Night Swimming: A Memory of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People

by Casey Chalmers

Smack crack bushwacked
An owl calls me out for pissing on the pinecones
and I’m wet-brained from the dim glow
of a dream’s neon rope.
She’s got the first track starting up,
tricking out the shadows
as she tip-toes into the water,
a Bartles and Jaymes longneck
kinking the porchlight.

I have seen things that you will never see -
The hard half moon shoving itself into the drift.
A young woman, topless, ashing her Marlboro
on the slow simple tides fondling her aimless sashay,
the stern steel reinforcement
holding the pool up and above the ground,
over the septic tank leaking its trade up to the surface.
The lean chain-link pattern gift-wrapping the whole scene.
Me standing still on a hump of brown pine needles
decaying quietly.

Today I need something more sub sub sub substantial
It’s a criminal pinch point for a pubescent voyeur
second-handing a wine cooler’s sin
on some damp, darkened debris.
I can at least desert myself
and fall mid-distance into a weakening perm
pulled high and tucked into the haze.

And the night, the night is yours alone
Her parents have gone to the cop auction,
scanning for a jailbird Fiero.
She turns this one up a little,
sucks the melancholy in, and leans on the pool’s resin rim,
getting the song on her,
and turning it over to the batshit treeline at the back of the yard.

New Orleans Instrumental
Sound of crickets, wet plastic, reverb, breath.

Brooding, duplicitous, wicked and able.
In the transitions,
in the desaturated distance,
here’s what you do -
hotwire a golf cart,
let the blood run a little,
see if the window slides open.
See if you can slide in too,
off the top of an injured condenser unit,
dented, puckered, and caving
with the weight of a hundred horny footholds.

It could depend on your take
I’m under the impression
it’s the first time I've seen someone high,
forgetting the bright, better proof
of Youth Group smokers at the cocky edge
of the Lutheran Church ditch.

Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse
She turns this one up too,
and the piano scoops me out,
its chords nicking my back walls,
giving the lonely filth
a worried, shimmering shape -
an invisible lasso holding us in place.
An oboe tune wisps across
the clouded pulsing present,
cooling our swamped brains
and sweetening the silhouette
of a soaked and bent bench press.
Above-ground pools weren’t gonna make it out of the 90s,
and the ooze was gonna ease off
when our thoughts got dry
like raspy deadened tendrils.
I bet one day we’ll soften back up,
so we can slide back out of ourselves
and get hawked out into the dark stock
sweetening the contorted, unwound cigarette butts
lacing the subsoil
and keeping time.

The river empties to the tide
like warm gossip that spools out,
decades from tonight’s wet midriff.

Casey Chalmers lives in California’s East Bay, where he just started writing again. South Carolina, Louisville, and New Orleans are some spots where people helped him get out of his head and body and town through art, film, & music. He’s moved and modified by absurdity, sentimentality, & violence (and their intersections), and he loves eavesdropping, trespassing, and hanging out with family.

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