Fall

I feel it in my bones, the gradual chilling of the days and the yellowing evenings turning darker ever earlier...the morning fog in the valleys limiting the views of the hills beyond.

I can smell the wood burning, escaping the brick chimneys in languid gray smoke, and I remember the feel of flames crackling in the fireplace, warming and engulfing the first thin pieces of wood that we gradually slowly fed...pieces getting slightly larger...this orange yellow and blue beast consuming everything we placed in it.

I can traverse the leaf-lined walkways...the scent of decaying leaves, wet from cold morning rains and they mute my footsteps...no longer merely crunching under my boots but now soggy, furled and scattered.

Mushed and crumpled.  Waiting to be absorbed once again by the earth from which they first rose.

The sunburnt skin is long gone. The colors of the earth become blended into mere shades of browns, the color of earth, the color of dirt...the colors you see when you close your eyes.

Fall is all about dying...briefly, colorfully.

It churns the dirt like blades plowing, slight graves for seeds and crop...until the winter glaze can enshrine it in its marble.

Mile markers

There is a rhythm on the road...a cadence...like breathing but perhaps with a little more agitation. More pulse...depending on your speed which of course at hers was enough to buckle seat belts and settle in.

Which was ironic when listening to Chris Botti's "Slowing down the world" with the sound of his trumpet echoing in the car, just a little louder above the din of the tires and the trucks.

At this point though it was his drive...his speed and his cockpit taking in the tumbling hillsides and gray freeways...she was smeared on his mind in a way that reminded him of a slight cling...perhaps the way windchimes work...quiet until a breeze disturbs them and then they awaken sonorously and produce a pleasing note or two.  But it takes a wind to create...for now she was upon his mind like a quiet candle.

So he drove.

The songs played and his thumbs kept beat...a steady thump...the car aching to unleash its full power but traffic and trucks had other ideas...he maneuvered and tried to keep a steady pace...but he was fine with it all.  He listened to the music, felt his foot on the accelerator keeping him connected and watched the set of hills start to rise in front of him.

But of course as all things in the mind there is a cavitation...an implosion.  A song comes on and the curtains are pulled back and exposed.  For him it was the "wee small hours of the morning"...sung by Sting.  Background trumpet with Botti.

He was reminded of her shape in the dark...her outline...her geography.

He knew inches and portions, delicacies and familiarities.   Every bit.

And in the echo of the song he felt her absence like a stab...somewhere on him.  Nowhere particular, just visceral.  Like a passerby had glanced upon him and then fled.

Despite the daylight he remembered dark eyes in a deeper blackened room...unblinking.  And as he watched the remaining song timer wind down he remembered the scarcity of her.  The rareness of their time...always a countdown of departure...hours, minutes.  Never a day.  Nothing could ever be for a day.

The hillside was growing lush, the almost-middle of spring...mountains were flourishing with leaves of green and the stray wildflowers along the highway were in full thrush.  He motored by them, hoping to speed wherever he was going...almost hoping to forget the left-behind.

She crept into his mind like the way she crept into bed...a slow, graceful alignment, her cool torso sliding across cool sheets to him, his warmth always a thing between them, with her wrapping herself from the top of his shoulders to their legs and finally her feet rubbing against him...she was always cooler, seeking his heat.

Until her mouth connected with his and then like lights turning on a timer the warmth cascaded.

He remembered this as he drove...stirring a warmth in him that is a memory-pluck...it isn't just a sensation but rather a reaction...atoms-splitting...whatever...his brain was now a leak of her beside him, spilling all over and drowning his emotions with a staggering amount of her.

He passed an exit...decided to stop for gas.  Feeling like he needed to breath in the air that perhaps she had been breathing a bit ago.

Graffiti

Words...

weapons.  Or flowers, gifted.  The most amazing thing of letters is the order of them, the collective.  The formation of them that fall into your eyes, perhaps a murmur on the lips of certain words aloud:

-Love

-Love

-Love

followed by the brain accepting them and allowing them to infer, impact...land.  The circuitous loop that words take is enlightening as I see the you and I attempt to define, refine.  I catch glimpses and stares, side-looks and imaginings.  I see the person, I see the shape...and then I try to describe.  I try to define.  Yet it is my interpretations...what you read is what I capture...my mind the camera, you the model.  I am not a mirror...no far from it.  Instead I absorb and try woefully so to conjure up pretty words...

-pretty

-pretty

-pretty

Like a sprinkle of dew on a Spring grass, except for the part that the only thing close to that analogy is that you are fresh to me, to my eyes, my aperture...you exist and you belong and then I appear and now there is something so much more.  And I attempt to describe it, maybe as I said define it...and whether you believe it or not is not my goal...I want it to be my imprinted clay, that you form on me.

I think that many passersby see you...but not in the way I do. Unfocused.  Withdrawn are they to not see what I see. Perhaps they haven't enjoyed the studies...the long studies of you.  The long looks and the quiet observations.  They will never bring their eyes up and analyze...

-recognize

-recognize

-recognize

The rarity of you...the unknowns of you that layer in tombs and catacombs and unexplored portions...the mysteries and the riddles.  

Like how you leave chalk dust upon me after writing my name on some place and then erasing it.  You try me on, you try me out...

You write graffiti on my heart and you use enough spray paint to finish...written on some place that maybe no one else will see.  And I can live with that image.

Sundays in the Fall

 I remember eyes that perfectly matched the color of her coffee...the color of the James River after a heavy rain...such dark quietness...her blink like the shutter flash of a camera and you were now a portrait in her mind...hung tidily on some wall where she might let you venture.

On a day of worship that is what he did...he fell to his knees and held her above him, his kiss along her thighs, the top above her knees, he felt her hands on his shoulders, her hands in his hair...murmuring her name as he nuzzled her skin...worshipping her on this Sunday.

The sun was late and low these days, the hours of daylight growing smaller, melting like the way sugar melts in water, making the day parts that much sweeter.  She moved around on the porch the same way a leaf would fall adrift from its limb, to and fro, and finally alighting upon him, butterfly soft.  Lips as warm as noon in an Indian Summer, each time rekindling him.  Reminding him.  She spoke in a quiet throat, him straining a little to hear, to catch each careful word...nodding in response.  Pulling her into him, like the envelopment of flannel...she covered him, cloaked him.  He was the barren ground and she was the maple leaves, the beautiful yellow, orange and reds that fell gently...her bareness even more beautiful than when fully clothed, stark and perfect against the dying light of the short afternoon.

She arrived each time as if daybreak...time only started once she walked in the door.  And in her departure, a void like space where no gravity existed and time was stuck blinking and unmoving.  As if winter was an extra frozen month, and slowly warmed but only enough to melt snow into dark gray piles.  A day in noir, a black and white photo of nothing.  That was time away from her.

But not yet...

For now, she was close...close enough to feel like a furnace.  But warming from the inside rather than from the outside...because she was still inside of him, as well as the outside.  On this day of worship he lingered and slowly let fingers become intertwined, praying for the hours to slow down and for the daylight to still burn...just as she did beside him.

Full Tilt Downhill

He needed her.

Needed to return to her, needed her proximity, her closeness...her alignment against him, this calming salve that spread slowly across him and gently drained into his mind, the precursor to sleep, a precursor to dreams...

The days were bricks, laid one by one...whether placing them gently in an otherwise un-extraordinary way,  a simple placement and mundane way placing them slowly on top of each other in some imagined pattern...or smashing them to pieces in a day fraught with excess and stress...fucking unleashing some primitive portion of his brain...the days were bricks and each day he awoke to an unvarnished stack of them. By the thousands.

He was the bricklayer...the calloused hands, the dirty parts, rough-hewed like an old pair of gloves...his heart was calloused and course...he was grit and soured and plain in his days...unremarkable, unregarded, a brick in a wall filled with look-alike bricks...something you could literally see every day and still forget about it.

She.

She was the flower in the sidewalk...she was the harvest moon...she was the butterfly in winter.  The ember that arose from a sparkling fire and blurred itself into the night...she was seldom, she was rare.  And he felt like he had seen her once, maybe briefly captured her for a bright morning second...only to find his calloused hands empty...bereft.  Ugly without even the notion of her alighting on him for just a second and announce her beauty as a cleansing of him...as a brief acknowledgment of him and his dirty soot.

He carried the glance upon him from her like a lover's locket...a chain across his chest, settling above his heart.  She radiated upon him like a shadow, a tattoo...but invisible...not many could see her with him but he clenched that view in his calloused hands.  He caressed it like a baby bird that shivered in his grip.

She haunted him.  She showed up idly in his thoughts like a random cloud in an otherwise brilliant sky.  She invaded him, overpowering any desire to smother her image and her eyes so deep inside of him...a ghost hell-bent on appearing, a bit of water slowly working its way through bricks and finding a way to collapse them.  She worked on him in a way that was quiet...careful.

The way winds carve rocks in the west...the way tides create sandbars and beaches...a slow pace that can impact even the most calloused parts of the earth...the most calloused parts of him...a subtle presence of slight pressure that creates the friction that molds underneath...

so when he was in his dark and ugly place, littered with bricks and pieces of mortar and unfinished walls...he wished for her...murmured words and her name and rubbed his calloused hands to feel a warmth...nothing compared to the friction of her but a poor-man's substitute...

And in his mind...in his thoughts...he was running.  Racing actually...hurtling himself down a hill, everything akimbo, a reckless pace, a relentless drive...full tilt...hurrying himself, flinging himself...to find her...to join her...to align with and be with her.  

Merely be with her.  Quiet.  Quietly.

But still with her.

He placed another brick in place and he remembered and he slightly smiled and turned to the pile of a thousand bricks and he knew he might be able to soon see her...at least perhaps when asleep.

songs from a car

Try that station...no, the one up from that one...

Her voice was slight in the sound of the winds and the music but it was a song to him, her southern tones lilting their way into his ear, spilling against him...certain words, certain phrases...she owned...nobody else could claim them. She was leaning forward in the car seat, turning knobs and working the dashboard...it was a rental and there were some things unfamiliar.

I think you need to push that left arrow he offered...and she just turned and looked at him, that flat gaze when she knew what she was doing...letting him know his suggestions were unhelpful.

Outside of them was the world, tilting to the west....a stretch of highway alongside the Pacific as a great blue ribbon as far as you could see...the sun shining billions of dimes on the surface.  It was warm, a day that felt like there was no need for a thermostat...the warmth of walking into a barn in late spring, a dry heat that didn't move at all.

He had first met her, or come to know her, from outside...a day unlike this day when he was barreling down the road and saw her on a tractor, an older man beside her (her father?)...and returning hours later she was still out there, doing whatever she was doing in this field, great motes of dust surrounding her...the older man gone but she was still driving and working against a barely-there sunset.  He thought about stopping for some random reason but decided it felt early....too early.  Besides, while she looked stunning from the road he couldn't quite tell.  He drove on.

And a few days later he drove past and saw the same thing.

A few more days and the same.

So he purchased a cooler and he filled it with ice and water bottles...on a whim he bought some beef jerky and some hot fries snacks and threw them into a bag.  He drove slowly past he farm but she wasn't there.  He sat there at the edge of the road, hearing the ice melting in the cooler and wondering what was next...

he couldn't find an FM station so he tried AM until he stumbled upon some weird jazz station...he was listening to it briefly when he heard a bit of a rumbling...he glanced in his rear view and saw a tractor on the road.  

She was driving slowly...up and coming behind him.

He heard the ice moving again against the cooler in the front seat.  He put on his flashers.

She slowly came up behind him and started to go around...when she got even with him from her seat she stopped.

Are you okay? she offered.

He looked up at her in the seat...got a pretty decent view.  She was sweaty, reflecting off of her forehead but she had amazing cheekbones and searing dark eyes.  

Uhm, yeah...I'm good.  I was actually waiting for you he said.

She looked ahead at the road in front and then turned to look behind her.  You've been waiting for me?

He looked down at his front seat.  He picked up a bottle of water from the cooler.  Actually, yeah.  Can I give this to you?

He held up the bottle, dripping wet from melting ice and condensation...she kind of released in a way and then said Toss it to me.

So he did and she caught it...first rubbing it across her forehead and then opening it up and downing it in one fell swoop.

So you said you were..."waiting" for me?  She looked ahead again to make sure no traffic was coming, her tractor in the one lane next to his...his car partially off to the other side of the road.

Yeah...he started...I've seen you working the field.  Do you know how you see something from afar...like across a way...and you find it intriguing?  Like discoverable?

She was looking at him flat...nothing to give.  Her hair was darkened by sweat, her hand holding the empty bottle.  I don't really know.

He shrugged a little.  I saw you out there, with someone...it was hot, it was muggy...I was driving by in my convertible with the air conditioning on and I was still hot...and I saw you out there in the middle of this heat and...and I guess I just wanted to give you something to bring you relief.

He patted the cooler, and just looked at her...looking at him.  He then burrowed into the bag and brought up a bag of Hot Fries.

Is this like some sort of bribe? she said

No...no....think of this as....like some sort of icebreaker.

Now in the convertible by the Pacific, she was twirling the knobs to find a suitable song.  From that day long ago she had stayed so aloof and so alone but she had allowed a piece of her to break free.  Her father, the man in the field so long ago had passed away...and she was far away from the farm.  But she had retained that same outer layer...that tough bit of facade...and he had tried to whittle away at it...tried to chip away.  

The ice had been broken, but just barely so.  She still looked with cautious eyes.  She still was quiet more likely than not.   But he looked past her to the Pacific, in its blue depth brilliance, and instead of recognizing that beauty he felt more drawn to the one beside him. Her complicated quietness.  Her depths.

She found a song and they drove on.

Echoes

I wake up and through squinted eyes and a bourbon hangover I see a yellowish gauze coming from the window...it is a reminder...I am alive...in a world...and somewhere in this vastness so are you.

A clock ticks silent seconds and I try to remember what time feels like when I am with you...a racing entity, speeding moments and feelings, unable to catch my breath, hurtling down stairs and inclines, I pray I could cement these moments, carve them on a tree, cutting bark to permanently imprint these frames of my memory...and I fail.  I fail to do anything but to catch a few exquisite moments that flashbulb in my mind before vanishing into tiny dots...

I want you to be a bruise so at least I can touch it, tap it and feel the feeling again...it wouldn't be pain, this bruise of you, but remembrance...a raw, rare sense on my skin...it might hurt to push but it would connect my skin to my brain and back to my heart and the colors would remind me of the marks you have made upon me.

Cotton candy memories spooled out of confectionary sugars, a taste of a stolen kiss, a glance, a stare...compiling these sweeteners on a stick to walk around the fairgrounds of my life.  Sticky, sweet, a quick sucking of my fingers to remind me of the remnants of a place...a time.

I sit in traffic, a thousand taillights...time is a straight line in a lane ahead...seemingly endless...I realize just how fleeting our time is and how there is not stopping...no stop and go...but rather a fluid drift like a river after a rain...a gentle nudging against the earth, a flow that is unstoppable, unrestrained...a calming of alighting upon the earth, the topography and easily floating along top, no obstacles, a trust we are heading to a place together...so very different than when sitting in my car going nowhere.

I hear a song and want to share it...I see a flower and want to grow it...water it and care for it until there is a time when it can be plucked from its darkened earth and in its most beautiful state be pressed into your hand...for you to enjoy, even if only briefly.

We are a flower at its fullest.  We are in a jar on a table emitting colors, vibrant and provocative.  We can be seen from across the room.  And thus we stay...we never wilt or wallow.  Rather, we are this snippet.  This beauty surrounded by the ordinary...

I wake up, with squinted eyes and blink against the gauze of yellow light coming in...and in my mind I hear the echoes of the colors and the flavors and the noises of you.