by Eileen Myles
Peel
Turn off the sound. And the peacock feather falls onto the keyboard. Its eye blue staring at me in a block of sun. I shove it away.
Each love, each yard yellow flowers each fence each hose. Each blue bucket each mailbox each potted plant. Stalling. The leaning white board with orange emergency stripes. We look to accommodate the pace of her body. These rungs the only way we go. To magnify her. Behind the fence and mulch pattern of berries something red. I feel like a cop. Looking for the rhyme in flowers berries thrown down in the yard. I can’t write. I always want to feel your large head and go dog. A truck backs up. This empty street covered with spots. Flutters.
Here is the dog. Tiny paws on the side of the screen her shadow leads at a decent pace. Suddenly even wheels hubcaps are interesting. A ring a shallow cup around a central gleaming circle. The hub! And a leaf falls in the still life of the world. And you muscle around a yellow fireplug. And the tree sticks its legs in the air. Horny for meaning. For day. Oh fuck and the phone wires so slouched. That’s lyric. While you stall the world’s a bit capsizing.
We cross the street. It’s like water ballet this intersection and the silent cars all white.
If I add something it changes and I’ll work with the new accord. If you would come back after these white flowers. I want you again. We tunnel right into them and their yellow heart. It’s the slowest thing.
Whirling around. Closing in and you’re a bundle of leaves and flowers over a wall your shadow too everything looks like old slip covers. Give me my dog. Start there. And for one careening moment she’s here.
Transcribed in Istanbul, August 2013
Dog House
Ireland, 2013
“Rachel?”
“Marie?”
“Laura?”
“Rose?”
She was peeping out the window.
Knock Knock Knock.
One of the two men outside waved from beyond the gate.
She’s not going to come out said one of the men.
Well what’s she doing said the other.
She’s got babies said the first one.
Doesn’t mean she can’t open the gate.
This is definitely the house.
Is that a house.
The first one put his sneaker on a part of the fence and lifted himself up. He began taking pictures with his phone. Holding himself up with one hand and trying to take the pictures with a finger of the other. The pictures were bad.
This is definitely the house.
You think it’s a house.
She’s coming.
He kept taking his pictures then he jumped down.
Hello the girl called.
May I help you she said.
The inside of the house was open to the yard. Plastic chairs tipped, a long shelf on the wall and a mirror over it. A sickly blue green wall. Was the fuzzy pink stripe a piece of his arm. That’s cool. He sort of liked the bad pictures better. The stripes of the fence weaving unceremonious like an amusement park ride. The picture making him think strangely of what he saw on twitter the day before. A girl’s mouth with someone’s dick in it and her eyes looking up at all the world and the man’s flat stomach viewed like the fence. I guess he took the picture.
May I help.
The long haired guy tried to explain—
—Hey said the grey-haired one.
Long haired one mimes “I stand corrected.”
My family used to live there.
This is not my family the young woman said. She had black hair, long, and she was a little plump. No she was young.
I’m sorry I saw you up there with your babies.
There aren’t any babies up there.
I don’t have any babies.
I’m sorry I thought maybe you were baby-sitting—
I’m 20. I wouldn’t have any babies.
“Elaine.”
The house torn open like god’s ass. And the roof torn off a lot.
Yeah that’s the roof.
Now they were sitting in the car. That’s how most of these houses used to be built. Grass bursted out of the old stone sides of the house. Then he was circling. Click click click. He had to get something.
Are you sure this is the one. I don’t think—
You should ask Jackie. She lives right up there around the bend. House with the electric fence.
He was trying to picture.
Can you open the gate so I can go in.
I can’t.
That dog is the problem.
Bark. Bark. Bark.
Oh yeah. His name is Casey. He is the noisy one.
Yeah he’s been barking since we got here.
Who do you think—
I think my grandmother lived here.
She looks at him like he’s crazy. No she’s a little interested.
Thank you for letting us bother you—
Sorry, we’re—
Hah. I’m doing nothing. I saw you getting up on the fence.
Well I was trying to see. So I can’t get in—
This dog is the problem.
He can’t be with the others.
How many dogs do you have in there.
Hunters bring them.
Oh I don’t know she laughs. I think there’s three.
No seven.
My father lets them stay.
This is where they leave their dogs when they go hunting—
It’s hunting season.
She doesn’t know what that is. She shrugs.
The long haired one smiles.
It’s always. There’s no season. There’s just one season he chuckles.
Really?
So you’re related—
My grandmother was a Riordan.
Or an O’Riordan.
I’m not family she said.
Of course she could have babies. He liked that she laughed at that—
She must have something in mind.
No just you know hanging around the house.
Just dogs here.
That’s all the house is now.
My father’s going to fix it up.
Go talk to Jackie.
The electric fence—?
There’s just a lot of crap out in the yard. God’s asshole. White stuff and old wood. There’s a square where the bed used to be. Wall’s falling down. That’s all there is.
At the lake the woman was walking back with a large group of them in brightly coloured parkas. They like colours. Someone suggested they stop for a photograph. They stopped near the pond. The artist did. Because she had an idea. Later on she gave him a drawing. Was that the last time I was her. A little two inch figure. That I have a portrait of her. An innocent doll. They were going to hear some music.
Can we talk, she said.
I don’t have so much time. I can call you back.
No for a second. There’s something I need to talk to you about. I don’t know how this happened.
2
He died in the house. Benny did. Peter found him. He had been there for days. That was the beginning of Peter’s drinking. And of course Benny had the bleeding ulcers.
We have that too. My brother had it.
She shrugged.
He’s got a few cows now.
Peter does.
It was very hard.
He was young.
He used to ride a motorbike.
He liked that very much.
We wouldn’t see him for a while and then he’d turn up.
We figured he was drinking.
He didn’t say much. He was quiet.
I’ll have to check the date.
I don’t know how this happened. I was in his apartment. We were kissing and touching each other. I started it—
I have to go hear some music.
I can’t believe you’re going to go hear music now.
I think it’s a really good thing.
It’s beautiful like God’s asshole torn right open. To the day. And now
dogs live there. That one bastard—
Peter was bad for a few years after that. Barney was the father’s name.
Why do I feel my family is here.
Birmingham. Annie was there. I see Rosie in her eyes too. I see my father.
Turns her head like that she looks like Aunt Annie—
and you think they’d be John Joe’s—
don’t you. There were no.
Can I talk to him.
Timothy, Timothy was my father.
I think before him. Like there was an older sister who went to America. Ellen. Nellie.
No. there weren’t any others. I don’t think so.
It was famine. Everyone was gone.
He delivered mail.
The one little house. Certain dignified sides. Almost a drawing of a house, a hole in the stone, and cementing, and some lightening on the right. The day pale blue, hardly blue and the scratchy red corrugated roof. Like it has sky too painted on, but it’s just metal, whatever it is, broken faded.
She came back out. What was her name?
Thought you might want this. That’s its name. That’s the old name of the house:
“Gleann Alainn”
Knocknagoun,
Rylane,
Co Cork
You can find it on Google earth just the house, this house isn’t there. It’s there all alone.
It means beautiful view.
Jonathan: you should describe the scene from outside. First what it would look like to a person watching.
From the outside.
Yes he said. From the outside.
And then something not human.
But alive you mean.
Yes something alive but not human.
And then a thing.
A tree?
A bucket?
Three perspectives.
I took the old dog, the bad dog from so far away. He would see a man trying to get into his yard, hopping up, making himself tall clicking with his hands and later he would feel that person walking by a lake and the clicking thing makes a chirping sound the man holding the thing making no sounds to his head fast and choppy and not heavy but then he is asked to hold something. A bucket? A big proud sad thing.
Now. He is holding it now. The dog feels a fence in the man. The man’s climbing down and he is now in a small area. He is watching someone carrying something dangerous with their eyes closed shut. They are trying to make the man watch them hold it and they are suddenly very happy to hold it it is a glowing thing and the man wants to turn away and he opens the gate and closes it.
This is what tragic means. That’s what he tells her. That there’s doors that really close.
She wondered what Peter saw. Would he tell her. He was a boy. Well he was in his late twenties. Everybody in the little town would take the man’s son into their houses and make him some tea. Often he had no shoes. We all did then. We knew he was your son. Yes he came here once in a while. It wasn’t for him. They looked around the room.
The dog just wanted all of us to go away. It was his yard.
You know Casey right Rose.
I do.
The tree has been here for so long so if it feels a woman coming up from the lake, it feels the lake and it can feel a group of people, but maybe not one person, it can feel the phones in the place where the phone nearby is receiving it and it can feel the resistance to the distance rays and the pressure arising to stop it, to ask it, the pressure breaking down, the quickening when the far away sounds hold on shaking something a convoluted energy wanting to relieve itself and rocking back and forth for a while in the cold when each leaf and all the leaves fall. If the tree over there suddenly didn’t know how its leaves started leaving it but where could it have been in all the risings and fallings that happen inside where had it been why did it want to be seen now lightning becoming naked and an alone tree is there such a thing now here except in the old sad gem of the telling.
A cigarette parks in and out of lips watching the intense raggedy woman receive the call from far away and the cigarette smoke is pulling down into a chest as the eyes of the woman look around getting slower. The lips about to receive the warm paper as the woman seems to drop into her own body cavity to let the facial expression a little tighter almost happy to be told that the thing she saw approaching now blazingly here the lips almost kiss the cigarette as the woman says you love him and the energy on the other side echoes. The smoke blowing against the pinkening sky as the woman looks at the door into the building and feels the music and describes the door to the cell phone and the cell phone can’t understand why there is a door there now but there is. And she is going through it, slow. Far away a woman falls backwards on her bed in much brighter light and pats her dog.
Bernadette. I think it might have been Bernadette.
No it was Rebecca. And she was laughing now and holding her hand to her hair and her mother Veronica was there and there were seven dogs all of them theirs. Red dogs and white dogs. One dog sits in a truck. The bad one. And the small boy, Darragh, led us into the shed. It was different people now. The men were gone. The bed was there he said pointing with a stick. That’s original. The white and green dresser sitting against the wall. He watches her mouth open. That’s not true. It would be more like and she pointed at something old and brown. More like that. She’s with Deirdre Powers. And the twilight setting in. And both sides of the street were theirs. It was referred to as the shed. It was out of great respect and John Joe’s home would not be torn down but it was the shed and the dogs lived there. Eileen Lynch says do you know who this is. Yes I have definitely seen this before and I don’t know who she is but I do know this. You don’t know who this is. It’s Helen. Because Eileen Helen Ellen it’s all the same. It’s one name. She smiled. Are you married. I said no. She smiled. She glimmered and crinkled. And her brother did too. It runs in the family she smiled. And it did.
I am one of them now. He was tall, very tall and powerful and he loved the Gaelic language and poetry and he could recite it for hours. He had a beard. And at that age (91) you could count the white hairs in his black beard and his head. His name was John. Jack O’Riordan. Are there pictures. No there are no pictures. And she smiled. These are the pictures. That would be her little boy. Do you know which little boy this is. I do not know. He would be her little boy. I can’t keep this. You have it. These are your parents. Right. Yes they are. Then they sat on the mantle like they were always standing there. Benny’s mouth is open.
And Peter is preparing the landing strip. He saw Benny. The location is no longer receiving information. Possibly they feared he would just write about them like he did with his whores and the young drunken woman shaking her tits they just didn’t want to be lied about. After all they were family. And what about the old woman in the hospital. Nellie. It was too hard to see. He read that the paternal grandmother will tell you how you are going to look. He laughed when he pictured himself in a scarf like his farther. The women so often protected them. The land was bad. It was a manner of slavery. They might pay you in drink to work. Not even an animal. More like an angel who exchanges work for going away. Getting lost in exchange for it. All of them.
He was found in the other house and his mouth was open. It was an O surrounded by an O and one was brown and one was green and it got wider and wider eating up the entire house and the field. It was the kind of O that would tear up your face and your hair fell in and all your clothes. The bed he was lying on was gone. It was an entire hole. And the stove. Everything wavering and greenish. That’s how it looked. And the land and the trees. He wavered back into the house and the mouth like a clown’s mouth, he looked like a black man and the earth. He wasn’t human. And all of him was huge and bursting out of his clothes like rags. He had stopped for a couple of beers. He had a kit bag. He went back and got it and crouched on the floor. The room stunk. It stunk to high hell. He didn’t have eyes. His eyes were torn open. His hair—he sipped his beer. He would begin planning the fie
ld. I thought I might get a few cows he told the hole. The hole stared. I thought. I wanted to talk to Peter about what he had seen because he had my whole life. Did I just want to see death. Why would I just want to go in the ground. Did you see it Peter. And what was it like for them. Did he blow the house down with his explosion. I had it too and I wanted to see what it was like for him. Up there in their ships they can see what we do. Peter moves the cows around. We are organizing the yards and the fields so that the ships can come. His mouth is open like a hole like a signal. He is huge and he is breaking the house. Peter staggered out. He stood in the field. He counted his cows. He looked up. He was waiting for them.
“The Dog’s Journey”
I’ve been gone from your life for seven years. But believe me—I am keeping an eye on things. I notice a chapter on your list called “The Dog’s Journey.” I read it and think: I can help. I know I’m the dog being referred to and I’m a pit bull. We love to work so I will help you get the thing up and running and on its way around the world. Afterglow is totally a book with legs (four if I can be dumb) so it will go a lot further than your earlier Eileen-based fictions. “The Dog’s Journey” is, as I envision it, is a big chapter, maybe the last. You’ve got that look of fear on your face, Eileen. Okay I know you don’t like to get pushed around. I’m not doing that. But I most definitely am dogging you. You need it. Here’s the plan.