Accidents

Newlyweds.  In bed.  Sleeping.  The crash will take them from their dreams.  Half an hour from now.  When the fissure opens in the earth that would devour me.  And drunk.  I am careening (out of control).  Across four lanes of traffic.  The burning headlights.  The blur and swerve of tail lights.  Street lights.  Neon.  My wife.  Of fourteen years.  The decision made.   The divorce all but final.  The velocity of life is the thing that will get you.  The trouble between us.  Yellowed the wallpaper like nicotine.  Yellowed my teeth, jaundiced and jaded my eyes.  Tainted everything.  "But still I loved her."  The last swallow of whiskey.  The bartender cannot be persuaded.  The groom presses his body against his bride.  He enfolds her.  Sleeper's hand finds sleeper's hand.  He holds her.  Soft body.  Cool fingers.  Her hair lies about her.  Long, silk ribbons.  The blue light of the moon.  On the ceiling.  Cars passing on the widened avenue are slices of light.  Sliding.  Down dormer walls.  Round corners.  Over the bed like angels.  Hovering.  I am an accident.  Waiting.  At sixty miles an hour.  To happen.  Bouncing over the medium.  A crystal ball.  The glass of the headlamps can see the future.  Crashing a gate.  Bright white.  Freshly painted.  Decorated with the bride's proud stencil.  "Our first home."  Then nothing.  They are in pajamas.  Police called.  Slow to suffocate.  My own blood.  The young bride is crying.  My own wife.  When she hears it.  Will feel nothing.

Wedding

Given to discipline both in the organization of her time and of her ideas, the well-bred bride smiles (politely) and waves with pride disguised.  Humility is wound to wild vibration by the adulation of the crowd.  She cannot contain it, even if she knows them to be willfully misinformed.  Their perception reflected back to her obscures for her the shortcomings that eat at her confidence.  Draped in lace and taffeta, she was today, perhaps for the first time, breathing in her own power.  Would there ever be another day in her whole dreamed, anticipated and uncertain future when she would feel this important again?  This beautiful?  Listened to?  Loved? 

Her father, a retiring alcoholic, had settled into a chair of an abandoned table on the edge of the lawn.  Her mother, divorced from that man (and another) and now married to a silver fox who you could easily read as gay, sits with her husband at a crowded table where--if the conversation lapses at all--she interjects trivial facts into the air the way some people hum.  And from her perch, the beauty queen can see both of her parents as well as the three of five siblings that actually elected to attend.  Unheard of.  She looks at them all without feeling any longer connected to them.  The champagne's digressions, the bride begins to fantasize about a future in which she can begin the forget those ties.                                                          

     

"In these crimes you might find a five year reprieve."  Putting off the inevitable.  "Their domicile was here in northeast,"  the best man, her new husband's brother, keeps talking.  And because her attention is divided between her own private thoughts and his prattling, his line of reasoning is quickly becoming impressionistic and meaningless.  "These philosophies and theologies have persisted in Providence, face them now to face them down.  Better now than later."  She is stymied.  He speaks a few lines in French, unexplained.  She thinks, "This is an odd way that the intellectual boob maintains his ringing arrogance." It sounds genuine to him.  

The bride reviews her motivations, the wisdom of this marriage.  She feels insulated from so many decisions she had made.  Except the big ones.  Big one.  Where is the groom?  Why hasn't her new husband intervened, saved her from his brother's suffocating attentions.  Looking around she sees a half dozen men that arrest her gaze.  The waiter, boiling with a nonspecific exoticism.  A friend of her husband from college had seemed interesting when they were introduced earlier.  Even the young minister with his perfect teeth, shining eyes, has entered her imagination.  What will she do without her aching wants?  She is over it, wishing for something different.  There is less boredom at an age of limitless desire, but there is hope.

Dear Diary

The dark poignancy permeated my senses, a kind of relief, like learning one's own name, and knowing...

...and being okay. 

At least, there was "more."  The hopelessness opened us to the beauty, delicate and rare, of other things, things that had been hidden under the dust.  The rust of these days passing--remembering old movies, or stories we heard from strange adults when we were children--ate at everything, my mind, your heart.  We say children are naive in an effort to make them powerless. 

What could breeding have done for us (apart from the obvious, the momentary)?  Imagine the guilt I would feel today facing off with an eighteen-year-old, an eight year old, trying to explain the selfish indulgence of subjecting them to this existence.  Life is not the issue; it is easy to appreciate the simple majesty of breathing, of seeing.  But the predicament of the planet, blue marble spinning in space, what is that to bequeath a boy, our boy, still born a hundred times, daily. 

I have measured his growing limbs to my arms, missing.  The proportions of the wanted are always exaggerated in absence, inflated by desire:  the notorious criminal on the post office wall, the average-sized penis of a talented lover, the empty bed left by the dead, or the unborn. 

The hopelessness is personal.  It is global, as well.  Like water, like air, it slowly seeps into everything... 

It undermines.  I rot.