bodies
shirk orbits and though my sister has written “ghost of Christmas past” on the
bulk-head wall far below the steerable levels of her, to me our ship is
an angel of a god we do not serve but believe in; what a waste of time is
faith. Visitors bring conversation but leave
loneliness. I have given up being anything for her and yet confuse just
being. Our stories are here, in a ship
of dreams, to far above time for time to be an ocean and too long in that sea to
think we know anything of it. It’s said in a book
that if you try to save your life you will lose it. Our lives were never ours to diverge, shape or
unreal. Looks tear centuries like cheap
curtains and I have never known myself to be anything.
We
dreamed in the witch house and down streets that were never real and
pulled columbine and smoked tobacco rolled in obituaries from towns that have never existed and drank water we found
cold and deep and every inch of our own possibility thundered like rocks in our
chests and we never found a way to leave that Christ though so cruelly and like
that same lie we tell of all those we have loved the most, he is not here.
We have
known strange seasons to be this free. As
we sit I hope she thinks that I am just another dream from the witch house. I am. If you were something once, in a place
that was true, you might be able to try to say to us, “Son, Daughter, Come away” but we
never saved him in the end.
