Morning

For now, we will forgive the nightmares (so-called) because there is nothing should distract us from our happiness.  As children, we are obligated to be happy.  Those inconvenient moments of confusion, anxiety, terror are easily glossed over, easily treated with the rosy sheen of sentiment.

While babies smile and toddlers squirm, they worm their way into our heads, our hearts, into our dreams.  My father will recount to us the emerging personalities of each of his five children.  His youthful speculations of who we were, of what we would become slowly evolved into a stolid confidence.  Infants are amphibians; between two worlds, they crawl out of the mire, the muck, the mother...  The eyes are slits.  They slowly open.  These five nascent senses--so powerful, so persuasive in experience--are finding the way onto the land.

Thus,  overwhelmed by light and noise, the body begins to breathe, begins to be in the world.

I taste the salt of my own tiny fist.  I feel the soft cotton against my cheek and smell the extravagance of the fabric softener that my mother has justified by my arrival.  I am a speechless voyeur.  My own eyes, defocused and straining in the grey evening light, stare abstractly at some shadows in the corner of the room.  

A creaking door and light invades the somber silence of my cell.  Then there appears above me a crescent moon of smiling faces.  Back-lit and nodding, they are a bouquet of flowers above me.  I smile.  They are stars.  They are flowers floating in the firmament: they are love, attention, security, in full bloom.  

The Living and the Dead

Enrique is, by no doubt, dead by now

His flesh has leathered on the bones and he has long since sunk into the auburn tropical mud like a drunken sailor. His hair, that awkward Irish red that blended with the freckled caramel of his skin is still clinging to his skull. Tenacity.

They say that lives don’t truly end until the last person who knows you passes over. Tenacity. Memory like nails and hair growing into legend in the days and weeks and years that proceed from the funeral.

Meantime, Enrique is getting more and more comfortable in his grave.

Enrique is, indeed, dead by now.

But that summer, Enrique was alive. The tropical sun and the lung of the sea teased him from his hospital bed. And as if to be polite, as if not to taunt him with our bronzed skin and brazen health, we didn’t go there. We didn’t visit him. We didn’t want him to witness the crime of our vivacity. We didn’t want to stand trial for the crime ourselves.

Instead, we spoke of him on meeting one and another, at parties, at restaurants, on the beach. We always spoke of him. After we had greeted, after we had introduced our companions, we spoke of him, early in the conversation, a few solemn sentences to acknowledge his struggle, some rumors we had heard(rumors that would inevitably return to us—slightly colored-- a few days or weeks later when we encountered another of his friends). 

And after that acknowledgement, that brief exchange, we would settle into the cacacha and the laughter. The sun would melt our bodies and we would sink into the sand or we would be carried away by the spin of the music or the lurid wanderlust of the gay male gaze. And we would, without self-consciousness, leave Enrique to his bed to sleep and slowly die.

It was easy in the loud company of my friends to close the door on Enrique’s illness. It was the right thing to do. He needed his rest. It was best to take the party down the long hospital hallway, down the stairs, down the street. Beneath the glitter of a cheap string of lights at a beach barraca we would encamp. Our voices would get lost there in the pulse of ocean waves. There we would not disturb Enrique’s fragile dreams. We would not disturb our own.

But when I was alone, Enrique haunted me. 

On the balcony overlooking the cacophony of the streets of Rio, I would meditate on his existence. I would imagine him in his hospital bed, his mother beside him, measuring the hours like labor. And it was all quite bright and clear. I could see his fingers gripping a talisman. I could smell the nurse as she bent over him: ammonia, bergamot, and sweat. I could hear the television in the corner ridiculing him, the histrionic characters swooning with exaggerated ambitions, unrestrained lusts, and deafening regret. 

But this vigil was no soap opera, and Enrique--dear heart, humble soul--was not some inflated character without dimension. Bravely smiling at his mother, making uneasy conversation to fill these days of inevitability, Enrique was the complex soul that I had met 5 years earlier.

“Eu sou feio.” I am ugly, he had said to me when we first met. And it was true. With his large nose and the jumble of genes that informed his physiognomy, he was ugly. He was short. His eyes were widely placed on his too small head, and there was an asymmetry to his features that, while not repulsive, could not be called attractive. 

But this assertion was not made in a pitiable fashion. “Eu sou feio,” he had told me as a testament to his sexual charisma, pointing to his boyfriend Rafael, who, 15 years his junior was by anybody’s standards strictly beautiful. “You see?” he said to me grinning and smiling across the table at his boyfriend. Enrique had pronounced himself hideous, and then he had laughed.

Enrique respected the dead. The spirits that move through the jungles and streets of Brazil whispered to him. The inaudible rhythms to which they dance he could feel in his living bones. “Atenda!” he had said to me, “They are congregating there.” He did not point but instead gestured to the place with a subtle nod of his head. “Don’t look at them. They don’t wish to be disturbed.”

And the shadows of the jungle trail were deepening, the broad leaves expanding like the treacherous wings of some emerald breed of bat, filling in the spaces of the dimming sky. Enrique walked in front of me with solemnity and silence. His manner or the mood or something else made me shiver, the sweat of our hike turning clammy and cool in the hollow of my back.

But I looked over my shoulder when we had passed--Lot’s wife--into the forest alcove that he had indicated. I saw the candles burning in the mossy earth. I saw the feathered sacrifice that hung from the trunk of a tree. I saw the blood, almost black running down the bark. And in the shifting shadows of the jungle twilight I imagined I could see the glare of a spirit now offended. 

“And now Enrique,” I asked the air, “now that you are slowly fading from this world, what do the spirits say to you? What advice for dying?” 

From my balcony I could see what I imagined was a hospital, its roof straining to hold a cross above the residential high-rises that surrounded it. I did not know if this was the hospital of Enrique’s repose. It did not matter. The mystery of where he was at that moment seemed an appropriate prelude to the mystery of where he would be going. The vapors of the tropical day were settling into the vapors of the tropical night. From my balcony, I watched the sunset over Ipanema.

A few hours later, I left the building and walked the 10 or so blocks to the bar in Copacabana where I was meeting Fernando and Leila. Leila had been promoted to a new position with the government and would be soon moving back to Brasilia. It was a Bon Voyage party, and in Brazil all arrivals and departures must be celebrated with a clamorous affair. There was sure to be much drinking, much laughter, and a sizzling conversation that crackled with the fever of life. 

The whole of the city was alive that summer night. Each café I passed along my way was crowded with fervent revelers. The light from the bars poured into the street and glinted off the glasses transforming the beer into gold. The music and the laughter got lost in each other, like two lovers entwined and reeling on the dance floor in search of a bed. There was nothing one could do but smile.

I found Fernando and Leila colonizing a long table at the edge of the sidewalk. There were two or three others there already that I did not know. So I sat further down on one side where Fernando and I could still talk but which permitted me a broader view of the crowd. The table slowly filled. The volume increased as Leila in animated voices told a riotous version of her revelation to her current boss that she would soon be his supervisor. The tale had just culminated in a thunder crack of general laughter when Marcelo arrived. 

“What?” he asked, and without pausing added, “Oh well, I will laugh out of respect for laughter.”

Marcelo greeted me across the table. We grasped hands and he winked at me in the way he had of separating his affections for the individual from his affections for the group. “Tudo bem?” he asked, and his eyes shimmered in generous feeling. 

“Tudo,” I replied.

“I heard Enrique’s father has come up from Sao Paulo to see him,” Marcelo told me. And we silently concurred that this was an ominous portent. 

“Is he staying for a while?”

There was a pause, as if Marcelo were trying to decide if my question was in reference to Enrique or his father.  We all stay too long and leave too early.  

“I don’t know,” Marcelo admitted. “Mauricio spoke to Enrique’s sister. His illness is not improving.” 

The waiter, efficient and courteous, had arrived to integrate Marcello into the party. “Favor, uma vodka caiparihna.” And with that our conversation about our friend Enrique came to an end.

While we were here at the bar, a mob of boisterous characters, ruffians carrying the ball of conversation through the mud of this makeshift stadium, Enrique, not with us, was not alone. Enrique’s illness—for it was never called anything else except his “illness”—was now his companion. It was the lover he sat with at table and slept with every night. It was his comfort I imagined. It was the clear voice of a spirit encouraging him to stop, to look, to not pass reverently by but to join that congregation in some jungle alcove.

Enrique is dead. I heard the news this morning. His cold flesh is moldering in the dense tropical ground.

Memory

Your mother does not know.  

You killed yourself.  

She is holding her own body, rocking.  Wrapped tightly, inside the scratchy blanket of her dementia, she is whistling a sloppy, almost breathless progression of notes.  It is like you, the distant recollection of a song.  Someone feels that they should tell her. 

(This obligation, oblivious to the painful reality of the situation, is something like the Amazonian explorer bothering the natives with the obscure details and odd customs of his culture from this tropical remove.  The rules written for cobblestone alleys sound absurd in the jungle's savage tangle.  Foolishly, he tries, in a strange and nasal language, to explain the meaning of his visit.  The presentation includes properties.  This is a picture of the Portuguese prince who rules over him.  This is the savior twisting on the cross; He is the God that condemns you to Hel.) 

And one wonders--having seen a silver flash of recognition, a brightening in her blue eyes--if the information somehow comes to rest and fill one of the holes that now make up her grey matter.  A camera focusing, the calibration of the eye.  There is more in there.  Reference.  Cross-reference.  The brain is working.  Connections are being made.  And maybe, in predictable confusion, she relives your father's suicide or her own father's death.  Even before the Alzheimer's, she blurred the three of you into one man:  father, son and holy ghost.

Noun and Verb

For a time, the idea of him--for what is memory but idea enhanced by prejudice--persisted, haunting those left behind.  He was the topic of gossip, of rumor, of speculation.  In the gesture of his death, he became the Everyman, the Anti-hero; like a fairy tale monster or the vague outline of the title character in some moody French film, our imaginations coalesced around him, turning our fears, our loss, our fascination, into twisted projections that did neither justice to the complexities contained in him nor to the complexities contained in ourselves...

Suicide.  It was that word.  Always half whispered, delivered into the conversation in a puff of smoke that woke the nostrils, shook the senses; it made the whole body alive while simultaneously permeating one's' being with a slow soaking novocaine.  The numbness is something like death.  Creeping.  And that is just the word...

The act is something different.  It is first a solution; it is somebody's idea of a resolution to a minor--but not trivial--chord.  And after, when the sustain has drained the last color from the notes, there is nothing, just silence.  Silence cowers.  Silence doubts.  Silence aches for the sound that could fill it, the percussion and honey, the music undone.  

They say, "Absence is invisible."  It reassures us of the imperfection of the eye, reminds us of the risks that arise when we believe our senses.  But, in this one case, in the case of the dead, absence is obvious and brooding.  Absence is phosphorescent and loud.  Ghost, be proud of the hole you have ripped in the story...

Once, on a cool day in late April, nineteen seventy something, a quarum of Colorado teens were standing in various postures on the grassy bank of a stream glutted with the Spring run off.  Here, there was a bend in the river, and the water enlarged into a lazy, wide-mouthed, muddy miracle.  The kids marveled, laughed.  "Dive in!" someone instructed.  "I bet its fucking cold!"  There was that momentary silence, then the pulse pulse pulse before the (im)patience was answered with an act:  somebody pushed you, quick and hard, their splayed fingers and flattened palms knocked the wind out of your down jacket.  Your hands scrambled, and each found a body to cling to, briefly, before pulling these others in behind you.  The flailing limbs, the muffled screams, then the bodies--falling like angels, one-two-three--into the murky aftermath of this latter-day deluge...

Three Photographs: 3. Movie Star

He was beautiful, the dead.  Here is a picture in starched dress uniform taken seriously in the shadow of DDay and the ongoing atrocities in the Pacific Theatre.  He had a liberal afternoon between graduation from officer training and his next deployment which he spent wandering Manhattan alone:  obscure conversations at other tables, loneliness pulling on him like a lost and demanding child, while simultaneously there was the vivacity of the city--the people, the possibility--to sustain him.

Histories he could not know, the lives of others, filled him with the fire to be, to see, to mark, to free his imagination.  He was Walt Whitman singing the city, its virtues, the virtues that lay in her vice.  It was a pensive (mostly pleasant) oddyssey through the box canyons crowded with a million people all believing tenaciously in tomorrow, tomorrow and the day after that...  Meandering through street scenes inhabited by Italians, Jews, or Chinamen, the soldier saw the complexity unearthed by seeing.  The world, the country, the little town on the high plains (so familiar) made their way communicating both uncertainty and desire.  

There was much on his mind.  

"What we are fighting for" was disguised in everything, hiding in the tall grass or in an abstract reflection on the surface of the "lake", a stagnant and expansive puddle on the roof of one of the tenements that served as a mirror for Midtown's ambition.  He was taking a break brightened by nicotine.  One last drag, and with the smoke the idea enfolded him.  He tossed the butt still burning into the pond.  It had occurred to him to find  a portrait studio to mark the occasion, to send back to his mother in the Dakotas, so she would have a good picture of him--the cloud of morbidity descended--"just in case."

Seventy years nearly and his movie star good looks are here retained.  They shrouded him as quickly and as conveniently as possible, in a box, in a fire, underground.  The metallic paper with its subtle and suggestive variation is what remains of him, and of that day.   Tyrone Powers pearls, the certain uncertainty of his smile, or Randolph Scott's purse, lips dipped in saccharine and a body built of steel or there was Larry Olivier, the poet with a pulse in his breath.  Waiting to return to pick up the prints, the young man idled matinees amidst the smoke and light and celluloid of the second balcony.

The (Sometimes) Comforting Tyranny of Details

They had gone over it again and again.  The repetition, the circles, were unnerving, unsettling like a carnival ride.  And within each interview, Frank would invariably expose some new detail, kick some new rock and unearth the sinister insects underneath:  the black and white millipede with the two red horns, the jet black beetle laquered over with blue and silver layers like an abalone shell, or the red ants with their fiery temperaments amassing around the torn portal of their community, white blood cells coalescing around the crowded organ to combat the attack.  

New information, new ideas, new assignments from an indifferent deity to keep us centered as we enter a new realm of body and mind.  The transformation is slow and uneven.  The past is still churning and to admit the limitations of memory is to experience a terrible loss.  If the past as I conceive it is as mutable as that, then what value can it serve?  And, in the event that you want a permanent souvenir of this queerly unsupervised summer--the persistent stare of the moon on the lake, the strange names hand-painted in bright colors on the silver canoes (Hiawatha, Hyacinth, Happy Trails, and Higher Power) or the wires stung from log to log in the front of each cabin, prayer flags made of wet socks and swimming suits--you will take a picture.  

And we think of memory as photography, precise and journalistic in its recall;  but it is in fact more akin to collage, the creating of assemblages that are incomplete and evolving within the internal eye.  It is the details that reveal this disonnance, that revel in the spaces between our accounts and expose the distance between the experiences of different bodies, different minds.  While we are easily convinced by our own notions of reality, a private history of "what really happened", in attempting to reconstruct another time or place with someone who shared it with us we are often disappointed by the obvious lapses and loss in their version of events.

But in those moments when some refined and delicate detail is found and shared, some item on which alumni can agree--the morning they saw the eagle snatch a shining silver trout from the water at the end of the dock, the girl in the polka dot shots who wet her pants while leading the camp in the pledge, the billowing smoke and rattle of the old red bus that conveyed the campers hither and yon--there is a reassurance in the world.  To know (or at least believe) that what impressed oneself  enough to be  held for 20, 30, or 40 years in the soft grey matter of one's brain can be found in the labyrinth of another skull is to believe in something like kinship, in communication, and perhaps in the universality of what makes a mark on the human mind.                                                           

Nick of Time

Memory.  A decade on.

Summer felt somehow brighter, lighter.  Ignited by flowers, fireworks, the explosions of color, life on fire.  On fire with life.

There was the warm sun of our promiscuity.  The libertine hours.  The languid days.  The electric nights of Scotch and water.  The embers of endless cigarettes.  The way faces appear, vaguely, when you inhale.  An orange glow to trace your features, to suggest you to me, to draw me deeper.  Follow.

Follow the moon into morning.  The indigo of 3 AM.  The green of 4 AM, the pink of 5 AM.  Orange arrives without trumpets.  There will be no apocalypse, today.  Just the dawn and the devouring engines.  The heat of the day.

I assemble the pictures.  I guess at the people's names.  They have left me to make other lives, large lives lived large.

What has happened?  Time is a fleeting melody.  Recalled in the shower.  For no reason.  Erased by the towel that covers my face.  I lay naked on the bed thinking of nothing.  The summer air comes in the window.  A light wind.  A cautious lover.  I lay naked on the bed.  I slowly dry.  Only five notes retain.  They make no sense.  They are stripped of their context.

Like these pictures.  Like that summer.  The hum of the cicadas says nothing.  The fireflies are submerged in the blue ink of evening.  Like sparklers, they spell something when on wing.  Their mutant calligraphy will make sense, one day.  They are casting spells.  

An old friend.  More likely.  An acquaintance, tainted with a hopeless crush on me, stops me on the street.  This is not the town we lived in, then.  This is not the town I live in now.  I call this a coincidence.  His romantic mind prefers to call it serendipity.  But it is quickly clear that his life then and my life then depend on nothing shared.

At his request, we exchange phone numbers; we will never speak again.

I dare to say:  were you absolved of the expectations of others.  The connections controlled by rhythms and words, well-practiced over years, might be abandoned.  And you discover the limitations.  Yourself.  Your family.  Your spouse.  Your lover.  Your children.  A tired script of acceptable topics.  Predictable phrases.  Familiar lies. 

Take me back to summer.  The undulating forest floor.  The acid filling the pines with breath.  The lessons of your scouting days applied.  Before...

And after, just the photographs, just the names scrambled.  Just the sun.  The long arms of memory.  The long arms of summer. 

The Witness and their Amnesia

Father, confessor...

To what end do you listen?  For what purpose are you here, hanging, on every word?  (only to forget them:  a handshake, a closing door, my confessions escaping in the wake of the wind...    You said to me once, "Your very presence pulls all of the oxygen out of the air.")  I am a ravenous flame, and you are the vacuum that would silence me.

You have reassured me, more than once, that what is said here is confidential.  But it is this secrecy that unnerves me.  I do not wish to obscure anything.  I am transparent, fallen glass.  I am the gravity that calls me back to sand.  And I crave, more than anything, a witness who--in his fascination--will recall all of this to some faceless other after I am dead.

To be one composition--musical, written, visual--that explains everything.  Ambivalence, desire, overcoming fear...

But your attention span is such that you could chronicle nothing, not even remembering my name in your silence, when sitting in a mutinous circle around some future campfire.

The genesis of these issues lies in the family's exodus from dusty midwestern hamlets for the lush undertow of California's central valley.  Still singing, clutching Bibles, these pilgrims advanced across the road in hesitant steps.  The laws of Leviticus inform them, inform them of their failures, their shame, their sins.  The gyrating music from inside the club is blocked out (a little) by the policemen converging on the corner...T carried off in cuffs.  He yells back to me--a bright orange blob dissolving in the sun at the far end of the corridor, "Dude, did you do raw to me?"  But he is gone, absorbed into the corpulent light.  Now the crowds numbers swell.  Joshua judges Ruth.  They will speak intermittently over the weekend...fighting at times...   ...but first Samuel says his piece.

Body's in Trouble

This is an anatomy lesson, a body's dissection, the probing with cold instruments at the edges of the human soul.  You can see yourself in the reflective stainless steel.  You can see God too; s/he sits fitfully on the scalpel's invasive edge.  S/he tears me open with greedy curiosity--sanitized and precise--but forgets me easily to the infinity of time and the eternity of space.  

Out of the cool, light rain of the anaesthesia, I return to myself, to my being.  I am nothing save this discrete body with its dilemmas.  There are aches that recall everything, and mysterious pains that prove nothing, the half-sewn incisions made by (well-meaning) "doctors", my own bad decisions and the bruises they leave behind.

But there was a time before...

(This is the corny, old-movie moment when the body on the gurney moving from the surgeon's amphitheater through swinging doors and down a bleached bright hallway begins to dissolve.  This is a flashback, the black-and-white of the future dissolving like liquid into the technicolor of childhood.)

My skin was a testament to summer.  Naked and nine years old, I stood beside the green pool--its circulating currents turning round upon some mythical center like Muslims in Mecca or the stars, endangered, spinning round Polaris, fixed and finding direction through physics, even though 'direction' is itself an illusion.

It is June in Montana and despite the heat of the day, the creek recalls the winter.  The eddies, blue and green, that blur like watercolors on a page, disguise the blinding white of the blizzards--long subsided--but I know Jumping Creek is cold.  I anticipate the bracing chill the way we anticipate our lives:  a mixture of fear and excitement, assured of some pain, but believing--against logic--in something akin to pleasure.  I will dive into the water.  In spite of the frigid burn, its thousand needles, I will dive.  I will plunge into the pool disregarding the cold, or because of it.  I  am on that cusp when everything is a crucible of  my masculinity.  Everything is a test. 

You curate, cautiously, the museum of your days, your life.  You share what you share, sometimes to draw a clear line--point a and point b--that draws attention, that draws the fire, or draws a conclusion that draws the breath away. 

You were less complicated, younger, more handsome; I fetch these memories like water from the well, and I am thirsty even if the complements are either false or comical endured by my middle-aged ears.  This is the imperfection of time, of expectation and experience.  Even one's fondest memories are diluted or devoured by a current myopia, the lens of this lifetime cast back.  

Desperate honesty, the Casio's drubbing is the hum and rhythm of what is and will be a strip tease, essentially.  Sometimes you reveal just for subtle seasoning, sometimes to confuse and confound.  In the hallway, long and echoing, ten pictures are displayed.  They are sequentially less fickle, more brave, the artist obviously idolizes some idea of honesty, some notion that nakedness is (or ought to be) sacred.

The Body

The adrenaline of sex may be the only thing that will sustain me, maintain for me a level of "quality of life" that is still recognizable from this deep pit, this cistern echoing with fundamental fears, smelling of death.  And remembering my conquest of other fears, retaining those life lessons, I am eager to confront the underlying monster, the demon that possesses or is my body.  I will go into the darkness.  I will feel both its cold and its heat.   This is like being launched into outer space.  I will go to other sunless worlds.  I will grope the uncertain surface.  With tactile knowledge, I will make maps and by them I will achieve something approximating understanding.

There are specters there.

Outlined against their nakedness, the thin ones always look ghoulishly hung.  Their exaggerated phalli hang strangely against the skeletal outlines, their bones like fragile trees (waiting) in November.  Mortality and vitality thus stand together, starkly, each exposing the other, removing the mask.  

The fat ones, on the other hand,  continue, elaborately shrouded in the folds of their gluttony, a whole history of their desperation remembered in the flesh.  And somewhere, in the obscenity of abundance, the shy turtle-head of the penis peers with lust and shame, afraid of being seen, hoping to be noticed...

There is no logic in fear.  There is efficacy, efficiency even; but as far as rational standing, fear--regardless of the facts and statistics it may recite--speaks with authority about nothing save itself and its possession.  Fear is the demon that speaks to the hole in our understanding, connects the dots to the troubles from beyond the bubble have always promised to come.  The dispossessed, the refugees, the savages will most certainly ravage us in the coming storm.  At least these animals can only wait at the gate, impatiently, eluded to in rumors, imagined in bad dreams.  The most grisly monster is the murderous worm that turning in the belly is waiting inside to devour us.

Is he the alien or am I?  I feel as though there was, at some point, a green world that basking in the light of a not-so-distant star, became inhabited by my memories, the people of my reveries, the inhabitants of my heart, my soul, the whole of what's left of my being.  

This body, broken on the beach of some black sea, this invisible cadaver, this bloodless trunk, this wuthering tree...

I am 47.  I am at that age wherein my memories have begun to coalesce.  I am making sense of them, but they are scattered.  As if I am gathering matchbooks and cocktail napkins, old envelopes, post-its. and photographs that contain both of us but sharing the lens with "good friends" with forgotten names, I am making the collage of my life, my days.  The pretty pictures in calendars almost persuade me.  

On all these scrips of paper--my broken voice in pieces--there are careless whispers (as they call them) bits of wisdom, scraps of poetry, that say too little and talk too much.

For Example: 

...to fuck a 22 year old requires an energetic belief in tomorrow

but the very act (and the attraction)

demonstrates the grim fact;  you already cannnot believe
in tomorrow for yourself,
projecting your regret and hopelessness
and the idea of hope itself
into the body of someone half your age...

Our Knot

This accident or conscious act,
this unconscious act of accidental will--
of suicide--tears wide the dam of memory
and floods the valley.  Fast again
from sunset until the morning comes
with the humming of the tall grass.
The flies are already chiding
your 4H steer.  The hot-headed monster
ought to be dead.  His breached birth
indicated ill fortune.  Life is hard,
and we are soft, still children
that have filled our minds: the restless crowds,
imagination.  Now call it madness, 
this maturing toxicity.  The drunkenness--
with these slurred words--could pass for
prophecy.

As often as we picture it, no man knows
the date or the hour, the souring wine,
the spill.  The red pavement smears
the fear implied by steel-toed boots
punching the fabric of time and space
and jake brakes squealing, "Some pig,"
some diabolical pig.

And I can picture this grim tableau
with blood running over the bench
out of the sunset and cutting, drenching
the Shonkin dry falls.  Or I can call you up
in smoke of memory, twelve years old,
making faces, making music, making friends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends...
you in a thousand pieces and me
in a singular peace.

Martin's Meat Market

Now its name sounds to me like a leather bar, under an elevated train, in some narrow strip of Gomorrah.  Here rebellious sons and strict daddies dare to break the city's smoking ordinance, in a designated section, determined by the management, unprotected by the yawning red-and-white-striped awning, still dripping from the rain.  (Cigars are permitted on Thursdays).  Rather, Martin's Meat Market was a butcher shop, one block from the school and three blocks from the edge of town where a hill named for a condiment--Hill 57--rose out of the plains like a dust storm or a mirage. 

It was our ritual, Danny and mine.  When school got out at 3:10 (the hour and minute that I was born, in summer which I suppose negates the significance), we would walk to Martin's to buy Garbage Pail Kids or Swedish Fish.  Or maybe our hunger would demand a Ho Ho or a Ding Dong, the chocolate already beginning to sweat in the clear plastic wrapper.  Pausing to look at the headless cadavers, to watch the saw separating bone from bone, we would giggle at some joke that, had we been asked, we would not have been able to translate out of the language of twelve year old boys.  Then with our booty, a brown paper bag packed with that day's delights, we would head behind the gas station. 

Martin, the real name of a real man who's bloody apron clung to real muscle, had purchased the shell of a Chevron and converted into the meat market, a modest answer to a modest dream.  Marty, as his wife called him, was a stoic man.  He was a mystery.  He said nothing to us, ever.  He grunted at his wife, animal to animal, and she was able to transmute his wordless mood into an at times hostile impatience with the indecisiveness of sixth graders.

But convenience controlled us.  The still unpainted gas station stood at the crossroads where Danny and I separated.  There, he headed up the hill to his parents modernist palace (his father was a doctor, I think, who had purchased a view) and I headed around the bend to a place at the base of Hill 57.  The white cracker box had been, before the second world war, a country school.  Once this school turned house  had been crowded with my sisters, loud with fights and laughter, saturated with hairspray.  But I was a straggler, meandering, even before Danny I would find the long way home. 

On the way, Martin's was the perfect weigh station   Behind it, beyond the rusting remains of some nameless mechanic's forgotten hobby, six ponderosa pines towered in the northwest corner of an uneven, weedy unfenced field.  These trees were history, two rows aligned with three to a side with branches straining (to touch) and tangling into a ladder that easily lifted us agile apes up to our usual perches thirty feet, forty feet in the air.  The wind ran its hand over the land, playing an instrument, pulling a tune out of these giants as the branches danced with us, laughing, in their arms.  For the duration of our sugar-dipped afternoon snack (and sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes after) Danny and I would chat.  Up above the world so high, I had his undivided attention.   

Gibberish

I wanted between seven and twelve words. These, when strung together in bright colors, music playfully rattling the walls, the 70's era lime green paper ready to snap back   

...oh the idea, "to start over"...

would serve as a welcome banner, a congratulations, somehow, a bon voyage.  

Night was the worst for it.  The old CD playing ad infinitum, choking us on liquor between meandering lapses in conversation. Already, I didn't know her.  My body was transforming, arriving in a new place with a new relationship to other bodies.  I still, of course, thought about the scandal, morbidly, carefully, going over the details like a child learning his spelling words.  I thought now maybe the whole business would burn itself out.  Right then.  Right there.  

Just like that...

For me, there was still (and always)  to be a thickening satisfaction over even the slightest victory against this vague "darkness".  The childhood fear--like the rest of the mythology--still held onto the persuasive tongue.  She suggested something to toast, something unrelated to my triumph.  I was polite but quietly creating the space in which her discomfort could cause a bit of an itch, her consciousness returning, replaying worn vinyl, or warbling cassette.  

Something to mull over.

I might trump the night, after all, trick the stars and the Buddha-white belly of the rising full moon and keep myself ((laughing)/(crying)) well into morning. There, us, the penetration of sunrise, the golden spears that cut the land:  amber, honey, Riesling. Everything dilated differently when the sunglasses cracked a bit.

But, there was still the grand magic as your eyes adjust, teaching you everything you are.

Permanence

It was the seeming permanence in everything that frustrated us, precocious pubescents who had been through everything before. Our gravel-road boners were grinding against the denim wall of our Wranglers, as we jumped from the back of the truck. The '57 Ford that my brother-in-law was so proud of rolled lazily across the road into the waiting Cenex. Everything was a stinging wind, parched by the granules of what optimists called "top soil". The noon sun chased the shadows--panting like dogs or criminals--under the rocks that speckled the ashen desert, Ole Yeller's matted fur punctuated by the soft, green sage and the occasional rattlesnake.

Time was going slowly--a lethargic predictability in which questions must arise, formless, made of suggestion, just like feelings. As in every summer past (cast like silver coins into the river's familiar bend), there were, generally a few days between the end of harvest and the county fair. It is this respite itself that best illustrated our conundrum: Now that the boys and I had a few days of liberty the ideal had been flattened by the accurate complaint that there was "nothing to do." The Piggly Wiggly was still there with its abbreviated lunch counter. As we entered, there was a loud crack as if somebody had dropped a large volume of some kind...

The spring of that small town's trap was about to snap, leaving this vermin breathing but not able to move. "The spine is the nerve's super-highway," someone had said. Then, someone added, "This little guy's a paraplegic. He ain't driving a super highway, none too soon." I am easily distracted. I began to drift away. I thought about a reckless Mouse and the Motorcycle, about Ralph as Marlon Brando with a twitching nose and a death wish. The janitor, unceremoniously, had rid the store of this cadaver. He stretched the miniature guillotine back and set the spring. Almost silently, he slid the death raft back behind the refrigerator. (An Aside: There is nothing humane in luring rodents into (a presumably raucous party) "hotel" thats lobby turns into Treblinka once their rubbery tail is through the turnstile and the concierge locks the door. Forever.)

The spring holds back everything: winter's return, summer's arrival, the prank of a mouse's decapitation. The spring in the park--a sloppy, artless fountain--flows constantly. It holds back the desert as it pours over the well-eroded granite into a narrow ditch. The sound settles into a ripple that transforms into this narrow, glimmering creek. Still, it babbles. It is this creek without a name that circumnavigates the single block of green oasis that is the small town's only park. The water cuts bravely through the manicured lawn, past the peeling painted horses secured individually on their own metal springs, around the back of the patient gazebo, and hungrily along the side of the log shelter where the VFW sells burgers and dogs every Saturday night.

Knowing these patterns is comforting but, for Milo and our other 4H buddies, comfort is claustrophobic. We posit ourselves, lemonade in hand, in the screen porch of our grandma's place. Then a makeshift army arrives. They are spraying pesticides along the roads, in the ditches. They are laying long billowing ribbons of the chemicals from a laughing, dancing plane. The crop duster challenges the monotony. Coming in the morning flames, the wax crayons melt and smear on the eastern horizon. The plane reminds us of the possibility beyond this permanence. It feeds our imagination.

Remembering Sex

The contours of you are shrouded now, veils of vaporous silk, smoke that smells of lavender, vanilla, amber or civet. The oils evaporate on disappearing skin. They are a shimmer, a shiver, a shudder, a wake. Only pieces of you will remain: your name that sounded like a character's, your black eyes entrapping the sun, the apish hair on your forearm, the leaden weight of your cock. You are a stain on my memory, spilled wine on white alpaca.

I have laid beside a hundred (or more) lovers and--closing my eyes tightly, trying to memorize this other, concentrating--I have listened to the crackle and pop as they begin to burn. Disfigured by memory, I retain them, the ember and the heat. But they are only skeletons, bones thrown on the fire. The glowing eyes of Tituba will teach us how to read...

...our fortunes. This one is only a trickle of sweat that cuts his blade and bleeds down the valley of his spine. Another will forever be his muffled ecstasy, the pleading whisper and the arms wrapped, starving, round my neck. A third is one bright blue, bloodshot eye, comically caught in the deluge of ejaculant, the stinging of my laughter.

The last, let's say, is a gray-haired stranger; between his few and awkward words, a sadness sits in the expectant silence that almost sounds like screaming. After we have both cum, he will show me photographs. He too is trying to remember the details now forgotten, trying to be satisfied with what remains.

Juke

This was a song, which he had chosen from 48 songs, 96 counting the unfamiliar grooves on the backsides, their obscure spiral paths. And here was the silver throat, the pleasure when the quarter--for a moment--chokes the mechanism, a little. The nickelodeon gags. E-8 is too maudlin. C-4 reminds him of a fat boy from 4H camp. B-8 is danceable, aggressively so. No matter--walk, run, or crawl--the end was always the same: breathless, the sighs and whispers, the crackling circumference as the black plate spins, and the unnerving comfort in its repetition. Even the scratches contain rhythm and melody.

But this song was something else: an oxidized coin, an old letter, a man out of time; and it evoked the smell of his grandmother's moldering basement, the dusty sachets in her dresser drawers. This music was music his father--less than half the son's age now--would have sung and hummed and whistled in that little box on the prairie. (The radio did its best to plump up the rooms.) Respiration, windows open, allowed imagination to circulate, the spices from the baking inside going outside; the flowers now allowed to stealthily cross the sill into the claustrophobia of home.

"Everything absorbed through the wide-eyed stupidity of the wantonly naive..."

"Be quiet, Charles." I pause. The whiskey gives me manners. "Please," I add, "Just sit back and be quiet. Listen to this song."

He is still fidgeting. He had a point to make and its stuck there. Between the pulls on his cigarette and the sips from his beer, he looks everywhere except at me. Its not that he's "angry", just consumed with his own thoughts. Meanwhile, I can hear my father humming; I am dancing back near fifty years. This is a crowded fair filled with bustling associations, sounds and visions. Cotton candy melts in the summer's oven (easily) while the starched bouffants of the lipstick girls survive the heat AND the Tilt-a-whirl. And I am lost there for a while, til I realize, conclusively, that Charles would not have followed me here even if he could have. The black spiral maze. The gasping at the end of it. A few seconds of anticipation...Then, the soft clatter as the next 45 falls, and then a hiss, the prelude to...

Dominique by The Singing Nun