20 February

Hai(na)bun from the Anti-Portland

for David

2006

Everybody, it seems, knows these places. These vortices, cities of anti-matter, landscapes of dream. I remember one winter twilight when I had been calling and calling you, but you had probably yanked the phone cord out of the jack, tired of telemarketers, collection agency representatives. By then I was hopelessly lost, only a few miles from home. Approaching a familiar intersection from a new direction, I had no idea how to proceed. I pulled over, called once again, and this time you picked up.

-The sign says I’m at the corner of Portland and Greeley, but I know I’ve never seen this place before. There’s a car wash, a Plaid Pantry. Please tell me how to get home.

-Oh, you’re in the anti-Portland.

Like I said, everybody knows these places.

Later, we drove through our city’s dark mirror together, your sense of direction so keen I never thought you could lose your way. But you were in the passenger’s seat, and I was under the influence. Not so much that I couldn’t drive us home, just enough that I didn’t feel like having a conversation with the police about it. You were keeping me off the main thoroughfares, telling me which way to turn at each intersection as we made our elaborate way between two points on the very same street. Slowly, the realization crept up on me that you didn’t know where we were, either.

A vast park on the right, trees both inviting and intimidating, still stark against the late winter twilight sky. A floodlit housing development stretching out to infinity, pristine as if they had just cut the ribbon, held the grip-and-grin pose a little too long. As if not a sneaker had ever left the imprint of its tread in the brand-new mud. Off in the distance, a huge fire blazed not quite out of control.

-Do you see that? I asked, pointing with my chin.

-We’ll have to come back in daylight, you answered inscrutably.

The end of the line, before we admitted defeat and turned back toward anything resembling something we had ever seen before the last half hour, was a monstrous parking lot looming with big metal containers, the kind you barely notice stacked like shoeboxes on trains and freighters. Ordinarily I love scenes like this, but it was too dark by then, too late, too weird, too close to home.

We'll never find

these places

again.

(A haibun is a literary composition that combines prose and haiku. A hay(na)ku is a three-line, six-word poetic form, the reverse variation of which has three words in the first line, two in the second, and one in the third. This hai(na)bun is my combination of the two forms.)