Act of Divination

7/31/2019 Act of Divination

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Act of Divination

JOHN DAVID ELLIS JR



Contents

A Mother to her son about his father 2

The Babysitter broke it off 3

Act of Divination 4

How Murder Creek Got Its Name, 1788 5

The Spacewalk, After Chagall's Der Spaziergang 7

Karma's an itch 8

One Best Way, or A Shithead in Business School 9

Bummed on New Year's Eve 10

Silas walks outside to make sure he's still alive 11

In retrospect, the Grandfather grows taller 12

Who consoles who 13

I gave Father a face 14



A Mother to her son about his father

I was fat like the sun, a whitewashed fence with a cowbird sitting in my stomach, and I carried you, an overflow grown too bigfor the banks in my belly, a bucket

of blood, I carried you, my baby born of me.And when you first breathed your father stood,a mouth of teeth just set to smiling, just showing

the good side of a weary soul, and he held youlike a weight, a cord of wood. All himself,he held you, and said he saw a forest within you.

Yes, he said he could see straight through the pithof you, a finch shaking in the cage of your chest,and when you was born, he said he saw the Redeemer,

and he was saved for he was cursed like a knife foundlying in the grass, a straight blade tempered by the heatof the fields, a pair of shears cutting patterns out

of sadness to be worn as a coat sweating in summer.Our baby boy, you grew like tendrils trained to the waysof your father, and I swear, when you spit, the wind spit back.

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The Babysitter broke it off

Wanting the fireworks to wait, the boys' hungerednoises were matches lit like eyes widened. Ravenging

through cherry bombs and roman candles, sparklersand fountains, all in the box of fireworks that I saved for you. The world was ending and I wept like Jesuson a sponge to apply the temporary tattoos of heartssplintering and furious skeletons.Your arrival was the tail end of a bottle rocket. Coincidence? I think not. I want to build time machines as gifts for everyone,so they can warn the others past that even with glasses, stars can't be seen from space. And to my younger self:

did she resemble a soccer player or a flautist

or a woman or a goddess or what's the difference?Maybe she was complicated like time. Still, I eat the white rice for fear of Y2K, the year that nevercame for us, Babysitter, whom I love.

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Act of Divination

My mother says she found mein the gutter, explains why I prefer

to sleep on the floor. It's the reason whyI've never told anyone about how I fell out

the bed. Once when she tried to hug me,I was slick. I shot out her hands like a fatcatfish, landing under a bridge right across from a girl whom I watched climb up

to walk barefoot and let her hair down. I imagined it braided like a length of ropeto climb during gym class, a dowsing rod

pointing me in the direction of her doorstep.

Sometimes when I've been in the sun too long,I see Big Mother picking enough cottonfor two people and walking the eight miles home.I see the future like a regular palm reader.

Do you believe in magic? Because I do.Once, I was a baby. Now, I am wanderingtowards a place of comfort, a house, maybe, or a tent waiting in the woods with the others.

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How Murder Creek Got Its Name, 1788

I.Innocent tributaries point in ways fingers cannot, the thorns

of a windrose that spill aged blood like brown leaves in piles.

A boy pulls on his britches, or maybe he says, "breeches",as the father and his servants blanket the horses, clouds of hot air

escaping open nostrils. Above, a single black bird flies circular,Their host yawns, waving them away from his porch, the trail

ahead narrowing into a knife blade. "What are the names of the trees?"the boy asks of his father. "What are the names of the creeks?"

The father has no answer. He is just passing through this landthat cannot be claimed as his own. Still, he calls it home.

II.Catt can't travel alone because he gets lonely like an animalchased up a tree, so he brings his squaw wife, he brings the servant,Bob, he brings the Hillabee whose name is Manslayer.

Catt knows trails better than any Indian, but Manslayersays he can hear the words they speak. Up ahead, a man with goldenpockets and a funny tongue. The trails never lie.

With one hand, Catt covers his squaw wife's eyesand with the other, he shakes with the stranger. They sharethe sofke. It is soured except for the little taste of honey.

The man and his boy ride on. Catt spits in the dirt. Bob's one earcan hear the coins jingling midst the horse tack. They countthe steps and decide they are not so many, doubling back

with the cloak of night and the hood of silence. A twig snappingdisrobes them. The boy starts for the trees, but Manslayer is faster.He says,"Watch this knife whisper cross your daddy's throat."

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III.My friends and brothers: I do not wish to tell it, the story that begs to be told, to you, therespectable men that make their homestead here in Newport. Appointed by theHonorable Alexander McGillivray, I have been asked to track down the murderousparty responsible for the death of Joseph Kirkland and his son, the bodies of whom

were found by the creek which the reds call, the "Alootchahatcha". There, I found thedeceased stripped not only of their valuables, but of their dignity, for in the ambushperpetrated by the man known as Catt, the victims were bare given time to open theireyes before the curs took to blades and opened their naked throats. For three days,they eluded the Scenthounds, but I come to proclaim that the ample arms of Justicehave embraced the one known as Catt, as I, in my prodigious facilities, have capturedhim and returned him to the creekside where he was hanged by the neck. Below thevery tree that Joseph Kirkland slept under before he was quelched! I shall have youknow that Catt was not shown the same mercy he showed his victims. Nay, I showedhim more! Before the final airs escaped him with his wretched soul, I shot him throughwith a pistol ball, having grown tired with the dramatic clamor of his gasping. I should

say that his boots hung from his body like twin stones of unpardonable shame.

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The Spacewalk, After Chagall's Der Spaziergang

Together there on the earth, for now a patchwork quilt of a picnic, and the man and the woman are happy,it is in their posture, a delicate ribbon floatingabove his head, a proud anchor of a smile with greedy fingers intertwined with hers.

Euphoric is this space walk,this couple in love, but everyone is beautifuloutdoors and in love, everyone is in loveon a picnic. What the poor proud man does not know is gravity proves a better lover when the scarf of a woman floats away-

the rapturous end of the world.

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Karma's an itch

Were Hell realit would be these ant bite blisters,

this insatiable itch.

My mother says it's poison ivy,her nurse friend says no, it's sumac.My uncle blames the cow itch vine,The doctor's diagnosis: contact dermatitis.

I'm thinking of a fallen angel with manydifferent names because this itch is evil. Oh,and too, what a weeping rash felt likebefore the advent of antihistamines.

I imagine a cowboy whistling, pockmarkedand spitted, roasting over a campfire. An indianscratching with a deer bone knife at the summer

blooms like a patch of azaleas across his skin.Can pants and longsleeves cast out devils?I'm too chickenshit. My grandfather crushedthe leaves in his hands and sprinkled

them over oats like old medicine for breakfast,

a balanced diet of consuming his enemies.I'm pink with calamine, my skin glowinglike a chigger's nest. I'm just a poor babe

left in the woods. The cowboy is buriedto his neck in velvet ants, and my friend, the indian,dangles from a tree while the sun sets.

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One Best Way, or A Shithead in Business School

I thought the guest speaker's suit and tie made him look like an old dog shivering

just before it takes a shit, and when he said,

"At your age, I was living out of my truck and struggling to pass my classes," I wished the younger version of the man was speaking to us. The one before the CPA and Accountant's Oath,the 18 hour days and three-figure salaries.

Even more, I wished I sat nextto the younger version in Managementwhen we learned how Frank Bunker Gilbreth made

bricklayers more efficient by taking fast-motion photographsof the process, reducing their essential movements from eighteento four and a half. Making little Sallie Gardners of them, all at a gallop.All of 'em, little brick-laying horses, mid-stride.

I knew I was spinning my tires, stuck in suspendedmotion. The same way the younger version of the accountantmust have felt, living out of his truck parked near the tennis courts.Did he stop to ponder Gilbreth's theory that in everything,there was only "one best way," which still seems like the perfect salespitch, but did he buy it?

Now, the old accountant, and partner in a local firm,talks about Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to shitheadcollege students, and when I lost count of how many times he said,"starting salary", I knew I could never be a bookkeeper,

and when he called for questions, I might've asked him if his wifeever saw his checking account before they got married, or how Gilbrethmanaged to reduce a motion to half a motion, or if he consideredhis youth a debit or a credit to his current standing balance. But I was too distracted, counting syllables scribbled in a notebook, imagining Old Frank standing over my shoulder,

just hoping he might say, "My what you have here. Not a single word was wasted."

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Bummed on New Year's Eve

Tonight the sky is a bellowing hydrangea,or a tin roof rusted red.

I turn my back to it like so many sunsI've seen do the same before.I don't need to see to knowthe beginning of a new year,so I shut my eyes and go to sleep.

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Silas walks outside to make sure he's still alive

Under the water oak I met the crescentin the night, a lover lying on her back, and I was waiting for the voice of god or the specters hanging from the upper boughs of the tree. I waited, but no one spoke much 'cept for the little croaks of thunder leading lightning by the hand, and the voices of the mole crickets that sang of coming rains.

Still I listened for a while, wrapping

my heart in the thin kerchief of the night.

I left it at the base of the oak in hopes that its rhythms would take root,a lullaby like the sound of flattening coins on railroad tracks.

I yawned and walked back to the porchand tears came, a habit for old souls that pass in their sleep, and before I went for the screen door,I turned to watch the moon pull clouds down over her head and cry paisley.

I couldn't help to laughrubbing my hands to my eyelidslike a fire that would never startor two sleepy-eyed lanternsthat would never extinguish.

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In retrospect, the Grandfather grows taller

I thought I caught a whiff of the cab of his truck coming down the highway, sitting with my mother

in the gravel parking lot of Fran's Diner, the waftingscent of spilt coffee and bee vomit rolling throughlike a tumbleweed or the sun of a lazy morning.

The smell came with four generations of apiculture and followed him just as well in his skin and loose fittingbutton-ups, an Indian growing older. Only six, I knew I wanted to grow into that smell, to be able to tell the bees to be still and have them listen. I'd tell them

of how he helped his daughter move into the old house off Cove Ave., and while she made space for the Maytag, how he threw his arms around the dryer to carry it like a baby,albeit a heavy one. And of the source of his permanent hunch,

the three-story plummet of an aircraft elevator on the U.S.S. Hornet when its hydraulics gave out, how he shattered his spine and would never walk again,but did anyway, going on to lift a dryer clear over his head.Though in this memory there will be no heavy lifting.

Just he and I riding, the windows rolled down, no faster than forty in his red Dodge pickup. The bees waiting for us on the river near the Tupelo.I am barely taller than the broom sage, he lumbers like a gallant pine bowing in the wind.

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Who consoles who

I'm thinking at any moment either of uscould disappear, too, you know,

or maybe both of us at the same time,

and just because we've both disappeared,they say that doesn't mean we'll disappeartogether, which is a scary thought

because I think if I absolutely hadto disappear at any moment, with anyone,it would be right now, with you.

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I gave Father a face

My father was The Price is Right on Monday morning when I skipped school because I was "sick."

That burning feeling under my skin when my grandmother told me I had to go

anyway, the vocabulary primer I readat recess, and the blurring lines

I traced with my eyes from the window seaton the school bus. My father was my glove, my bat,

and the willful team of ghost runners that played in the field across the street, losing forever to older cousins. He was waking up on Christmas morning with a broken arm,a busted head while my mother got ready for work.

Maybe kissing that girl in the empty movie theater,or George Washington crossing the Delaware, or learning to shave from my mother, which is to say, on my own. He was driving at night until the baby fell asleep, tossing the pair of cordovan wing-tips out when I wasn't looking. Maybe doing me a favor. My father was Billy Powell changing his name to Osceola, the unlacquered saxophone purchased by monthly payments. He was getting paid under the table. He was the cable, the electricity, and the water turned off. My father was watching Mother date the roofer from Detroit who drank enough to punch through wall plaster, enough to leave a hole gaping in the hallway. My father took my face when the drunken hand shook before it, the blood pooling in the knuckles of clenching fingers, the lactic acid in my legs riding a bike across the country, falling in love over a dry cappuccino, spending a month

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in Puerto Rico. My father was my first and second gray hair,invisible in the picture of me sitting on his shoulders. He was falling asleep in a bathtub, but before that he was thinking of wading the mouth of the river.

John David Ellis Jr.

Contact @ [email protected]

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Act of Divination

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