John Gallaher
American Travelogue (Architecture 79)
After the plane lands, and I’m being driven to My New Life,
I call out, frantic for my PEZ candy dispensers, pronouncing it “peas,”
and my New Parents think I have to pee. They told this story
for years, about how funny I was. Funny kid. Hey, everybody.
Britney Spears says there are two kinds of people. Those
who bring the show and the audience. I’m disconsolate about my PEZ,
and they’re trying to teach me my new name. It’s “Hey You”
or “TBD.” Emotion + Emanation of Nature, in 12 candy pieces.
Absence is the necessary part.
Out the window, there’s some fog
over the pond, and it feels like the spirit rising. As we
become builders by building, painters by painting; so too
we become spirit by doing spirit acts, by water, by dust, brave
by weight and walls. I hear voices. I have only to walk
by a thrift shop, antique shop, and the PEZ Sailor
and PEZ Boy with Cap pipe up: Aye, these briny waves! Golly, Sam,
what’s gotten into us? On YouTube, there’s a video
of a rainstorm over a valley, sped up so the rain comes down
like it’s pouring out of a bucket, it splashes along the ridge, where,
if you leave a house alone for fifty years, the land will pull it
into itself. They embrace, Lil Bad Wolf chuckling in the background.
Driving home tonight I saw that the hardware store in our town
is having a sale on buckets. If you’d like a deal on buckets,
call me. I’m a recast character, dropped in, season three,
gray city in Brutalist architecture. I can point to the sky
and know where I came from.
I decided I was brought by aliens,
and I’d report back by saying, “Report to ship now,”
which would upload, since the last report, these fragments,
the consolation of objects, with my PEZ dispensers
in a row along the windowsill. Casper. Sheriff Yellow. Goofy.
And so now every time I read this, I’m reporting,
repeating the incantation. It was a joke at one point,
but I kept it up for years, as one who no longer believes,
who goes to church anyway, crosses themself, sings.