Shiver Me Timbers

The old rugged cross and its long, long shadow casts doubt on the decisions she has made.  The child was a foundling, an orphan; she had not aborted him.  And yet--not knowing his fate--she still feelsthe stabbing guilt of having given him up.  The act, and the exaggerated memory of the act, percolates through her dreams.  She hopes the child is safe, loved.  And he stays with her.  Waking from fitful sleep, she pictures the boy--now eight years old--all smiles.  She imagines his happiness will sate her curiosity, her belief in his happiness.  But the doubt stays with her.  In her mind's eye, he remains a smudge, a blur, and the houses she pictures him in do not manage to define him.  Tonight, projected on her clenched and prayerful eyelids, he is playing in front of a house that is hosting an invincible summer.  The lawn is green precision.  The flowers crowd the various  polygons of rich, red earth.  This is his home, the house she provided for him by her sacrifice.  Designing these make-believe habitats for her disappeared son, she gathers to herself a (false) sense of control.  This is a practical excercise.  She is astonished by the lack of sentiment.  The dream house evaporates--presumably carried away in pieces---and, in the darkness, she imagines solutions to problems that her perfectionism has invented.  We join them all for a beer on the porch.  But the enigmatic boy is not there.  Cold.  Tired.  Afraid.  He goes down the stairs to sleep on the rug in front of the fire.  She is left with the houses (and her own guilt and loss) and to keep from going mad, there in the wee hours, she closes her eyes and remembers the rooms, explores their size and decoration.  She traces the dimension walking the floor plan.   And the idea of the house is a gift to be given away.  The missing child is suggested again and again.  There is no one to defend him. 

Absolution

Vodka poured
in the open wound.
Your mouth
anticipates love,
the salt of me
and the consequences
of honesty.
The drink speaks
a language lost,
blurring the words
with their emotions
and ample desire.

Tomorrow--
waking late, hung
over and alone--
you can regret
nothing.  Guilt is made
of memory.

You have no sins
in need of
absolution.

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.

Equator

You were there
beside me
the first time
either of us crossed
the Equator.  You were
sleeping,
I think.  You were
dreaming of eternity...

The lights of the plane
smeared against the firmament
like a tear
running under
the spell of gravity.

I woke you up
to remind you
of the world.

Its limitations
inhabit us, we begin
regretting
our past immediately, our present
in the (near) future.

We will stand
equidistant
to the end of the Earth,
you to one side
me to the other--
Tropic of Capricorn
Tropic of Cancer--
waiting.  For no one
knows the week
or the day
or the hour.

No one
speaks.  In a weakened whisper,
at my death
I will say
your name
instead
of God's.

On Time

The train that I have been racing has been obscured in smoke, blurred by speed.  It forever going into tunnels..............................................emerging faster, shinier, polished chromium reflecting the world, reflecting the sun, bouncing it back into my eyes.  By foot, on horse, in a  70s Cadillac the same color of the sky, I have challenged this agile serpent, this zipper quickly closing up the land.  Like barbed wire, the humming rails communicate the danger.  I hear some explanation whispered in the cold shell of my ear.  One's memory of the ocean could start to ache here.  A train can't come fast enough/a train can't go quick enough to alleviate the melancholy knowledge that one feels at the station...........waiting.  

But in those days, I tried 

to outrun time 

to the crossing, my sneakers 

kicking, gravel 

flying from the Appaloosa's hooves 

only to shock 

a crack into the windshield 

of the Caddie. 

My watch,

face broken,

now always reads the same

time.

In 5

In five graceless minutes,
the world's will
(so willfully driven)
will end, will come like a kingdom,
will come to an end.

In significance,
there is meaning.  Nothing
more strenuous
than understanding
the limitations of time.

Special-ness

Special-ness is not measured in the exterior world but in the interior realm that ruled our childhoods...then imagination and creativity were the sustenance of being.  It is only later that the material world with the barometers of success and reward eclipsed the pleasures of play.  The origins of our art reside not in the corrosive value system of competition but in the sheer joy we take as individuals in using our mind to express the impressions of the heart.  

Compare yourself to yourself and  not to others.  At all costs, ignore the fabrication of self that has been invented and distorted to meet the expectations of others.  These are, at bottom, only illusions that we have inflated and given substance.  

Life is the now, not the idea of the future we had at 16 or the regrets of the past that gather around us on birthdays or new years (any artificial milestone).   Life is the now.   Life is the wit that sits gleefully on our lips at brunch with our friends.  It is the electric connection carried from body to body in sex. Life is the way words urge us forward, music attaches to our memories, and nature--in its intricacy and its simplicity--can completely engross the eye.  Now.  

Looking at your hands, in your eyes in the mirror, sharing your thoughts with others, sharing your creations....you are this miracle.  How could you be more captivated by any other bit of magic?  Are the stars stitching the night sky any more special than you?  Is the ocean with its rhythmic lullaby?  The complex coloring of a bird or a beetle?  They are all less so, less special than you because they are not you.  Unlike your own living, breathing, thinking, feeling form, these other miracles are a step removed.  

You are seven again and every breath expands you with your amazement at being.

Mast Head

jailed

fair young Billy Budd

tangled 

on some heart's envious mast, elegantly
recalling god...

you are the first

to see

each new continent,

you are

young, restless

the flowering of manhood,

a fearless garden

open ocean means nothing...
under rose skies

where you wait (patiently) for

evening

fall

unctuous nature 

and its moldering treasures

conjures up twilight's

pearls and diamonds

the way

eyes inching

slugs on the spilled galaxy

gracelessly hung

with dogged stars and supernovas

comets

meteors

tearing into now cool heads
coming

out of space

like Jesus

on caravels, kites

on the wind.

Christmas Ghosts

The ghosts that haunt us, the memories, the stains regain their footing on our neck, our soul, every December.  A snow globe--dusty, forgotten on a high shelf--is stirred by our agitation.  Old phantoms start to circulate.  Impatient flurries of wind carve out a space in which the snowflakes freely congregate. They are forging shapes (more animal than mineral), the camouflaged fox and his camouflaged prey and everyone, dancing.

I equate mental health with action.  I am not alone.  To do nothing is a frightening prospect, the only actual cardinal sin.  It is tempting to lay awake in bed, or pull over and take five minutes to enjoy your motorized isolation tank, or wander (not too far) into the Scotch pines, the centrifugal cologne of Christmas.

But this can be, unnerving freedom...
 
One can only imagine the thoughts that might condense into fears in that silence.  The ideas that would arrive like birds to fence post and wire--a kind of melancholy punctuation--only to scatter from every perch when the shotgun of your father, rife with personality, arrives (again). He is the biggest ghost, the loudest ghost.  He is obsessed with our contingencies, wailing his opinions, a grating wind.

Haunting is done by the living, chasing the dead.  The obsessions of a ghost boast about his only son, still waiting, for word.  He haunts me.

Music teases the early morning, through smoke and fog, across the lately frozen lake.  Their anxious play, the specters, arm in arm, reflected in the mirror of the ice, the flattery of the pond.  Distance persists and these are simple facts that you hold onto that prove that you were there.

The idea is taught,

passed down through ranks and generations:  that we are the haunted; we who walked with kindness and with bravery, tormented by mere figments.  As if we make a passive audience, politely overwhelmed by this broader world.  As if we weren't drawn to the apocalypse, the accident, the sticky spill...

You haunt me, in your strawberry blond wig.  You're the new girl, with no mirror of your own. "Honey" is the  new girl's name.

I used to strip as Santa Clause, drunk on stage,  writhing. Just beyond the bubble of stage light, I see him grinning while shaking his head.  Not "honey" nor "sugar plum" nor the luminescent "candy cane", I will present the facts and play back video with Christian strictness, because "the ghost of Christmas present" has cursed us, and cultivated distinct biases...

"Thank you for your question!"

As he peals the pages back, the stocking cap, the fur-lined gloves, the fur-lined boots, slip off his body creating an out of place pile of mukluks and blubber, drying in the sunshine of Los Angeles.  Your hostess's pool  flashing with sapphires,  looked like summer had come, like summer was literally stripping off layers of skin.

"Come here, come here."  There is something more shocking in his final reveal:  The velvet and the ermine having been "good to him" will enhance his renegade run.  In an exaggerated gesture of gratuitous wealth and its toxins, he drops the precious fur on the ground. After cape, his pantalons , his jacket, suspenders and shirt have been removed.  This is a queer, Papa Noel, and--obsessed with hope--a specimen of Christmas present.

The red cotton long johns are tight;  they are made with a hint of lycra that describes all ill intention and makes me capable of forming egoless apologies, little white lies.  My misguided ambition is to liberate one's past.  The strip tease has ended with his massive trunk, hunky legs, each clutching the uncle's vain glorious romance.  This emaciated child called Ignorance, once angled with everything, locks her fragile body on the stripper's left thigh.  The other, a boy,  a smelly urchin named Want, looking down and sniffling, is that anchor that is always so heavy, wrapped around this powerful right leg, paralyzing not only ability but also desire.

The One Life that God Gave You

The remorse bores a hole and my dreams leak out.  Here is a puddle of my ambitions on the floor; my anxious bladder and the end of the world.  Fear has robbed me deaf, dumb and blind.  I know nothing of life and being.  From a young age, painfully cognizant of death, I have been burdened by the ambivalence that is a product of this context, the swallow in the mead hall, the would-be mother straddling the grave.  Action becomes effort instead of purpose.  Motivation is borne of boredom instead of inspiration.  Meaning exists only moment to moment instead of in the beating heart.  The body is absurd in its persistence.  Thus, nearing fifty, a comet (a swallow) coming out of the darkness and hurling toward that which has the most gravity, I look back at the tracers that chase me through space.  What do they illuminate?  What have I left behind?  And I regret things both done and undone, regret words, both said and unspoken.  Perhaps there is no tragedy in this balance of success against loss.  The melancholy I feel is only sentiment defended by the lingering expectations of parents, family, and friends, my church and by God.  I cannot be a mirror of thy perfection.  I am human, and I am flawed.

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.

The Perseids

The earth pushes his shoulder
into the wheel, metal against metal;
the sparks enlarge and dissipate.
Every wish is fumbled,
the dumb luck of a blind man.
Who can know what is
without feeling, what was
without memory...

These are the blue-green evenings to chase fireflies.
These are the rose singed mornings to see God.

There are (a hundred thousand) legends
that enshrine (a hundred thousand) lies
of shamans and scientists--natural curiosity--
into rumors that codify a kind of faith
in nothing
but one
single
falling
star.

There is a legend that explains
how we came
to neglect the sky. The truth,
triumphant out of its----------- pure hubris,
tells us nothing
about the doubt-filled vanity.
of Venus:

Love hovers
like an angel,
tenuously attached,
just inches above him.
This is his soul
trying to escape
the cacophony of his heart,
the shallow breathing in his chest.
She breaks her wings
on everything
and confined, like a guest,
she takes to her bed.
Love is an invalid
in his broken arms.

This is
for you.

I keep failing. My failures
are smaller, my diminished ambitions;
I find no solace
in this fact...

In the middle of the night--eyes wide open, the cats steady gaze, the vigilant television pumping blue flames into the room--even with the volume off, I cannot sleep, cannot avoid meditating on my predicament. I am listening to the night, to your breathing, to my heart in my throat. This moment is only a point in time. There is the wake of days behind, the days unawakened waiting. There are regrets on the one side, fears on the other. Sleep is a luxury for those who have lived.

Intrepid

That pitiable carcass on the side of the road--broken limbs, gasping, the blood in its mouth bubbling from aspiration--was, just a few moments ago, the intrepid animal confidently trotting across this melting asphalt stream. He was on an adventure, and he was alive with scents and sounds of mid-summer. Now he is bleeding, seeding the night with those distinctly eerie cries that indicate the proximity of death. Does this beast recall the brave certainty that moved him, inadvertently, into the path of his destruction? If he does reflect on his carefree ambling, does he regret his hubris? Does he idle as his heartbeat fades in the miserable memory of his earlier actions? Does he think himself cavalier? Does he blame himself?

The living cannot accurately surmise the complexity of thought and emotion that must crowd the dying person's mind. The textures of that experience (for as near as they are to us) are alien, unanswerable; they reveal a tactile landscape, blurred and out of reach. That said, the dead in us, the part that will die, nevertheless possesses an opinion on the subject that is worthy of expression. And I cannot imagine that the two states of mind--that of happy-go-lucky animal emerging from the thicket and that of gasping cadaver weeping on the shoulder--necessitate any kind of a straight line. Apart from being fired by the same synapses, in actuality, the mind of he who will cross the road and he who does not make it to the other side, are discrete entities. In the rush to make connections, we make mistakes, we lie. Anticipation, that unnerving insistence of writing the story to its end, threads the needle between present mentality and the past with all of its tremulous "truths." But we each forget everything when the angel comes.

Possibility

The young people plot and plan, crowding the calendar with a thousand things "too good to be missed." And we are jealous of their memories, still pages waiting to be filled. Theirs is a dance of possibility, the percussive insistence of childish expectations. No one sets out upon this journey wanting to have a failed life. No one, at twenty one, knows what a failed life looks like, how regrets can overcome you like a heart attack. When looking at your spouse, your kids, when looking in a mirror, the arch of years, of choices spreads into the infinity contained in human eyes. Regrets are questions poorly formed, amorphous in the fog of middle age.

Because I wasted my talent, God has elected to silence me.

Regret

I am 45, perhaps too young to be consumed by regret but certainly too old to be immune to it. And it is not my actions that haunt me but my inaction, my lassitude, my long years of waiting, breathlessly, for some other entity to emerge from this skin.

I have managed to take a single photo of myself every day for a year. The project, small in its demands, was nevertheless an enforced daily encounter with myself, fifteen minutes of creativity and inspiration (more and often less)that asked of my attention something beyond my brooding in its many forms. It was "good for me," that cliche that belies the underlying desperation of it all; it was good, fun in the way that child's play is fun (for children) as a manner of losing oneself in the imaginings of who you are and who you can be. And perhaps to be both model and eye offered me that same playdough of personality. I envisioned who I wanted to be, or who I could be. I reconstructed my aging features with light, or delved rapturously into my current mood. I made faces, and I kept face. It was good for me, plain and simple.

The process has reinvigorated me a bit in the direction of my biggest regret: my writing. I commit today to a similar project of 365 days here and now. I activate this blog with a handful of words, promising in turn to throw another handful of dirt on the pile daily for the coming year. Will I make a mountain on which I can stand or simply fill in my own lazy grave? The prospect makes me nervous. I have made these grand gestures before. Perhaps if I think of this more as play than practice. Perhaps if I place my faith squarely on the beauty of the words.