Joshua Cohen - Witz

The sun setting, and in its wane a host of tapetum lucidum reflect the moonlight risen over the snow, its dusky sandsheen — the Kieferöde, aglow with their eyes. Though it shouldn’t be in conjunction until the opposite season, the Dogstar winks above, Sirius to shine at the very height of the sky: nature resigned to regression, whistled home, put to sleep. Time is dark, and the packs attacking, not attacking, too tired, reluctant, retreating, seem deeply afraid — of what, the lost light, the starlight, the moon’s…of what else might night up ahead: a clearing, burnedover, barren, a forlorn expanse of sand topped with the rime of the prevailing hyemal, the whole of it ringed with stones ritually, and so as if a firepit or altar sunken, unmarked by tracks. Mada meets up with Hamm here, fetched and dogtired, they’re bit up, their clothes hanging in tatters; wounds flapping like the tongues of their limbs, they suck them warm with the wound of the mouth. Then, they hurl the stones of their encampment at the dogs more to air emotion than to injure, soon tiring, toward morning, the death of the stars. Hamm heels up a turn of sand, Mada sighs doubt.

Opposite the clearing from their entrance, a swath of old growth reduced by burning to husks, this clutch of trees gutted to molder — trees so closely grown, so barren and yet so near and twined, they’re one, as if splinters of the Great Tree, destroyed in the first lightning on the third day of Creation. In the midst of this burnt, wasteheaps, dumped, irradiated, who knows, and you really want to take chances, on trashcans municipal issue from any last Administration, overflowing a grossgummy slurry; above, plastics clinging to ashen branches as if shrouds for ghosts, windingsheets of wind; further: a huddle of wrecked hulls, the chassis of antique cars, junk without tires, up on their gas canisters and cinderblocks for repairs only the dead could perform; a disastrous prop aeroplane lost out of Newark, its propeller smashed, tail-twisted — blame a hurricane named the same as your mother, during which you, my boychick, were conceived; what else, the forest floor: a slippery and fall patching of kitsch novelty postcards once postmarked Atlantic City, lost on their summery ways to grandkinder residing northward in zips 10somethingsomethingother; rotors ripped from defunct telephones, discs gusted to roll edges across the scathed ground; dead AA alkalines, 9volts, spent bullet casings; a clutch of umbrellas, more metal spokes than holed fabric, tumbling around the trunks of trees, picking up radiosignals — foreign and maybe even extraterrestrial, yet outdated, old news of it all — amid screeches scratched on the exposed reticulations of roots; snakespidering a tunnelling web westerly and south toward this tree spanned wide of mysterious metal, its unpainted, autumnally oxidized leaves forming a mottled netting that, upon later inspection, are only odd, interrupted sections of fencing, makeshift and weathered, rusted, breaking here and intermittently there over ravine and ridge, piles and all midden manner of natural swell, the compost of stray cats, the ruin of paper mills, turbine, grist and furnace remains: a fence strung high and taut with barbedwire, tightly coiled to threaten, too, the wires that’ve flurred loose from Parkway’s edge, just further a wave, a thumb out and flag down — powerlines screaming their shadows, torching ponds of stray gas to flame, guttering at trunks of all root sunken with nothing left ringing above them to burn, no soul left to become ash, air, damning sky…

Benjamin, though…He hadn’t wandered as much as hurled, vomited Himself atop the mess and slithering over, to wriggle with the wind, with the treewind, the dogwind, Godwind geschwind, that of every quarter then against them, too, winds from all opposite fronts that make for this perpetual weather: unopposably gloomy, grave; maneuvering Himself stomached, roly-poled, scraping the clothes from His body, the skin. Unharmed upon reaching the clearing He continues through it, not to the right, and yet neither to the left, as it’s been argued by those who’d wish to forget this Joysey sojourn out of shame, but straight on, directly into the woods further burnt, immediately upon entering which His tshirt’s tail, used to patch the seats of His multiple pants, gets snagged, He rips, it tears; the mend says in white type bolded on blue: Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien, 25th Annual Firm Picnic , stained with the blood of the chosen.

A flag, a Joysey standard. Raise it high and proud above the any, all of us as upright as poles. Over the Gatekeeper’s, He remembers…the Development’s, too, had been blue and white and red, with a house in the middle field, stripped of family, its siding striped and windows starry. Benjamin slows into the pace of this memory, the sidewalk stroll from house to house, everyone of them known and the neighbors within them, knowing. An afternoon with His mother recovering outside for a walk, Hanna in the stroller, with Him pushing, to remember…these woods aren’t familiar, though, nothing doing. The little greenery He’d glimpsed, that’d been gardened, neatly, plots both herb and flower left untilled for the season of His birth, with the rest and more public of it landscaped, kept to grated planters along the slabs of Apple, Birch, Cedar, concrete, asphalt, planted to take root amid gravel that would ground the tankings of tiny pet fish, Judy’s gold, those upsidedown floaters flushed down the drain; with the odd weed, Developmentapproved rest assured, superadded for the sake of diversity. Trees separated, appropriately, spaced at intervals surveyed, all paid for by — Depro, the Development Prettification Organization, His father a founding member, and as such open, fair and solicitous, from donations received at the generously anonymous. Each tree would have its sign to own, tacked at trunk: Pick Up After Your Dog , as imaged with a mensch without face kneeling to scoop at poop; Curb Your Dog , no, curb your meaning; No Littering , except for the litters that are signs; alongside plaques that identified each tarred tree with its sponsor, whether individual or business, which was an excellent tax deduction — welcome to the sacred grove of the accountants, Mister Buchhalter, CPA, from down the block a ways.

Half Benjamin expects those other placards, the Latinate wood, those that identify tree from trees, and from forest, which sort as to type, Genus, species —as if to provide an experience more welcoming, more understanding, by way of introduction to the outer world, the earth unkempt by our trivial science. Him left unprepared for such surroundings, then, these trees so oddly intertwining, grown up from out the earth at any which way angle: these trunks writhing, without fruit, around each other and up; a canopy of closing trunks, obliterating the above; the occasional two trees merged entirely into one, forking into another, growing out the other; strangling two trees growing out from their trunk shared, mutual roots, common ground argued over in a high, conflicting silence…spindly burnouts starved of bark to peel from bone, their pleading limbs waved fanatically, fingers spread to the vault in a supplication charred, and chilling. He makes past them all on tiptoe into berryless branches, bush, through the webs of spiders, their spinneretwork sticking to His face, sticking His mouth from saying, fine dewed silk that holds the light, and then’s ripped through, torn by sound, by the gust with which it’s brought — the faint rataplan of wind, a clattering of the clouds with brandished branches. Fire tears the Kieferöde, a weapon unloading into the later sky, each bullet the beat of a wing…birds scatter, the echoes of their calls disperse into wind, as winds themselves; the snow snows on unabated. And then the smell, which is the promise of smoke, of heatless smolder, then the pineneedles, too, to Him an outer household disinfectant without any hint of that Floridian citrus, PopPop’s balmy lemonlime: more like an organic dank, an illicit wetness, as if of the panties of His mother schlepping, at the end of a long long day of rushing around, vomitous at depthless stink, the basement’s crotch, that of rot’s own grandmother, mind the hip, the slip to break all cracks; the reek pervades, subsumes, wafts spore, fungi and lichen under the horizon’s door — the woods, He wipes His mouth, an abandoned bathroom…to remember the womb, fold fast the underwear drawer. He’s wet Himself; what’s let is frozen; His knees are spurs of ice.