Renunciation

It’s a jade branch on the floor, broken in two, love,
or a stain raised on the lapped grains of a suede glove.

It’s the lace, blown by a strong breeze, of an old gown
with the cranes crying at night, lost in their long sound.

It’s a vase made from the noon light in a closed place,
and it falls, shatters the sharp edge of a jewel case.

It’s the Muse, mute with a shell clenched in her left hand,
a refrain deep in its coils, joined to the dead sand.---J. Reeser

So Much Easier When Away

In a different time, in a different city it was so much easier to forget about her.  He told her that once too.

You'll never forget me, she intoned.  You'll be surrounded by hundreds of strangers, but you might see something that sparks a memory of me.

That's why he wore sunglasses now, hoping the reflective turbulence of lights and passers-by didn't spark anything..rather that they felt wooden or deadened.

There had been a few conversations in the terminal, the overhead announcements blaring away while he had to ask her to repeat herself time and again.  He wondered why he even tried to hold a dialogue with her while walking past beeping golf carts and gate change warnings. 

Mostly he knew that the tether between them felt present...felt taut.  No real distance could unroll its miles and winnow away in timezones.  But for now the rope had frayed...like in an action movie, strands popping slowly until it just gave way.  No pull, no scream...just like a broken shoelace.

I can try he replied, and her face frowned. 

Well that makes me sad.

I didn't say I'd be successful.  But maybe I can pretend.

So he sat, mostly pleased that the tiles and the ceilings and the walls and the chairs were black and white...no real colors invading his vision, the sunglasses helping the effect and the result being a stark view where even the most brightly colored dresses were now devoid of any contrast.

And departures left him feeling reminded...of the comings and the goings...the never-staying.  People in-between things...home or away. 

She was now a missed flight, a missed chance...a journey not taken, a place not visited, red letters on the monitor, no announcements...just a very brief silence. 

He pretended now, in the missed connection, that he really hadn't missed anything at all.

Hazy hot and humid

I think it is in the co-mingling of sweat, the hot skin against skin, the slippery skid of us against each other…salt, lip gloss, lotion, the saliva streak across a stretch of flesh in the hazy hot and humid…

I think it is in the quiet stillness of an afterwards, fingers trailing the length of an arm, finding companions and linking softly, a clutch of hands and a clutch of slightly warming radiance, the tips where you and I are just barely touching after having completely touched before in the hazy hot and humid…

I think it is in the collapse of a distance,  from feet to inches,  centimeters to millimeters, until the collision occurs and the unfolding, the unfurling commences, wrapped in each other and entangled, caught in the spider-web of each other, the sticky silk of a mouth upon a mouth in the hazy hot and humid…

I think it is in the proximity, the periphery, the slow blink of an eye, the depth of colors in a pupil, the toffees of you, unfiltered, unhesitating, uncovered to discover the landscape of you in the hazy hot and humid…

I think it is in the break of you upon me, a moon-tide upon rocks, a splinter into skin, and the collapse against me like the heat and haze giving way to a summer storm that breaks apart in a day, tearful, regretful, dampening the starch white into a depressing gray…the departure of you, yet again, as it continues to be just another endless stream of days…in the hazy hot and humid…

Mad Girl's Love Song...words not by me...

Skywriting

He had a small laugh, at his own expense, when he conjured up a brief cobweb memory of one of his favorite ideas of communicating to her. 

I have an idea he said, laying there beside her on a blanket beneath an afternoon. The sky was a blue dome with no end or horizon, especially when laying down and looking straight up. Not a single cloud blemished it. It was a color you could almost taste, the blue of an ice-pop at the height and heat of summer. 

Oh yeah? she had said, turning her head slightly towards him. For what?

For telling you something. 

A pause. Well. Uhm why don't you just tell me instead? she had asked. 

The idea?  Or the thought?

Oh. Uhm. The idea? 

He felt the wind blow slightly, the trees of Texas fluttering just a bit. Just enough to advise a breeze. 

He wondered if the words he might write would get caught in the upper air drafts. He wondered if they would smear across a perfect sky before blurring into dissonance and before she could comprehend. 

I would like to write you something in the sky. 

A slight pause. The sky?  Like what, a hello or my name?

God no. Something better. Not better than your name, but you know. Something better. 

There's not a lot of better things than my name she had countered. He turned to look at her. 

They have this new technique, like a dot matrix printer. Four or five planes fly straight releasing smoke at intervals. The words hang around before getting all caught up in the winds. It's really quite cool. 

I still like my name up there. 

You see your name all the time. I'd rather give you something special. Something a bit more unique. 

Well what would you write me?  

He was quiet for a time. And then probably just a word. 

A word?  One word?  How is that a message or a sentence?

It would be a description. It would be as unique as you. Or maybe representative of you. At least to me. 

She seemed to buy into that. It was quiet, the quiet times when he knew she was thinking of a response and doing all of her safety checks to make sure whatever she shared was what she approved for sharing. 

Do you have some ideas? She asked. 

Oh. Of course. I know the perfect word. 

Again the slight brief moments of quiet. Of wind. Of blue spaces. 

Would you tell me?  She had moved over a little bit closer. He could sense her beside him, almost feel her breath. He closed his eyes and let the afternoon envelope him and he could feel the slight weight of her against the grass and the slight angle of the sun halfway through its descent. He wondered how it would look against the sky, the white contrast to the expanse and the long crazy letters written so high up. Would she notice?  Would she care?  Would she respond?  Would she just let the clouds dissipate after an understanding?  

He didn't know. He didn't care. 

illecebrous. 

Name Day

Deluge

This?  This isn’t rain…

She would gather up my notes, my scribblings…my pieces of words and strings of letters…adjectives and nouns, descriptions and metaphors…

Tiny gifts and gestures, shells from a distant beach, sand from a nearby sea, little things…

Pieces of glass, parts of a day, hours of moments, snippets of time…

Remembered scents, brushes against, discrete glances, unspoken sentences…

A brief compliment.  A paragraph of interest.

A memory.

Another memory.

A forgotten one.

Remembered in a moment, suddenly, like a dirty thought.

And she would gather all of this in her hands…fold them, spindle them and then tear into bits, tear into pieces, confetti, garbage, snippets, fragments, chunks and morsels….and in rubbing her hands together create such a deluge that would fall from her, the tiniest portions of me that she scattered across an afternoon that everybody else considered rain.

Cue Piano Music as Scene Ends

It was in the quiet silence of her departure, the way the door thudded close and the way the car remained glazed by the scent of her that made him pause.

The rain had stopped...and he imagined there may have been a rainbow as the sun piroutted from beneath a cloud and he imagined as well that if there had been some colors in the sky that she might now be looking at them.

He looked directly towards the sun, wishing, faintly and almost laughingly like they would burn his retinas, render him briefly blind.  But it wasn't blindness that he really wanted.  It was something else altogether.

Numbness.

I cannot do this she had said, and in those four words he knew he had nothing in response.

And beneath a mottled sky the car sat beneath clouds unfolding themselves, pulled apart as so much cotton and breaking up the storm that had throttled them in their very brief discussion in the car.

And the absence was more than a silence, more than a lack of presence.  It was like an umbilical had been disconnected...a space walk untethered now dooming to a slow drift in the cold black air of space.  Maybe to slowly float down, moving at a speed unfathomable...to suddenly catch fire and burn up in re-entry and maybe somebody would call it a shooting star and make a wish.

And there had been no conflict.  There had been no brief war.  It was almost a hospice moment...something was dying, everybody could see it and it merely just needed a time and a place.  It wasn't peaceful, but it wasn't supposed to be.

He saw the console, filled with pennies dimes and nickels.  He wondered how many wishes he might have with those.  Probably not enough.  Probably nowhere near enough.

But he grabbed a handful, emptying the last coin and opening up the door.  Ahead of him was a series of tide-pool like puddles, the ground bumpy and filled with the rain in silver pools that streaked with the reflection of the clouds.

He walked a short ways, alternating his path, gently tossing a penny or silver coin into one of the puddles, a small splash remarking his effort.

He exhausted the small collection of coins, and when the last dark penny disappeared beneath the rain-water surface he walked back to the car.  Out of coins.  Out of wishes.

He drove away, the car pitching and dipping as it hit the holes filled with water, driving over the coins he had flipped and tossed and likely crushing them further into the dirt until any chance of a wish embedded itself with the mud and dirt between the grooves of his tires.

He was neither blinded nor numb. 

The Not Quite War Story

In the summer of 1994, I came the closest I'd ever come to a shooting war.

It was a relatively straightforward mission...restore democracy to the righfully elected President of Haiti who had been ousted by General Cedras of the military (it is not lost on me that currently Egypt is experiencing the exact same thing)...and use whatever means necessary.

That's like giving somebody the green light to essentially go kick some ass using airborne troops, naval gunfire and tanks against a semi-informal army opponent who had 5 armored vehicles total.

But what I remember from my fast and furious weeks of activities were actually snippets of time when things took on an almost surreal view...

-I remember the Asian lady as she was sequestered in our ready-rooms, sewing on the colored American flag on the sleeves of my Battle Dress Uniform (BDUs).  I remember wondering why it was backwards on my right arm and learned it was the way the flag was represented by history when it was carried on military horse charges, the natural flow as it hurtled into battle.  This seems like such a trivial and innocuous moment but for me it was when it really dawned on me that we were going to invade Haiti.  You don't sew these onto your day to day uniforms unless you're going to be in a place where you need to be identified as friendly and I remember fingering the patch on my right arm.  When I left the military I kept one uniform...that same shirt that has the flag sewn on it.

-I remember the young enlisted armament specialist handing me magazines of ammunition, grenades (smoke and shrapnel) and even asked if I wanted a Light Anti-armor Weapon (LAW) rocket.  I was preparing to jump out of a plane and wanted as little extra weight as possible.  I thought it might have been cool to go all Rambo on the poor Haitian Defense Force but frankly I would have probably blown up a church or something like.  Or worse, a hospital.  Even worse my own unit.  So I didn't take the LAW but for a brief moment I held it in my hands, marveling that they were dispensing this like so much candy. 

-I remember flying with the General to brief the helicopter squadron stationed outside of Miami.  We flew at night, and I remember flying low over South Beach, seeing pink neon and green and white lights and marveling at the fact that I was heading to a potential war while these people partied below.  And frankly they couldn't have cared less about what I was doing.  I was in a private jet, with four other people, and I was insanely jealous of the people below.  I felt like I was somewhat swept up in a vortex.  It wasn't fear...nothing like that...just a tad of regret.  That my path, or my choices that I had made, were now in full-scale comparison to others and we could not have been further apart. 

-I remember getting Last Rights said to us, in a large group as we were preparing on D-day.  They did have a D-day countdown, starting with D minus 7 or a week away from launch.  Time was marked by D-6, D-5...not Monday, Tuesday.  It was another moment in that inexorable slide.  It was a curious time.  I also remember thinking as we were getting blessed and repeating the prayers that everything I had been believing as far as Catholic ritual was being thrown out the window.  I was fine with it.  But it was interesting.

-I remember telling my parents, in the most vague terms, that I was going to go away "for awhile".  My dad completely understood.  My mom was a mess. 

-I remember packing in our kitchen, our daughter was 5, our son was a little older than 1.  I remember us writing my name on parts of my clothing, with A+ (my blood type).  Just in case something happened.  I remember putting everything into zip-lock bags and then into my rucksack.  I remember how quiet it was as we assembled my war things. 

And as fate would have it, President Clinton sent former President Carter and former JCS Chairman Colin Powell to let General Cedras know he was about to be invaded by the largest airborne force assembled since World War II.  Needless to say the planes turned around and we never went to war.

Some of my friends still went down to Haiti to help stabilize operations and hand out food and water...not my unit...we had been poised to go down and kill people and break things.  So we stayed back at Fort Bragg.

A few months later, I left the military.  It was a promise I had made and it was a promise I wanted to keep.  It was a great decision, with no regrets and a ton of outstanding memories. 

But every once in awhile, and maybe perhaps around July 4th, I go back to a time when things were very different and I am thankful that I had had a chance to serve.  Not because of some overzealous patriotism...no, not that.  Rather that I got a chance to experience some moments that I will never forget.  And will fondly remember.

A Girl Called Summer

She was hot laying beside me…the way you feel when you crawl into an attic. Or touch an iron. She filled my day with fumes and dreams, she smelled like ginger. She breathed warm scented breath on my ear, the whoosh of an afternoon thunder.


She was a Kodak photograph, the kind where it would buzz out of a slot in the camera and you would wave it dry to expose. She made you wait for her. It was worth each agonizing but knowing moment.

She was like the glaze of suntan oil, the scent of surfer wax, glistening in pearlescent shine, the fine hairs of an arm. You wanted to rub the shiny parts in, even them out.

She was the double-stick popsicle, daring you to evenly break her apart. Melting upon you in sweet stickiness, dripping down and cooling your hands, covered in the smears and cherry-taste in an afternoon.

She was the scorched flower, left beside an unopened window side. A reminder of beauty, even when gone.

She was sidewalk chalk, leaving silly messages…hearts and arrows, stick figure kisses, a code known only by us…to us.

She was a lone cloud across the sun, darkening briefly, wondering at the eclipse.

She was shaved ice, covered in colors, with the odd little wooden spoon as her weapon, daring you to eat quickly before she melted.

She was a bikini drying on a single line strung across the backyard.

She was a clutch of fireflies, high in trees, slowly drifting down to the grass like tumbling stars.

She was the taste of a push-up pop, a sweet tart. Her kiss was candy.

She let me play with her hair, side by side on a blanket. Beneath a pink sky that mirrored her cheeks.

She was heat lightning. White lightning. Thunderstorms and squalls.

She could be the mosquito bite at times…the no-see-um.

She could be the bee in the grass.

She was a sand dollar, seen through the water but disappearing in the tide.

She was the sound of the screen closing. The sound of sprinklers turning on.

She was the kick-off of covers in an evening…to be pulled up later in the dawn.

She kissed me every morning with a slight humidity, perhaps hair still dripping with rain from an evening before.

She lasted too long to be any sort of firework except the sparkler, which lit easily and burst quickly and allowed you to hold in your hand such innocent but menacing beauty.

She was the chirp of the evening. The late darkness in daylight savings.

Mostly, she was a reminder. That she was elusive. Temporary. Inconsistent. Mercurial. So goddamned mercurial.

Only to find me the next day waking with her beside me to start it all over again.