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Show THE ZEPHYR/PEBRUARY-MARCH FEATHERS 2008 from the BIRD of PARADISE By Francois Camoin So why not the desert? It has rocks, clay and sand, plants that, alive, look dead, and, dead, look no worse than they did alive. Little animals that look as if they had been molded from the stuff of the soil by a clever hand. Also there’s a tradition. You put on sandals, walk out into the country, listen for Somebody to speak to you, to whisper wisdoms and warnings, imprecations and impossibilities. Then you come back to town and call out to the people, and like as not they throw stones and call you terrible names, names that draw blood, names worse than the stones. Eventually you get used to being a wandering morality, a purveyor of goods nobody wants to buy. So, Nachtman says to himself, why not the desert? Yesterday his son called from Los Angeles, said why didn’t he get out more, he didn’t have to stay in that room reading and reading, it wasn’t healthy. Today, heeding his son’s advice, Nachtman points his five year old Ford south along I-15 and thinks maybe he’ll go to Moab. Moab in September. Why not? On the Brigham Young University radio Leslie Norris is reading a long poem about being a child in Wales—streams, flowers, birds, innocence. Artifacts gathered from the Romantic warehouse and shaped into lyric. Leslie Norris died last year, but KBYU has oblong buildings, the high chain-link and razor-wire fences, the guard towers. Years ago Nachtman taught literature to some of the better-behaved prisoners. Class was held in the prison chapel and Nachtman spoke from the pulpit; his voice echoed from the vaulted ceiling, was rendered larger than life. He said Faulkner, he said Hemingway, he said Virginia Woolf. In front of him the prisoners sat in rows; their faces reflected nothing. In this they resembled the men Nachtman used to play poker with on Tuesday evenings. Leslie Norris thought the eyes were the windows of the soul; behind the eyes Nachtman stared at from the prison pulpit the shades were pulled down, the blinds closed. The men to stored snatches of poetry, stories, anecdotes, interviews. The radio has given him a sec- ondary existence, an electromagnetic afterlife. Today, heeding his son’s advice, Nachtman points his five year old Ford south along I-15 and thinks maybe he’ll go to Moab. Moab in September. Why not? Nachtman met the man once, after a reading; here was your regular lion in winter, Nachtman thought then. Leslie Norris had dignity, white hair, a spread-legged solid stance. —I thought you would have been younger, the poet said. He looked at Nachtman sadNachtman was puzzled. Younger than what? Maybe Leslie Norris thought he was someone else, another Nachtman, a doppelganger. Sometimes he suspects there might in fact be a shadow Nachtman walking around Salt Lake City. Now and then people accuse him of things he’s never done, swear they saw him in places where he’s never been. They are reliable people, men and women you could trust. Now it’s hawks floating above a canyon floating from the radio, a different poem, another vision. Norris alive was a nature guy, a walker, an explorer in little, a lover of the plants and animals that people the world, an admirer of the rocks and sand, the streams, the canyons, the whole Romantic panoply of the sublime. Also like the Romantics a passionate lover of memory. This last love Nachtman shares with the dead poet. He carries his cherished former selves over his shoulder the way a chambered Nautilus carts his undiscarded shells. Natchman remembers the comparison from an essay he read last year. The essay’s author was obsessed with analogies, comparisons, metonymies and metaphors for the human condition. The spread of his language, glorious as the tail of the peacock, was, in Nachtman’s opinion, not a consolation for the human condition, which is at best bleak. Or not—this bleaknesss could be a matter of mood, or of the condition of the body. Pain in the bones makes the world look bleak, if it doesn’t make the world disappear altogether. Natchman, impatient, drives faster than he should but steers with care, pays attention. He fears the big articulated trucks whose tires are as tall as his car. What if the inflated spinning construction of rubber and steel disintegrates while he’s alongside? Like TNT, like dynamite, Semtex, C-4. He stamps the accelerator to get by more quickly, anxious to shoot himself forward, ahead of the unlikely but possible catastrophe: Down the valley, past Point of the Mountain, with the hang-gliders and para-sailers on one side and the penitentiary on the other. To the left the gaudy cloth wings—red, yellow, periwinkle blue—move across the sky in big loops; tiny figures dangle underneath, men in search of a different sublime. On the right side of the freeway are the low earth-colored aia HUB OF MOAB CYCLERY CALL US TOLL-FREE 888.304.8219 DO ee aa 94 WEST 100 NORTH MOAB, UT 259.5333 rimeyclery.com BIKE RENTAL & SALES eas eee al Le MAPS & BOOKS NW ier e) a BS MERCHANDISE whom he said Donne, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, were islands unto themselves, iso- latoes, singularities. Eventually Nachtman stopped talking. He and the prisoners stared at each other. After a few weeks of this silence the prison authorities, reasonable men, asked him to resign. Nachtman saw the justice in their decision and agreed, though to him the silence was interesting, maybe even useful. It hollowed out a space for thought; if these men with the big arms, the wide necks, the tattoos, had continued to listen while he didn’t speak, they might have learned something. But all this was pure speculation and Nachtman wasn’t ready to explain his unreasonable ideas to the reasonable men in their blue shirts. Phallic striped ties hung from their necks like fetishes; they said no more and Nachtman agreed. Leslie Norris comes to an end and the station announces a speech by: one of the Church Authorities. An apostle? A member of the Quorum of Seventy? The Twelve? Nachtman never learned the complex hierarchy of the church, but religion makes him anxious and he fumbles with the radio until he finds an oldies station. The Mamas and the Papas. Buffalo Springfield. The Jefferson Airplane. A truck comes up on the left and Nachtman scoots ahead to get away from the big dangerous wheels, the explosive tires. Nachtman Leo...BRO... | dig your beard, Dude. : "The sole meaning of Life is to survive humanity.” |