Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  my engineer’s lament

  with my mind vacant of everything good and affirmative, it is the place from where I will give vent to some terrible curse, rolling it from my black mouth across the vast acreage of space, rolling it to its furthest horizons and further again so that it chisels a new edge to the universe, working itself out to the staggered depths of the void where in this moment God might hear me and come looking for me, recognising a fellow engineer, my howling curse the sound of a decent man gone to his grave too soon, a man who went about his work and raised a family, everything about him marked by that degree of moderation which he could now set against the darkness out of which he would come looking for me, as I did for him, ever hopeful of finding our way to each other in this blackness which is our way and guide, down into the thickening night where prayer and curse are conjoined at the one root in the inaugural moment of being, down into those depths where only true believers can find their way, those with the light drained from their eyes so that they can have full night vision and access to the complete absence of themselves where, hand on my heart, I can say

  I died in that lay-by

  died surrounded by tons of sand and gravel and hard-core with my mouth open in a black howl to take leave of myself as, without missing a beat

  my body had already picked up the rhythms of decay which had begun to work immediately in my soft flesh, that momentary heat spike which gave way to the falling temperature of rot with my blood passing from oxygenated red to black as the universal cellular explosions which bring on that spillage of filth within my organs which will eventually purge from every orifice of my body even as I

  found my way home

  home again

  to sit at this table

  and drift through these rooms

  room by room, agitated beyond all comfort, as if the giddiness of this day had got into my body and is now setting up again that grating current inside me which brushes my nerve ends and has me so jittery there is nothing for it but to keep moving, drifting from room to room like one of those sea creatures who cannot stay still for fear they may sink and drown, everything solid in me draining away towards the floor, going from

  room to room

  killing these couple of hours before my wife and kids return, trying to shrug off this sense that all things around me are unstable and barely rooted in the here-and-now and that the slightest pressure will cause everything to tip away from me as if it were all cardboard scenery or, like this house, that the slightest push will send the whole thing skyward into the grey light leaving me

  am

  alone here in the open space of the world with no walls or roofs or floors around me, the sole inhabitant of a vast, white space which is swept clear of fences and homesteads and plants and trees, all gone, the world as complete erasure since even the sun itself is drawn from the sky leaving me wholly alone, fading in whatever way it is we fade from the world

  animal, mineral, vegetable

  father, husband, citizen

  my body drawing its soul in its wake or vice versa until that total withdrawal into the vast whiteness is visible only as a brimming absence so that finally there is nothing left, body and soul all gone, and these residual pulses and rhythms which for these waning moments, abide in their own recurrent measure, nothing more than a vague strobing of the air before they too are obliterated in that self-engulfing light which closes over everything to be

  cast out beyond darkness into that vast unbroken commonage of space and time, into that vast oblivion in which there are no markings or contours to steer by nor any songs to sing me home and where there is nothing else for it but to keep going, one foot in front of the other

  the head down and keep going

  keep going

  keep going to fuck