Stars on Top: Annivyrsary 2011

ISSUE #153

Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.

You smell the syrup of fog before you see it. Moisture starts to settle, coalesce. Birds with heavy feathers sing from branches unseen. Stalks of green and hidden gold pass on secrets of prairies past.

When I fled to the warm and verdant South, the first thing I missed was the flat horizon, that voyeur’s glimpse of the edge of heaven. The trees down here, my blessed protectors, are beautiful beyond my words, but I find myself missing the black breath of space.

It was a comfort to be so close to the stars. I loved them, and I know that now—though it took a deeper learning of the word before I recognized it. They were my shelter, despite their distance. A pockmarked tent of caring presence, silent and stolid as the friend who moves to sit next to you even when all words fail.

In my early days after ditching home, I found myself in someone else's bed, awake for hours which should have brought sleep. This happens when I leave—I fall hard for the New to quell the storm of what's gone. The songs she used to rest her head were bouncing off the window’s screen.

To my terror, Bon Iver's “Holocene” began to play. I’d stuffed that song in the wardrobe of memory; now, the lock was being picked. Forced to listen for six fireside minutes was the farthest I’ve ever felt from home. I was thinner than a string of putty as I stretched across the rack of time.

I've made no secret my obsession with memory. As I grow old, I recognize the shadowed imprints I too leave behind with others. 2011's Bon Iver, for me, is the sound of that past and future, the moving on from things still broken. “Hinnom, TX,” “Towers,” “Wash,” all form a tumbling waterfall’s veil. I have to brave the cold to reach any shelter within.

In my dreams that night, I pulled off the highway under the humming bulbs of our red brick gas station. It was one of countless nights I’d stopped on that black dirt for coffee. I had to taste the earth in the back of my throat. The air kissed my drying eyes as I ducked out of the car. Wind like that gives you healing relief—the warm promise coming only through pain's future absence, like the pleasure of a night alone when you know it's not eternity.

But time was carved by glaciers and it stretches on forever—it is sound without an echo. Even then, my life was littered with mistakes. It’s hard to place your books on another’s shelf, to trust that your story is safe behind their lips. The sharing of real emotion, through confession or art, is the casting in iron of an imperfect self. Sometimes it’s brave, and sometimes it’s folly—but if I learned one thing from the Midwest sky, it's that we'll never rise to meet the stars if we won’t first risk the bone-rending drop.