Simply

She didn’t look like her name.

Rather, she looked like the way an astronomer would describe a night sky, with very specific attributes, very complicated orbital arrangements, involving physics and undiscovered theories.  Perplexing, mystifying, overwhelming…and to render a few letters of the alphabet to describe her in a single name just fell way too short.

She didn’t look like what other people called her…hailed her, shouted out over the crowd noise in a bar filled with people escaping the rain. 

Rather, she arrived with colors that only existed in Monet’s mind…or J. M. W. Turner’s…yes, she was made of the same Crayon box as the rest of us…but at times, when certain light encountered her, when certain backgrounds revealed, she created whole new mixtures.  An artist’s palette.  The sun after a rain storm, the black and blue clouds of a summer thunder, the slightly pale marble color of her skin along the waistline when her shirt raised slightly and I caught a glimpse of her.  She was an American girl, but she possessed colors that I had never really seen…never really knew existed, but hoped that I might see again but never would…sidewalk chalk rained upon slightly.

She didn’t look like what she introduced herself as when meeting new people…more formality, more tradition. 

 

Not like the way she was just beneath that surface, in the same way you can stand on a beach and watch polite waves but know there is a strong under-tow…she never planted red and black flags to alert you to such dramatic unseen forces until it was way too late…as you swam hopelessly against her.  

She didn’t look like her name, but she always responded when I whispered in her ear.  And at other times, when her name was all I could find to say.

A Collision of Sorts

It was evening, on the cusp of June, and they were on the wide-plank porch that had once been in her family, an elevated spot where the dusk could settle against the rhythm of crickets and a star was too light to see yet.

She had her hair pulled back, a look he loved as it gave him the full range of her angles, moved the color from her hair into the full-throat of her eyes and it made her younger, made her more innocent, made her appear more vulnerable. 

 

I am just a butterfly-wing smudge, aren’t I?

She looked up from her reading at his question, her eyes a little narrow.  In the haze of the evening they almost appeared to be the color black.  But he knew they were just a very dark brown.  He knew because he had been very close to them once, particularly as they were closing.

A what? 

A smudge.  From a butterfly-wing.  

She put her book down, a book of poems that he had bought her once that she still leafed through…in it he had underlined certain passages before giving it to her…tiny scribs of notes, stars where appropriate, and perhaps influencing her on certain passages before she could conclude in her own mind.  He expected that it annoyed her, like revealing an ending, but in the end he still felt it was a sharing.  He had purchased it in an old book store while traveling…a nook in a block in an old city.  It wasn’t full of love poems…rather it was filled with tales of the oceans, views of the nighttime, the descriptions of sounds in a thunderstorm.  He loved it and he wanted to share it with her because he found, while initially reading it himself, that there were so many parts where he imagined he might find himself in them…and if he had, he most had hoped she would be there too.  So he bought it, used, and took it back to the hotel where he wrote in it with the hotel pen…he earmarked certain pages…the paper was old, the leather binding loose, but it felt like the spill of parts and pieces of beauty strung together in something he could hold in his hand.  And he wanted for her to hold it too, just in case the feelings he discovered might be discovered in her.

I’m not really following you, she finally said.

He stood up and walked from the chair he was in up to the patio post at the top of the stairs.  He could smell her lotion as it warmed in the slight wind, a unique smell to her but also one generally available in many stores and once in awhile another girl would be wearing it and his mind would go back to her.  The flatlands rolled out in front of him, and the breeze was just enough to stave off the night-bugs.  He briefly imagined her having an electric bug-zapper hanging off the corner of the porch, lightning whenever some poor June Bug or something crossed the lethal threshold and he grinned at the thought.

What are you smiling about? She asked.

Nothing…just had a funny thought.

He turned back to her.  I was driving the other day…fast down the highway because there was nobody around, fields deep and uncut on either side, and I could see for miles so I wasn’t afraid of cops…it was warm enough to just let the windows down and crank up the radio.

He walked a few steps towards her and she watched him as she usually did, unrevealing and unveiling.  Again, with her hair back she cut through the distance and her face was extraordinarily refined…the obvious cheekbones and the sculpture of her that had transfixed him…if she had closed her eyes she would have looked beautifully asleep…carved from marble.  A hint of sunburn had painted her nose a shade of cinnamon.

And as I was driving I caught the slight movement of a large butterfly, just flying on the air currents warming from the highway pavement…and of course it had tumbled in front of me and while I didn’t want to hit it I just couldn’t swerve so I got very close and then it got pulled into the trailing wake of the car and it collided slightly with the top of the windshield.  It left this gorgeous yellow thumbprint, these lines and I don’t think I killed it as it was just a glance, but I know we hit.  We met.  It left a slight scrape on the car.  

 The air was still now, the landscape quiet.  She regarded him, her fingers lightly tapping at the book in her hands.  

So I thought about it, as I was driving and I looked back in the rearview to see the butterfly tumbling, still hopefully alive, beautiful and unexpected but no chance against me and my car…and as I was driving I saw the yellow smudge and I wondered sometimes about me colliding against you…and perhaps I don’t leave a mark…I don’t leave a dent…perhaps all I leave, on the part of you where I have touched, is the simple smudge.  Just like that butter-fly wing.

She looked up at him, slightly blinking. 

 

So…you’re comparing me to a car?

He let out a slight laugh, knowing that her first defense was to play offended.

Nooooo….no, I’m not.  It’s a metaphor.

I know what it is…but you’re comparing yourself to a butterfly wing…which means I must be the car.  Or the windshield.  Not sure which is worse.

When she tended to get this bothered her mouth tightened slightly and her arms crossed.  And when she spoke her head moved side to side.  Classically angered.

Fine, I take back the imagery.  I take back the question.

You can’t take it back…you asked a question…it’s now my obligation to respond.

You’re not obligated

.

If I don’t answer you’ll just ponder your own version.

Probably.

So let me answer it then.  She pushed herself back into the chair, looking sort of down at the wooden porch beams.  Without the benefit of her hair falling forward in her face, he could see her furrowing and narrowing her eyes.

No.

No what.

No, she said.

Okay…so I am not a butterfly-wing smudge.

Nope.  And I am not a car.

Fair enough.

And do you want to know why I am not agreeing with the smudge hypothesis?

He walked over and sat next to her, and she turned and was facing him but when she spoke she turned again and looked back out over the purplish evening.

Because smudges come off.

He watched her lips moving as she said it, it was actually almost a whisper.  Like a reluctance.  And sometimes she shared only reluctantly and sometimes she shared knowingly.  Like she knew that he actually had left smudges on her before, many times, with her ability to erase, lick the napkin and rub vigorously to get the spot out…but sometimes, when he wasn’t around her and the evening was draining in ink and the night noises were starting she realized something he might have said, or something he might have written and perhaps she missed that piece and had forgotten to try to simply wipe it away.

And it had stayed with her.

Numbing Agents

Spread a thought of you, spread an image of you across a hole in me. 

Fix me, even if temporarily. Give me a thin veneer and a paper-sheer cover. Clothe me in the lightest, most briefest of thoughts. 

Let tea leaves of you join the boiled parts in me, spreading a dark warming substance of our mixings like a tea that I can then drink you in, warming, numbing. Take a taste yourself, past your lips and let the honey of you sweeten it further. 

I ache. 

I adore. 

I let the puncture wounds of a day staple me with their mundane and trivial purposes. I put a finger or two on a few to no avail. 

A thought of you paper cuts my mind. And sits there, waiting as I go about my day until it catches on something unexpected and fucking reopens. 

No cloth or gauze to hold over, and if applied would only see the bloom of you expanding in a color beneath it. 

I prefer you in my bloodstream where you can course in a hot blend and blur versus the cold gap in my mind when you imprison me in fine icy crystals. But still cannot stay numb. 

The burn of you I can absorb, as the skin scorches and dies and blackens. The ice of you I cannot. 

It is why I seek to find small pieces of you, small parts of you to plug these tiny holes that you have left in me.  Remnants. Discards. 

I will take what I can take, to be able to be numb, just for a moment, even though you may be so very close to me. 

Broken--That Felt Like a Goodbye

That felt like a goodbye

It wasn’t the slam of a door, a violent act of closure.  It wasn’t a hurtled glass to smash into smithereens.  

It wasn’t tearing up a letter, shards falling in rough uncut triangles.  It wasn’t the emptying of a vase, water and flowers strewn on the floor, stomped into petals and stems.

It wasn’t a five year old in a Toys-R-Us, screaming while being dragged out of the store without the requisite favorite toy.

It wasn’t the tightening of a smile when encountered unexpectedly.  It wasn’t the diplomacy of such encounter when “how do you do” is as close as you get to…words that had once been murmured in millimeters away.

It wasn’t the squeal of tires, leaving dark grooves in the pavement, squirreling away from the scene. 

It isn’t a ringing phone disregarded into voicemail.

It wasn’t the song that suddenly comes on the radio, in traffic, in rain, and in the quiet car-stillness when the world has shrunken and your hair is still wet from the rain…and you let a refrigerator-light blink of my memory come in and you rapidly, maybe violently turn the radio station and maybe just clench your jaw.

It wasn’t walking through a darkened parking garage and remembering a different parking garage.

It wasn’t a drink at Christmas, an eve, when discovery was clarity, and bourbon was bourbon and the what-ifs started getting bigger and soon the sky turned a slate existence and driving home the radio seemed to know what was best played for that moment.

It wasn’t a nail tapped into my chest.  It wasn’t a bruise.

It wasn’t a staple, a pinprick, a paper cut.

It wasn’t a splinter.

It wasn’t the sting of a bee.

It wasn’t the fucking boring mundane afternoon when papers and emails and decisions and data was piling up and it didn’t really touch your soul but you never let things touch your soul so nevermind but if something did than God forbid…and when you came home and threw out leftovers were there things, things that reminded, things that demanded, things that perhaps compelled you and yet you still tossed those things into the garbage.  And as you looked at the remnants was it perhaps those remnants that represented at times the best of things but were now just that…the past…as somebody else came in and wondered why you hadn’t taken the garbage out?

Rather…in the end....

it felt more like a barely lifted finger.  From somebody sitting in a chair, comfortable and cool, hands on the heavy fabric, deigning to move the forefinger up in the air, just an inch high, as I walked slowly away.

And knowing I’d been put in my place.

Sunday Confessions

It was a lazy Sunday morning and she was asleep still, her face quiet in a pose against the pillow, head slightly angled facing the ceiling, her gentle features softened in the dappled light coming in from the dawn.

Her hair framed, slightly askew, for she had showered the night before and merely let it air dry.  He smiled at the capriciousness of the strands.  She looked very much at peace, lips not even barely parted and her chest rose in quiet swells like the glass on a early-morning ocean.

He hated to disrupt her, but figured the small act of getting out of bed would likely do so…so instead of waking her with his movement he leaned over and kissed the corner of her mouth.  She inhaled, and stirred, rolling away from him and in a barely-audible murmur he heard her say one word—Coffee.

Her voice was thick with sleep, a husk that he had heard many times but it also sounded like the times when her mouth was pressed against his ear…but in those moments she wasn’t mentioning coffee…rather something usually all together different.  

But for now, the voice demanded the traditional breakfast drink so he headed downstairs. 

And for now, he paused…halfway down the stairs he stopped and lingered on the stairway.  After a few minutes he stole back up where the door was already opened and he could see her facing towards him.  She had fallen back asleep. 

He watched her for a moment, knowing her annoyance if she woke up and caught him staring but for now she didn’t.  It’s rare to be able to stare at somebody without creeping them out…the benefit of sleep is getting away with the stare.  It might still be a little weird but to him it was like admiring a painting…her perfect eyebrows, the tiny nostrils, her lips pliant and slightly upward like a slight smile.  Her skin was flawless.  

He left the doorway and headed back down.

One of the more interesting morning noises is the sound of coffee percolating…he wished they still had those old silver coffee makers, with the liquid bubbling up in the clear top…a visual bit of evidence that something magical was happening between boiling water and ground up coffee beans.  The louder the noise the closer to being finished.  He had heard it growing up and he remembered wondering what the fuss was all about.  Now he knew.

In the ancient days supplicants would ply the royals with all sorts of offerings…ambrosia, lavenders, small trinkets of gold and perhaps some wild small bird from a far-off exotic island.  He traipsed through the yard until he had collected a small thatch of daisies, wild ones, yellow and fresh and he clipped them into a small gathering.  

He placed the clutch next to the coffee on a small wooden tray…steam rose from the cup and he inhaled it slightly.  Outside the sun was coming up at a decent angle, streaming through the windows and throwing their keystone squares on the floor.  The house was quiet, still, a few birds outside the only disturbance.  He loved this part of the day.

He carefully ascended the stairs and was able to silently enter the room since the door was left open.  She hadn’t moved at all.

A tiny icicle thin remembrance broke in his mind, of a time when they had first met, and she had kept such reserve, kept such quietness…in his memory she was like she was now, quietly beautiful, unspeaking, perhaps dreaming of something that he would never quite know.  

But she was here, and however far away she might have been in her mind, she was now in front of him, barely dressed, almost naked beneath the sheets.  

He wanted to speak to her, wanted to let the words that percolated in his mind be revealed, come out steaming and wake her with their energy.  He wanted her to know that the day that started with her in it was his favorite part of the day.  That her proximity was humbling, that she would stay a second, a minute, let alone an hour was more than he could absorb at times.  

He wanted to wake her, but in the end she woke herself…that sweet change in breathing rhythms, the slight stretch as she blinked and looked around.  She saw him standing there in the doorway and she had a smile that looked like fortune.

You brought me coffee, she said, in that voice now slightly fuller but still reminiscent of sleep.

He wanted to tell her that he had brought so much more…a mind full of cravings, an imagination full of metaphors for incandescence, a body flushed with energy at just the slightest view of her…but in the end he just said 

Yeah, I brought you some coffee.