Surry County...In a Rain Watching the James River Flood

Come here.

He was standing outside of the porch, listening to the rain...listening because outside it was pitch black, but somewhere past the evening air was a river of even darker colors growing slowly, slurping at the sides of the riverbanks...he thought he could hear it growing, thought he could hear it slowly filling like a tub in a movie until the water starts to seep over the edges...

He turned to her voice, coming in from the kitchen.  There was a single light on, so she was mostly in silhoutte and he likes to think he remembers her smoking a cigarette. 

She rarely smoked, and he couldn't remember a prior time.  Her mother's radio was a yellow plastic one and she had it on radio station 92.3 The Tide...

Why are you outside?  Come out of the rain.

 I'm not out in the rain he replied...I'm under the awning...I'm fine.

a bit of silence

I don't want you to get wet...why are you out there?

He stood looking at the darkness....listening to the rain hit the trees, crackle against the car, falling in droves and almost enveloping them in its gray curtain.

I'm listening to the river...I don't want to have it flood.

She took a long draw and blew out a plume of purple-blue smoke....it's flooded plenty of times...one more won't matter.  It's all flat down there anyways.

He could smell the slight tobacco...he suddenly did remember when she last smoked, and the taste of her against the backdrop of it...she was perhaps his hidden habit.  An addictive element...she may have been his nicotine.  He smiled slightly.

Do you remember when we were on the sandbar in the river, that really hot day when it barely moved?

I do, she replied.  It had happened a little after her dad had died, and she had been home making arrangements with her mom...he had stolen down there, invading her calamity, but in the end she was comforted.  One afternoon he had taken her down to the river at a low ebb and they walked barefoot on the brownish sand...the water tub-warm, the sky filled with pillows of clouds and the beads of sweat on both their foreheads.  It was a day of nothing...it was a day of her stacking memories like dishes in her brain, it was the pull of her family and it was his intrusion...old world, new world.  It was perhaps cumbersome and yet inviting.  He stayed on the periphery.

I always tried to imagine that river filled to almost over-flowing...wondering how much it would take to do that...to almost flood...and it was unfathomable to me that it could happen.

Outside the rain pelted the sides of the house, almost blurring the sound of the music...the wind swept away her ash and her smoke...the kitchen was very small and it was just the two of them.

He walked in, closing the screen behind him.  He had a few damp parts on his shirt and his hair was slightly tufted with rain.  She took another drag, regarding him slowly, then blew it out in the air above her before stubbing it out in the ashtray.

You're a foreigner here...it's a little disquieting that you're even here.

I know.  I'm sorry...I just wanted to see you.  It's that plain and pretty simple.

The cigarette burned in a brief orange then settled down to a simple gray smoke...dying in the quiet evening with just the sound of the radio and the rain.

Well...here I am.  You're seeing me.

She was pushed back in the chair, arms folded...she smelled of cigarettes and stress...of a tiny daughter and a father no longer in the kitchen...she was remarkably as alive as the growing river outside, continuing its journey around its places to the sea.

If I told you that I'd go stand in the rain, go stand in the shallowest part of that flooding river just enough to keep my head above it, just to see your shape in the rectangle of the doorway for just a moment...that I would welcome that...that I'd gladly let the water overrun me, slap at me before finally swallowing me...just so long that I could see the angle of you, the stance of you before turning away and returning to a home that I do not know...but knowing that you saw me I'd gladly let the waters pull me down.

She looked at him...her eyes never narrowing...never blinking.

I'd say you were a fool.

Outside the rain pelted and swirled...her southern voice was the bit of a reminder that she was back at home and he wasn't...and that she was his river, and he was a bit of the flotsam that floated and bounced along until she neither no longer wanted or no longer needed him.

Until he might slowly float to the bottom.



 

An Afterwards

After the chairs are pushed back, and the sounds of the meal subside and fade into the echoes of other rooms, perhaps you might find a moment...when it is quiet, and the remnants of the evening are starting to reveal their colors.

What I am thankful for....what I am hopeful for...

Perhaps you'll go outside, out back with a drink in your hand...to escape the noises, to escape a debate.  To look for a star, or a fading sky. 

I am thankful for the moments...sometimes quiet, sometimes filled with words and sentences.  Sometimes just standing close by, close enough to detect the slight perfumes of you.

I am thankful for warm memories, that you can clutch like a sweater around you and pull closer to your throat.  Maybe feel the heartbeat against your fingers.

I am hopeful for more moments...but if those are merely minutes spread across weeks than I will be slowly devastated but thankful for those minuscule times...

And hopeful that you are indeed warmed...and satiated with food and drink...sleepy with a drowsy desire to go lay down, and perhaps you'll imagine the weight of me beside you. 

That is something I would be extraordinarily thankful of...some more.

A City We Might Have Known

We were never there.

Together.

We were never the couple in the park, tree-lined against skylines...cement gray against tea-leave green.  We were never the couple in the crush.  The crush of bystanders, the crush of cabs...the crush of cars carrying them to and fro...and for us to simply be just a simple pair.

We were never there....we didn't see a show, we didn't collect the cards from the comedians in Times Square to get discounts on late night venues...we didn't feel the swell of the tourists and buses and neon.

We weren't in the quiet of a neighborhood...maybe 2nd avenue...off the beaten path...a quiet Italian restaurant...some uncorked wine...a kiss in the middle of a meal and a stare to return to if perhaps only in minutes.

We never were at the rooftop lounge, drinks in hand, shadows and a cool evening requiring proximity...pointing to a planet, debating if a star, wondering if we were closer to some Heaven on the terrace or if that was found much later side by side in a bed...we never whispered against the backdrop of sirens and sounds...outside air and noises impacting our breathing that was inside and oh so close...

We never ordered room service...we never debated menus, or mixes, or mini-bars.  We never stopped in a crowd on 7th and felt the surge of those on the sidewalk and stopped and realized the stark contrast of you...the earthen eyes against urban dyes...the soft and pale parts of you against a cement gray line of building...the human part of you against the backdrop of machines and maintenance...I never got to hold you in a city of millions and allow me to describe you as a soul.  I never got to...I never got to...

I never got to confess to you, in the hours and the minutes...in the times and the moments...in the pieces and deflections that when it came to what really mattered was that it was you that really mattered...
you that distracted...you that impacted...you were reflected, billions of times in mirrors and the way the sun split off buildings and cascaded in colors and in a city of grays and whites and blacks you were the color of earth because of your eyes...a piercing, deepening piece of spring in a city of winters....eyes the color of bourbon....eyes the colors of trees so far off in the distance they may have been stars.

In a city that didn't care...in a place that didn't notice...when the millions were beside us, with their own foibles and troubles, dreams and remembrances....they kept on walking past.  But I held you, or at least wanted to, in that row of people and passers-by.

We were the moment....we were the eclipse.  We were the twosome.  We were the union.  We were all that mattered.  We were the laughter in the hallway, we wakened people with our noise...we caused smiles because those passing us were immediately jealous of the way you looked at me...and I could not take my eyes off of you.

We were never there.

But in the city...each time....as I return, it almost feels like we were.

A Stolen Moment

Light is diffusing.

Sometimes even a tad confusing.  He could always see her in the dark, could always tell where she was by the sound of her voice...the colors of her tone were evident even in the blackest room...slight drawls, a sorta-southern undertone that heightened when she was drinking...or tired.

He had heard that voice murmured against his lips...smashed even...deep in her throat, and glowing.  Embers of some heat behind her, from within...he couldn't tell.  Wouldn't try.  Rather, he soaked it in and felt it like some distant sound that perhaps only he could hear.

He loved when the lights turned out and he stood for a few moments as his eyes adjusted, his visual-purples, his rods and cones all assimilating to the sudden blackness.

Here she would say...

In this tenuous game of Marco-Polo he would drift slightly...waiting for her to merely say it again.  She never said "here" a second time...rather the next word was always...

Closer

He imagined the faint outline of her, the contours and the pillow landscape.  She never would extend an arm or a hand...rather that stayed next to her...she was comfortable...it was his role to join her, not disrupt.


As he got nearer he could detect the slightest scents of her...lotions...tiny whiffs...finally understanding what drew bees to flowers...

what hummingbirds imagined in fleeting seconds before nectar...

perhaps primal, reptilian cells in his brain and the sweet scent of her cloying his mind...he could almost see her, more like a presence than a shape.  It was completely black in the room but he knew exactly where she was laying.

She was the sun...the rest of it just orbiting around her...gravitational pulls and floating freely until he got too close...

The room always seemed warmer with proximity...as he put his weight upon the bed and she knew he was close....she shifted slightly, and at that moment an arm might arise...and he would trace it back to her, where the shoulder was tilted and know that her neck was exquisitely close, and her lips very near from there.



Some mornings, in the diffused light, as she lay peaceful and filled with sleep he stood briefly in the doorway while the grays were lightening and the morning sun was the color of butter...

the artistry of her was in full bloom, the quiets of her face and her tones were mute, and she was there simply as countenance...simply as angles and geometry...

He knew why bees were drawn to flowers, why men painted and sculpted and he knew that in this stolen moment it would paint yet another million reasons of why he couldn't forget her.

The Jamestown-Scotland Ferry

Near the tip of Surry County, where you take Rolfe Highway slightly northeast until you pass Rte 637, you find the road winnowing down until you enter into the unmistakable narrows that suddenly stop dead at the foot of the James River...and guided by pilings and signage, you find the welcoming of the Jamestown-Scotland ferry, ready to transport you across to Jamestown...a fifteen minute ride that may as well go back in time.


He sat near the rail, the slow engine churning up white wash, the river almost as dark as her eyes if he paused to remember...which he fought against, fought against the raging current of a stream of thoughts that crashed against his mind. 

Memory was a ferry...it carried him back to where she once was, never allowing him to return.  It always carried him back there...and he always returned alone.

In the heavy thud of engines against the water, the ferry moved steadily....the vibrations emanating beneath his feet were from the gears and metal parts and not the hull against the river.  He looked at the name of the boat...Surry...an older county, known for agriculture, farming...and lumber.  It was uncomplicated...land, being harvested to grow...steady farmers' lines and straight vertical leaves springing from the dirt.  There were complications...weather, drought, insects...but by and by this little corner stayed the same.

It was easy to see that she was from here...it was easy to see her roots, her depth, her steady part of her that rolled easily past him like a bit of river.  He had introduced complexity.  Deviation.  Mostly it was just something different, something apart.  A sandbar to be avoided, perhaps...

He was made of sand to her...to be slowly turned and eroded by her steady stream...slowly, inexorably until he collapsed and joined the millions of tiny bits below her.

He was the blown harvest...stunted by conditions...blackening along the vines and snapped in two by winds and insects.  Allowing the earth...the darks and browns that were once so engulfing to merely reduce.  Scattered.

He had become the dry riverbed, across which no ferrys would float.

He headed north towards Jamestown, the sky still light in the west although clouds would rapidly collect and bury the colors in minutes.  He headed away from her.

The ferry docked.

He moved off and tried to forget why he had even crossed.

Remnants of Hurricanes

This reminds me of you....he said...it was in the gloaming of an evening showering blondes and yellows from a faint sun obscured by clouds and rain...the sky was fantastic.  The air was filled with the pulse of rain and wind that drove both colorless drops and colorful leaves in scattering downpours.

The trees lilted and piroutted and shed tiny bits, seemingly moving in unison then randomly. 

Why? she replied.

Well...first of all, being named after a hurricane would be pretty awesome...as the skies collected the remnants of Patricia and strew them across the horizon....but I think the thing that I was sort of intimating isn't the power, or the fury...or any devastation--

-Well that's thoughtful--

Let me finish...it is in the aftermath...it is the scrubbed clean air...it's like the day was freshly washed...it is--

So I'm an exfoliant?

Christ would you let me finish?  No.  I can find that in a drugstore...you're way rarer.  

Well...thank you.

But it is the calming impact of an afterwards....like violence then calm, like wind then nothing...but there is clearly evidence.

Evidence?

Like something has happened...something has changed.  

Like what?

Like...like me...like when you walk by you strip me of my senses....maybe briefly, but you dust away my current thoughts...you scatter my immediate concern...you dissipate my worries...maybe just for a second but you leave me with  nothing but a very clear and unfiltered view of you and I find that amazing.

She paused, head down.  Maybe that's how you should've started this conversation.
 

 

Invoke an Absence

The shape of her is fingerprinted in his mind...the way she walks, the way her head turns and allows the slope of hair to glide and fall against her.  The way her eyes move from the ground to high-beam into him, sometimes the tiniest...

tiniest pull of the line of her lips into a sad smile.  A clench.  Wry.

If like him she lets something break inside that spills warm...chest-high, acetylene-pure and a little remorseful...because breaking something should hurt.

And you would figure over time that the little parts would ossify, they'd harden like a fossil, rust even.

No.  These remain vivid...blood-red and body temperature right...never exhausted, never worn out.  These tiny bits that remain...like the parts of a bullet left inside a body, in-extricated, spread out in some random pattern.  Just below the skin.

You would think that in the absence there could never be such presence.

That in the fall colors it would be a gray spot...a morning fog color due to just time doing its slow acid drip on memory so razor thin it is now barely reminiscent.

But not her, and her way about him...she lay inside of him, encapsulated in tiny crystalline capsules of memories....built over time and built over effort.

And the ironic effect that every time he saw her, or perhaps even less...thought of her...

another one burst inside of him and was very soon and quickly....

tidily, efficiently and perhaps more than a tad magically...

became replaced by a fresh and brand new one.

Share...don't share...don't care

It is amusing at the parts of you that you allow to merely wash down the drain.

Bits of you....pieces.  You cut away parts and let them get mixed in the downstream.  Parts that once clung to you...were a part of you.  Just nicked away, sliced, cut, shaven. 

Why would I then, feel like that was not a habit?  Why would I have entitlement to being different.

In the revealings it was not so surgical...it was actually quite methodical.  Like a child plowing through a pop-up book, turning the page and moving the parts and watching it grow and reveal...and not being able to wait to turn to the next one...and the next one.

A favorite movie where you cannot wait for the great scene.
A song where the riff is contagious.

A food that you crave...either making or ideally somebody well-heeled serving it to you...bringing it to you.

Discovery.  Unexpected.  Delighted. 

That was you...to me.

The Willy Wonka reveal of you to a part of me that found myself in the shade of you...everything making a collage of colors and tastes...and each one more perfect than the previous one on my tongue.

I found so many locked doors in you.  But at times they were opened.

Once and again...in awhile.  And the rooms behind them were so spectacular....standing in a hallway of dark stained floors and low-dimmed lights...finding rooms of candles and neon...colors I had never imagined....these discoveries of you that you let me find occasionally.

Occasionally.

You were like learning a new language...there was familiarity but not quite exact.  But as uncomfortable as it was to learn a new tongue, I knew I could ultimately convey what I was trying to say.

You knew.

As much as I didn't, I think the biggest part was that you knew.

I revealed more.

I explored, and prodded...and went around the back-way where the weeds were tall to find perhaps a hidden entrance I hadn't seen from the front.

Leaving big footprints and broken stalks to mark my efforts...you could track me in your mind and perhaps open and unlock doors at your whim.

And maybe share.  Maybe reveal.

But mostly it was like those slivers of follicles that you sliced every morning, wantonly letting them slip away from you and drift aimlessly into a drain.

They had once been part of you.

And maybe tomorrow some will grow back.

And that is the effort that I undertake. 

God...I Remember

It was a Sunday...maybe it was.

I don't remember much anymore...little details that elude me.  Times...dates...unimportant.  What I do remember though is the proximity...the sense, awareness...like a teenage-dance when bodies softly touch where never touched before.  It sounds trite...god, I know it does...seems pitiful now.

But then?

You were an IV bag hung beside me, dripping slow medicine into me. You were in the bloodstream.  Comforting...curing.  Yeah...you helped fix me.

You were an antidote...a remedy.  You obliterated the bits of me that were snapped...you reconciled and mended.  You binded.  You bandaged.

In a way you became my religion, you became my deity.  You were quite subtlety the power...the beginning of something that I cared to remember.  The start.

I remember...God I remember waiting for you...

In a quiet evening with only headlights and the sound of heels on bricks.

In a picnic with the grass heavy with humidity.

In an evening...backlit with pinks and peaches...in a storm, exploding around and deafening...but folding into each other...

A winter, with just a fire.

It was brazen.  Wanton.  Chemical.  The introduction of you into the awaiting me.  Placating...pulsating...the wary climb onto the top of the highest diving board and the release of the immersion into the water.  You were the libido, the exhale.

Stolen.  A kiss...another.  A touch.  A glimpse.  A pull-back and a stare.

What are you thinking...exactly now.

I remember...God I remember trying to read your mind.

A thick bound leather book...with a lock.  Maybe a time and again when you might open it and pull out a page and let me read it before crumpling it in your hand and hiding it away.

You whispered words...you spoke in tongues.  You invaded quiet silence and broke it with a violence.  A tone.  A reveal.  Exposure...like standing nude before me...not naked...nude because you are art.

You gave in...you released.  You allowed....you offered.

I wanted to keep you for myself...such selfishness knows no bounds.  I coveted...I sinned.

I remember you dressing...God I remember the way you returned to your outside world after sharing your inside one with me.

I drank from your cup...
I took your chalice.

I worshiped you.

I remember worshiping you...God I remember worshiping you.

In a pink and peaches evening I still do.

Mile-markers

He let the engine die and let the ticking of the engine settle as he waited in the driveway.

It had been awhile since he had last seen her...but she had been branded in him in an indelible fashion.  The years were like mere minutes and he felt the slight heat rise inside of him as he anticipated her arrival.  The clenching, anxious moments...what the hell...he needed to just relax.

She pulled open the door to the large beachside home and exited in a blur of white and the scent of sunburn and tanning lotion.  She mouthed the word "hi" and got into the seat of the jeep, pulling a pair of sunglasses off her head and nestling them on her face.  She looked at him...like waiting, like she had just seen him versus last seeing him months ago, and she implored him to start the car and drive.

He did.

The sound of the engine and the uptick in the roar of the wind allowed them to be silent...the noise of traffic, the sound of seabirds....the acceleration to the speed limit left them without a need to fill the void of the silence...only when he stopped at the stoplight was it suddenly quiet.  He could smell the potions of her...it smelled of a summer night, full moons and fireflies.  It was pine, sap, sand and salt. If he would ever find a candle that captured this scent he would fill his house with it.  A breeze lit up and the scent disappeared.  She looked at him through her sunglasses.  Her hair was tousled, a bit disrupted...he had seen that before...just never with her fully clothed.

A Pete Yorn song played on the radio.

He pulled into the Corolla Village Barbecue...the lot was filled and noisy.  He found a place where the jeep would fit, tilting on one side, the crushed shell driveway slightly white against the backdrop of the evening.  He stopped the car, turned the keys off and got out.

Dinner.

Dinner was sublime.  The smoke of the mesquite, the scent of the rub...the hustle of the kitchen.  It was noisy inside, the crush of people and sweet tea balanced on waitresses' trays...they ordered brisket and beans, Coronas and sides of water.  They shouted over music and over patrons...they talked with their hands and every so often their hands collided and it was like a fork stuck into a socket...he almost had to withdraw it just to realize they had touched.

It was if no time had happened...no time had spooled...that her perfect magnetic part of her continued to exist and was the exact polarity that attracted his...nobody wanted to mention it...they just let it sit out on the table like the unused spoon.

At one point she had asked what he was thinking...he shook her off...no need to go there.  This was a dinner...not a date...not something promising...rather, it was just a meal.

They walked out of the restaurant...they jostled slightly against each other in a dangerous glance of bodies that were exceedingly familiar.  Or had at least been once.


On the car ride home, up the main drag, they passed the mile markers heading north.  It was dark, the ocean to the right of them, and now and again a white streak of lightning pierced down.  To the left was the last remnants of sunset.  It was a between time.

It was how he imagined them...between the storm and between something dying...between the thunder and the evening-tide.

She fiddled with the radio, found a song and sat back.

The sky was dark black and burnt orange, depending on the direction.

He pulled into the driveway, where she was staying.

She leaned over, a quick kiss, smelling of barbecue and the salt of an evening...in a minute she was gone.

He was parked so that he could see the Atlantic, and it was dark water with darker skies.  Again a quick bulb of lightning parted the sky and for a moment it made him forget the bit of blackness that was soon to return.

It happened anyways...it always did when she departed.

Sunday evenings...without a you

Time was always a bit of an enemy.

Never too much.  Never together.

He listened to the waning sounds of the saxophone peter out into the mike, the slight breathiness of it as it ended...a few claps from the patrons.  The place was dead...of course it was, being a Sunday evening and a rainy one at that.

He had fled the pour while it was just starting, but heard the rhythm of the rain as it pounded outside...he glimpsed a few in the audience still dripping as they made their escape inside well past him.  He lifted his drink, Angels Envy, and took a long draw.

Sundays sucked.

As much a start of the week as the end of the weekend, he secretly hated them.  His Catholic portion chafed at such a reveal...but it was true.

The new song started and was a bit better...more drum, more bass.  It was a little more melancholy and it fit his mood like the way the wet rain bonded his shirt tighter to his skin.

A few smokers turned the air a bluish hue...it was amazing it was still allowed in some parts...but every rule had its exception.

She had been his.

The one outlier.  The one who had taken a slight step into his world and thrown bright paint against his white walls.  She had turned her sweet eye upon him and intertwined his fingers against hers.  But mostly she had stayed consistently inconsistent.

She had said goodbye in an afternoon that felt like it was mercurial.  But, as he took another sip, it was increasingly permanent.

He hated that.  He wanted a nuclear effervescence...he wanted a barn-fire.  Instead it was a quick and surgical and sterile removal of him from her.

He was the band-aid that had gotten wet, and just became unstuck.

The band had introduced a trumpet, and it brought a noisy cascade to his thoughts....it was not unpleasant, but it was interruptive.

He finished his drink and signaled for another....a double pour with ice in a separate glass.  He could add bits and pieces to mellow the drink.

He had to waken in a few hours...but he debated on staying here with her dust-cloud motes in his mind or staring at the ceiling in the quiet of a hotel room.

He stayed...knowing that each minute would penalize him in the morning...but it was why he figured he'd stay.

He thought randomly of her fingernails...she never painted them except for a pearl colored scheme, and he realized she rarely wore anything other than black or white....

Like the piano keys rumbling nearby.

He wondered in the fleeting moments now that he had opened the unlocked door in his mind and invited the contents to spill on the floor...what she may have been doing...at this moment.  His watch reminded him that she was likely asleep.

He remembered that he had told her, quite often, that she was beautiful.  That she was unique...talented...and struck a chord with him.  That she was discovery...she was vastness.  She was unexplored but when encountered it reminded him of evenings and subtleties...the way music hangs in the air after the last note is played.

She may have listened...it clearly didn't work...didn't matter.

But he knew he had communicated.

It was Sunday...and mostly over.

And he turned to listen to the jazz as it spilled over him, washing away the tiny bits of her that had been exploding into pieces of his brain and it sounded like the rain outside had ended after all and he could soon retreat to the streets outside that were still glistening from the storm.

Sunday Around The Early Part of the A.M.

Perhaps the cup of coffee is warming as you hold it with both hands...the rise of steam slowly awakening as you watch the morning unfold for you...

Perhaps you're close enough to hear the slight spill of waves...there is still a lot of glass to the Atlantic, smooth clear water light enough to see through...likely low tide or at least a calm that feels like the ocean is just starting to stretch.

Perhaps you can only hear the sounds of the gulls...spiraling and starting to descend towards the water.

Perhaps you're still in your sleep-clothes, outside on a private balcony...the early sun not so hot yet but you can tell it will be full-throated and heated later.

Perhaps the inside of the house is still quiet...a peace that rarely is seen once day breaks but a welcome absence...you can have some moments alone, some seconds to stir...perhaps feeling the stress drain slightly from your shoulders as you realize you have many days like this ahead of you this week...no phones, no computers...no work...at least not the usual load.

You taste the coffee and sip slowly, like you could let each moment stretch just a few bits more...elongating...a minute suddenly adding seconds and time becoming the way the sun moves across the sky rather than a minute hand.

That is the way I want to imagine you...in the salt-filled air before the afternoon humidity rolls in...feeling like a fresh sheet of the day has been torn out and tossed into the sky...drifting, untouched...spotless...without a single thought of me to spoil your day.

Scorched Flower

 

In a summer, when the wind held its breath and the day lay like a sheet of wet-wool he would drive past the small little church and wonder what sort of words were written on the scraps of paper in the Prayer Box.  

The Prayer Box was about the size of a good-sized cooler, bigger than a mail box, stuck at the end of the drive-way where passers-by could take a piece of paper, scribble with the pencil attached by a string to the side and offer up missives...offer up wishes, cures, miracles.  He never saw anybody stop by, so he often wondered if it was even used.

One day in the heat of an early summer-start in June, he saw the pastor walking down the dirt driveway...he pulled over slightly, watching as the gray haired minister opened up the top of the box and pulled out handfuls of folded slips.  There must have been 25 or more...each pulled like a lucky lottery number, stuffed into his shirt pocket.  It bulged after a minute or so.

Sitting in the car, he felt amazingly small. He had written all of them.

And so far, despite it being a single request, multiplied over many instances, it remained unanswered.

He watched the pastor walk up the hill, unfolding the small pieces, reading them and then putting them back into his pocket.  At one point he thought the man paused halfway up the hill, glanced in his direction, and then resumed his pace.  In his car, he stared back at him through his sunglasses, never wavering.  But he wondered if the old man read his lips as he mouthed "come on, give me something."

The written words were pretty much chicken-scratched from memory; fueled by bourbon and the color brown and all its permutations...he wrote of the salt of sweaty skin, he wrote of the warmth of a mouth...he scribbled at the point where her hair arced around her ear and how he drove his tongue deep into the fold...he wrote of her breath hitching...her mouth mentioning his name...he wrote in tiny sequences that unfolded.  They were not prayers...not exactly....rather, they were scenes that now, in the full heat of summer, he perhaps had hoped they'd be replayed.  

It was a false hope.  And the fullest part of a prayer is in its truth.  Therefore, these had no chance.

He watched the pastor shaking his head slightly as he read a tiny script of paper.  

He pulled the car out on the road and drove away.

Yet the words continued.  The spill, like a faucet turned on after a long time alone, sputtered, and splashed...until a gentle rhythm spooled out.  Halting at first, he intertwined his thoughts with his wants...he started using full pages of paper, the words piling on and darkening the white.  The paper had to be folded into quarters to fit the Prayer Box slot...and the 25 became 45.  And the pastor started bringing a paper sack to the end of the driveway.  

After some time, he realized the pastor knew he was just an outlet.  That the prayer wasn't even real...it wasn't an ask.  It was a hope.  And even then it was more of gesture.  A politeness. 

The way a flower will still bloom despite lack of water.  

He knew that his words would end up in the pastor's can in the corner of his office.  There was no prayer in them...no holy request.  It was carnal, visceral...thoughts of encounters that he felt might be answered.  

She had been a part of that summer...that succulent and fertile place where she bloomed in his mind, his touch...full blooms that created colors and pastels that she alone possessed.  

And he held that craggy flower...long after the rains stopped...long after the sun beat the stalk into a brittle black stem.  He wrote a few words now and again...but the earth would now consume itself and erase the colored parts that were there before.  The pinks and yellows now reverting back to the earth-tones.

The dark tones.  The sepia moving into a coffee colored mixture that was rain-less...

The dirt colored colors that were just like the color of her eyes.

He picked up the piece of paper and started writing again...black letters like the color of scorched stems that dotted the white of the paper that was filled with pieces of her.

 

Soliloquy

It was June and it was rain. 

From far above the city it was black and gray...but close enough to hear the cacaphony of sirens and the occasional horn.  New York was angry when wet, and it tended to seeth with clenched teeth that lowered the view with fog and low clouds. 

He had dialed her a few times throughout the day, but the ringing went the usual four times and then into voicemail. 

"Hi, this is--" Click...he lowered his thumb on the red radio button of his phone.

For a bit he watched the taxis, distinctively yellow and amazingly maneuverable move across the lanes below...the other cars melting in colors that were washed out...blues, whites, grays...only the taxis and their majority presence stood out in the scene.

He dialed her again.

This time, she picked up. 

Listen....he interrupted her...just listen.




I've been away from you awhile, but I think I remember your stare.  I think I remember a fast-burning retina when you were not looking at me but you were looking at who I was.  You loved me in that glance...and now...

and now...you look at me like the stranger on the elevator who expected a clean ride to the bottom but I disturbed his descent...like a beaten prisoner who hears the footsteps in the stairwell of his next interrogator...like the person on the street who accidently bumps into me but keeps walking.

You glance at me.  You lower your lids to me.  A slow blink of disregard.

I find that maddening.  I find the whole concept frightening.  

She murmured back to him..."frightening?"

Yeah.  It's frightening....because what it means...at least in my take-away...is that one of us is dead.

"Dead?"

Yeah...at least to each other.  

Taxis jockeyed for awhile around stopped trucks, horns blaring their discontent.  Sidewalks moved slowly with the parade of umbrella clutchers and the city looked down and rained gray wet rain.  The city moved along though.  It let out its breath.

Yeah...he returned to say...it must be me.  I am really...really sorry about being unable to bring back life in a look.  I'm really sorry that I cannot put lanterns back behind your eyes and maybe some light when you pause to cast a gaze.  And as I watch a city that I have seen a million times...like the way you saw me a million times as well...I get that you will just keep watching but never really looking...never really staring.  At least at me anymore.

The phone was like an oxygen-line in a hospital...somebody breathing in and something providing oxygen.

He hung up, pretty sure which was which.

 

Tonight though

Tonight's moon was sort of like a half button of an elevator...not quite full, barely yellow.  Did you see it?

Tonight was a bit of the past...an outside air hazy with humidity, stickiness...(do you remember the way your hair would curl, do you remember the sweat on a lip?)  It is ironic that the heat and the warmth of day finds me cold in a swift thought of you...that you were a bit of the ice down the back of my shirt feeling...stark.  Contrast.  Unexpected.

I think the thing of you that I reminisce about is just how your invasion of my mind was to immerse me into you...like stepping out of the air-conditioned car into a world-ful of heat.  Off the sidewalk, off the street.  Heat posturing, heat enveloping.  You.  Once,  you were that heat, the minute I could walk into a presence of you.  Nearby.  Next to.  Closer at times.

Now, it's far.  It's a distance.  An orb away like the moon, a touch away like the button of an elevator.  Both take me places...some just sooner than others.

You glanced against me tonight...and changed the temperature.   Maybe just in my mind, or maybe just in the time of the day. 

But tonight though...I remembered a thing or two and in that same shallow instance I remembered a warmth that was long gone after the sun.  And that sometimes the heat of an evening isn't due to anything other than proximity.  And not some moon shaped object that is miles away.

Palpable

Say something pretty...say something pretty about me.

In a dark with grays and light colors, her voice was southern sounding.  Slow, honey over pebbles.
He turned slightly, the stir of sheets ruffling.  He could see her outline, the landscape of her in the darkish almost Kodachrome light...she was present. 

Of course she was. 

Where would I start? he responded, the morning quiet, the day early.  Rain.  Not yet though.

He saw her arms move to cross themselves across her.

Start where I'm not the prettiest.  

He laid back down so that he was flat, staring at the ceiling.  There's parts of you that perhaps I haven't seen.  But even then, maybe I guess I could start with the scars.

Okay.

Because they are the start of healing.  I love them, in that now you are past them.  Yet they are still there.  Alone, I guess I could see where they are a point of...well a point of you where you would cover.  

I do.  Well...I try.

And I love that...I love that I get to see them.  To me, at least...there a bit of a reminder that you can be cut, and maybe healed.  I find a lot of you more than that.

Silence.  A bit of a risk.

She started:  Okay, that's fair.  But let's get to something prettier.

No...let me linger here.  Because this is important...this is why you need to see me the way I see you.

How?

Because you need to see that the starting point of what I find attractive in you, at the very beginning of that attitude...starts with something that you don't like.  We are at opposite ends here.  I think the part of you that may be a little different is exactly why I think you are extraordinarily different.  And it just keeps cascading from there...your hair, your teeth, your eyes...all of those I can compare with everybody else.  But your scars...goddamn, that's you.  

The light outside was widening....the grays moving to a little more white.  The negatives of the photos becoming the Polaroids.

So I could say a bunch of things about the prettiness of you...but I guess the thing that I would leave you with, the thing that I would want you to remember....is this.  I find many things pretty...things at night like colors and skies, the way headlights look across a field when coming towards me...like rivulets of rain on a glass window high above a city.  I think pretty is a word that is only a bit of justice.  When I see you...I don't see a point in time.  I don't see a snapshot.  Yes...yes, of course you're very pretty.  But it's beyond that...it's what you make the day...it's what you make the moment.  You add....you enhance.  You're not just pretty.  But you make the minute with you in it that much more.  Even in the dark.

He heard her breathing...and even in that quiet rhythm he found a glow.

For Awhile

It is like the air tastes different...not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that implies an absence.  A piece not included...a hole. 

For awhile it was simple, as achingly easy as a morning wobbling like a toddler to get up, light a yellow sun and drag it across the sky until smashing it on the other side into bits of orange and pink.

It is not emptiness, because the day looks exactly the same as before.

It is not abandon...it is nothing like that.

The rope tire swing simply frays, once-strong chords straining, yielding, undoing...that place in a summer when there wasn't anything else...anybody else...except the both of them.

The rope... one day...
one strand, slowly unveiling and unwinding...not even a snap when it lets go but rather a simple string that breaks soundlessly...a tire slowly rolling away from a tree.  It's not absent.  The piece parts are there...the rope now hanging, still tied to the tree...the tire feet away. 
But damn is it broken.

For awhile though it wasn't.  For awhile it was timeless, effortless.  For awhile it felt just like breathing.

Now nobody has fixed the rope swing and nobody has moved the tire.  Summer is now a hot pale haze and spiders lay eggs in the darkened places of the tree. 

But it is a lovely view that remains, when there wasn't absence but presence.  When the day was occupied by a laugh, a brief word...a glimpse.  And held me there, not caring about the other hours, the other minutes. 

For awhile.

But not now, where my heart lies scattered beneath that rope swing like a sun-scorched tire, blackened by time.

February

It is the shortest month, like you can almost see the end of it while still standing in the very first day.

It is meat-locker cold, wind-laden and chafing.  It is long dark hours, blackened coal skies that muddle to smears of gray and white behind an orb that claims to be the sun.

At night a fingernail scratch of white grins over a cold planet Mars one hour after sunset.

There is a pain in inhaling that cold air, there is a bite in taking tiny sips of the day.  Pale, a white candle burned down to the nub with its fragile black wick a reminder of heat.  

The crunch of dead leaves, stuck in puddles of ice, alongside a road once black but now streaked in salts and deicing stains.   Small clusters of snow turn gray, mushroom-colored stumps flecked with black.  

And all these taillights…and people warm in cars heading to a place I will never see. 

I get home, headlights on the trees, knowing how cold it is and wanting to stay briefly in the car.

Later.

I think of you when I come in with wood for the fire, my boots shedding clumps of snow that reflect against the flames…tiny sparkles of ice that melt and disappear into the cords of the carpet.  

Gone.