Jeff Whitney


Hero’s Journey


It’s all a matter of how you see things. Isn’t that right?
The triangle on a dollar bill used to hint a group of shadowy figures 
watch over all. But now I see that pyramid and eye, and the eagle, too, 
as “Homage To Wonder #73” or “How Magic Permeates Even 
The Most Stodgy Accountant.” In the show he wears purple 
socks with whimsical patterns, or has a unicorn keychain,
to show that an accountant can still have fun, and thus, 
so can we. Yesterday a shooting at a mall in Texas but today 
a baseball game! That kind of thing. And in the in-between 
someone’s father shows a video from 1960-something of 
his high school production of King Lear. You see? The clothes 
are different, and there’s Mr. Gimble, who ran off with Jamie, a male
student, to the city, and isn’t that funny? Only none of us thought
it was. How the lava lamp in my living room in 1995 didn’t shatter 
it became a working model of the atom or a snapshot 
of a moment, when my father threw it at the kitchen wall 
to scare our dog, who’d just finished mauling me. It’s 
physics, particle or otherwise, where everything is balanced
by a symbol, maybe one not invented or one that is and appears 
like a squiggly line with an upside down n. Then it’s just physics 
of time, where that thing that happened didn’t really happen at all 
like that, and you’re at a barbecue trying to tell a funny story
only when you get to the end, no one’s laughing. It morphs
like we do, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly does, which, I’m not even sure
in movie logic how that was possible, something to do with science
gone wrong. Deep time. Like most parts of living, where Intention 
and Action are separate islands, and there’s always this bridge 
between. That feels pretty reductive, like getting a single hair cut 
at a barber or a dentist looking in your mouth then saying okay
I’ve checked it out. Or how Larry Levis wrote a few times about Death 
blowing his little fucking trumpet. But what about Death’s miserable 
fucking mortgage, Death’s stupid fucking bird house glued poorly 
together, Death’s popsicle stick? Hamburgers or rocket ships, 
we have different scales for measuring. I’m about a seven in rocket ships 
today which is a four in hamburgers. It’s my even keel, cruising
altitude, where most of life happens. At Hamburger 1 or 2
it’s this pot-banging crisis. Then you’re a teen in the movie
swimming a moon-lit lake, and you’re the worried one who hears
something in the woods. What was that? you say, growing increasingly
alarmed. And it might be nothing or it might be something.
It’s May. After a cold April the world’s a Dickens character 
saying Come, and know me better, man! My mother is trying 
an experiment where she texts emojis and asks how we’re doing. It’s so hard
to be someone’s Anything. You walk all this way through the woods 
not being eaten just to get eaten in the warm cabin, the one that smells faintly
sweet. Or you’re at a wedding, and your best friend from high school   
is loaded again. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend, also there,
and he’s going to do something stupid. Then he does. He takes her to a room
and begs her to take him back, kind of blocking the door, then when she pushes
past, he punches his fist through the wall and nobody knows what to say.
The music keeps playing. YMCA. Years later he’s loaded again, asking 
if I ever hear from L, how she’s doing. How I become some kind of keeper 
of crystals, sharing murky details without defined edges. Remembering it now
I think of that headline about the two men rescued after twenty-nine days 
lost at sea, how they said, “It was nice to have a break from everything.”
And I’m not sure, telling you this, if I’m hoping for tears or for laughter.


A Chapter on Love 


So how many would you launch? Ships, I mean. For love,
I mean. Maybe you’d first like to know: is it a general love 
or specific? The idea of vs. Kevin who you met in Spain.
Let’s say it’s Kevin. How many signal fires, and how many 
hounds? Do you journey seven days to the mystic’s cave 
and request the jumbo hex? Do you convene your six wisest
dudes who are trapped in the bodies of children due to a curse
we don’t have time to get into? Do you down a bottle of Popov
and remove the key from around your neck, the nuclear one, 
and turn it with your Chief Of Love while singing “I want 
to fly away”? Do you keep your finger on the button long 
after the nukes have flown? How many Humvees, and why not 
one more? I went through this phase where I questioned motivations 
behind each action I took. Was it my idea to wear these pants, 
live in this city? I never got to the bottom of it but at least I have pants 
and a city to wear them in. And at least I can wonder if your lover, 
generic or otherwise, were kidnapped by a baron how many days 
and nights would you travel to find them? Because, mostly, I want to root
for love, and I want to see you doing it too. And not with 
the temporary passion of visiting a friend’s town and going to a ball game 
where there are all these people and colors you’ve never seen 
but they seem in love and you think maybe I should be in love or at least 
move to Baltimore, support the Birds. Let’s get back to Kevin. 
Or no, not Kevin. There was also Dan, who said if I ever lose you 
I’ll boil half of all living frogs, and, yes, while creepy, it seemed sweet 
at the time, “Dan sweet,” and you figured, hey, every planet has 
its star. Assuming the physics worked (and maybe that’s assuming
a lot), would you load a rocket with seventy giant squid inside 
and point it at the sun, the sun a facsimile for the heart, the rocket 
a facsimile of the javelin that shreds it or maybe it’s the wooden horse 
full of soldiers ready to die, to die for love. Of course love like anything begins in fire 
and ends in an attic. It falls to earth in a new human body, and goes out among people 
pretending to know how to tie its shoes, use a salad fork. And it’s a little funny
and a little sad to see it trying so hard. You almost wish it had an agenda 
involving a secret government lab, super scary scientists, and everyone holding
machine guns. Well, maybe you don’t wish it, but I’ll step up here and say I
do. Which is what a lot of love boils down to: I will, and I do. And I won’t
give up when giving up tempts most. Because remember skinny dipping
at the beach in Alicante after staying up all night with that handsome stranger?
How alive it all seemed, how it was either the birth of something or the death
and it didn’t really matter? Because it was here. Horizon glowing orange-blue
or blue-orange. Smell of smoke on his fingers, smell of smoke in your hair.


Hero’s Journey


Hannah was explaining the concept of the hero’s journey, and I did that thing
one does: is brushing my teeth at 9:57 PM the inciting incident 
for the rest of my life? If I had turned left instead of right, worn blue
instead of black? Who is my antagonist, and how will I know them? 
Then Hannah mentions the conflicts: Man versus Man, versus Nature, 
versus Self. Oh, I see. In that case it’s me against everything, 
including me. Maybe this is why I took my character, Lost Boy #7, so seriously 
in the community production of Peter Pan. I longed for [whatever] 
while fearing the distance a son can get traveling at speed X on Train A 
while family travels at speed Y on Train B. To be lost on stage allowed 
the possibility I could be unlost, and the place I was in could look an awful lot 
like where I was supposed to be. It’s one of the seven aspects of The Beauty 
Of Things—how, like a Bond film, there’s always another home to replace 
the last one with, so the scratching of the inside of your skull doesn’t cease 
just changes pitch and frequency. It’s very much like life and death
or isn’t. You may not mind, because after all drinks are half off until 
eleven, and because, I overheard this, aren’t we all ripening cherries 
on the same massive tree? Maybe the journey began that year I taught English
in Spain. Or I could have been a peripheral character in little Alba’s journey,
the inciting incident, when I taught her in one breath to say, “I’mfinethankyou-
andyou?” Okay, I didn’t teach her so much as reinforced what she knew.
Which is what any guru worth their salt or hero’s arc is for: to remind 
the zero-come-hero they’d better get a move on. Giddyup, motherfucker, 
I wish I’d learned her. Giddyup. And now she’s on an asteroid somewhere 
saving us all. Or attending university in Madrid, excelling 
in research of several distinct types of cancers. “I don’t feel different,” 
heroic Charlie thought after a sneak of Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink
though he clearly was floating. What does success look like? 
If you’re a dung beetle it’s dung and a place to roll it. If you’re a human 
it’s twenty years ago in Mrs. Moosakhanian’s second grade class 
drawing our lives twenty years from now (job, car, spouse). What’s 
striking in the picture I hold today (found it in a box while searching
for some records), is what remains unchanged: the sun, my hair.
Though I wear fewer medals and don’t live in the ocean, and I’m not 
rich, and never made it as a soccer pro slash firefighter. But the yellow 
of that sun! My hair! I even sometimes smile still, just like that,
even today as I’m observing my feelings at a distance like a scientist 
observing a moon or rare mouse. “The self is worried that the self 
has no future.” “The self is building a house of matchsticks 
yelling Fire, take me now!” Oh, self. Have some chocolate. And be careful 
with that kind of thinking. It can grow wild. Like a beard of bees. 
Like a head of hair of bees. Which is too bad, because we’re having 
so much fun in the multiverse today, remembering that day in Montana 
when Jon came across a foot of an animal bitten off in a trap but no animal 
and said, “???????” The same, long ??????? we go out on adventures to find
then come back to a house of bees, a closet of bees, and clothes that don’t fit
the same. It started among cardboard trees and blue paper, forgotten lines, yes, 
and…and it says: “What are you willing to do with your mother-fucking-duck-
hunting-devil-humping life?” Which is another thing I overheard, but not in Montana.
Like an election, there’s probably an answer, but they all feel bad. 
It’s opening night, and nobody knows where Peter is.

 

Jeff Whitney's most recent chapboox is Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). His poems can be found or found soon in Adroit, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. He lives with his wife in Portland. For more info, visit jeffwhitneypoetry.com. 

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