decadent tranquility

676. a canvas of them

2009-07-18T10:21:00.001-05:00

Why was it so cold. Why did his absence grow the room and everything seemed smaller, the familiar routes between rooms, longer? Grabbing brush, erecting canvas, paint flew as magic from a wand, thoughts as hues, mood as light, shadow, frustration. Would he come? Would he open? Would he understand that none of it, none of the past was necessary. She didn't want what was. Nor the coloring of what was. Not even the weight of judgment and expectation, the friction of the sea, reluctantly allowing passage, of ship, of time, of what would and could not be stopped. Why this silly attachment to control? Why did he do it? What did he fear? And why oh Janus did he not see her arms extended, ready, waiting, willing, wanting to catch, to hold, the vessel for his water, not shaping, just holding. And still the paint flew as thoughts, as questions. Yellows and oranges and reds sprayed forth. Strokes uninhibited of form, of purpose, of goal. This is how he should be. She his canvas, open as white, textured in care to catch each nuance of pain. She could absorb it, all of it, if only he would brush her, paint her, open his tubes upon her. Caress her with his sable. To blend his pigment into her, blurring a this and that, a his and her, creating something other, something more, a canvas of them.

taking requests

2009-07-17T22:57:00.002-05:00

In the mood to do audio readings and commentary. Please leave your requests in comments.

1944 (of leather remembered)

2009-07-17T14:58:00.023-05:00

She remembered spreading her legs and she remembered the cold metal against her hands as she reached to brace herself; and the cold air between them, if only for a second, a lull between waves it had seemed. The ambulance chimed in the wind of exertion, jiggling with bottles and needles and other loose bits for healing, for saving, for puncturing, entering, injecting serums and opiates and she felt herself, legs spread, knees bent, as a vein, a flood of warmth entering her, filling, stretching, fitting, and the thought, strange as it seemed then and strange as it seems now, of leather, clear as saddle soaped, of blooded neighing, perhaps the smell of wood, of hunt, of chase, the bark of a dog somewhere, of pheasants over the shoulder and shells being slipped into smooth bores, unhinged and vulnerable to those casings, a cold touch of metal upon metal, a trigger away from fire, from light, from that noise that silenced all other noises, of feathers flying and falling, the rush of the kill, of blood, of leather, of that leather worn smooth, spit-polished. This, like her warm café au lait, such the resemblance of the young man filling her cup, was he remembered, twirled in fading memory, with each petit sip a familiar warmth, over lip, tongue, held and savored, each Tuesday morning as it was that day he walked into her hospital, so many Tuesdays before.

Reading and Commentary

675. his chary tongue

2009-07-16T16:58:00.016-05:00

The dining hall on Bravo, angles of glinting steel, fit, annoyingly, the coldness of his cliffed face. He ate, slowly. Too slowly. Disgustingly slow, his arm an apathetic waterwheel, turning without thought or bogged down, perhaps, with too much. Only the sound of his spoon scraping the bowl, and the sound of his lips slurping in that irritating way of his augered for space in her throbbing headache. And damn if in his not looking at her, he seemed to hide, his chary tongue lizard-like in silence, retreating with soup back into his dark cave. Together they sat, but he ate alone, chewing Janus knew what, loudly. She removed her caressing hand from his inner thigh, and yet he breathed then as before, as if his thoughts were color and everything and everyone else but a blur of gray at the edge.

She took a napkin and scribbled a few words. He pretended not to see, maybe couldn't see, his pain jealous of hand or help; just a little longer the siren call of agony, of loss, of grief demanding its due. Commanding it seemed, his attention, all of it, as he appeared not to see her leave. His eyes somewhere in his head.

I can't heal what I can't see. I'll be in my quarters if you want me. Don't come without your tongue.

He placed the napkin back down carefully, ironing it flat with the edge of his hand, staring at the whiteness as he once did at the sand, the sand before the cottage, where on his lap lay a flaming head of sun; or so it felt from the heat she breathed into his belly, her pearl lips translucent, iridescent in smile, in him, of an us in the sacred bond of release. A falling she would have said.

674. the elegant grace of the fall

2009-07-16T10:54:00.006-05:00

The exercise was simple. Sit. Watch. And in time, from the rose, would be a falling, a petal overcome in time, by age, coming to terminal (in the sisterly way of leaves in autumn) like a train at the end of route. A slow, gentle succumbing. Taken with an innocent breeze from the motherly lips of a blue wind. A return to roots, to the fertile dark soil, the tail of the circle caressed, joined, connected in the way of fish and water, of sun and sky, of inhale and exhale.

As a chatelaine to be, this lesson, understanding to observe the unnatural resistance of life self-centered, misunderstanding it's place, role within the greater play, act, performance, this lesson. above all others, the elegant grace of the fall, the eternal truth of the circle, of relaxing into the dulcet rhythms of biology, of relationship, of love and letting go of ideas, of constructed constructs masquerading, of, as was revered, surrender.

Three weeks is a long time when all you have are your thoughts. Your thoughts and your past. Your thoughts and your training. Your thoughts and the molasses of a future moving like lava within the caged cavity of demoniacal desire. She knew all this. Like a fly to flypaper. If her petal were to fall, she wanted that fall in his arms, to see his eyes close the act of her life, his limbs holding the nesting of her heart, his breath the final kiss upon her lips sending her, her falling, to the dark soil.

__________

Thought percolating, she thought of Trev, of verse. Reaching for parchment, she quenched thirst of paper for ink as soil for rain:

I remember clearly the day
I learned to read
again

when the ocean rose up
and slapped a smile
across my face

and the sun sent
its arrows
upon my back

and your toes laced mine
upon a sea of sand
hands wet as kisses

I knew then
your verb
and not a few adjectives

like so many grapes
bleeding
my tongue rouge

673. Eternal Falling

2009-07-15T10:07:00.012-05:00

Mairi watched Bravo depart. Growing smaller. And smaller. Just a star now. Extinguished in the great black coldness. An ocean, ink for water. Murky as the future. Left and left. Gauche feet. Gut gouache. Seeds in the belly. A growing hunger. Ambition driving rain of duct. Between and between. A landscape pocked with the unfamiliar. Moon barren. Dark side cold.

"Your transport is ready."

"Thank you," said Mairi, the voice, her voice sounding distant as if she was overhearing a conversation. "How long to Arc'teryx?"

"Three weeks."

She followed the drone through a sea of metal, of voices unknown, whispers in winter snow, the raven hungry, the dead buried. A walk not unlike one taken a lifetime ago, maroon cloak pulled tight against the wind, hair like flags in the open air, nose pert, alive with the breath of nature amidst the garden of Eternal Falling in the house of Chatelaine.

__________

In her private quarters aboard the transport, Mairi watched the liquid fireworks of the universe slip by. Her chest felt like the nebula before her eyes, mysterious and seductive, beauty pure, as a hand leading. She drank wine, red to match her lips, the crimson of life, of blood, of the wine that warmed the turmoil within; as if a furnace she stoked with each sip, twirling tongue, imagining two where there was just one. She could not read. Too many thoughts barricading the entrance to the written word, pages feeling old, of a story known, static, dusty when air she needed, like a swimmer, like a baby born, to gulp and grasp the invisible tether. To pull this life into her lungs knot by knot, to fill as a balloon and rise to the light. She sighed. The only sound. Her only companion.

__________

She closed her eyes in the silence and began to float. Her cloak unbuttoned, hinged on shoulders bare, a curtain to the ground. Knees delicate and denuded, bent and spread with intent; cool air as a whisper flowed upon the river of dusk between her pale mountains erect, ripe of aching cherry. He had taught her to go inward, to travel the path of those electrical impulses, to caress and massage in the way of dreams sweet. Each touch a finger, of tongue educated in the ways of solitude and water, of clear glass filling and emptying, of that twin gateway of softness before the moat of orgasmic falling, falling as leaves, as petals, as the sun that rises must fall with a kiss of the horizon, dipping, melting, glistering out into the nothingness of abject surrender to a night drunk on stars, afire in the pen of meteors castings the warm flickering glow of a smolder burning beyond sight.

___________

In the silence of her cabin, skin bare, breathing the view, floating as on a calm lake. She exhaled. Lips full, blushed, agape. Limpid eyes of glass. Hands drained as legs tremulous in effort released the ecstasy of creation. Hair damp of exertion essayed. She eased into sleep deep as the cavern of her sorrow, as the cavity of her hope.

672. the rain and the rainbow

2009-07-14T17:25:00.004-05:00

Three hours had passed and yet it seemed three days. She did not come. She did not call. It was as if he had plunged off the side of a cliff and she just kept walking. His skin felt heavy. Like a wet coat. His beard growing in weeds, a briar to match the thorns of his past, of flowers and thorns, of the thorn flower he wished he still had.

He reached for paper. Reached for ink. And one sat beside the other stone mute. And this is where she found him the next day. His face as blank as the paper. His blood as still as the ink. His thoughts as lost as the bracelet of a little girl dropped down a well. Until she slapped him. Her hand a map upon his face and what came forth, came as orgasm unutterable, his shame unleashed as nature unleashes the bowel, as a woman unleashes a man.

Em listened in the way a cave listens to the ocean, wet with wicked waves of tongue, lashed with words wanton as whiskey. Together the pain intoxicated, conspiring in the tell, complicit in the listen. His words rolled forth on breath both sweet and enticing, eidolons salacious, leather burnished, arms and legs spread and secured. His neck craned in the memory. His veins bulging like inverted purple rivers and what was pale became poppy red.

A rain of fist. Unable to sit. Her hands, her bosom, that red hair protecting him, the bathing, washing, tucking, holding, touching. It all came out. She had succored him, held him soft and hard, dry and wet, minds locked, caressing his neurons, a private Chatelaine. From death to life, from darkness to light, from sodomy to her, her eyes, her lips, her healing heat, a pillow of flesh fresh with bath, gentle primrose clean as a new day. She was the rain and the rainbow. The mother and the lover. The salvation of his virginity.

671. the way she looked

2009-07-14T14:09:00.002-05:00

Trev had loss weight. His face a construction of triangles. More it seemed each day. Each with an edge and one had the feeling that what laid at the summit of that geometry would require much rope and skill to ascertain.

"She's gone now," said Em.

"I know," said Trev.

"You were the only one not there."

"And?"

"I could see it in her eyes, the way she looked."

"And pray tell how would that be?"

"Just as you have described it. On a rainy day. Looking across the brown and black and gray of the dock, looking for one primrose head, bobbing with the desire to see you."

His chest rose and dropped as if the sigh were the breath of a weightlifter. The angles of his face sharpened into shades and shadows like ledges. Like a face of knife edges.

Em continued. "She whispered something to me. When I hugged her goodbye."

"I don't want to hear it."

"Well, you're gonna hear it."

"If I wanted to hear it, I would have been there."

"It was her wish. Would you deny her a last wish? Is your heart that insecure? Or is it just the demons of your secrets that you fear?"

"Say it. Just frailing say it!"

Em moved closer. Lowered her voice and leaned into his ear as a bird into the side of a cliff. "She said to tell you that in every birth were the seeds of death. She said you'd know what that meant."

Trev pulled back. "I have no idea what that means."

"Is that right?"

"Absolutely."

"Then why would she say that you would deny the phrase? Why Trev?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I suggest you learn yourself up quick. In your own quarters."

670. the rein of heart

2009-07-14T11:05:00.002-05:00

"Mairi, may I come in?" asked Kyra.

The door opened. Kyra stepped in, museum quiet and clean the quarters. Like a docent of hair autumn coiffed, her kit organized, clothes folded, bed made lake smooth in the way of one trained in the sartorial arts, stood Mairi. Elegant sadness, flowing steel, cheeks doll symmetrical below eyes limpid in the vision of heart, reins held beyond articulation. Bearing dignified as death, her fingers blanched in the way of deep space, graceful in length, manicured as gardens of state. "If you've come to change my mind, I will allow you to speak."

Kyra smiled of cheek only. Starlight evident in the glass of her eye. "I've come not of word, but of ear, not to talk, but to listen, not to command, but rather hold."

Mairi sighed. "Have a seat. I have nothing to say, which is not to say I do not appreciate your gesture."

"I know."

Mairi continued to pack. Her movements measured as if the very reach of limb and climb of leg could control the chime to come, paint texture to the hour with each slow breath, each soft step. Kyra watched as one athlete watches another, admiring the choreography of past training bearing fruit, ripe, mature. She moved like water flowing, continuous, without beginning or end, a geometry of curves in dance.

"You know," said Mairi after some time, "I must go."

"I know."

"I would rather a goodbye without ceremony."

"As you wish."

"Ceremony seems so final. And there is always crying. And I can't bear either."

"Mairi."

"Yes."

"You will always be a part of Bravo. And you will always be welcomed back."

Kyra stood, opened her arms and as the sun dips below the horizon, Mairi poured herself into the melanic leather of the one taut and tight, her red hair looking like a torch held in the night of Kyra.

669. something changed

2009-07-13T16:53:00.007-05:00

Von raised his amber glass and returned it clear. A slight scorching of the throat, this waterfall of fire into the gullet, spirit dancing in the nose as the eye. "Tell me what changed?"

Kyra looked up like one upon waking from a sleepless sleep. She stared at Von as one stares in a mirror after some absence, seeing what should be familiar look strangely unfamiliar. He tilted his balding head and raised one gray brow.

"When?"

"When you had blood on your hands and the number slain were as stars in a dark sky." His voice trailed, hand unsteady on the bottle and again his glass returned to a golden hue. "You've never spoken of the matter."

"No one has ever asked."

Von inhaled his drink allowing the fingers of libation to widen his eyes. "I'm asking. Something changed. Very subtle. And I can't put my finger on it."

"I don't know. But I feel it too. Felt it. As if I'm not alone. My hands have never looked the same. The images of that night are like cobwebs, the kind that no matter how many times you sweep them away, the next day, they're back. I remember losing control in the way that a gear slips; in the way that once it slips the first time, you always wonder when it will slip again; such that the canvas of my days is hued with crimson memory and my actions governed from the dais of an event long ago. So, I suppose, I live with a multitude whereas before, there was just the clutch of Valla, Papa and I, and life was good. And simple."

"And now?"

"Nothing seems as it was. And as it was seems another lifetime. My days dim as night in the way of a life rotating once every forty years, has turned a shoulder to the sun. An accumulation of debt greater than the days to repay it, for how does one repay a life taken. Or several dozen for that matter."

"Do you want me to answer that?"

"No."

"I didn't think so."

"Fill my glass and let us drown our answers."

Von poured. They drank.

"By the way, has Mairi spoken to you?"

"About leaving?"

"Yep."

668. galloping gently

2009-07-13T10:28:00.003-05:00

Em leans into Trev as two statues carved from the same block of marble. The slab of his chest galloping gently against her ear, soothing and soughing like the sound of the ocean in a shell as sighs well and subside, rise and fall with the cantabile purling of a morning stream. His hands lace themselves, a bow on the small of her back she wants never to loosen, the gift in the wrapping, delight suspended in the amber of this anticipatory moment, magical as youth before the cliff of age, before the cares and concerns of gravity weave their rivers, knowing the fall to come, but not just yet.

vertebra dunes

2009-07-12T18:10:00.005-05:00

vertebra dunes whisper
rivers of golden curves
choreographed in flickering shadows
upon a sea of cotton
and a caravan of fingers
move like languid camels
to sighs steady as sunrise
shimmering in noon heat
between tremulous lips
and cool murmuring tongues
that dance below moons taut
as flowers flow
in the lake of fire
and minds twine
the wicked routes
of trade bartered
spice quartered
and fruit martyred

in the warm
commerce

the nugatory road

2009-07-12T14:19:00.005-05:00

as there are days senseless
as spent shotgun shells

as nouns and verbs scatter
like so many autumn leaves

before the nugatory road
of my hunt

and my hands ache for wood
and my lungs to bite

the sharp end of winter
drained dry of purgatory

in the sweet sweat of labor
returned by gravity

from the pools
of my eternal salvation

found between corkscrewed
tresses

falling as daggers
from her quarter moon smile

saturday morning sketches

2009-07-11T10:40:00.003-05:00

eyes like drops of sapphire paint in a bucket of white, liquid marbles, december day clear, the kindness of a young school teacher, alive with the road ahead, gated lashes, a gentle arch of brow plucked, punctuating the cheek, rising, highlights drawn in sun upon morning dunes of snow

she tilts her head. parts her lips. a touch of tongue silent as the lesson loud, bells of school ringing in the mind, of old wooden desks squawking and the perfume of fresh chalk sacrificed, of large clocks with black hands and white faces and ceiling fans twirling slow, casting lazy humid shadows, of buttoned blouses and pleated skirts and the easy movements of languid afternoons, of heels metronoming the hall beyond frosted doors and still those lips, two curves to the well beyond time where hours become minutes and women become memories

____________

she said goodbye like the wind, like a child, like an old person who couldn't be bothered with sentiment, afraid of betraying the heart with the eye in the gloaming of relationship, of the forked path, of the tragedy of geography, of a mother watching her son slip away

vase without flowers

2009-07-09T11:49:00.002-05:00

Within her arms he hung. A rag doll. Mouth open. Eyes blank, staring, the dull white of polished glass. No one stopped, sweeping by her as water roiling around a boulder. She stood against the stream of bodies, of time, of life and death dancing in her mind, held in her embrace. His blood seeping into the white fabric of her blouse, the last of life leaving, leaving her standing, a shell of herself as if something within her had opened and all of her had voided leaving just a frame, her skin and bones, as empty as the vessel he had once seen, as empty as that vase without flowers, standing upon the grave of his body, empty.

like waves in sunset

2009-07-05T16:48:00.003-05:00

Her hair rose and fell from her head like waves in sunset, on fire with twilight's colors, the autumn hues of gold and raw sienna. Each brush against his face, fingers of flame, burning in his memory a night as warm as it was cold and what rose would fall like a locomotive approaching, picking up speed, louder, faster, pistons howling in steam. Like that it was. Rails they rode in the way of fate, in the way that one believed this and only this was destined, in the way one positioned themselves as the center of experience, the axis of the universe. This one time, known only later, would it be like this.

1944 (revised--partially--unfinished)

2009-07-05T00:38:00.002-05:00

ed note: several years ago, I read the account of a young american pilot, in France, either late '44 or early '45, who had an intimate rendezvous with an allied nurse, in the back of an ambulance, in the middle of nowhere. I've always been enchanted with the imagery surrounding that encounter within the context of their lives and the historical backdrop. Below is my attempt to flesh out how it might have happened, who they might have been. Everything below is fiction.

She walks upon fresh fallen snow, each step the only sound on the small road winding deep into the forest. Her breath graying the air as mist, rising, dissipating in the cold December twilight. The sky is a darker shade of mauve pinpricked with fledgling stars. The trees bleeding their hue in the fading light. Even the snow looks more blue and gray than white. And still it falls as if the stars were weeping, or shedding or simply throwing confetti. Her hair frosted in the parade, her skin tight, cheeks hollowed, lips red as the cross on her arm; red as the cross on the ambulance she walks toward. Red as the blood still on her hands.

In the distance she sees him, leaning against the back of the ambulance, lean, a shadow of army wool, camouflaged with mud both dry and wet. He wore a cap, tilted and a smile that looked like the quarter moon on its side. He was twenty-one, a year older than her but in these many months, on this foreign soil, where death came not in the newspaper or from around the street but (came) in a hand held, a low whistle, a friend crying or body parts no longer recognizable as such, in this world, age and time held no meaning, or, as she said to him earlier, held some new meaning, like a new word not yet learned. Days and hours and even minutes no longer meant what they had. He had nodded. Then he kissed her, his taste on her lips, earthy, rich, a smell of tobacco and whiskey, of stale linen and plowed field, of burning wood. Maybe even coffee.

He had come with a friend to the hospital. The blood of brothers, maroon, still damp, pooling in the creases of their stained tunics (draped over bone), the lower rim of their eyes weighted, stretched, pregnant such to make the eye look loose in its socket, larger than normal, so white against his dirty unshaven face. He didn't speak. The vastness of those white eyes just looking like twin moons over a foreign landscape of priest and nun, nurse and doctor, morphine and drip. He stayed to the end. Just looking as if nothing registered, the way a child looks on their first day of school. Standing in a corner, waiting it seemed, for someone to tell him what to do.

The floor was lit like christmas, lights blinking with each blast, the jingle of mercy against makeshift cots. He stood in a corner, away from the windows. He saw the hands I saw, those hands reaching for warmth to match the warmth in their veins. He saw eyes that saw what they wanted to see and hold conversations with faces fixed in smile, of eyes long teared dry, where nurses became mothers, girlfriends, lovers come to life as the light in their minds brightened in equal measure to the light in their eyes dimming. And he must have seen a vessel poured empty, a beautiful vase without flowers, becoming brittle without the loving waters nourishing local flora. I felt his water, in the way he looked. I saw what would be, his breath filling me, pouring, flowing over my lips, filling my lungs, the breath of life so very different from the breath of the men that held my hands holding drug induced hallucinatory conversations.

It is snowing, as it has been for days and everything is white and brown or some combination of white and brown slush. Only two other colors fill the landscape, green and red, the colors of christmas. The colors of war. She walks in the path grooved by the ambulance. She glances down at her blouse to see if the beating of her heart can be seen against the unwashed fabric, her small, petite torso a vitrine it seems, feels, for what lives inside, what threatens to burst forth like so many bubbles of life expiring, bubbles tinted pink, she had seen between young lips, always parted, always cracked in cold like tiny riverbeds dry. She looks at her hands. Forgotten to wash in the whirlwind, crimson as curtains between acts, shutting eyes, closing lips, echos of mother only in her mind now. They always called for their mother. Never the father.

and in between

2009-07-02T23:01:00.007-05:00

coffee in the morning
sleeping pills at night
and in between
all the hell that requires both

__________

there is truth
to what we put
in our mouth
in a way
that often eludes
what comes
out of it

1944

2009-07-02T20:59:00.011-05:00

Upon fresh snow she walks, blue in the setting sun, shades of spruce spared touching her feet, pointing the way, like so many shadowy fingers growing long in twilight. White everywhere but. The cross. On her shoulder. The blood on her hands. The thoughts of him in her mind. 1944. December. France. Cold. Her eyes the luggage of more death at twenty than her grandmother at eighty. More priest than nurse. That sweet release. Hand as curtain. Shutting their eyes. Closing their lips. Silencing thoughts of mother. From blanched faces, blanched as the lights in their eyes, the light leaving those glassy orbs. Leaving. Thoughts of a life never to be lived. Like the girl never to be dated, held, kissed or loved. Of the home never purchased, the children neither birthed nor raised. All within sight. All beyond reach.

She was that girl. The one they talked to now, confided as their bowels voided. Shame blown from them with shrapnel. Vanity buried in foxholes overrun. In the gleam of bayonets falling like the ornaments of christmas from trees green and dark, limbs bowed with the cloak of incessant snow. A flash, a grunt, a sucking sound. Metal into flesh. From flesh. A soft sound, the entering. Somewhat softer still, leaving.

Lives in orbit. Just not around each other. Not around anything it seemed as he stood leaning against the back of the ambulance, scarecrow lean in faded green wool, his face as dirty as his uniform with the business of war. Looking older like they all looked older. A year here as a decade back home. What died, first, those ideals, dreams, like the life that would die later, torn from bone by Krupp metal, foreign as mortality. He stood, half a man. Known the way one knows repetition, as one's hand knows the burning of a stove, needing no language. Nothing prior.

Her breath grayed the air. Chest tight. Cotton stretched. Buttons strained. Lips red, the curve and curl of brunette bouncing. With each step. The static recording of snow, of smiles cracking in the December cold. A touch, warm, a blanket. Government issue. Scratchy. His eyes, two pools of white defying gravity. Pushing back death in the act of life, an urgency born of war, life seen, felt, feared, not by the day or even the hour, but the minute. Minutes, moments, like the constant drips in hospital. Each thrust a drip. Each sigh, life, living, now. He the needle. She the arm. A memory between two. Understood singularly, framed in context the way a thousand deaths are framed in individual stories, the way rivers are known from their tributaries, the way men know to slaughter other men without threat of their own, with hearts never the same.

She would love him this way. The idea, of being fucked, an idea of language, of act, beyond her home. This world, this war, death not of the old, not of time as much of mother, of father, of apple pie and country and everything known before. Blown, not buildings as much as the constructs of her world, the learning of classrooms, the lessons of dinner table, all this, consumed in the burning wages of war. Memory scorched as cities at night from the air.

Revenge in the back of an ambulance they would take, against this horror, this war. His ankles spreading hers. His dirt her dirt. They grunted. She braced. Pushed. Joined. Conspired. Against everything she had been taught. Everything he had seen. It was, she recalled, that night, in the back of an ambulance, somewhere in France, a small bit of heat amongst the cold, the greatest fuck of her life. Never again, never would she admit, had she lived, felt as alive as then. In that moment. With that boy, blown to bits, the very next day. His arms, in hers. His blood, her rouge. His heart, so alive the night prior, so quiet in light of day. In her bosom of white. White as the snow stained in her memory. As red as her lips. As red as the cross on her arm. As red as the slush of his life at her feet.

the peace of war

2009-07-02T15:08:00.003-05:00

editor: your work is too wordy

tolstoy: really

editor: and too long

tolstoy: wow

editor: yeah, no one will ever publish this

tolstoy: too long and wordy huh

editor: and if they did, no one would ever read it

tolstoy: any advice

editor: find another line of work, forget this nonsense

tolstoy: okay

editor: no problem. you just ain't got it, not your fault

tolstoy: yeah

editor: hey

tolstoy: what

editor: hold your head up, writing is not for everyone

tolstoy: (looking up) I suppose the same could be said for editing

667. as a ship waiting harbor

2009-07-02T09:56:00.001-05:00

She rested her head on his chest, in that spot that felt like home, as if over time the stone of her head had worn a perfectly fitting indentation. She could hear his heart beat and feel the warmth of his metabolism. His chest rising like gentle ocean swells. He smelled of sweat and a sweet smell that reminded her that once he had been a boy, a boy with a grin as wide as sunrise and the energy of a cowhand living hand to mouth, past and future framed only by dawn and dusk. He would slip into sleep soon. His hand a rope over her shoulder. Running down her spine. Holding her as the night sky holds the moon. She would wait, holding her dreams at bay. As a ship waiting harbor.

666. in the shallow water

2009-07-01T15:02:00.002-05:00

Yul reclined and inhaled herself into the leather, into the world of obscura, smoke roiling, curling upward, twin plumes from her pert nose. The room began to halo. She lifted her bare feet, spread them against the picture window as if flashing the cosmos. A wink of creation to creation, the inhibition of birth in the bend of a knee.

Her chest rose under downcast eyes with each long slow pull of the smoldering drug, a gift from the doctor, which Mairi would have nothing to do. She had no such reservations, feeling light, a rising, a lifting, mind and body, tight and taut. She exhaled, unzipped, the soft cool starlight a river in the valley from navel to chin, her lips in mist, a cave before the lagoon of drift.

Leaning her head back, her hair fell as water, straight, shimmering gray. She closed her eyes, spread her legs, nerves as lights on a river, alive, burning, heat dancing on an ever flowing stream of life, moving, throbbing, twinkling as the stars without. The leather warmed, the air humid with obscura and unblinking eyes.

Crazy they said. Her depths unplumbed, a craziness only understood by others who had lost their way in the murk of insanity. Looking into the reflection, she motioned, fingers feline. Rog smiled. Took his shirt off. And dived.

What do you need he said, her fingers in his hair, nails raking his scalp. Tell me, as if gulping for air, tell me your need. She grabbed his ears, pulling him forth, up, his lips to hers. Her legs rode his rib cage locking in the small of his back. She felt light, hollow, hollow as her eyes, looking from fear, fear of him, of him letting go, that each time could be the last time. How could she say this. She didn't. The moment came and she kissed it away and in this way, they remained in the shallow water.

skin and bones

2009-07-01T11:24:00.001-05:00

I have bones
had them all my life
shy bones
never broken
never spoken
never seen
so close
so integral
yet,
forever
clothed
within
my exhibitionist
skin

mornings

2009-07-01T07:03:00.001-05:00

morning is here
on time again
I pour my coffee
and sit with
the quiet
as I do
every morning

same questions
sit with me
quiet as
the morning
as ever present
as the dawn
outside my window

the day
in my mind
appears as
an account
an accounting to be
in the quiet
of twenty-four hours

I have these
conversations
just me
the dawn and
my coffee
and I wonder why

I don't
fire
myself
and hire
a
new
me

one that won't
disappoint those
I love
and bring pain
by my acts
or non acts
into their life

and I wonder
why they don't
fire me
and find someone
else
that will treat
them better

and this is it
the question
above all others
the question
of value
of time
of accounting

a class I dropped
twice
before switching
to history
a subject suited
to us flagellants

of a cottage I've never seen

2009-06-30T14:01:00.001-05:00

I think often of a cottage I've never seen.
Made of stone, it overlooks an azure ocean
with paned windows painted in oil white
in time.

I can see the khaki stone wall facing the sea
as clearly as the day is honest
as clearly as if I myself have been there
to this cottage by the sea
this cottage that lives only in my mind.

The image of this cottage is based
purely on my imagination.
No photo reference. No drawing or painting.
A coloring of, perhaps from, desire, although on some days
I think need is the more appropriate word. A calling from
somewhere within, someplace I'd like to know a little better,
someplace that seems to know me.

I need not even close my eyes to hear the gulls,
to smell the sea just beyond the swaying sage oats,
a small path, single file only, weaving from the wooden steps of the deck
to a beach glistening with shells, the ocean's fruit. This sacred
walk I've taken a thousand times in my mind
as surely as beads prayed under glass stained. Each step
known, acknowledge, an embrace of sand and foot to the eye,
a compact between heart and mind to the soul. Where
the wind gently combs the moonlight from my hair
and the stars wink of a time no more
no more than my cottage I suppose
in my mind. Still, I pray the steps
as my grandmother prayed the rosary,
taking no bead for granted in the power
to make a difference, to climb those imaginary
stairs under arch divine.

The sun is warm but not hot, the light golden
never harsh and the air as clean as air on undiscovered
islands. The place breaths me, breaths me back
to start, to neutral, to that place without the toxins
of hand and mind, of account and ledger, of list and do;
a place not unlike the other ocean
with a gentle, motherly rocking
home of dreams
cradle of health.

I sit as an only child before this clear horizon
wordless as one who knows not a word
and try as I might, I find any and all words
just more windows between me and my soul,
my ocean, my dear cottage

that needs me, I think, as much as I need it.