Tim Keane
Tim Keane’s poetry book, Alphabets of Elsewhere is coming out in November 2007 from Cinnamon Press. This fiction is from his widely excerpted novel, That Strange Flower the Sun. He lives in New York City. website
Cian Corley on the Path to Cheng-Zu’s Palace
Sleeping, awake, easy, who cares asleep or awake there’s no difference when you’re in space so open there are no rules about direction, even awake in this sleep, or sleeping to wake, he knew this walk was China, opening mountain space just like he’d seen and read on the postcard he’d begged Ma to buy him, ‘two pennies just,’ then the man behind the desk at the flea market handed him China, on a card, not Red China the radio talks about, or China where people are starving without rice, but this China with a thin mountain painted yellow and trees on every cliff, and a path to take you toward it, which it did, so he walked it, sleeping, sleeping more awake than ever before, never surrounded by so much space as this, and ‘why?’ he laughed, his feet feeling the mud of the path, the grasses so tall on each side, flowering crazy grass without cows or horses in those fields, ‘why did I get born?’ he laughed, ‘why did I get born except for this amazing space and to walk without rules?’ and why his friends in the cafeteria talk about dreams of being an astronaut with a gun fighting on Saturn’s rings, or of being a fireman on the roof of a blazing school where you rescue some people and don’t rescue teachers, or of kissing girls who wear yellow bathing suits at the Cascade Pool, girls you’d never kiss in your life but you can, why all that when this walking is better because of how real it is, China, just you, alone, you on this path, muddy, but not wet under your feet, once in a while birds on that thin yellow mountain hop and glide from one treetop to another, far away you can see them move through the air as you walk toward that mountain, the air feels watery in your chest, and he could still feel the water-breath even after he got told to hop-to for breakfast, hearing Ma and the girls talking over eggs about men on the avenue who scratch their bellies, hairy bellies and they made man-faces saying that, hardly eating their eggs but pushing their plates away and laughing so hard Ma was crying from laughing so much she didn’t notice he hadn’t taken his bath, because he wanted to keep this walking-feeling about China alive in his nose and under his feet and even up and down his arms, so he took a quarter when she wasn’t looking and didn’t even tie his shoes as he hurried down to Piccolos for yellow construction paper, running up the street where the sun was trying to push past clouds so low those clouds might as well be winter, and in the store, he pushed aside men in hats on their way to work who were in line holding newspapers under their arms, the smells of the candy store so ordinary and woody and dusty that he knew he was born to walk and draw places far from here and could, as soon as he paid for the construction paper, and as he paid for the paper he looked back at how busy the men were so he took a Hershey Bar for breakfast, let it melt in the center of your tongue and taste what kings taste because kings eat whatever they want whenever they want, all the men in hats who are not emperors in China busy talking about a plane that crashed in New Jersey, from fog, fog is the ocean half-up-turned into air but drifting-breaking clouds like something to remind you can see but you can’t, or can you? In fog you see things better because things peek out of the fog so by seeing just a part of what you see you like it more than ever, more than if you ever saw the whole, just parts is better, hints, like now, running, how the silver ends of cars and the fire hydrants pass so quick you only see a part of color, a blur of black and brown and white-gray color, even of the girls you pass, red ribbons, blue shoes, black spotted gum-spots on the sidewalk like planets that need to be given names, cosmos is the only word bigger than universe but don’t say it’s bigger than a god, or China, up the stairs with the girls and Ma still talking at the table now describing different haircuts, hair styles and hair spray, beauty parlors, Puerto Rican girls’ hair and black hair and Jap hair, but no one at the table said Chinese hair, or even saw him with the paper, slipping off his untied shoes, hearing his own voice in his head, laying out the colored pencils on the floor near his bed, spaces so open there are no rules, just China coming back to him, there, that thin mountain painted yellow which he was walking towards, he knew, as he drew, the walk must be to see the emperor, emperor, the name for kings in China, and as he walked, not hurrying but not afraid either, alone with no shoes on, he drew the muddy path, wondering how the emperor would feel if he saw him in no shoes, muddy toes, and no Chinese eyes, but, he could tell the emperor ‘I’m not Chinese but look at this, I can draw, grasses’ grasses he drew longer on the right side than on the left side, just what he saw when he walked, but the left side, he remembered as he drew it was further out to a field that went to a horizon, flatter, more free as he drew the horizon the walk came back to him, moving him along faster, the watery air and the mountain ahead he drew which was thin but as he moved toward it grew thicker, cliffs, trees hanging from the cliffs, birds on the tree branches he could hear them singing by now, his nervous hand sprouting those trees on the mountain’s cliffs, watery lake in his chest as the far-off mountain past the closer yellow mountain grew bright as sand, walking on mud, drawing toward the mountain, one tree at the bottom colored with orange fruit, and, once, a white bird dipping down from one of the cliffs as if it were falling but stopped plunging and did a glide in the air, not far from clouds, shot up as if showing off a wing-trick, which is what he drew, the going-up blaze of the Chinese bird, not a pigeon, whitish gray, like a small-fast seagull, this was amazing walking like this with so much space, so wide, rocks on each side of the path colored seven colors—blue, gray, brown, black, violet, purple, pink— another pencil for each rock, that’s what the colors were and he wanted to pick the smooth stones up as he walked but a voice not in the air but somewhere else told him those path rocks were ‘off-limit’ Chinese jewels, and the emperor would see them in his pockets, and they’d chop his head off in China for stealing, so it’s kind of a rule you like, leaving the colored stones right there where he colored them, no one here to walk with except yourself and to not be scared at all, alone on this planet because you were born and now in another country, walking, what was more awake than this, the mud-flat feeling between his toes, the watery air, a burning-good-feeling in his stomach that rolled on as he was going to meet someone no one ever knew, find a room in an emperor’s palace, down there, coloring trees with his eyes and now his hand, lines of red showing the ridges of the mountain, white trees far behind near that second mountain with the lake, even grass on that lake in small quick lines, ‘what in the world is he doing in there?’ a voice asked, ‘drawing,’ someone said, ‘well leave him drawing, he hates eggs anyway,’ and as he walked he laughed at their kitchen-words, tracing a swerving way up the path he was still walking, as if he ever needed anybody to ever allow him to be on this path, walking in China, moving into ways that made his hand as alive as his moving feet, watching colors happen in a dream which was never fake but more real than any sleep or any being-awake-day, open day-space all around, the tall crazy flowering grass on all sides almost finished except for the petals, feeling watery air on his face as he got closer to the mountain big and more real than anything he’d drawn before this walk, on a path he drew that moved into him and out but wouldn’t stop happening here as long as he could see.