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Rehab

Kate Falvey

And then you get addicted to a cause,
the lines running smack
into the tracks laid down with
someone else’s want
by gangs of desperate nomads
spiking for a way
out of town.

The hoon of the diesel
smoking into the sun
around a precarious curve
is always a dream,
fragrant with singed gravel and earth,
petulant with movement.

There are never any cars
swifting into the bead
of your desire, never a brace
of slowing steel
for hoisting up your
downright tired needs.

There are shovels and picks,
sledgehammers and the land,
muscles plunging and rearing with
requiting the iron of their own demands.
There is forwardness, the destination of
a day, the dear and dire leveling of

the narrow straightaway.

Step 1: Concede. Nothing picks you up. God
doesn’t have to
like you. You might
hug the pavement and
squint into the spare light of
another early sun
but God
conducts business as usual
and is just as interested in
the hollow breastbone of a lark
and the sodden fleece of a
bursting cloud. Pain
is inevitable. Wishes crack
into the void and small
mediocre voices get flinty
with begging mercy from a
thunderous beyond. Face it.
God files His nails sometimes
and simply enjoys his snow geese
honking perfectly
into an untroubled flange.

Step 2: Simplify. While God takes in His
offerings and leaves you to mull
over His intentions, consider
that He intends nothing
but life
which includes
death. And once the ball is
rolling it can bounce off any wall,
fracture a crusty neighbor’s window, or
boing into a gutter packed with
derelict webs and nests,
and hunker down among the
curled and loitering leaves
flung hapless and moaning
from shrill Novembers.
There is no telling
what wall will become
the sun, what tiny delight
of scrappy coverlet
will become your mother’s
sheltering hands.

Step 3: Dread. God, it might occur to you,
sickens and takes to His bed,
turning a tossing face to
a fevered wall, shooing away flocks
of angels who come calling with
cooling fans, spicy chest rubs, and
deeply concerned magazines. He
still sees, but tires of being
everybody’s eyes. He swivels ages
in His bones and makes use of
His dominion: nothing stops Him
from leaving. Nothing starts Him
up again. You might be aware
of a providence, all mead and
conifers, somewhere up the line.
The cold groan of your heart’s gears
as you rise among bruising shadows
might sound like scales of an
immense love. You can host
your chronically believing self
with whim or menace or
assert divine command. Order
is illuminating. Anything
can be adored.

Step 4: Aim. Dozens of minds go out
with each blink. Your eye never registers
enough. Even when you swirl
an easement of Sunday cream into your joe,
there are deaths. Impossible to spot
a hawk camouflaged by crows. The air
is rancid where the night peels away
and in the brush some bitter voles
make frenzied loops around the same
emptiness, the grass flattened and
unwarm. Your own claws must
scrabble for dropped berries, your own
beak must stipple the husks and rinds,
intent on meat. It is you
who sift seeds in the wind and
drag the fur from your pointed teeth. This
swooping is yours, this soft reluctance
of viridescent gills torn in the usual air,
your spearing, your intimate regard.
Even when you are taken, your strong heart
mealed between prolonged, efficient stones,
your mouthy dust will spark and fly,
nipping triumph from the air.

Step 5: Review. The past is a
strange bedfellow, monstrous and
polite. It stays still while you
pat it into smaller gargoyles, lifting
snarls into fetching grins, askew with
their own bedeviling. It invites you back
for seconds, thirds, all
the helpings you can hold. The fare
changes nightly. It is
wondrous strange and
mythical. Shells can still
cut your tongue with their
razory evanescence. Wine
can turn to water, water can turn
to sand. The company
are revelers
drunk on their own survival
or wallflowers daintily biting off
more than they can chew and,
riveted to the courtly centerpiece,
making certain that
they listen well and fetch
some roses home. There is
always a dormouse steeped
in the teapot, a flurry
of silk and music as the next chair
is seized, music like a scent
of a trail never seen.

Step 6: Rue. Regret is essential
but difficult to marshal. You might
get lost here, circling the same
prideful patch of your
wilderness of errors
until time is marked
by the frayed ellipse
of your irregular achievement.
There is so much more to rue.
If you can tolerate
the future, you have a shot
at gaining solid ground. The past
is not a training ground. It is
your life. The fits and starts,
the flights, the ferocious tears,
the fancies wrung out and flapping
on the line like the jeweled light
of a northern midnight –
these are your prizes, your pale
distended luxuries, the aches of
the weight of you,
your way and your way.

Step 7: Reflect. Morality comes clean
hardly at all. Inducements to behave, to
choose to behave, come not from above
but from decisions. This is
hard to take. Edicts are out
sunning themselves on rocks, the same
as sins. There is nothing
to cede to, no one to
swat away your crib sheet, pull
the pillow from the mewling
infant’s face. In the morning,
you are forced
to face your absences,
to reckon with your trusty, foolproof strengths.
How you get going
depends not a whit
on anyone else’s tenderhearted arms.
Even charity is ambiguous.
This has nothing to do
with whether there is
a God.

Step 8: Attend. Looking is love.

Step 9: Avail. Receptivity needs to be
practiced. Hands that spasm into fists
when touched by a wandering breeze
need coaxing, finger by finger, into
exchanging dignities, openly, with
the plinth and plight of this lilting world.
Carry a pail of sea water to a scooped moat
ovaling around an unelaborate sand castle.
Tip a dribble into a rush and see
the sun wending glints in the spirals of the fall.
No one says this needs
to be enough. But if it is not,
you are likely to
miss
the rest.

Step 10: Resolve. Recklessness is not
easy to give up. Your dreams are like
derelicts. They come laden with
responsibility, rough hats
thrusting for change. They don’t need
to be respectable. You do.
A sack of wine and a street corner, a
stab of silver in the damp glow of a
streetlight smell of weightlessness
and purpose. It is just a matter of
how this is supplied and how
it is delivered. An open door,
a bowl of soup, fresh towels
and a bath, sheets turned down and
made ready to receive - - could you
be your own
innkeeper, your own
always-welcome guests? What matters
is what you serve. There is something
humbling
and beautiful
in honoring what ails you.

Step 11: Withstand. This has something of
forgiveness in it. You can start to
sing songs
with people you’ll
never see again. Children
you gave away in sorrow, fair
tomorrows banked on and
unplayed, lovers inviting you to
Tennessee, the turnings and turnings away.
Aspiration is a proof
of God. After everything –
and there has been so much
of that – you still intend
to rise. It doesn’t matter where.
As long as you
have eyes.
What gives this flesh
its space, its listing one way
or the next, its homing toward
a thousand likely roosts until it quits
and tries to rest? The urge of you
is all the air there is.

Step 12: Witness. Mouth off among the dirges and
assaults, devotional complaints, and the rag-bag testimony
of gutsy hallucinations whizzed like bloated prayer-beads,
meltingly, into the curb-light. Everyone wants
to kneel. The atmosphere is pitched
with indecision, wan memories and hearts twitching
with delusions unconcealed. A wail, eerily noncombatant
is an ancient medley of frittered hopes. You,
compulsively fingering what you have botched,
could be any old Adam, an Eve,
dusty with inclination and disuse.
There is a fruit
you have been taught to believe
is forbidden. I tell you: it is yours.
I tell you: pluck
and eat. There is no greater sin
than gabbling on into eternity
without listening to
what your own heart speaks. It is
full and it is succulently still. I tell you:
night in the garden makes gods of us all.

I tell you: prepare.
You are in for a surprise.

 

Previously published in Inscribed, 2008

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