Thanksgiving

Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door. Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God. My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head because I too would like to live in such a world where an eighty-nine year old crawls out a window and falls seven feet to the ground, in turn the miracle of her body stained a deep blue, vitreous. In one room of the unfinished mansion where we will celebrate the day, the ninety-year-old matriarch sleeps in her four-poster bed under the canopy of a wedding dress, its hundred eyelets a fallacy. After dinner someone will hand around an indulgence of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the lady’s dark cheek marred as if she has been scratched. Who at this table fled the police? Who left that place in flames, the rubble of infinite hearths? The deer’s eyes like perfect cataracts, the evidence cooling. When I think of my room in the earth, I can’t breathe. A friend of a friend recently hit a small bear with his car. At the end of my favorite novel a bear is dancing on a makeshift stage, the bear a grotesquerie like the rest of us. No one stopped to help, said my friend. Traffic barely slowed. I do not judge this, or even the surreptitious footage of the workers somewhere on the killing floor, stomping the breast-heavy creatures with their rubber boots. How we raise them not to fly, what should waft gnostically through the air, the hollowness of evolving. My heart is doing that thing again, saying climb the stairs on your knees. I tell a friend a man halfway across the world has been killed, torn apart by motorbikes, each limb tied in a different direction. Could a universe be born this way? One minute you are scarping the silvery bark off a birch when it comes to you forever and there you lie in the bed of a blood-smeared truck at a stoplight on Highway 41 because this is the season of messages. The man was a teacher. He taught girls. When they came for him he told his children not to cry. Then the men took out half his bowel, the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart. In that other place three million of us died. When I left, I left them all behind. In the unfinished mansion someone will ask me what I’m thankful for. What to say? That one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a paper nest secreted by wasps, and that in the summer I would sleep under it, the runnelled mass turning like a planet in the moonlight? I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened. At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat the deer. If I had to watch someone be torn apart by motorbikes I would still be me, which is the horror of it all.