Signal Fires Read online

  Mr. J.P. Molen

  Weather Bureau Meteorologist

  Hunt County, Texas

  August 8, 1912.

  Coal forest of the Carboniferous delta swamps. Lepidodendron trees, their anthracite trunks embossed with spirals of interlocking diamond leaf-scars. Exquisite fusain sceptres. Snakes and ladders. The river current quickens as it nears the falls. Elastic water pulled viscous over the lip. Fossil glen. Nine Dragon Scroll evening above Lake Erie. The forest rises in music like an ancient air. Twilight priestess administers the evening, her dark splendour.

  Entrance colonnade to the oak forest, microclimate of hardwood shade an aerodrome nave. Distant figures numinous through summer haze. Windy August stars drift over sighing pine trees. Pine-grove star needles. When we come it rains. Indexed by sassafras trees the grassy hills undulate with soft Miocene turbulence in the July heat. High summer. Giant bulrushes. Night herons motionless on terrapin logs. An insect alights momentarily on a stainless steel stela. Luminous dream vista.

  Pipes, water mains, gas lines, the roots of houses spread under the landscape. Sandy paths. Calm, alert valley air. Distant tinkle of lawn parties beside smoky rhododendrons. Honey locusts shelter summer in their foliage well into October. Cool July day, her long, honeyed thighs slipping out of her jeans as she crouches to pee in the forest loam. Fine pale arches of her feet, the hot gush of her. March hills – secret blue drifts of snow in sheltered hollows on the northern slopes. Glacial refugia.

  Redtail oak forest. Narcissistic talisman of our love. A metallic green haze between the columns of this metropolitan forest – lovers wet with lust. Ginkgo leaves. August tea roses, pink, orange & cream. The constant, almost inaudible rustling of leaf mulch on warm nights in early spring. Soil and leaves heaving in slow-motion turmoil of dew worms sliding through autumnal debris, a faint, chalky cellophane crinkling.

  June empire of green, coronation of green. Aquamarine and jasper. Blue-green. Yellow-green. Green of constancy and desire. Corundum. Verdigris streaks on limestone walls.

  Hot, still air. Heatwaves linger in closed rooms. Unfortunate your beauty. Disastrous your lovely salamander arms beside the restaurant patio hedge. The city is a ripple-tank of violet & orange, molten steel squeezed into the shapes of machines. The simple, rude pragmatism of size. Intolerable heat of a single desk lamp as moths gather at the window screen. River musk smell of dried algae. Luscious, earthen scent of cantaloupes and peaches in a wooden bowl on the kitchen table. Tickets till dawn. Spring twigs, their buds reptilian, as we are reptilian in our extremities. Scaled & cool the clear borders of my own partiality.

  The cliffbrake fern’s blue-green tenacious filigree. Niagara-on-the-Lake twinkling in the stone night. Hot July afternoon. Empty apartment buildings. An extinct river reconstituted in the meandering interior of the willow brake. The children who play there. Green tissue commotion as a praying mantis rises laboriously through the August mist under a sodium vapour lamp. Indistinct conversation of restaurant patrons leaving the patio in small groups. Giant silk moth. Unseen river sliding noiselessly behind all this.

  Cool summer night. Blue midnight sky behind deserted buildings. Nostalgia steeped in its own intoxication. Empty dance pavilion beneath the summer stars. Every forest is a beckoning sensual labyrinth of lust. Radiowave rooms echoing within rooms, the hollowness of love remembered within love realized. The lonely bliss of completion. Delicious emptiness in this late summer night. After the dance a waning moon rises. We walk through empty streets past buildings filled with sleepers. Their dreams perfuse the night air.

  Tonight the sky is inky black, a carbon night without a trace of blue behind the full moon. It is a deeper evening, a universe slightly more vacant than before, as if this warm darkness required a triumph of representation, as if the sky conformed to its own description in a continuous devoted hue. A single cricket calls from the grass beside the barn. Indigo summer.

  Purple and grey. Metallic dust in the subway tunnels. Darkness at the interstices of the city. Burgundy on limestone. Lilacs bending in a rainy wind. University residences glowing deep yellow. The airport thundering through the night air. Wind in the Wychwood oaks. Green argon lasers flicker over Queen Street sidewalks. Dirigibles. The museum deserted on a cool night. Its air-conditioned interior simulates the evening air. Asphalt lagoons. A nightflight banks over the spreading ledges of city lights. The streets are vast crystalline networks, linked luminescent organisms proliferating to the horizon. Cooling lava glowing through a lacework of cracks. Moonlight on Lake Ontario is a dazzling path to the dawn. Night corrupt of another. Slim curve of her waist unfolds itself in silence and without witness.

  Fireworks explode in the summer night. Pyrotechnic blossoms of silver and gold. Their dazzling, empty perfection. Spring aches within a palace deep inside the autumn forest. A clear evening with celestial gauze so that the largest stars have misty haloes. This lucid haze signifying magic, charmed darkness. Jupiter, Mars & Venus. I know you are love, in the absorbent summer twilight of the forest strand.

  Enigmatic nocturnal waves phosphoresce on the moonlit shore of an inland ocean. Beech trunks incarnate with cloud light, as if you weren’t sure you were naked in a dream. Moccasin flowers. Trilliums. Lightning blossoming in the purple strata of distant storms. Wild grapevines spill from the branches of white oaks overhanging the creek. A suffusion of emerald light through the waist-high ferns, our clothes soaked with rain & sweat.

  We follow the river down the Escarpment ravine. The clouds are a violet-grey ceiling to this vast, open-air greenhouse. The air thick and hot, the foliage dripping with recent rain & illuminated evenly. In the forest a deserted building witnesses our opaque Logos, the tiny furious engine of a hoverfly suspended in mid-air. Pale rain on the pond’s surface. Pillars toppled by sycamores. English ivy growing behind storm windows, leaves pressed green against the glass. Darting & hovering, a flock of cedar waxwings hunts insects at the edge of the marsh.

  There is a darkness outside the city. Her face vigilant through night elm corridors. Summer lawn under green cumulus trees. The city park full of couples. She resembles herself darkly, like a sensual memory. Her wrists exalting with such cruel delicacy as always attends on beauty. Our hands alive to each other. Exist, to quicken the air around us, for this moment we are golden. Red oaks. The night guides us. It is warm outside and the air moves the leaves variously. Her pelvis vaulted light. Powdery with stars from a desert night, the wind has come to blow away what is weightless in us.

  Dactyl leaves of the white oak. The white-tailed deer are melanized thermograms of themselves. There is a consensual domain in the summer wasteland. Giant Haida eyes stare from beech trunks, their rapt bliss.

  Lyrical monotony of the whip-poor-will’s song. Jupiter and Mars bright through the lattice of the oak canopy. A nightjar’s haunted clockwork call conjures memories and floating reminiscences. Hollow music, as if the soul were a cuttlebone. Sinister to be so bold. Cool mist over the river. The whip-poor-will stops the night.

  Multifoliate her orgasms curl and vanish into the landscape. Electric gradients motionless in the stadium heat-zone of her touching. One pure, interlocking network of desire. Thought impulses and thunder, my fingers water dispersing porous into the land. Dwarf chinquapin savannah of the Pinery dunes. Black oak. A late cold spell decelerates the unfolding spring foliage. Magnolia flowers transfixed in perpetual blossom for two weeks. Lilac and forsythia suspended in cool vegetative orgasm. Raw spring sun on tombstones. Granular luminescence in the grass.

  Naked, she places her foot on a limestone boulder and reaches up into the leaves. Rapture. And touching you my dreams lay waste the foliage of your nervous system. Soft electronic hiss of night wind in the treetops. Purple night of city rain. Luminescent video-jelly oozes drugged & cool from a slice in the television cable – clear iridescent gum flickering with electric colours. The rasping call of nighthawks through an open window. Raccoon eyes glowing red in our headlights. Leaf shadows.

>   Delicate precision of an albino fox. Its white fur ruffled by the cool wind before the storm. Umbrella magnolia leaves amplify the sound of the first raindrops. Cold-cream scent of linden blossoms in early July. The eyespots of the polyphemus moth are reminiscent of an earlier civilization, of smooth futurist caterpillars. Their hallucinogenic blue evening reverie both alien and unconscious of itself. Large moth flower of moody smoky eyespots – rings on fawn and pink sand dunes background silent to this kingdom’s maze. On the outskirts of the city there is a forest.

  A muddy river shines quietly in the darkness beneath the span. Rain falling all night. Red cedars luminous with hundreds of green diamonds in the flashlight beam. The Bouguereau August light. Local time anomaly, thrilling August mist over several days. Darkness so the night can see. Waxy green gloss of oak leaves in July sun. The forest rejoices in the sound of distant waves. This choice conceived by her witnessing.

  Teetering flight of a butterfly, its destination barely a probability. Dwarf hackberry. Swamp white oak. Hoary bats tumble like acrobats through the savannah airspace. Margin of evening, an indeterminate limen between creatures diurnal and nocturnal. Twilight congeals as the first raccoons descend the chinquapin oak. Hanging gardens, ceaselessly dark at the bottom where grub-jewels glisten in the hollow oak’s loam.

  On the grassy flats behind the dunes giant cicada-killer wasps establish restless, uneasy field colonies. Their magnetic, zigzagging, hovering flight, as if suspended on the wobbling tips of fine metal rods. Small onthophagus scarab beetles hunt for dung in the solar furnace of the Pinery dunes. Shagbark hickory and sycamore. Lights twinkling on Kettle Point at night, the long curve of the beach. Grand Bend on the Ausable. August fireflies beside the evening river, wandering fairy-lights.

  The machinery stands poised and glistening in the forest clearing. The first cicadas of morning, their slow metallic grind. August rising through the fields and forests, the height of summer. The dust on the path is inlaid with a palimpsest of shoe-tread geometries in a hieroglyphic pastiche. We articulate every surface with our insignia. This internal summer a tender flood. Spiders are sinister optimists. Red bats careen through the light-cones of street lamps, their velocity gathered outside the light’s perimeter.

  Late August gold, silvery haze & hot wind in distant trees. Waves of wind in the grass, orange sunlight and a black swallowtail butterfly. Goldenrod. The field autumnal, dry. Limestone wind, damp & humid. August where it was named. August where it began.

  All the invisible cameras shift into our eyes. Deep in the light field of the city a pink electric sky glows through the evening foliage. Delicate rustling static of leaves moving in the wind. Them. Honey to the quick. Spent hurricanes of late summer, flooded culverts and hollows. Giant sphinx moth at the porch light on a cool evening. Black shadows beneath the white oak. These successions swarming through the trees of the broken consort, their branches bending in the nocturnal heat storm.

  White sunlight, white sand. All day in the dunes, leaves of small cottonwoods on the beach wagging in a hot lake wind. Calm bowls of still air behind the sandhills. Tactile revelation of stone bridges the dream city.

  Early June evening. Dark overcast sky behind green leaves. Sexual green, handsome green. Malachite. This summer grey and startled. Our broken lives illuminate it with such sad delight. The world is ourselves come to this childhood wisdom.

  The flesh of the apple is a strategy, the summer night sky a cathedral of stars. In the coal swamp the lepidodendron trees rise. Their helical blazonry of mysterious bituminous crystal. Jet coal. Methane from an ancient swamp suffuses the depths of a coal mine. Giant salamanders stir in the slurry at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

  Twilight deepens as the sky loads its nightware. Bright tedium of the whip-poor-will’s call. Its empty, lonely song is a kind of memory entrapment. This night connected to all nights. The whip-poor-will’s bubbling call recedes into darkness. Its carnal song is an ominous invitation, an absent counterpoint over the bleak, modulated surge of distant diesel engines.

  She is darkness enthroned, slender stem of pink mist. Her delicate white metallic night. The summer sun low and softly stabbing the weird music of the stars. I have seen this day from the other side of my life. Pale, dusty green leaves of the silver maple bending in the wind. This wind, this light. All alone in the dream of night. Arkona. The sound of a far horn. Unknowable desire, unknowable wisdom. A white subtropical forest hanging in the air like a cipher of sound. Wind gusting on a hot afternoon.

  Limestone boulders rise from the depths of the hills, eroding into fantastic shapes as they surface. The soil is an ocean, a fluid heavy with thousand-year viscosity. Blind worm snakes. Tunnels, roots, and the smooth, underground shapes of truffles. Mozart from an open window in a country home. Empty heraldry all the more profound because it is unconscious. Sitar monotone of high-tension wires humming above the transformer station. Cool May nights before the nighthawks arrive. She is otherworldly, immediate.

  Sunspots crackle through the radio waves. The planets are caught in that higher music. Aurora borealis. Solar wind conjures an iridescent crown on top of the world. Sweet nocturnal fragrance of sycamore foliage. Silver stars cast into the dark wells of the sky. The wind a waterfall in the treetops. The marvellous machines wait silently in the forest clearing, starlight gleaming on their polished metal contours. Mood palaces deep within an oak tree. Smoke tendrils rise from the smouldering campfire, time unfolds in arabesques.

  Sweet desert of soul spreading into the city you are this still evening. Andromeda galaxy overhead, a tiny, fuzzy colossus. The night sky a time-mosaic. Distant symphonies from the bandshell in the park. Eocene light, Mesozoic light, light from before the earth existed. Time wind blowing through the Milky Way. An evanescent Stardust settles on the flowers in the garden.

  The night sky is prehistory factored by the speed of light, a thick lens of time jelly, photon molasses. The faintest stars further back in time the edge of the universe is its beginning. The pure retrospection of starlight, lamented light from extinct suns and distant galaxies. Countless stars that have shone on forgotten cultures of unknowable complexity. Lost technologies in the hard silver twinkle at the edge of this pond.

  A gold scarab waits within the cottage dream. Clark Point. In the river the green newts are resting, still and random, strewn by gnostic impulse in the sandy shallows. Beside them miniature underwater mountainscapes of algae and pond weed. A scarlet tanager flies through the green oaks. Limestone pavement showing bare through patches in the savannah. Moonlight deep inside a dark October lake. Our strange, liquid intimacy in this lush landscape. Thrill of moist warm air in secret rooms the velvet light. Sex a delicious conspiracy focusing the wisdom of the trees.

  Clarion fountain above all this. Jazz saxophone sliding languid over the pool in smoky loops and tusks. Hypnotic music of desire. The logic of indiscretion. Soft-shelled terrapins slip into the water at our approach. Late April storm and lightning-sparkle saturates our peripheral vision until our flesh flickers. We make love in the rush of warm rain. Orgasm-shivers flash neuronal like foxfire through our single body. Thunder rupturing the clouds overhead in wild, extraneous, baritone ventriloquism. The rain splashing on your long thighs. Goosebumps, rain foam pubic hair, dangling come jelly we make love on our knees. Thunder rippling above, murmuring like memory or revenge. The grassfires of early April. Fortnight of dry weather before the foliage humidity engages.

  There is only one night, one day. The March full moon the last high, winter moon. In April the lunar arc is low in the southern sky, a summer moon.

  Outdoor concert in the park bandshell. The empty stage is lit. The audience is a dark mammalian cobble of heads extending into darkness beyond the footlights. Above the stage the stars are shining. In summer our afternoons are bright and cruel with youth. These our mouths, our sex, are dark openings into mute unknowable bliss. As if the city were a desert and we were a people of prophecy. Spring on the Forbidden Planet, dune rev
erie of lost alien civilizations. Blades of grass are narrow, supplicating astronomers in the night wind. Realm sensualist her gold mail and silk indispensable. Midnight dew trickles down the sides of the glass machinery.

  The afternoon we fell through each other into this magnificent autumn of fire and ice. We haunt this season in a white room, flickering ultraviolet light flooding insubstantial through the architecture of our skin. You are a leaf drifting to earth, a thin, spiral galaxy. This sunny autumn wind. The blue optical spruce. You are worshipped in the emptiness at the threshold of the temple.

  Spring insists, in its tragic splendour. Crickets interrogate the night, their insect Morse a sourceless gamelan. Still summer evening, pink-gold sunset over the viaduct trestles. Wish now the train were upon us. Ultraviolet moon in a purple sky. Together we are erotic technicians. The exquisite panic of orgasm, divine rush of electric honey flesh burning the mind clear. The immanent hush of pure existence, rapture in the grey 1911 industrial Victorian landscape. Iroquois delirium of the sandy red tobacco fields near Delhi. The Milky Way a dusty star trail high over the Huron dunes.