Can’t Be Far

by Jed Myers

upon the death of Navalny

So you’ve strangered yourself, years slaving bricks up the same huge monument hump,

and swallowed, as if you’ve had to, the soap-opera myths those around you nod to, all

to a vague ache in your chest. So a faintly-rotten-egg scent follows you,

and there’s a needling the skin, out from in. So, like a migraine or flu, it begins—

a blinking, as you bank your wheelbarrow rounding a bend on the ramp back down

for a pour of wet mortar—in the air itself, a tremor of coming-to, shiver

in one eyelid, tiny demon crew camped on a tonsil and staking an itch

your tongue can’t undo. So it starts fresh, the penitentiary uprising

sending its gray bouquet up from the swamp at your daydream’s edge, the unison

chant out of that tower-shade downtown park, the car-honks of sympathy blowing

through the crowd’s bloom of placards. So there’s a chance. You could punch out now

and rub your brow for the rest of the day, watching that pack of stray dogs meditate

under the bridge. You could hitch a ride east—see if you’ll still let yourself

look at that skinny lot that had been an apartment. Or go stand among those

who’ve been leaving red and white flowers against a wall out of love for the dead

one of us who stood for all. Days or years, you could be crossing your own

wind-disappeared tracks, new deities heroes or stars bending your course

by mere tugs on those sparkling strings hooked through your nose—but how far

can it be, if you keep gently slapping your face awake, leave that batch of bricks

in the scaffolds’ shadow, allow the foreman his small shock at your desertion, and walk

toward where that oddly insistent song seems to drift from—is it the 45

disc Hernando’s Hideaway you’d play on the toy turntable on the living-room rug,

or is it out of the beaks of gulls feasting at those great heaps by the docks, or it’s

wafting across the coast range with all that orange exhaust of the flames, that remote

thud-and-roar, the call, like surf-slap, like a gust-bothered screen door, too much

like a muffled chorus, hundreds on hundreds of hunkered souls…. It can’t be that much

of a haul, from this monstrous anthill where you have just stood unbent, swept

the drip of sweat from your chin, and half-pondered the trip you might simply start on

now, through whatever, the bogs, the thicket, the railyards, the battered town

squares framed with shatter-taped dark storefront panes. Can’t be far

can it, from behind your eyes down a carotid slough and on into the aortic

current, upstream yes, to that old thumping waterwheel pumphouse tucked in its narrow

canyon between walls of breath—that’s where you’ve stowed your courage. So

while it’s in you, why not. You can sing all the sorry you want to the constant welcoming

swells’ harmonics (what one of us must’ve heard in the silence of his Artic cell) once

you’re in, but go. You know—it’s unlocked.