Bed Sheets

Sunday mornings...

Lounge with me...luxuriate.

Let me bring you splits of champagne that explode with a pop that wrecks the quiet color of the morning...

Let me push your sleep hair from your eyes, kiss a forehead and pile pillows behind you to get comfortable...

Let the talk be low...lazy.

Let me find socks to place on your feet.

Let there be no television, but rather songs played quietly in the background, an almost-white noise to just barely disrupt the silence.

There will be not talk of futures...no discussion of pasts.

Rather, it is just a conversation of the now.  What we are thinking in this quiet moment.

Outside the light is warming, the window filling with yellows and a bit of gold.  Almost the color of the champagne.

Inside you blink and regard me...and it is a favorite sight of mine.

After Dinner

Dirty...that's what he felt.  Unwashed. Unclean.

Before him, in a window over the sink, the view was towards the East, over the James River and its outlets to the Atlantic so the reflection was of the west, now pink and orange in a cold haze of an evening.

The dishes were stacked in lumps of circles, pots and pans discolored with the burnt renderings of a dinner.  It had been an amazing meal, served with decades of recipes, murmurings and suggestions of a spice here and there.  Fingers tucked into servings to offer a small taste.  Heads nodding in agreement.

Somewhere behind him was a slight murmur of argument or disagreement.  It was always like this when the liquor kicked in.

He was in the small side of the kitchen, the sound of faucets roiling as white noise.  He imagined it was like the churn of ferry engines across the James.  They just carried people...they didn't get involved.

He pushed hard scrapers against something baked on a cast iron skillet, keeping sure he didn't clean it with soap, an unforgivable sin with such southerners.  Meanwhile his fingers grew white from the soap and water.

Every so often he thought he heard her voice.  Her laugh.  It was picturesque.  It was a fingerprint.  He would recognize it for the rest of his life.  It was embedded upon him like a name.  She wouldn't fully appreciate it, but for him, scrubbing dishes in an evening it was perfectly fine.  It was what she did.  She interrupted.

A tiny tinny radio played...beach music, the type of southern music that allowed dancing and knees bouncing.  Weird that it was so late into November but that was this part of Virginia.  Southern, farm-raised, James-river echoes and frost in the mornings.  Sometimes sunrise was a perfect circle...but for tonight it was a long time coming.  Rather, in this small kitchen he only heard her voice in a room of others. Relatives, strangers, family...but as much as he was common she was exceedingly uncommon.  She never felt like that, but he knew.  And with every brush of his sponge across some dirty plate he tried to come up with words that revealed how truly uncommon she truly was.

He was left alone in cold suds that he would disrupt with hot splashes from the spigot.  That was his world...cold water, dirty from nights before...she was a hot disruption.

He thought he heard her voice coming closer...he tensed a bit...the way he always did in her proximity.  Closeness to her was was one of his favorite sensations...like the way you felt a lightning strike.  The way a magnet chooses its attraction.  The way you feel when a certain song plays.

It lands in your chest and plummets through floors...pulling wood and splinters with it.  And the bright sweet feeling that plumes.  When she was near...sometimes quiet...sometimes talking.  Either way it was kept inside of him like a window...opening and closing randomly.  Her reflection against it.  Her presence beside.

He splashed soap against a rather stubborn pan.  He exerted effort to get some stubborn stain.

When it cleared he raised up the dish and wiped it clean with a drying rag.  It was pristine.

Like her...rubbing against him to remove his stains, remove the dirt...the debris.  The parts of him that were unclean.

He watched the colors transition into an evening, the radio playing dance music and the laughter spilling from the larger part of the house.

His hands were warm, the towels a wet-warm in his hands, the stack of dishes and plates and pans miraculously clean beside him, awaiting their next role in the day.

He turned, to go back in...ready to be whatever she wanted him to be...cleaned, ready and perhaps hoping that she would pick him up and use him.

Autumn

The world is a convertible…best lived in the open air, the fresh cut wind tinged with the scent of firewood ablaze in an afternoon…

Summer slides over to let her sister, Autumn, slide past her in the seat beside.

The afternoons tilt earlier.  An apple falls.  Suntans fade.

The radio plays a song that conjures up a memory like dust being blown off of fine china.  Crisp and white, fine-bone…and in that arc of minutes as the song plays it feels like somebody just tossed those dish-plates off of a front porch to splinter and crash onto a driveway no longer heated by a summer sun.

Autumn is the color of a pumpkins eyes lit behind by a candle.  Her sister, Summer is blonde.  Autumn…well Autumn is Auburn.  Hair flecked with hints of colored leaves and earthen tones. She is blindingly more beautiful, her dirt-colored eyes reminders of how she buries the summer seeds and simply waits for Spring.  She lets you feel an afternoon warmth but cools you in the evening blues.  Overnight she taints you with a glaze of frost…perhaps to remind you of her aloofness.  Untamed.  Mercurial.  In a season of vines and stalks dying Autumn is a gatherer…pulling you deep into the ground. 

We scurry to find our hearts like kids in masks scurry for candy.

We feel the break of leaves under our feet.  We fan fires, hoping embers can reignite and bring some warmth to a suddenly cool room.

We find fault in Autumn as we reminisce of summer…we remember beaches and turquoise waters and now we only see the oranges and rubies, the scarlets and the salmons.  The colors are so glaringly close to each other these become shades of each other. 

There was a point where we were so close that we were blended colors of each other.

In winter there is only blacks and whites.  Autumn melds us…molts us.  We blend.

We blend like a leaf falls a thousand feet to join others, to nestle amongst the grounds and slumber peacefully.

The world is a convertible…we breathe in the changes in the season.  We cling to an outdoors to remember last season.

You were my calendar…my work week, my day to day.  You were my calibration, the expectation of a sunrise and a sunset.  The minutes, the slight nuanced changes of the day due to the season.

You were the colors.  You were the high foliage blooming beautiful.  You erased the humid summer.  You smelled like home.

Each year….goddamned each year I looked forward to the season of you.  The change, the aging, the gradually getting more beautiful…impossibly beautiful in the age of a year.

Autumn is a reminder of some things that are dying, and some things that are returning…if we only have such daunting patience. 

And there is the sensation that I am but one of those leaves…a bit discarded, set aside.  I tumble…I crumble beneath a footstep.

But perhaps in those brief turning moments I am attached to something more beautiful than I could ever be by myself.

The world is a convertible…breathe it in as you speed by.  It has its scents.  Particularly after summer.

Sparklers

From the moment it was lit in your hand, that brief sizzle and the convulsion of stunningly bright shards of fire made you feel magical, made you like some ancient conjurer of fire.  You held fire literally in your hands, waving it around, running with it streaming sparks behind you.

Sparklers barely left any smoke behind, they curled and blackened and collapsed in an ashen heap.  Easy to discard.

But god during those seconds when they hurtled bits of gold into the night, starting with the same amount of energy until they were finally silent, they became the official symbol of summer.  Anybody could hold one, mostly the smaller kids, but sparklers were silent and made no loud noises...they were perfectly quiet and explosive.

In a darkened lawn in an evening beneath barely visible planets and stars, the sparklers leapt and startled in the darkness like meteor showers, briefly shedding sparks and laughter across the grass.  Shining brighter than the fireflies in the trees behind them.

The problem with sparklers is they burnt too bright, too hot for too brief of a time.  They appeared in such dizzying light then disappeared.  The night became immensely darker when the sparkler fizzled out.  Almost disorienting, being guided by the light of the sparks and then absence.  No light.

I think sometimes that you were there, in my hand, emanating such brilliance and heat...cascading light upon me, a bit of flame slowly creeping towards me.

In your absence I feel a bit alone in the darkened grass, my eyes temporarily blinded and now blinking back the blackness.

It is soon to be July 4th.  I think I will think upon your gaze and the explosive resonance that it reflects upon me.

Naming Colors

Can you imagine coming up with the process of naming colors?

It was posed as a question, a straightforward one that on some level didn't do enough justice to how one came to describe something that had to be seen...versus felt...or tasted.  It's the one sense left open to interpretation and nuance.  Well maybe the sense of hearing...

It's like describing her to somebody else.

There is no way to do it justice...try to describe blue to somebody.  Half of the time it's going to be the color of the sky.  For me it would be the color of the Pacific Ocean.  To others it will be Tiffany...or the color of a bruise.  And each would be correct, each one exactly one hundred percent on target.  And each one different from each other.

So to describe her would be like describing a color...limiting it to pre-designed tints and textures...no real adequate way to uniquely describe her without falling way short in the desire to fully convey the exquisiteness of her.

The delicateness.

Feather-weight against him with the intoxicating scent of her...eyes brimming with leverage over him...knowing smiles on her barely lipsticked lips...

The fine down of hairs on the small of her back, invisible until you are right up against them.

Every day...every day he would walk outside, climb into a car and drive out into traffic, past trees and parks and the colored sky that most days would be blue.  He went out in a world surrounded by billions of colors...each one of them reminding him of her.

Summer

Somewhere a dog was barking.
Not an alarmed bark, just conversational...a few notes in the quiet late morning that barely disturbed the air.

They were high up in the barn, where the hay was usually stored but it was empty now, the space wooden and slotted, the air dry and a few strands of loose hay strewn on the floor.  They sat cross-legged facing each other, their bare knees touching.  They were sharing a popsicle, cherry red, and in the hot air it was slowly melting down her hand.  She would take a lick and then hold it out for him.  They were 14 years old, mouths a dark shade of color from the ice and when he leaned forward he went right by her hand holding the popsicle and kissed her on her mouth.

It was their first kiss.

She tasted like the sweet fruit of the ice, a candy-like moment, her mouth a little cold from the popsicle but in the heat of the hay-bin with summer starting to rise in the morning outside of them she tasted like he had always assumed she would.

New.  Fresh, foreign.  It stayed with him...long after...way long after.

He saw her now and again....a wave from a car window...a nod in church.  But like most things young and fresh and green there are movements sideways, new things to go see...the horizon of a 14 year old is a few streets, nothing like that of a 21 year old.

Later in that first-kiss summer they found ways to find each other...moments of intersection.  He would be mowing the lawn and she would appear with a glass of tea...an iced-laden glass condensing on the outside and frigid to his throat.  He would be there standing, shirtless, bits of blades of cut grass clinging to his skinny frame, his shins green.  She would smile and in the heat of the afternoon she felt like a quick burn on his skin.  She had a knowing smile...she knew she pleased him.  He drank the glass empty, returning it and briefly glancing fingers.  She walked boldly away.  He kept on with the lawn.

Or an evening when the fireflies were in full bloom...he was walking by her house and heard her laugh...knew it like you know your own voice.  Like when you hear the first few notes of a song and immediately recognize it.  He stopped, listening to her voice call out like a siren, her high notes of laughing and then a whisper to another girl's ear.  He had taken a few steps when he heard his name called...but not like a question or a surprise...rather like a statement.  Like she knew he would be stopping by and just said it flat and factual.  He loved the sound of his name in her voice.  Even at that young age, surrounded by the bright twinkle of golden lightning bugs, he understood attraction...he understood why the males burnt brightly in the hopes of finding a female.  He wished...he remembered thinking...he wished he could burn bright for her.  She laughed, called his name again and he laughed back and said hello...and for a moment they stayed like that...until her friend started along again and he waved his goodbye, the fresh cut lawn flickering with fireflies, the evening a bit humid but with a breeze.  He didn't know the word yet but what he felt was yearning.  He couldn't explain it and that made him unsettled...departing in the dusk and following the white sidewalk back to his home.

Years later, after he had joined the Army and she had gone to school there was a town picnic.  It was very hot and humid, and the crowd was moving slow and lazily, mixed amongst park tables and lawn chairs and blankets spread across the ground.  He had somewhere perhaps hoped that she would be there, but had no definitive expectation.  He had learned of the word yearning and while it was now just a bit of a pilot-light feeling for him, low and quiet inside of him, he knew that the sight of her would perhaps change the conflagration.

He didn't see her though.  He saw her mom, and she had fussed over him and his short hair.  He had a medal, it had been written up in the paper...but he was dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt.  She was spending the summer traveling...looking for work but mostly following a boy.  He smiled at her mom when she said that it wasn't worth the follow.

He asked her if she might be home soon...he was receiving new orders and wouldn't be around much longer.  Her mom wasn't sure.

In the walk home, where the pines were across the low flat field the first fireflies of the evening were starting to blink.  A few low, some adventuresome ones braving the higher limbs, most likely perfect for when the bats would start to appear.  The town was behind him, but the grasp of it still held him..the tiny streets and the park...the white church with its steeple and the fresh cut lawns of summer.  He heard a dog bark...not a dangerous sound but a call...perhaps wondering if another animal was out there to respond.  He felt the bit of sweat slide down his cheek and he remembered the first-kiss summer and the float of fireflies and the announcement of a dog bark, the canopy of ghost-like stars and the smoke from backyard barbecues...the passing by of slow-moving cars and laughter from porches...he breathed in the things that were still her from his past and he could easily pluck from his mind and from his yearnings his memory of the  newly discovered and never forgotten taste of her.

Scrimp

There is no picture here. There couldn't be.

The main reason is even a picture would fall woefully short of you in my eye. Dreadfully scrimping on the details of you when you frame in my iris.

I do remember sights. I remember an encounter in a supermarket with white halogen lights and bright tile, a cart filled with boxes and wines. The color of spices on the shelves.

But you. You were delightful. You barely cracked a smile as the surprise of our encounter registered on your brain.

But that was then.

Now I get to see you again. Albeit briefly.

And you forgot that I love the whole of you that you may have forgotten.
You do not see what I have grown to expect. The familiar. The comforting. The exquisite unique but always the same face and body.

Ageless. Unrelenting.

I could see a million sunsets and still be drawn to the beach.

You are my horizon. The edge on me. From where I get to stand you are not a sunset because you are not a nightly scene.

But goddamn.

When I get the slight chance to spend a moment with you I am inspired. I am reminded. You are my muse. My pallet. My colors. My walk amongst a hallway of art.

You may wear yourself down in your mind. But in my world you stun. You eclipse. You echo and reverberate and consume my thoughts.

You. Your gentle movement into me.

You are so new. So familiar. I cannot scrimp on the words you compel me to describe the amazingly influential impact you bring.

I memorize you. Only to find it is more beautiful when you appear.