Steam Rooms

It is the proximity of bodies that gives form to the aching.  Where one thing stands in relation with another matters.  There is weight, gravity.  In the geometry of attachments and attractions there is  insight;  it comes, at times, in the form of public humiliation.  The patience of Job.  In the process of revelation, there is innovation.  There is a new road, or at least the old road has finally gotten rid of those sentimental notions.  Represented by the nostalgic gas lamps in the center of the hamlet, these tiresome peers were all, individually, called up  were a fixture in that/this part of New England.  Even in light of this practical solution, a generous silence punctuated by and the view from the top of the hill. 

The size of the idea, the idea itself changes everything, changes itself.  It is always adapting to more readily serve the specifications of our habitat, the shape of our dexterity, the hints of our superstitions.  Here, it seems, the stone can often excuse genius and its equivalencies.  The coach, the teacher, the artist has experienced the cool almost hostile reception that is intended to obscure the goal.  We are kicking up the tropical sand in the Y pool during a blizzard in January.  The chilling edge slips easily through organ and agony and what opens onto the mysteries within.  

There are valleys, forests, ambitious rivers with bends in which the water pools.  It is the blocking that the bodies pursued, repeated, recalled the chalk marks that soon replaced her and then the uneasy permanence of the that the tape marks imply.  Earlier,everything was running from the rain, pastiche pastels of pageant gowns, the blur of an uneasy night of sleepless dreaming.  Meantime, a beautiful butch lesbian entered the bar on a lark.  The writer remembered her now.  They laughed at the Pride Day prank of showing up at the brunch in make-up and a dress.  Now, the limp cotton doily that hung off her tits was a bucket in the extreme.  Pointedly proud of the woman (a Methodist) who, to be honest, welcomed the cooling splash of reprieve from the slow boil of the thickening humidity of summer.  

Three Photographs: 1. The Winter's Gate

This photograph is bleached by the August sun.  When you show it to me, we are drinking lemonade, mid-afternoon on the lawn.  The blue glass is wet with condensation.  The tiny bubbles, the glass, the ice, the liquid itself capture the sunlight, holding it until...  my next drink, your next drink.  

The thermal  reactor's fire is refracted a hundred directions We are pouring retardant on the furnace of the day.  To distract me perhaps, you have pulled the glossy 4 x 6 print from your purse.  Now a couple of years old, this picture was taken during that desolate winter when--blizzard blowing in after blizzard blowing out--all the roads, shoveled and plowed, were turned into trenches cut out of the gratuitous snow for some unplanned campaign on the northern front. 

Familiar, this is a photograph of the gate at the end of the winding quarter mile of road that leads up out of the coulee from the ranch.  But the landscape is inscrutable.  Under the quilted down, the very contours of the land are changed.   This is a new world.  The weight of the snow, the cold like a cast around my left foot and ankle (after my black rubber boot was pulled off and is out there somewhere half buried in a drift anticipating spring), the unnerving arrival of dusk at 4:30 in the afternoon:  it is so easy in summer to forget the little horrors of winter.

And in my fingers, the glossy surface of the print suggests a coolness that fools us easily.  The heat is precarious and savage.  It spits and sizzles and manages to say my name (at least the hissing shhhhh) throughout the afternoon.  In my imagination, I take refuge there where I have cut an elaborate igloo into the drifts.  Tormented by the heat, the sun, the bugs that tug and sting and tickle, I want for nothing save for winter.

Pais Tropicale

In the tropics, the ocean breezes tease the curtains open and find your naked body on the bed. The sweat has settled in the valley of your spine, beneath the shapely hills that rise out of the small of your back, sticky in the cavern between your thighs. You are breathing, sleeping. You are dreaming. This is a memory that, in returning to you, is sharper, brighter, and stranger: it is three in the morning and you are walking (with someone, faceless now) along the winding path that follows the narrow, familiar, little creek. And it has started to snow. The flakes are ominously big, intricate and enchanting. They are wet and stick easily to the bare branches, the fading grasses, the rocks--black and blue in the half-obscured light of the effervescing moon. Their level of submersion measures winter's fall from the apex of the spring's flow in summer. The various seasons, the pattern of weeks and days. Every moment is a distinct event, a distinct opportunity. You look up. A lovely, spinning flower of snow lands on your cheek. Your heat quickly melts it. It becomes a tear. Rolling off your neck onto your shoulder it wakes you. The sweat again. You remember dreaming. It is puzzling to be lost here--under the Tropic of Cancer--and conjuring up snow storms. They are as out of place here, as you are.

Summer undulates. And this small town is a vaporous mirage; the dust unsettled, like everything else. Lawns sweat under the mower's aggression. Gasoline mingles with honeysuckle: something to choke on. The red and brown bodies of the kids in the pool are a writhing stain of maggots in an open sore. Remember the knee you tore when your bike found the gravel; it starts where the steaming asphalt crumbles into the suffocating fields of wheat. Further, cows line the fence, their eyes obsidian mirrors. Flies disperse and congregate to the rhythm of their shit-slicked tails. Out there, invisible--colored by rock and weed, made of mystery and threat--the rattlesnakes relax the tension in their coil. You find the heat "oppressive" and remind us what the bunk house smells like, in July, after a bender, empty Jack Daniels bottles, shag carpet soaked with beer. Even the fan in the window sputters and spits. We are inches away from an accidental fire. It could consume everything, if only the night air might dissect the bare belly, the bare heaving chest. Place me on ice. This autopsy must include everything, at least everything that is left...this summer.