I.
The Garden
An enchantress sighs
in the room you thought empty, clearing a place for you. She calls out, this
seductive crone, in a language you almost recall. She needs to remind you of
something, but you have no way to respond beyond the ghost-like assent of your
presence. Beyond the barking of the dogs, below the level of speech is a place
that grants access, so you enter. She carries a lifetime of pain and loss. Hers
is an unassailable grief that finds release in the few remaining joys left to
her—calling birds down from the trees and feeding them from the palm of her
hand, bathing throughout the moonlit night in the tropical garden, loving the
humid air that pours the essence of jasmine, lemongrass and nightshade across
the ravaged contours of her flesh, a white cat the sole witness to the forms
she takes in her purposeful flight from pure earth to pure light.…
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i told my son you can reach me i am not the weather the same way my father was the weather i am not mystery or storm or the perfect day apology for the storm you can reach me i am willing to be shaken i used to be shaken all of the time you you you son you can reach me i have built a table too small to eat at so that we can sit there and hold no pursuit other than me what do you need
– Darren Demaree…
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And like a sailor, he lifts the blinds. In the distance, no matter how far he is in that VA nursing home, he sees us out here somewhere as we glide. Your elderly father sees you and me, our hearts as one woven kite on the porch swing just as night seems to nudge the sun aside. He knows we are falling in love.
After all, all our footprints in sand and snow and cinder and everywhere we go, we go two by two by love but look at how the world blends so small. He knows. Widowers may have a way of seeing all the power in believing, as somewhere way out there is yet a heavenly mother near her child.
He may remember his younger sky, and her beautiful eyes, and likely can see them still when you laugh and when you cry.…
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Names. You’ve got this thing with them. The names of plants, rocks, native species. Concrete details have become a favorite pastime.
Vehicles, clouds, chemical compounds.
You file names away in no particular order but know right where they are when you need them. And you will. Need them.
Architecture, muscles, functions.…
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. . . you burnt your lip on the coffee mug, distracted by the pretty crow eating french-fries in the parking lot, thrown out by a litterer during a conversation with a potential lover who wanted to impress with callousness, the girl who was only in the car by virtue of a blind date agreement, trusting another’s word, who hadn’t noticed the bird or the fries, her window rolled up since she was chilly, her mother’s advice unheeded as to the need for a sweater for the evening, the lights still on at home, that mother sitting, not really watching the television, wondering if the daughter will do what she did on blind dates, the worry turning to fantasizing about lost years and chances, the husband, separated from the worried wife, prone in a downtown apartment – cars passing loudly along the avenue – intently watching a rented DVD, absently murmuring on the phone with an old girlfriend, that woman, at work in the restaurant on a break where the fries originated, having just dropped some more for the giddy teenagers idling in line at the drive-thru, which is visible from the table where you sat when, instead of being in the moment of coffee and conversational enjoyment, you were entertained by a frolicking bird in the innocent evening sun in a littered parking lot – of which you blamed – mentally – for causing you to burn your lips, which would later tempt me but were ultimately kept at bay due to the pain.…
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I
Sex with you feels like survivor’s guilt. What were we but two figures at a bar sharing a gentle kiss and a Molotov Cocktail? I run my hand down your back like a train derailing off its tracks. This exchange of ecstasy will ripple chaos into this city—our city. When your lips touch my skin a trigger is pulled, a body hits the pavement, a splash of blood arcs in streetlamp glow. Two beings like us are not meant to feel passion—at least, not together. Every time we fuck we sacrifice a city block. Let’s call this what it is.…
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