Denham - Regeneration Machine

Regeneration Machine Regeneration
Machine Joe Denham Nightwood Editions | 2015 Copyright Joe Denham, 2015 all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, . Nightwood Editions P.O. Box 1779 Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0 Canada www.nightwoodeditions.com typography & cover design: Carleton Wilson Cover image created from illustrations found in Our Seamarks;
a plain account of the Lighthouses,Buoys, and Fog-signals
maintained on our Coasts , courtesy of the British Library. Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support
from the Government of Canada through
the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts,
and from the Province of British Columbia through
the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishers Tax Credit. This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,
ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free
and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada. CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada. ISBN 978-0-88971-317-8 In Memoriam Nevin Sample 19731995 There is an ache inside that Gordian knot, the brain, which wants to do so much in so many directions. Tomas Transtrmer The block hung like the bled carcass of everything thats carried us to what weve become. It swung slowly on its chain as wind gusted through the funnel of the deck awnings arc. Stripped bare to its singular chunk of machined solid steel, it spun like a marionette strung from a wheel.

I could feel its weight though its weight rose through the chain to the beam, loading the hoists four posts. The feeling was fleeting, a ghost. Driving home in dusks diffuse grey dimming, the asphalt, slick with rain, blazed golden as late sun spilt over the trees. The aura of the day died. Darkness seeped out from the firs, blooming in the world beyond my windshield as the highway swept seaside to where Id swerved over the soft shoulder, orgasm flaring aurora across my mind, a rush of dust trailing the car as it slid from the road into the broom. That was well over a decade past.

I was young. She was younger. The taste of her blood on my tongue didnt linger, though following the crash, for a long thoughtless instant, I suckled the head woundpardon the punwhere the console carved its corner, on impact, into her skull. It was the small sound in her throat that I recalled, the one shed made, like sad laughter, saying, Its all fun and games, Joseph, till somebody gets hurt. I pulled the truck over where the broom breaks to the shore. There was little then stopping me from not stopping, from letting the long box follow me into the chuck.

I rolled a smoke and thought of my as-of-late-piss-poor luck while smoke curled about the cab. The sea spread out like a thick slab of slate, roiling in the wind, as the cherry burnt like light off a wire. Lets just say there is a fire. And each thought is an injector ionizing the fuel, the fuel igniting in the hole. This is as close to the soul, or a vague sketch of the shadow of its silhouette, as Ill come. Im uncertain what to believe of what does and does not occur orbiting the sun.

I let the diesel rumble and thrum, each cylinder drumming its small compressive thunder over the counterpoint of waves pounding the beach as I huddled to the warmth whirring from the fan and thought of your heart as it ran and ran and for what? So it could break like a crash test car crumpling against the brick wall of your brain, its self-effacement, its pain? So you sent a bullet straight into your skull. And that was that, wasnt it, sorry friend? Sorry world, sorry witness, sorry wind that sang through steel railings the sound of bearings beginning to seize, their spinning straining, as I climbed out into the rain and walked down to be as close as I could to the gathering storm as it heaved and sheared off the strait. It was getting late, night gathering too, the islands distant lights like a static strand of stardust on the horizon. As close as I can come, which isnt very, I was thinking, my thinking sinking and sinking with the weight and violence of what you once needed, my rejection cold as my chosen occupation, the heavy block of that B -series Cummins hanging like the garbage guts of my trade, our trade, the last knot that bound us before you slid your finger over that trigger and the afternoon unwound under the shatter of the hammer. For years I could barely stammer my own name, and then I was there, in the leaden late light of that storm, choosing. I awoke alone the next morning with the sun cold calling through the window.

There was an angel pruning her nails, backlit, on the sill. The backspin of a bicycles freewheel streamed sibilant through my street level window, the riders voice singing over the click and whir. The trick is to not do a double take. The trick is one of light and of the mind and of wanting to believe we arent alone, in our hideous accumulation, without the possibility of more than what we find when we look upon the day finally, sleep rinsed from our eyes, and see. That morning I heard the heavenly host of my own vestigial hope lobbing lies over the waking border. I yearned to believe.

Since then Ive learned to leave such moments like a child learns finally that lifting the fish from its pond leaves it frightened, then frozen, then gone. Which is to say there is a long stretch of vacant sky between what I can imagine and what I can try. I took the day to recuperate, recalibrate. Left the dry beast hanging from its hook; shook loose the thick dust of winter in the new seasons first light; read some pages of yet another dead, much-redacted book. I learned to cook. I stood my ground against Bogdan with two pawns and a rook.

While we played there was a corvid clonk-clonking on a wire overhead. Taunting us, it seemed, though anthropomorphizing is like the angel: a fools dream. Ive seen what Ive seen , Bogdan insisted, telling a story of a sister speaking in tongues and a light so bright it was like staring at the noonday sun. What do you make of that? Not much. Id given up by then trying to believe, disbelieve or understand, as such, content as I was to listen to the lilt of his Slavic speech; to reach that place where its enough, much more than enough, to be alive in the alternately writhing and thriving world, in good company, airing out like long-used linens finally shook and hung on the line. There, in a moment in time.

Then the sunshine sputtered out, eclipsed by a dark cumulus from the southeast. The air we were airing in altered, charged and cold, and the afternoon began to fold (like a Murphy bed, like the thoughts in my head) swiftly into night. My wife once knew a man whod fallen three times from the sky in his hot air balloon. He remained, she says, an enthusiast into his later years despite the consecutive crashings of his basket to the ground. He was one of those rare dogs Seligman found who learned resilience instead of helplessness though the random flarings of intense pain he (Seligman) delivered through a wire undoubtedly seemed inexplicable and uncontrollable (to the dogs) as fire. Its how the music resonates from the lattice bracing and spruce though its been fifteen years since focal dystonia morphed Bruces picking fingers into one dumb thumb.