Susquehanna Sketches
By William C. Blome
Given a lifetime of late night walks, my favorite is to strut a huge semicircle girdling a bluff some two-thirds of the way up an elevation of the river’s eastern shore, but I only do this in late November, and a big plus for me then is that I can easily pace my way without a care in the world just by placing one foot down slightly in front of the other on cloudy, moonless nights, and so I’m pounding and stomping in rough memory of my long-gone father and his likely-long-gone concubine, but, again, this kind of strutting is minus the bright-faced lunar idiot looking on from above with those shifty and twitchy cohort stars in cahoots to spoil a tramp. Nonetheless, I traverse the semicircle (north to south) in joy and then slouch on back to where I parked my station wagon.
When you set your card tables up ‘long the edge of the greenwood, I’ve told you not to act surprised by what falls out of the overhead branches and lands all over the jars of jams and jellies you be hawking to passersby. And hey: what winds up cluttering your tables is not entirely all my first wife’s shit, though granted, there are several of those dark blue, flat, hardback books that were her copies of a naval treaty or two; you may also come across some puffs of hair from the head of one of her adolescent suitors; and don’t be surprised by yellowing sheets of paper that contain her best-and-final drafts of real estate contract wording (i.e., non-standard sections delineating stuff, like tricky easements or grumpy community covenants). However, I have to vouch that the other strange items I might spy are messing up your tables—again, this dirty stuff ‘come down from the branches to dwell among yo’ sweets— were never my ex’s property.
So as weasel-like you slink and sloop in and out of hedges and scurry up the hill before affecting the likeness of some clown pilot leaning on her grounded biplane and using her invisible goggles and gigantic binoculars to focus in on my current life, once you seem satisfied with what you see, I know you’ll happily honk your horn from the cockpit before vaulting away and starting to gun the engine in your Chrysler coupe as you then drive off. I realize you’re into a standard routine of motoring down the slope with paper flowers crammed in your arms. I further know the bunch of flowers never stays intact: you’ll either push some out the window or slow the car down so that when I do catch up to you, you’ll reach out and punch and jab and roughhouse the remaining flowers into the terry cloth pockets of my bathrobe. But it never takes a genius for any and all bystanders to discern you’re disfiguring my ass with your rough slugging and wicked clowning, and there’s an easy consensus among them that I’m being beat to pieces.
My third time ‘round the little hill it began to snow big, sloppy flakes, but I was still okay with my foot feathering the side of the gas pedal and only pressing down when I imagined in front of me unoccasional flash photos of some Hollywood starlets standing very straight and balancing themselves on the lip of a soundstage, where a trumpeter in the pit has just finished his solo and is setting his horn aside in favor of wolfing into a large slice of chocolate wedding cake. (Now even with my rugged discipline of cautious driving, I had to be careful my station wagon didn’t meow to a stop or lunge forward like a lion.) However, in the midst of the fourth revolution, I got thirsty for some snow, so I pulled over, got out of my vehicle, and leaned against it. I squinted through the falling snow and beheld the nearly-static river. Then I tilted my head upward and propped my mouth open till I was able to slake my thirst.
It’s not an honest concern for us if this river’s sometimes a frozen lake, but o I like to—but o I love to!—but o I have to pretend I’m goddamned Mercury a-standing tall in a pea-green dinghy, a-flashing my arms and legs all about and delivering a batch of messages to my client gods using these shaky, risky, and (I hope) classified semaphores I’ve mastered and practiced ad infinitum, as my boat—why, she’s female, of course—skims quietly along on her lonesome, a-threading and a-tickling the long and khaki western shore.
William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction. He lives wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he once swiped him a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Poetry London, PRISM International, Fleas on the Dog, Fiction Southeast, Roanoke Review, and The California Quarterly.
