decadent tranquility

to know not

2012-01-02T10:10:00.001-06:00

Night comes of starry softness, this whimpering of day, this orange draining of inkwell gloaming. The wind too has rested. Rain is coming. Cows lie in open fields of dewy slumbered wildness. Even the owls betray by silence, this place of knowing that neither hoot nor howl, fin or feather can stand against. Still, we build our houses and dream our dreams. God bless our bliss to know not the sun's notching, to know not tomorrow's absence, not of her sweet release from our daily concerns.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T09:44:00.000-06:00

2011 was a year of wonder, joy, challenge and change. New city, new job, new house, new car and the return to family while embraced in the arms of the love of my life. Wishing all a Happy New Year!

Lake Charles 9/11 Commeration

2011-09-08T21:01:00.001-05:00

I am honored to be a small part of Lake Charles' Commemoration of 9/11. The program starts at 6:00pm on Sunday near the 9/11 Memorial on the Civic Center Grounds. Should inclement weather prevail, the program will take place in the Buccaneer Room and will last approximately 30 minutes. Join us if you can. Below is the program schedule:

– In Memoriam –

We reverently remember those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

At this time let us also remember the countless acts of bravery and kindness that followed.

Russell Keene

Killed in the attack on the World Trade Center

Kevin Yokum, USN Killed in the attack on the Pentagon

— Program —

Welcome........................................................ John Ieyoub, President–Lake Charles City Council

Guy Brame, President–Calcasieu Parish Police Jury

Presentation of Colors ................................ LCFD & LCPD Honor Guard

Pledge of Allegiance.................................... Boy Scouts Troop #5

Prayer............................................................. Pastor Todd Schumacher Chaplain, LCFD

Pastor Steve James Chaplain, LCPD

National Anthem......................................... Melissa Vaughn

Introduction of Guests................................ John Ieyoub

Remarks......................................................... Chief Keith Murray, LCFD

Chief Don Dixon, LCPD

Reflections..................................................... Ed Nelson

Beulah Yokum

Moment of Silence

The Day Our World Changed........................ Trée George

Written by Dr. Kirsti A. Dyer

Remarks......................................................... Mayor Randy Roach

City of Lake Charles

Amazing Grace............................................... Piper-James Dean

Benediction................................................... Rev. Dr. H. Leon Williams

Taps................................................................ Dave Scott, Ricky Peters

Gallery Print: Parchment Mornings

2011-08-14T14:34:00.001-05:00

Available now at Studio-George

One Week Sale: 40% off

2011-08-09T15:14:00.001-05:00

This week only, everything on Studio-George is 40% off, including our signed limited edition prints. Coupon code: intro

Happy Shopping!

In addition to our own Prints and Notecards, we offer standard and custom printing services.

Printing:

Simply want prints of your own photos? We do that. Using only the highest grade papers from Canson, Moab, Museo, Hahnemühle, Inkpress and Canon, we do prints from 4x6 to 13x19 on gloss, matte, metallic or canvas. Want your matte print with a hand-deckled edge? We do that too.

All of our printing is in-house. We employ no outside labor so when you order a print from us, every step of the process, from printing to packing, is conducted by us and us alone (just the two of us). If you call, we answer the phone. If you email, we respond to the email. If we have suggestions on paper or size, you hear from us directly.

Custom work:

Want something more from your photos? Do they need minor adjustments to exposure, saturation or just a tighter cropping? We do that. Want your photo to look like a watercolor, pencil sketch, or oil painting? We do that too. Want your photo to look like a photo but have a larger than life look? We can do that. Do you have a great photo, but it is slightly out of focus? We can fix that. In short, using Photoshop, Corel Painter and a host of other programs, we can transform your photo into something unique, something more than just a photograph, something that will make people ask, How did you do that?

When we do custom work, you always see a proof of our progress and you have a chance to give feedback and direction. If we can’t do something, we will tell you. If the particular style doesn’t work for the photo at hand, we will tell you that too. In other words, the work becomes collaborative. We apply our creative sensibilities. You provide feedback. In short, we want you happy and we want you coming back and we want you recommending your friends.

Sincerely,

Trée and Stacie
studio-george.com

Our Yorkie Collection is ready!

2011-08-04T19:28:00.002-05:00

Our Yorkie Notecard collection is ready. Cards measure 4-1/2 x 5-13/16. Using Museo stock, these premium artist cards are a joy to write on, especially with a fountain pen. Inside of cards are blank. Matching envelopes supplied. For more details or to purchase, please visit our website: Studio-George

HeartTree notecards now available (Studio-George.com)

2011-07-12T17:01:00.002-05:00

If you love to write with a fountain pen, you will love the Velina finish on our signature square notecards. Cards measure 5-1/4 x 5-1/4. Inside is blank. Please see studio-george.com for details.

Mingo Notecard ready for purchase.

2011-07-09T20:28:00.002-05:00

Printed on Museo Artist Card Stock, these square cards with matching envelopes measure 5-1/4" x 5-1/4". Beautiful matte Velina finish.

Flamingo Print Available Now

2011-07-02T15:52:00.000-05:00

Last Friday at the Porch Coffeehouse Reading

2011-06-09T19:58:00.002-05:00

My Aunt, Me and Mom

The Poets

2011-06-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

All of the poets who were in attendance (Vision/Verse 2011): Stella Nessanovich, Julie Kane (newly appointed poet laureate of Louisiana), J Bruce Fuller, Michael Shewmaker, Rita Costello, William Coppage, Darrell Borque (outgoing poet laureate of Louisiana), and Tree' George.

Vision/Verse (June 4th)

2011-06-02T09:23:00.000-05:00

Time:
Saturday, June 4 · 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Location:
Art Associates Gallery
809 Kirby Street, Suite 208
Lake Charles, Louisiana

Vision/Verse, the annual poetry and art exhibition produced by Yellow Flag Press, is back for its third year in Lake Charles. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 4th, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Art Associates Gallery located in the historic Central School Arts and Humanities Center. A reading of all the exhibit's poems will be held at the Central School theatre at 7 p.m. during the evening.

The exhibit reinforces the bond between the literary and visual arts by encouraging artists and poets to examine their own creation process and how it can be influenced by another art form, specifically how art inspires poetry and how poetry is influenced by art. It brings together artists and poets across Southwest Louisiana as well as across the nation, including Darrell Bourque, the current Louisiana Poet Laureate, and Julie Kane, Louisiana's next Poet Laureate.

The exhibit's opening reception is the end to a six month long collaboration between ten poets and ten artists. Each of the ten artists created a new piece of artwork based on one the originally submitted poems; simultaneously, each of the poets wrote a new poem based on artwork by one of the artists. At the end of the process, the exhibit is composed of forty pieces of work -- twenty of which were created for the exhibit.

Yellow Flag Press, a local press that specializes in limited edition broadsides and chapbooks, publishes the Vision/Verse poems as broadsides, visual representations of poetry. Each poem will have ten limited edition broadsides for sale. The first edition of each broadside is framed and hung in the gallery with its complementary piece of art.

Poets:

Maya Beerbower
Darrell Bourque
Kolleen Carney
William Lusk Coppage
Rita D. Costello
Trée George
Ava Leavell Haymon
Julie Kane
Stella Nesanovich
Michael Shewmaker

Artists:

Graham Austin
Lauren Brasher
Martin Castillo
Brendan Egan
Meghan Fleming
Tony Forrest
Josh Guimbellot
Heather Ryan Kelley
Chris Marcello
Allison Weeks Thomas

Reading this Friday night (June 3rd)

2011-05-31T09:58:00.000-05:00

The Arts and Humanities Council of Southwest Louisiana and the Porch Coffee House & Café will present a reading by two local poets, Rita D. Costello and Trée George on Friday, June 3rd, at 7 p.m. at the Porch as part of the First Friday Reading Series. The reading series, which began in January, has showcased the talents of poets and writers in Southwest Louisiana and has helped to generate interest locally in building the Lake Charles literary scene.

Trée George was born and raised in Baton Rouge and received his B.A. and M.A. in history at LSU. He has lived in Tennessee and worked in sales and management training before starting a studio where he works to produce multi-layered artwork with photography, poetry, and fiction. His poems work closely with the prose poem instead of the more traditional forms of poetry. “As a visual learner, my poetry is almost always the byproduct of an image,” George stated. “I see first, write second.”

Originally from New York, Rita D. Costello has lived all over America and China. She is Director of Freshman/Sophomore English at McNeese State in Louisiana and co-editor of the anthology Bend Don't Shatter. Her work has appeared in journals such as: Glimmer Train, ACM, Baltimore Review, and Hawai’i Review. Costello has won the Glimmer Train Poetry Prize and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Testing iWatermark again

2011-05-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

Testing iWatermark

2011-05-18T17:40:00.002-05:00

First Card Design

2011-05-05T08:45:00.002-05:00

Happy Mother's Day (a bit early)

2011-05-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

finger of wind

2011-04-12T09:05:00.002-05:00

I could open a vein this morning. I feel that pull, that flow, of sun rising, so silent in low spring arc, so relentless, this spinning, this rising and falling, this exhaling of heat into the darkness. And too, this giving of life. And I wonder of my waste, of what value is thrown into the ocean, of what feeds. Perhaps here, as I watch morning warm lucid petals, is my tether.

And I think of reading, of how I do so little anymore, of how I never wanted to read too much, never wanted to finish anything but the worst. I know this attraction, to lie in the summer grass and feel the breeze of life, cleansing. Life beckoning life. Brother to brother. This is how it feels. That kiss of warmth on my cheek. A brother looking back. A finger of wind calling forth.

___________

. . . I feel that pull, that flow, of sun rising, so silent in low spring arc, so relentless, this spinning, this rising and falling, this exhaling of heat into darkness. And too, this giving of life. . . . I know this attraction, to lie in the summer grass and feel the cleansing breeze. Life beckoning life. Brother to brother. This is how it feels. That kiss of warmth on my cheek. A brother looking back. A finger of wind calling forth. Come walk with me.

how

2011-04-12T08:25:00.000-05:00

How does one write without what is not within? How does one add anything of substance to the daily narrative? What does it mean to build? And of addition, what is this? In a reality of change, can anything last? Is anything not relative? And of Love? What of this? This water and fish. This bird and air. So I say be damned all the clocks, especially the one on my wall that is an hour behind, that one I never bothered to change. It will be right again. I'd like to say the same.

Me

2011-04-11T09:01:00.001-05:00

of where and why

2011-03-09T08:40:00.002-06:00

Writing needs not retreat
but from one's self
that teeming spume of consciousness
forever obscuring the sea below

The pen longs not of sight or scenery
as the ear too hides behind silence absolute
or at least the idea of it
so pretty, so incorrigibly wrong

So too (And) the page seeks not the light
from a farmhouse window
or the wood nicked and scarred
through poverty's years

Red herrings them all
but shadows shimmering
whispering pelagic falsehoods
nefarious and treacherous
these diamond glimmers

Release, sweet orgasmic release
is sought, needed, prayed and begged upon
Inky depth sunk and cold amber raised
of dulcet rhythms, these
tribal beats as buried
as the heart
within satyric flesh

I need not vista, but vice
not silence, but sinuousness
Give me wine and song
and I'll write of women (woman)
as if their (her) blood were my ink
as if their (her) breath were
but the fire of god unleashed

for what is writing if not creation (this act)
to bring to life as soil to seed
the windswept field waving (dewy)
as the wettish page now damply symboled
of daybreak's warm smile
upon a cold pillow

Oh The Places You'll Go! Dr. Suess

2011-03-07T09:53:00.003-06:00

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any
you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you’ll head straight out of town.

It’s opener there
in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just go right along.
You’ll start happening too.

OH!
THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed.
You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so
but, sadly, it’s true
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.

You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump,
you’re not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused
that you’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…

…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

NO!
That’s not for you!

Somehow you’ll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You’ll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,
once more you’ll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. there are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t.
Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times
you’ll play lonely games too.
Games you can’t win
‘cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance
you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.

On and on you will hike
and I know you’ll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So…
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea,
you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

Man Overboard

2011-03-02T08:33:00.002-06:00

I rise into the fog of morning. My nimbus mind smoked in dream. I hear the foghorn unseen of day tolling for tribute, the tax of a beating heart. First, coffee, to course the veins of sleep. Then a plan. Not for what it seems. Not to accomplish. Nor to attain or gain. Neither not the day to rise and bake. But a plan of this and that, of simple things like shower, diet, exercise. And too with nail-less hammer, to drive away the ghost of ego, that quicksand of immolation, of consumption. These simple things, this forward movement of mind seeking tether, seeking movement, to join the living and breathe the air of life into weary lungs, to know of creation, even if but to float, to be carried somewhere, anywhere but here, anywhere but this stagnation.

Universe Calling

2011-02-22T17:10:00.002-06:00

Tumblr

2011-02-17T10:37:00.000-06:00

Decided to try my hand at micro-blogging via Tumblr. Everything created and posted by and from my iPhone. Tumblr is fantastically concise, clean and cogent in design. You can find me here:

TréeGeorge

Self-portrait Percolated

2011-02-16T08:17:00.000-06:00

Eye of Yul Percolated

2011-02-14T08:43:00.001-06:00

Von Percolated

2011-02-14T08:37:00.003-06:00

morning dawns cold

2011-02-11T10:03:00.002-06:00

Morning dawns cold. Rooftops of frost. Fields of crystal dew. And somewhere, a pond stares in ghostly pale reflection, frozen as the child within.

First iPhone created fractal

2011-02-10T09:18:00.000-06:00

First iPad created fractal

2011-02-10T09:07:00.000-06:00

809. slippage

2011-01-26T15:44:00.000-06:00

My hand is sore, something I only notice when I write. It is the holding of the pen by which I know it, this pain, know it is not natural, not the aging I see so clearly in the mirror nor some disease of unknown origin. My hand hurts to write and only when I write; otherwise, I feel no pain at all; the hand is, in every way, whole, healthy. The pain, to be clear, is not in the writing or perhaps I should say not in the act of writing, but rather it is in the hand, or more so, in my mind and transferred to the hand. And by this holding of the pen, I know. I am under extreme stress.

What I find most terrifying is not the stress, but that I must know it slant, know it by shadow, know it by degree of act and not of pure consciousness or unhindered awareness. This crass blindness to my own self is what I call slippage. I am aging. Life has found me wanting. In my premature weakness, in this calving of the psyche, I become, under the chisel, the hammer, as so many icebergs. And in this way, I see myself slowly floating away as one might if from shore, from what was whole, the country of oneself. And too, there is this sense that the shards shall never be whole again. One feels one is less than before. That what was there yesterday, is not here today. I suppose there is some correlation to knowledge and memory and the erosion that age imposes on experience. One feels as a book with pages missing, the story fuzzy, the fragments that remain as puzzling as the gaps. Like looking at a dry riverbed and wondering of the water that used to flow, must have coursed, as blood courses, in the living. Something died within me when Cait died. I can feel its weight on what remains. I carry it every day. And to think, I know it by my hand, by writing.

journal entry, John Discovery--written sometime shortly after departure from Polaris

darts and daggers

2011-01-25T08:51:00.002-06:00

There is a difference between leader and follower, between a plan presented and a plan created. So much of life is solitary, our internal experiences ours and ours alone; unity and togetherness but illusions; protectors of our psyche as coats against the cold. And what of Love? This invisible thread that weaves a life between two, that stitches collar to coat. Does it not need two? Does it not demand an other? And do we not punish most with isolation, solitary confinement. Hate me if you will. Throw your darts and daggers jagged. But by Janus, don't walk away.

benthic stone

2011-01-24T10:52:00.001-06:00

I dreamt he was a dolphin and she the sea. Again and again he dove, shimmering and arched. Again and again she sighed, glistening and parted. And where he leaped, I drowned. Slapped by her spume. Stung with her salt. Leap and dive, leap and dive. Sigh moaning upon sigh. The sky bright, burning bright. And still her waters heal him. Releasing and healing, releasing and healing. I saw this from the murky depths. This weaving of two lives. And then bubbles. My life rising into their wake. All is quiet now. I see them dimming, from a cage of benthic stone.

WIP: of cotton

2011-01-18T18:52:00.000-06:00

WIP (work in progress): The piece below contains the original first draft and, in parenthesis, optional edits both inclusionary and ex. Although this does not make for the best reading experience, I hope it gives some insight into revision. Enjoy.

She smelled of cotton and in this way (I found she) was linked to every woman (of significance) I knew. This smell (this redolent scent), (mind you), was not the cotton of fresh laundry or recent purchase nor did it compete with any perfume (fragrance), artificial or otherwise. It was the smell of earth, (not air), of hands free of (from) polish, (and) skin soft in labor, (not lab). (Her) {she stood before me,} unadorned skin and the thin robe. (She stood with her) head turned upon my chest (and as) I leaned to kiss her neck, parting {holding aside} (her) golden hair, drawing breath. This breath, of a robe long in storage, an afterthought, random, as there were many other robes she could have chosen, was the memory of (love shown with) weary eyes. It was the economics of hard times, of character grown in poor soil. It was the religion of another generation, of hand-me downs, of bedrooms too small, of meals too lean. She was, in this breath, in what could have been no more than a thimble of seconds, everything I had (ever) known of love, everything I (sought.) had (ever) wanted. We made love as if love was all we had. We made love as one does when love is what is made, easy and natural as breath, of that breath standing before bath, of arms that spoke where tongues would not, of (the) continuity {in the way} of blood, of no beginning, (and) {of} no end.

__________

revised: second draft

We made love as if love was all we had. We made love as one does when love is what is made. Natural as rain to ground, seed to sapling. In the peace of repose, we lie incandescent. Silence descending like dusk. Not even the sound of our breath is heard.

Chiaroscuro and sinuous she rises. I hear shape not sound. She moves across my still eyes and I am wordless before this nature, this lapping warmness that engulfs me. From the closet she emerges wearing only a thin robe. We meet in the bathroom before mirror and tub. Her arms open, taking me into her softness, her head pillowed upon my chest. Parting her hair as one would a curtain, I lean and kiss her cream white neck. She smells of stored cotton, of chest-of-drawers, of a time before I knew her.

In this way, she was linked to every woman I had known. The robe's redolent scent was not the cotton of fresh laundry or recent purchase nor did it compete with any fragrance, artificial or otherwise. It was the smell of earth, of hands free from polish, and skin soft in labor, of weary eyes and the economics of hard times, of character grown in poor soil. It was the religion of another generation, of hand-me downs, of bedrooms too small and meals too lean. She was, in this breath, in what could have been no more than a thimble of seconds, everything I had known of love, everything I sought.

By scent alone, she had entered the book of generations, had embedded herself in my mind and memory, this flower standing, dried and pressed between the pages of my past, of people and places that no longer existed, of those alive only in my memory. I knew from that moment she was both past and present, breathing and ghost. And I knew too, she would haunt me for all my days.

808. into the nether regions

2011-01-11T10:05:00.002-06:00

She waited at a table in the corner, alone. The contact was late. On the table, her slate glowed. A small red light illuminating her pale face. Her metallic hair aglitter. Rising, the red orb began to pulse, slow and steady in the way of breath in sleep. It felt this way, this slipping into the nether regions of consciousness, that place between wake and dream. As if one could walk between realms. And wasn’t it this way, of dying in pieces, of living with what could never be changed, of holding what could never be altered. Heavy as stone memory. So hard. To live this way. Shoulders always tired. Advice so unwelcome. For how does one leave behind the heart of identity? How does one deny the self? How does one disown the very narrative that is you?

Looking at her watch, all about glowed. A low hum of conversation, inebriated laughter, drooping eyes, clinking glass. The pulsing grew more violent. Wasn’t hard to imagine Bravo’s engines firing to life, of the crew preparing to disembark. Thoughts of Rog boiled in the gut. Visceral. This sense of being left. It was, she thought, her earliest emotional memory. Visions of her sister walking ahead, hand held by father. Her mother rushing to fill the void. Seeing her own solitary reflection in those quivering eyes, her dress dirty, hair disheveled, her mother’s hand reaching for what had already been lost. Still, no matter the number, no matter the direction, fortune or fame, that pull to the darkness remained. Woven in her very fabric. As much her as her hand. With a strength she couldn’t comprehend. Nothing but image and pain, hand in hand, of the two of them walking, neither looking back.

The waitress came, asked for her order. When she turned back, the red orb was gone. Her stomach settled on the thought, as if lead. Hollow, heavy, leaking poison slowly. Then he came. The transaction just a blur. Her vial again faithful. Removing the seal, she took a breath. Pain smiled. There would be no more hurt. No more leaving. No more anything.

_________

Kyra: Alert me as soon as Rog comes to.

Von: Will do.

Kyra: And Von.

Von: Yes?

Kyra: Thanks.

807. that alluvial stain

2011-01-10T13:15:00.001-06:00

As the hour of departure drew near, Trev sat with pen and paper. Em was quietly packing, folding clothes with care, holding them with the dignity of sacred texts. He thought of the return to space, to the hardness of metal, of manufactured air. Of how very different life had been here with the cottage, the lake, the pathways through the woods, of the sun in the morning, of dusk descending, of the sound of wildlife, of birds and crickets and owls. He thought of reading by the stream, a blanket laid on a bed of clover. Of glasses raised and toasts given, of wine on the tongue and smiles as beautiful as butterflies. He thought of open windows and candles and poetry written as she slept, that gentle rising of breath, the softness of her bosom under a light throw, of how her hair flowed over tranquil eyes. He watched her now, moving from chest to bed, organized, he thought, like the daughter of a sea captain, always mindful of what to bring and how to bring it. He thought too of the hour, of their leaving and as if a window was open and a gentle breeze beckoned, he thought of the soft soil of this place, of its wonderful aromatic richness and in this thought, of richness, of fresh-turned earth, this mother of all they ate and drank, he thought of Em. Of the line between mothers and birth, of the dying to one thing in order to be born to another, of the movement of arm and leg, the sweep of a look, the tenderness in breath against the ear. So he wrote. No editing, no revision, no care but for the flow. Then he wrote it again. Only later, when Em was emptying the trash did she find what he had written.

We leave in an hour. I want you in the humid soil before the lake, to know your dampness, that soft domain, refulgent, indolent, of grass and flower, of skirt and thigh. I want your sigh seen as ghosts rising, your teeth unconsciously bare in desire, your eyes full of the stars beyond my back. I want to know your gravity and shiver warm and cold, warm and cold with celsius pleasure, that seduction known to finger and glove. There is here life, this fullness, this rush, this fit. This crashing of you into me, my world, our world as changed as the boy upon the breast. I want muddy earth between my fingers, to smell of your bloom flowering my shoulder, your lust in the tremor of calf and the impaling of nails, this seeking of blood, to rip open, to expose, to reveal to the heavens what heretofore has been hidden. It is here, this last freedom released, unbound before fruit and flower, intoxicated in the way of poets with verbs and architects with nouns. But above all, I want not your soul nor your willing flesh sinuous and shimmering. I want what can never be taken, never be replaced. I want you, as you have never been, as you will never be again. I want dissolution. I want abject capitulation. The melding of our coin into new currency. I want it this night. I want it forever more.

As the hour draws near, my desire surges for soil, that alluvial stain, damp as damp to be, those soft domains moonly refulgent, this indolent night of sweet grass and bowed flower, of pleated skirt and willful thigh. I need this place of ghostly sighs rising from parted lips, of teeth bare before nature and eyes scarred of fallen stars. I ache to know your tidal gravity, to shiver warm and cold with celsius pleasure, that snug seduction known to finger and glove. This fit, this fullness, this silty rush of life, this crashing of you into me, our world as changed as the boy upon the breast. I want muddy earth between my fingers, the pungent flowering of my shoulder, lust in the tremor of calf, the impaling of nails, this seeking of blood, to rip open, to expose and reveal to the heavens what heretofore has been hidden. I need this last freedom released, unbound and given flight. I want not your soul nor your flesh sinuous and shimmering. It is not in the hour, or minute nor second that I seek, but this eternal imprint of memory stained in the act of dissolution, abject capitulation, the melding of coin into new currency.

806. chatoyant eyes

2011-01-09T11:18:00.006-06:00

T: When Yul stormed off did you have any idea what was going on?
K: I knew something wasn’t right, but my mind was preoccupied with Mairi and to a lesser extent John.
___________
Skeleton Chapter: This is where I simply tell you what happens as opposed to writing of it.
The relationship of Trev and Em, was to Yul, devastating. She saw that what they had, she did not. Unable to carry the weight of a moment that was of all moments, the sun to her long buried seed, she sought and found a supplier. Her vial, long empty, now full again. Only in this way could she cope, the pain released from her mind as the sweet serum entered her veins. On this night, she was a day out from resupply. To leave within the dusk was to leave her tether to life. To leave now, she thought, was death and pain. To stay she knew would be death too, but a sweet death, absent agony and anguish. What seemed a choice to everyone else was never volitional for her.
__________
Of what Rog saw:
She appeared as fire and hell, hypnotic chatoyant eyes singeing reason from my skull. Her breath, an updraft of wrath, contempt, of sun-licked anger, bellowed from parched lips. The wind of her tongue whipping my self-righteous indignation. My knees knew no brace. My arms hung impotent. Again her words came, jagged, raw, lacerating the flesh she had held so dear. I rose or so it felt for all seemed into, against, the air humid, heated, fierce as my very nostrils screamed and burned of her atmosphere. All was not as before. Facts came fast. She moved to a line once seen, now erased, snorted into the maelstrom. And I saw what I had never seen, the gutting, the spilling. She was of this, I was convinced, consumed. Just a wisp of what was.
__________
Yul, from her journal some weeks later:
It had been coming for some time. Or, perhaps it is more fair to say, what had been put in motion by birth, by fear and rejection, by a hatred I never understood, could never grasp or protect myself from, had been unleashed. Freed to wreck havoc. Fear reigning lawless. Memory violating me again and again; for who can protect you from what is inside? Who can hold what can’t be held, as invisible as the thought not thought, the word not spoken? So there is this falling, this pain so great, burning as only truth burns pure, that one seeks not salvation but surrender. I had found a supplier. Had told no one. In this way, I survived. The shipment coming tomorrow was my life, my protector, the love I knew I would never know. To leave without it was beyond my ability to imagine. It was as if asking Em to leave without Trev.
__________
T: So what did you do?
K: We left her.

805. Quotes: 10

2011-01-06T12:41:00.000-06:00

When you accept that you can break, that at some point you will be broken, by releasing the idea, something magical, something stronger takes hold and you find a strength previously unknown.

Von heard whispering to the boy

804. you know what

2011-01-06T10:32:00.000-06:00

We leave tonight, said Kyra.

Why tonight? Why not tomorrow morning? asked Yul.

It will make decompression easier.

Well, I don’t like it.

You know what Yul? I don’t give a rat’s arse what you like. We leave one hour past dusk. Say what you got to say. Do what you got to do. But we ain’t waiting on no one.

I call bullshite on that.

Chill, said Rog.

I just don’t see why.

Kyra looked at Mairi. You want to tell them why?

All eyes turned to Mairi. She began with an apology. Not everything she had told them about her and Dr X was true. And for reasons she would explain later, if they didn’t leave tonight, they might not be leaving at all.

Well frail me, said Yul, storming off.

Rog looked at the others with a shrug.

Rog! Turn and tuck or you won’t have nothing to turn and tuck.

Kyra turned to Von. Can you do something about that?

Nope.

Well, try, cause I ain’t got the time nor the patience. Oh, and Von?

Yes?

Tell John I need to see him.

803. tomorrow, we leave

2011-01-06T08:54:00.000-06:00

We sit before the picture window, robed, eyes full of sleep. The house is empty of sound. A warmness in dawn, of the silent view before us growing. Two cardinals flit, as if for us, a private ballet. We don’t talk. There is no need. Her hand reaches for mine. She smiles, takes a sip of coffee, her eyes over the rim looking at me in the way of eyes emerging from still water. It is quiet like that and I can tell from the tilt of her head, the squint of her looking, the grasp of her fingers, all is right. And the day looks brighter.

Later, we walk to the lake to take in a final view. Not so much to look as to breath, to know the air of fawn and fauna. Flowers everywhere, open, shamelessly exposed. Each breath full of this flora, infusing lungs and memory. Tomorrow we leave, replacing the blue sky for inky darkness, the soft earth under our feet for cold metal. It is as if we are leaving life. Even gravity seems reluctant.

Again she takes my hand. Holding tighter this time and I know this turning of page, this closing of chapter. She knows too. The unknown of space before us made more acute by the lack of space between us. We have, as two roots, grown together, unseen to others but by evidence of bough and branch, a shine as wind in our leaves. We glitter. Catching light in a thousand ways, fragments of moments seen mostly by contrast.

The sun rises above the trees now and the lake shimmers away the last wisps of mauvish mallow. Everywhere, as not before, gentle sound. She closes her eyes. Breaths deep. And I watch her lean her head into the warmth of day. Her hand still holds mine. Her fingers moist in our heat. We mix this way such that what is hers and what is mine seems the wrong question just as mother and child to be are both two and one at the same time. I kiss her cheek. She smiles without opening her eyes.

Neither of us wants to leave this place of birth, of root so firmly grown. The fear of the gardener. Of transplanting. Will it take? Are we more than this place of tranquility?

802. a clear day

2011-01-01T14:50:00.002-06:00

Yul: She’s a clear day and I’m thunder and lightning.

Rog: I kinda like your thunder and lightning.

Yul: Well, it ain’t always about you.

1944 (of light and love)

2010-12-31T11:03:00.002-06:00

Truth is like light. Duration is of no consequence. A darken cave of ten times ten thousands years is just as bright of light as one continuously lit. Love is this way. I knew Virgil for just a few days, yet in the last forty years I have never known a love as true, as real, as enduring. And I think not of the lost, of his death, of that snowy December day, of all that was never to be, but rather the blessing of holding what few ever hold, for a heart once lit in love is never not lit, never not warm. And the warmness is not of memory or imagination. His life within me, decade after decade has been something eternal, forever present. So, in this way, I live alone. For who can sit across the table and not think I’m insane.

801. the holding of hands

2010-12-31T09:53:00.001-06:00

It wasn’t till we buried Grand that I noticed. I don’t even remember the day, but I was staring at his hand, his old veined paw, fingers naturally clawed. We weren’t doing anything. Only the sun sat with us on the back porch. Each of us lost in our own thoughts. Lost without the sound of plates and glasses from the kitchen. That song of union connecting the three of us. So we sat now, just Papa and I. We rocked. We watched the ocean. And I looked at his hand as if I was seeing it new, as one sees a lion in the wild or a person behind bars. From somewhere I heard a wind chime, of a breeze gently rolling sand over the nightly crab tracks, of how nothing stands still and of his hand now, alone, solitary, sedentary. His gaze was of something else, his eyes unreadable in their unblinking silence, and I wondered if he felt what I felt, had discovered what I knew now, or whether he had always known it, always known this day would come, a part of his life shared only with Grand, a world that only the two of them inhabited. A world seen by their smiles and hugs, and above all, by the holding of hands.

Closing the Year

2010-12-31T09:29:00.000-06:00

What is this speck of consciousness that floats on the day? I’ve been asking myself this question since the age of five. I remember clearly riding in the back of my mother’s green station wagon. We were on Monterrey Blvd heading home. My hair was short and I had bangs. Why am I me and not someone else? Why do I live now and not some time other, either past or future? And why now, this memory so clear, clearly true and not true? I remember the question, of asking it. I remember the memory of remembering myself in the back of the station wagon at the time of asking. Yet, we didn’t move to that part of town until I was ten. So age, location and memory don’t match. But as I look out my westward window now, into a sea of trees and a setting sun, I can only think of the smallness of my existence and the magnitude of (everything else.)

Happy New Year. May you hold and be held. May your dreams come true.

800. as sun and cloud

2010-12-15T08:38:00.001-06:00

She sat on the porch and watched them walk to the lake. They walked like leaves fall and they held hands as children, arms swinging, fingers tight. They seemed to be talking from the look of heads leaning, of attention held, gyroscopic by way of centered, balanced. Their walk was not of time or destination, she thought, nor for show or presentation. They were as sun and cloud. They held that kind of endlessness about them. Moving yet eternal. An archtype. As effortless as autumn. From the distance, she could not hear them, the trail beneath their silent feet gutter worn. The lake beyond was smooth and blue in reflection, still and quiet. Tranquil. All of it. As clear as day is to night, as light to dark, as them to her.

Poet

2010-12-14T19:12:00.002-06:00

Yellow Flag Press in conjunction with the third annual Vision/Verse exhibit has chosen one of my poems for broadside publication and display. I'm humbled and excited.

Quote: Marc Barasch

2010-12-09T08:46:00.002-06:00

"Every now and then, I'll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You've met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady stream of, for want of a better word, love-vibes. As soon as you come within range, you feel embraced, accepted for who you are. For those of us who suspect that you rarely get something for nothing, such geniality can be discomfiting. Yet it feels so good to be around them. They stand there, radiating photons of goodwill, and despite yourself you beam back, and the world, in a twinkling, changes."

- Marc Barasch

799. one way

2010-11-19T09:46:00.002-06:00

Mairi would take the train back to town. And at the station, which would be awash in unfocused color, a blurred brimming of mainly dark hues, she would purchase a one-way ticket. The sounds of the terminal would be clear, of wheel and rail and steam and torque against the muted backdrop of conversations murmuring like sweet summer grass. Her movements, she thought, would be slow, her hands gloved, and she would wear a brown felt hat to match her long coat, neatly buttoned top to bottom. All in order. The Chatelaine words echoed. All in order. Let action shape thought. Keep moving. Go through your progression. Yet, those images; of her arm hanging limp against her side; the look of the agent on asking if there would be a return; her mumbled reply; the sliding of her passage under the glass; all would seem a little too much like Bravo leaving Hyneria. There would be departure. But no return. As there was no appetite, no desire to engage, to speak of things as if they could be spoken. So she would watch the endless flowing into and out of the station. She would watch clocks ticking the seconds into minutes. Thoughts of Em painting would come to mind. Best not too many strokes she would say. Paint neither too thick nor too thin. Apply with a even sweep of hand across the surface lightly. Moving. Always moving. A place, Em would say, far, far from thought.

798. I love you

2010-11-16T09:57:00.001-06:00

Zeke sat next to the bed as Grand slept. Sometimes just rocking, letting his mind wander over their years, as now, there would only be days. From time to time he walked to the bed and took her hand in his. Gently, rubbing her palm, his warmth becoming hers. She remained asleep, as quiet now as she was in life. A good life. Full of touches and looks, laughter and joy. Leaning down, he kissed her forehead, then her cheek. Her faint breath, barely a whisper. Her voice was that way too. In all their years, never a yell. Her tone, even now, as spring eternal.

He straightened her pillow and ran his fingers through her hair. She seemed to smile although it was hard to tell. She seemed to know he was there, as he said he would, that their union would be always, always held in love. Letting go of her hand, he pulled the covers up, kissed her cheek again before taking his seat, only this time, moving the chair a little closer.

When she had taken ill, he had begun a journal. Mainly, he documented his conversations to her as she slept, which was almost all the time. Late at night, when Kyra was safely tucked away and the house held but soft breath, he would read from the day’s entry. Sometimes he remained in his rocking chair and sometimes he would stand. Most of the pages were smeared. Emotion endless. The need to convey love, a love conveyed over decades, as urgent as their first days. So he wrote and read and cried. This was the routine. Day after day.

After several weeks, on a bright morning, for the bedroom faced the ocean and the window was always kept open, Grand squeezed his hand, opened her eyes and said, I love you. They kissed, her frail hand caressing his face as she had done so many times. Then she smiled again as her hand found rest and her eyes closed.

as you drive home tonight

2010-11-10T14:42:00.002-06:00

As you drive home tonight, and the sky dims of night, think of the stars. We know them by darkness, their brilliance, their shine. And we draw the most magical myths from father to son. I remember morning recess as a small boy, maybe second or third grade in the cold courtyard. Standing on blacktop. Wearing khaki, my brown eyes still wet with innocence. I remember looking up into the pale blue sky and seeing a fading star. And I thought then as I remember now, they are still there, watching over me and waiting, till their time, again to shine.

797. singular summers

2010-11-09T10:15:00.000-06:00

Kyra notes a conversation she had with Von shortly before he died:

My summers are singular. How many is hard to tell, but I feel some inexplicable calling. Mainly in dreams. He’s been coming more often. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes just holding and it is clear, he is holding me as once I held him. I see peace on his face and his voice is melodious. Our conversations, however, remain just beyond. Couldn’t tell you a single thing said. But make no mistake, these are not just dreams. There is no fear. Just a womb-like warmness where sound is muffled and light diffuse.

I listened to Von into the morning. He spoke of many things remembered and many more not. The envelope had remained unopened, and although he never spoke of it, I sensed he never made peace with that decision. Instead, the child became his life. He held nothing back, pouring himself into that newborn vessel, fueled, I thought, by his own premature parting. I left behind a grandfather. But Von left a son. I would say I understood, but I never had a child, so I never patronized him. I think he appreciated the listening. As Papa would say, one can heal a soul with the ears in ways the tongue cannot. I can’t say Von was ever healed, but I’d like to think his pain was a little less. I miss him. I miss the dignity and poise, of how he carried his sorrow.

796. night at noon

2010-11-08T10:55:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, he said, it is hard to remember the ground when you are flying. And when you are flying, everyone on the ground looks so very small. I swear the man said everything slant. I told him this. He smiled but didn’t say anything. So I told him again. I had stopped as we were walking the beach at Valla. I still remember his gray hair blowing with the sea breeze and his white tunic flapping against his broad chest when he turned. I remember too warm water rolling over my toes then back to sea, exhaling as I could not. My ears whistling like seashells held to the wind. He knew the language of my gestures, for he knelt and smiled and motioned. The slant beam is straighter than the straight one. This is what he said. Then he bounced me off his knee, held his arms out wide and said, We have all of this. No more talk.

Von nodded, his finger sawing his lower lip. His eyes looked like wells. My words a bucket, bringing forth into light what I always thought later should have been kept in the dark. I too had learned this language, the tone of a look, the typography of a cheek either rising or falling. I have regrets. Some of which I can’t explain. I just know I sat in my chair as he sat in his, neither of us moving, neither talking. I didn’t know of time then as I do now. I didn’t know of windows and how they open only briefly before forever closing. As Papa might have said, it is hard to know the night at noon.

my window

2010-11-08T08:49:00.001-06:00

I find that I am different from most other people. I make no value judgment in saying this for sometimes it seems a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, but either way, as far as I can tell and for as long down the walk of memory I can trot, it has been this way. From time to time the call of society knocks on my conscious and I venture out into the sun. I suppose this is where I notice the shadows the most. Once in the sun I realize my skin is too pale and I seek a shade tree or a hat until I decide I’d just rather be back inside. I enjoy the view from the window. I like seeing children at play, running, laughing and making the sorts of trouble that used to cause me stress. Adults are another matter. I see them standing or sitting, almost always talking. They never seem to be having fun. And this is where I think of my grandparents. Been two years since the last was buried. But I think and wonder if they had a second go, would they talk less and smile more?

795. dead as yesterday

2010-11-07T13:32:00.001-06:00

ed note: this chapter takes place in the future from current events in the story--how far, I don't know

I said to Von that there comes a time when all that remains are fading memories. And in this barren landscape what roots is not the vine but rather a thicket of questions. He looked at me or maybe he was just looking in my direction, for I sensed whatever wheels were turning, they weren’t rolling my way. Then he spoke. What he said next I have forgotten. And this is the pain. You see, we buried Von yesterday. And all I can think is, he's dead. As dead as yesterday.

they said

2010-11-07T10:42:00.001-06:00

They said he was in a new land and that the battles were different now. He’s lost weight. Smiles less honestly. Blinks more. This wager of gossip tossed back and forth, back and forth. But it is hard to know of a battle not fought or even witnessed. What of the orders lost or misunderstood? Of cordite and burning flesh in the nostrils? Eardrum bursting concussions? Or even the history between, say, the Turks and the Greeks or the Serbs and Croats? None of these things, however, slows the wagging of tongues. And one thinks of little boys and the pleasure of kicking a football, or friend, for that matter. And of other little boys standing mute before turning away in the comfort of twos and threes. The view is different from the ground with blood in your mouth and dirt under your nails.

more snow . . .

2010-11-05T09:39:00.003-05:00

The weather had turned cold and everyone took on the weight of coats and sweaters. The landscape held less light becoming heavy with shadow. He looked at his watch. She was late. A light snow began to fall. The street a white robe with cuffed sidewalks. The edges of his table softening. His own jacket twinkling the last light of flakes silently winking out.

He ordered another cup of coffee and watched couples come and go in holiday pace, their gloved hands held. Store fronts were full of frost and sparkle. Everywhere, jewels of red and green inlaid on white. He looked at his watch again. Even the second hand seemed impatient. With a weak smile his coffee arrived. The waiter someplace else. As was she.

Children seemed as balls of wool against this cold, their rouged cheeks full of smile. School was out. Somewhere a church bell tolled and the lights on the corner turned from red to green. Cars passed, slowly, little faces peering out of fogged windows. Families, together. They all looked the same. Happy.

Still, nothing. She would wear blue. Or maybe silver. Standing out against the others. And too, she would be walking alone, her long hair bouncing on cloaked shoulders, glint eyes and a smile he needed more with each moment she did not appear. He knew in the ambient sound, he could not hear his watch ticking. What was fact and what was real, like the winter sky, seemed gray.

From inside the cafe, bread baked. He smelled it with each jingle of the small bells on the door, opened always by men. And as quickly, closing, hushing warm waves of aroma over him, muting laughter he could see. He thought of her arms, of how they laid over him, the warmth of her torso as it fit into his under their sheets. The scent of her perfume fading now with the night, still sweet. He looked again. Down the street and then to his watch. Nothing but movement. And he thought of her moving. Her lines of silver and black against starlight, so graceful, fluid where breath alone was heard, where eyes held and arms embraced against their flow. As around him families flowed. As before him sat her snow dusted chair. Empty.

She said she would come. He had the note. Worn now from reading, its creases like elephant hide. He saw joy in the loops of her pen. The blue ink seemed alive, vibrant. She had written love, the L swooping as if she were all curve, all grace and elegance, as if this note, as last night, would be the last. Down the street more families came. Arms and hands carrying bags as still it snows and still there was nothing of blue or silver, nothing coming his way, not this morning, not ever again.

the snows had come

2010-11-03T12:08:00.004-05:00

The snows had come. Shyly, at first. Large flakes falling quietly in the morn as too the night. The countryside appeared quilted, little sugary ridges finding nooks and panes. There was a quiet to winter and one either embraced it or was driven mad depending on one’s propensity for solitude and the air not spoken. Or, in some houses, the madness was just the opposite, winter having driven folk inside and all their noise with them. Rooms grew smaller and tempers shorter.

Still, there was a warmth to kitchen and den, of stove and fire, coffee and hot chocolate. Lights became important in winter in ways they were never in summer. Lamps, candles and even Christmas lights imparted a measure of comfort against nature, the darkening sky, of endless grey. We never spoke of it in our house, the transient passage of mind and heart through this world just as we never spoke of death at funerals. I suppose this was the sadness. Not winter. Not less hours of daylight. But rather the highlighting of what was not discussed. And the feeling one got, but only later, that we lived in the shallows.

The Story of Kyra

2010-11-03T10:24:00.000-05:00

if nothing else . . .

current word count: 277, 394

794. I'd like to believe . . .

2010-11-02T09:47:00.007-05:00

I stood and watched from the bridge as Hyneria slipped away. Her dim light filling the observation deck as it filled our eyes. All were there, all leaden of foot and hunched of shoulder. There was shallow breathing and the quiet hum of Bravo. And one couldn’t help but think our coffin metal, these shiny walls of quarry and glass. To know the inside of one’s tomb, not with age and of purchase, but young, of within not as visit but swallowed whole, consumed alive by the infinite black soil of the universe. This is how I met the crew. Survivors bound by loss and weighed with grief.

My name is Kyra. I have passage because my grandfather was somebody, because he believed that I was too. These twin sacks I carry and the air I breathe is humid in memory of lesson and loss, of the dock and who was there and who was not. Of my family, I am the only survivor. I witnessed my sister die young in the arms of our benediction and ablution. The others, I can only pray imagination takes leave of me, of this sense of not knowing the last, not seeing the hand of peace close their eyes, a torment that knows no drowning. But I will say this, my parents died to me long before Hyneria consumed itself. I struggle to purge myself of the bitterness, the rejection they knowingly or not bestowed. And although it is not packed among our supplies, I can feel it as I feel the very leather upon my skin.

I suppose, as most, I am guided in this way, by what has occurred to me and of what is expected. I want to give what I did not have. I want a child. I want to know of warm blankets and of books read at night. But mostly, I want the tender kisses goodnight, of love exchanged in the first person, by choice, by presence. I want to look and be seen in the way of mother and child and I want to know of this giving of life beyond the giving of life. In a way, the child in me wants to be the parent. To know that in this interminable darkness, there is a light and to cup my hands around it, to protect it, to reflect in it. I would like to believe this is possible. I’d like to believe this is something.

793. blooded ghost

2010-10-29T08:09:00.004-05:00

Imagined thoughts of Kyra as Bravo departs:

My life as I know it is dead. Everyone I knew, every place I visited, gone. How to write of this, or even speak of it. Words and emotions have never been close. Translation falls to hell and frustration burns beyond the fingers to soothe. Where we go from here seems pointless. I feel like the soldier who survives the massacre, standing amidst smoke and fire, surveying a landscape of death, of the hand of fate upon the entire company, save one, save myself. Some ghosts still walk with blood in their veins. I know. I am one of them.

792. water and fish and such

2010-10-28T11:53:00.000-05:00

I would say you mean the world to me but that would be like a fish saying that water was important.

Overheard, Trev to Em

an easy smile

2010-10-26T08:44:00.002-05:00

An easy smile. He never had it. Apparently, neither do I. I’ve been told not to trust my eyes. Been told that within his weathered visage, past those watery eyes, his heart was good. Fair enough. We all have our beliefs and who is to say what is real and what is not. But I know this. Treasure buried is still treasure buried. Won’t pay my bills no more than that check he said he’d write, that night, over several beers, to buy me some new basketball shoes. Thirty years later, I still remember sitting on that shag carpet, in his bedroom. He was drunk. In bed. Doing most of the talking. Beer tended to soften him and in that softened state he asked if I needed anything. Basketball shoes I said. No problem he said. Whatever you want. I never got my shoes. Never said a word. Neither did he.

economics

2010-10-26T08:25:00.000-05:00

first draft:

He would take another sip of beer, (the edges of his day (smoothing) the edges of his day). His tongue would loosen to questions never asked and the answer, always, the same: economics. My father justified everything by bill paying, the holding of steady work, of having money in reserve. He lived in these narrows, sitting in his onion garden, an ice chest dog loyal by his feet (loyal as the dog he refused to own). The message was clear. Work and you are of value. But not just value. It was unquestioned value. Value beyond reproach. Or so it seemed as I listened to answers from questions I never asked.

He has been dead now half a dozen years. His words, however, have lived a bit longer. I needed help to see them as they were, as I was, (as it could be). (That there could be) A life beyond economics, beyond the (those) narrow straights to a larger body, one that could (large enough to) dissolve the salt of pain and (still) give life. She gave me this. A sense of value, of worth counted not in coin but of a different ledger. She gave me eyes. And, forgiveness. One could say, I suppose, she softened the edges of my day(s). I’d like to tell him of these things, if I could. But I can’t. He does not now, as he did not then, have the ears for such a conversation.

__________

second draft:

He would take another sip of beer, smoothing the edges of his day. His tongue would loosen to questions never asked and the answer, always, the same: economics. My father justified everything by bill paying, the holding of steady work, of having money in reserve. His wallet looked liked an overstuffed hamburger. Always. He lived in these narrows, sitting in his onion garden, an ice chest dog loyal by his feet. The message was clear. Work and you are of value. But not just value. Unquestioned value. Value beyond reproach. Or so it seemed as I listened to answers from questions I never asked. It was this way not just for a night or even a few sporadic nights. Decades. The man was, if nothing else, consistent. Untiringly committed to his view. Position entrenched. And I thought of a sentry, guarding some sacred ideal night and day, rain or shine.

He has been dead now half a dozen years. His words, however, have lived a bit longer. I needed help to see them as they were, as I was, (as it could be). (That there could be) A life beyond economics, beyond the (those) narrow straights to a larger body, one that could (large enough to) dissolve the salt of pain and (still) give life. She gave me this. A sense of value, of worth counted not in coin but of a different ledger. She gave me eyes. And, forgiveness. One could say, I suppose, she softened the edges of my day(s). I’d like to tell him of these things, if I could. But I can’t. He does not now, as he did not then, have the ears for such a conversation.

1944 (thoughts and notes)

2010-10-25T09:44:00.002-05:00

thinking of Mary:

options--

. there is no pregnancy

. pregnant but miscarried (stress of war)

. pregnant but aborted (by her hand or Kate)

. baby carried to term (in Germany)

. under the Germany option--baby is adopted by Kathrin

. baby carried to term (in US)

. under US option, Mary’s father puts baby up for adoption

notes to the above:

Mary meets Virgil (nurse/soldier/France/1944) for one night before he dies. She is convinced it was love as she has never known and, over the next fifty years, claims never to be known again. She either becomes pregnant or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, the story focuses on love, love loss, the management of grief and the edges of sanity. If she does become pregnant, she either goes AWOL and carries to term in Germany under Kathrin’s care with Kathrin adopting the baby as her own (for reasons not yet known) and all of the above with regard to love and loss takes on these new dimensions. In the US option, the army finds out Mary is pregnant and sends her home. Her father, who never wanted her to become a nurse (below the dignity of a woman, of his daughter) is horrified at the turn of events and arranges adoption. Mary sees her baby for less time than she had with Virgil and as soon as she is able, leaves home to never see her parents again. She relocates to the same town as Virgil’s parents and tries to make sense of her tragedy and so again the story becomes a study in the exploration of loss and sanity in the face of overwhelming despair. In this last option, there is the possibility that Mary and Virgil’s child finds her toward the end of of her life and the story ends with a coming full circle, a final healing and releasing.

1944 (pieces of Mary)

2010-10-18T10:38:00.003-05:00

There is nothing untrue about sunshine. He is this way. A life without shadows. Everything known, held. And loved. There is life in this kind of love. It is of light, warmth, home and hearth, of bread baking, a place of open windows and whispering candles. All as it is. Nothing as it is not. Just pure sunshine where clouds are clouds and rain is rain.

__________

He was coming home. Arriving by train. To see again what once walked, now carried, what should be walking, walking never more, of hands within wood and not upon it, of fences never mended, of grace not held, or spoken, or shared, to see the flag not flying, of patent leather shoes under granite faces, of woman in black not speaking, of men who had left their bibles at home under a coat of dust, and of children with wide eyes at rail and train and station. To see blue skies and hear nothing but my own thoughts and see nothing but dreams forever dreaming, forever stuck as death upon life, forever playing what was and what would never be. This is how Virgil arrived, or perhaps, of how I remembered it.

__________

As I age and I think of life, of what matters, of what we remember as important, I can’t help but think of holding and being held, in sunshine of course, but mostly against the darkness, when nothing pass your hand can be seen and all that can be heard is the beating of two hearts. As my days fade, too the memory, ever so faint, of his heart against mine and I wonder if what I remember now is simply the memory of a memory as I reach for coffee long grown cold in my absence. I harbor no bitterness and in this I marvel and wonder and in this way I see a shard of my difference, of a life I’ve lived alone and would gladly do again to have what we had, however brief, however fleeting.

1944 (the sound of rain)

2010-10-12T09:28:00.002-05:00

I woke to the sound of rain, to grey sky. The house was quiet of all but steady drizzle. I made coffee, pulled my robe tight and sat before the small table in the kitchen. His notes and my cup my company.

His journal was then, as it is now, yellowed of page, his blood, the darkness of it, even then, fading. I turned the pages. Traced my finger over his graceful lines. Raised the notebook and breathed in all of France, all of war, all of what had taken my soul to heights and depths that made the rising sun nothing but an annoyance.

But I could not not turn the pages. My coffee grew cold. I drank it anyway. The rain continued to fall and I thought of mud, of slush, of the color of young blood mixing in foreign muck, of his blood upon my hands, of my thumb making the sign of the cross on his forehead, his cistern eyes growing still, the tension in his neck released.

I thought now of what I knew, of what his mother didn’t, of her grief and my obligation. I thought too of the burden of my own weakness and I heard the voices of doubt as I had heard the chorus a few days before, those voices rising into the dark of wooden beams above wooden pews. And still it rained. Not hard. Not in anger, but softly. Relentlessly. And what rained was within as without and as my sight from table to field was not clear, so too, nothing else.

Those days have not grown as so many others. Some root remains barren and bitter, producing no flower, nothing green, nothing of life. Nor do I know the way of releasing, of pruning as so many others have learned. So this burden, so heavy, I decided, I would carry alone. I could not then, nor can I now, envision the benefit of sharing, of sharing what I knew was, without embellishment, a needless death, of a boy alone, dying not in the hands that bore him, hands I would see but never hold.

1944 (winter to come)

2010-10-09T15:01:00.004-05:00

Leaves fell like days. He came no more as he would come never more and what seemed so alive just a few weeks before, was over. It felt like falling, like Fall, like the inexorable end not ended. And all to be seen was brown, used as summer uses fruit not picked. Still I came. And still I sat. And still I looked down the sidewalk for what I knew would never come. Just me and a rumble of regret that made coffee bitter among a mock of voices neither known nor wanted.

There would be a service at the church on the other end of main street. Words would be spoken among gray hair and black leather and ears would receive what minds could not hear. She would be there. I would see her. And again I would feel an anger in my stomach, the kind mother’s feel in survivorship, of divine visitation absent, of a home neither warm of hearth nor heart. We would have this silent bond as we would suffer, alone. I suppose if there ever was a point I wanted nothing more of life, it was here, awash cold stone under the cool light of winter to come. This was not home. But then again, neither was any place.

1944 (Gone)

2010-10-05T13:00:00.013-05:00

I would watch him in the warm morning light, some seventy years old. Face tanned. Eyes clear as cloudless sky blue. I wanted to approach. To talk. To breath the air that had breathed him. To feel the hand that had held what I had held. To hold the look he must have known.

But I couldn’t.

And yet, still, morning after morning, I came, watched. I soaked his every movement into my imaginary world and dreamed of a life never lived. I look back now, father resting as son somewhere in the green hills. Both gone, perhaps together, perhaps happy, perhaps looking, waiting, wanting, a meeting, that meeting of us, of family, of smiles and hugs and words whispered on lips of acceptance. How I would have loved that. Just that.

I still drink my coffee, black. I still think of those days of creaky wooden floors and worn leather soles. I feel like that, a soul weathered and worn, my eyes dimming, gloaming, days fading with memory. Then it happened. He came. My boy. And what was held, released. And what was imaginary, gone.

__________

second draft:

I would watch his father in the morning light, some seventy-years-old, face tanned, eyes blue as cloudless sky. I had wanted to approach him, to talk, to breath the air that he had breathed, to hold, but not so much as hold as to feel, yes, feel, the hand that had held what I had held. I wanted his eyes upon me. To look upon what had been the most precious thing to his son. And I wanted to share, all that I knew, all that had happened. But I couldn’t.

And yet, morning after morning, I came to the small restaurant off main street. I sat in the same chair at the same table before the same window to the street, waiting. He was, in his professorial way, punctual, walking neither fast nor slow, head down, newspaper tucked under his arm. His overalls, unlike the others, were always clean, and at times, looked almost pressed and I wondered whether by his hand or hers. His hair, coin silver, thick, was parted on the side, just as Virgil’s. He wore no facial hair and his nose, in profile, was as the nose I had known and it wasn’t hard to imagine I was seeing the father as the son would have been--this world I constructed, as real to me as the snow to fall, so beautiful, so ephemeral.

Those mornings, I remember now, of life, fragrant of farm, of the day not yet warm, the light golden and the paper fresh of what was. I remember the creaky wooden floor, the smell of leather worn, of coffee and eggs and white aprons. Voices too, of men, old men with humorless faces, of white cups and black coffee rising between words. I still hear the sound of plates, talk of weather and crops, of local politics, serious as drought. And I still see those glassy eyes, fresh from a war paid in children’s blood, of son’s who would never work the land, buried in plots not for them. They knew what I knew. The line stopped here. Nothing would be handed down. And for some, they would carry their name to granite and no further.

One morning, not too long after I had moved to Tennessee, he didn’t show up. The coffee that morning seemed bitter. He didn’t show the next either and as I came to learn from the paper I’d never see him carry again, he’d see Virgil before I would. I’d like to think he’d introduce me and that together, they’d wait. I’d like to think that what happened next, they had a hand.

__________

third draft:

I would watch Virgil’s father in the morning light, some seventy-years-old, face tanned, eyes cloudless sky blue. I had wanted to approach him, to talk, to breathe the air that he had breathed, to hold, but not so much as hold as to feel the hand that had held what I had held. I wanted his eyes upon me. To look upon what had been the most precious thing to his son. And I wanted to share, all that I knew, all that had happened between Virgil and I. For him to understand, to accept. And, perhaps, forgive.

Morning after morning, I came to the small restaurant off main street. I sat in the same chair at the same table before the same window to the street, and waited. He was, in his professorial way, punctual, walking neither fast nor slow, head down, newspaper tucked under his arm in the way one tucks an umbrella on a clear day. His overalls, unlike the others, were always clean, and at times, looked almost pressed and I wondered whether by his hand or hers. His silver hair, thick, was parted on the side, just as Virgil’s had been. He wore no facial hair and his nose, in profile, was as the nose I had known and it wasn’t hard to imagine I was seeing the father as the son would have been--this world I constructed, as real to me as falling snow, so beautiful, so ephemeral.

Those mornings, I remember now, of life, fragrant of farm, of the day not yet warm, the light golden and the paper fresh of what was. I remember the creaky wooden floor, the smell of leather worn, of coffee and eggs and white aprons. Voices too, of men, old men with humorless faces, of white cups and black coffee rising between words. I still hear the sound of plates, talk of weather and crops, of local politics, serious as drought. And I still see those glassy eyes, fresh from a war paid with children’s blood, of son’s who would never work the land, buried in plots not for them. They knew what I knew. The line stopped here. Nothing would be handed down. And for some, they would carry their name to granite and no further.

One morning, not too long after I had moved to Tennessee, he didn’t show up. The coffee that morning seemed bitter. Neither did he show the next and as I came to learn from the paper I’d never see him carry again, he’d see Virgil before I would. I’d like to think he’d introduce me and that together, they’d wait. I’d like to think that what happened next, they had a hand. I’d like to believe a lot of things, but to see the child Virgil never saw, to hold him as I never held his grandfather, to know that although the name was not the same, the blood would carry on--I’d like to believe that meant something. I’d like to believe I could be forgiven. I’d like to know, when my time comes, I’m going to a place with open arms. And that perhaps one day, what was torn apart by war, could be put back together.

__________

fourth draft:

Each morning, I watched him walk to breakfast in the soft morning light, some seventy-years-old, face tanned and set with eyes as cloudless sky blue as his son’s had been. I had wanted to approach him, to talk, to breathe the air that he had breathed, to hold the hand that had held what I had held. I wanted his eyes upon me. To look upon what had been the most precious thing to his son. And I wanted to share, all that I knew, all that had happened between Virgil and I, for him to understand, to accept. And, perhaps, forgive.

Morning after morning, I came to the small restaurant off main street. I sat in the same chair at the same table before the same window to the street, and waited. He was, in his professorial way, punctual, walking neither fast nor slow, head down as if in thought, newspaper tucked under his arm in the way one tucks an umbrella on a clear day. His overalls, unlike the others, were always clean, and at times, looked almost pressed and I wondered whether by his hand or hers. His thick silver hair was parted on the side, just as Virgil’s had been. He was clean shaven and his nose, in profile, was as the nose I had known and it wasn’t hard to imagine I was seeing the father as the son would have been, give or take fifty years.This is the world I constructed each and every day, as real to me as the snow to fall, so beautiful, so ephemeral, falling as hushes fall.

Those mornings were, I remember now, of life, fragrant of farm, of the day not yet warm, the light golden and the paper fresh of what was, of what could never be changed. I remember the creaky wooden floor, the smell of leather worn of foot, of coffee and eggs and white aprons. Voices too, of old men with humorless faces, of white cups and black coffee rising between words. I can still hear the sound of forks, knives and plates, talk of weather and crops, of local politics, all of it as serious as drought. And I still see those glassy eyes, fresh from a war paid with children’s blood, theirs, of son’s who would never work the land, buried in plots not known in lands never seen. They knew what I knew. The line stopped here. Nothing would be handed down. And for some of these old men, they would carry their name to granite and no further.

One morning, not too long after I had moved to town, he didn’t show. The coffee that morning seemed bitter, the atmosphere, insipid. Neither did he show the next day nor the day after and as I came to learn from the paper I’d never see him carry again, he’d see Virgil before I would. I’d like to think he’d introduce me and that together, they’d wait. I’d like to think that what happened next, they had a hand. I’d like to believe a lot of things, but to see the child Virgil never saw, to hold him as I never held his grandfather, to know that although the name was not the same, the blood would carry on--I’d like to believe that meant something. I’d like to believe I could be forgiven. I’d like to know, when my time comes, I’m going to a place with open arms. And that perhaps one day, what was torn apart by war, could be put back together.

__________

fifth draft:

He looked like Virgil, only older. Same roman nose, same shock of hair parted to the side, same clear blue eyes set upon a glove-leathered face. Each day I would watch him arrive for breakfast, walking as I knew his son to walk, as I imagined Virgil would have walked if he had lived. I wanted to approach, to introduce myself, talk. To tell him all that I knew of his son’s last days. I wanted a lot of things I suppose and what was right and what was wrong, to this day, I cannot say. War does this. It changes everything and nothing is ever as it was.

So each morning, I arrived early. The small town had but one restaurant on the north side of main and I would take my customary seat just inside the glass window to the street and wait. He was, in his professorial way, punctual, walking neither fast nor slow, head down as if in thought, newspaper tucked under his arm in the way one tucks an umbrella on a clear day. His overalls, unlike the others, were always clean, and at times, looked almost pressed. His thick silver hair was parted on the side, just as Virgil’s had been. He was clean shaven and his profile was as the profile I had known and it wasn’t hard to imagine I was seeing the father as the son would have been, give or take fifty years.

Those mornings were, I remember now, alive, fragrant of farm, of the day not yet warm, the light still golden and the paper fresh of what was, of what could never be changed. I remember the creaky wooden floor, the smell of leather, of coffee and eggs and white aprons. Voices too, of old men with humorless faces, of white cups and black coffee rising between words.

I can still hear the sound of forks, knives and plates, talk of weather and crops, of local politics, all of it as serious as drought. And I still see those glassy eyes, wet of a war paid with filial blood, from son’s who would never work the land, buried in plots not known, in lands never seen. They knew what I knew. The line stopped here. Nothing would be handed down. And for some of these old men, they would carry their name to granite and no further.

One morning, not too long after I had moved to town, he didn’t show. The coffee that morning seemed bitter, the atmosphere insipid. Neither did he show the next day, nor the day after, and as I came to learn from the paper I’d never see him carry again, he’d see his son before I would. I’d like to think Virgil would speak of me and that together, as Virgil had whispered to me on that cold field of France, they’d wait. I’d like to think that what happened next, they had a hand. I’d like to believe a lot of things, but to see the child Virgil never saw, never knew to be, to hold him now as I had never held his grandfather, to know that although the name was not the same, the blood would carry on--I’d like to believe that meant something. I’d like to believe I could be forgiven. I’d like to know, when my time comes, I’m going to a place with open arms. And that perhaps one day, what was torn apart by war, could be put back together.

1944 (October of '45)

2010-08-31T12:21:00.005-05:00

I arrived in Tennessee in October of 1945. Virgil’s parents, as he had said, lived in the country, just outside of a small farming town. I found a garage apartment on the road leading toward their home. My landlady was a widow, like Kathrin. We talked some but she didn’t ask a lot of questions and I didn’t volunteer much information. Mainly, just small talk. Who she really was, I never knew. Her eyes held a sorrow I simply had not the strength to bear and she not the desire to share. So we lived in the shallows, always within sight of the shore, cordial like strangers. We said our good mornings and our good nights and talked of the weather and gardens. But that was about it.

The town was small, conservative, and if not quaint, clean. Main street was as it appeared in pictures a hundred years ago, with old brick facades and canvas awnings. People were friendly without poking into your business. That I had served in the war seemed to go a long way with both being accepted and left alone. Many in town had lost boys, just as the Kanes had lost Virgil. To talk about it was to relive it and there wasn’t much economy for that, although you knew it was all anyone thought about, sitting on sidewalk benches, eyes full of empty road. So I lived mainly among, or perhaps between, two generations. Of storefront glass holding faded wool skirts but not too many pants, pleated or otherwise.

Virgil’s father was a retired university professor who dabbled at farming. Each morning, after chores, he would come to town, talk with the men and drink coffee, black. His skin, tanned as the others, was not the same, had not the mileage of those who had lived all their lives on the land. I watched him drink and talk, but mostly I watched him listen. And if I looked just to the side, holding his profile in my peripheral, I could smell Virgil. A certain muskiness of lumbered floor, of pungent chewing tobacco, sometimes a whiff of muddied denim, of the farm, of chores, of men who earned their sweat honestly. Their eyes as clear as mine were not.

And I thought of the women, back home, perhaps cleaning the kitchen of breakfast, washing dishes while taking inventory of lunch or even dinner. I thought of the table, and those empty chairs, one’s worn of boyish energy, perhaps a groove in the wooden floor, of the lacquered back dull from dirty hands not washed of the day, of mothers and their sons, of that sacred place of conversation and food, of family, of a togetherness known in laughter and light hearts. And I knew then why these men came to town, to look upon chairs full and not empty, to see faces haggard in labor and worry but not grief. They drank their coffee to forget. I drank mine to remember.

New Program: ArtTree

2010-08-31T09:42:00.007-05:00

1944 (morning glories and fireflies)

2010-08-26T12:35:00.001-05:00

When the army found out I was pregnant, they flew me home. My parents were horrified. I was an emotional mess, so what happened next--(Mary breaks down and is unable to continue)

What happened next was Mary’s father insisted the child be put up for adoption. Her mother, who seemed opposed to the idea, stood by and said nothing. Mary had not the strength to resist. She saw her child for less time than she had seen Virgil. Shortly after, when her father was at work and her mother running errands, Mary disappeared. Her parents searched for years with no luck. As the baby was gone from Mary, so too was Mary gone from her parents. Her parents, without letter or call, would die bitter, entrenched in their own unspoken views. Mary neither knew nor cared. To the end she maintained innocence of the irony.

She had moved to Tennessee. Same area as Virgil’s parents.

(Mary resumes) I needed to see them, to know they existed. I needed to breathe the air he had breathed and to walk the pastures he had known. The green hills were everything he said them to be and I became an expert at sunrise and sunset. Even went to the art store and bought some oil paint. Each morning, I would mix the colors I saw. Would just stroke them across the canvas. Nothing drawn or painted, just streaks of color, the color as it changed by the minute. You’d be amazed how many variations of green there are in a morning.

I suppose those that saw me, morning after morning, just painting vertical lines of various shades of green, must have thought I was crazy. I really don’t know since no one ever approached me. Grief doesn’t much like a party. So I went for months without uttering a single word. Just watching sunrises and sunsets, morning glories and fireflies. Pain is this way. If one is talking, no matter how much they complain, there are no worries, the shore is still within sight. But I was someplace else, beyond the shore, beyond sight of anyone else, and in this way, beyond words, beyond the salve of language. I needed him around me. I needed our baby in my arms. I had neither.

And the thought, and keep in mind, at this time I was in my twenties, but the thought was I had had my chance. But thoughts come and go. Feelings, however, the kind that live in your gut, are a different matter, and the feeling I had was that what I once had, I would never have again. So tell me, how does one live this way? How does one get up every morning and pull breath from the air? (no response) You dive into it. You paint it in streaks of green in the morning and streaks of blue in the dusk. There is no other way.

1944 (enough)

2010-08-25T09:50:00.001-05:00

He had wide margins. I could breathe, swim, jump, run and know, through it all, he was there, same easy smile, same blanket arms. Virgil was Sunday morning breakfast. He was a full bellied afternoon nap. My fingers as children running through the waves of his hair. Waterfalling those beautiful brown eyes. He was the ground under this war and I knew no matter how much we moved, he would not. A harbor into I sailed. Fresh as ocean breeze. But all I can remember now is the smell of his blood on my hands and the taste upon my lips as I kissed his eyes shut. Of how time is not what we think it is.

I’ve lived a night and a day that seem as years and I’ve lived years that seem as nothing. The weight of a thing is measured not in seconds or minutes or hours. Just put your head under water and tell me of the air that enters your lungs after only a minute, maybe two. He was that breath. He was a light to eyes that had never known light. He was a reason prior not known, and as quickly, never again found.

But nothing is as words posit them to be, something always missing or lacking in the writing. He was everything in my life that was not indifference. Never has a man brought so many smiles and so many tears and for neither would I trade the world for I have lived with him as few live and I have lived without him as even fewer could. He entered my life, briefly and changed it forever. And he never knew.

So I dream of heaven, not for my sake, but his. That in his waiting, he had a place to know of where he took me. And I dream of heaven for how could he not come to know of what he gave me? How could he not be waiting to take me for that walk through the pasture, his hands behind his back, head bowed, listening to my years, the memory of him I kept sacred, of how I loved and never forgot that in this life there is but one path that crosses another and to meet at that crossroads, even for just the night and day we had, is enough.

791. and out the door

2010-08-24T11:30:00.001-05:00

Continuation of Trev's last journal entry:

When she leaves and the smell of her is still upon the air, still in the room of kitchen warm, what flows into my vacuum is as a dam opened. And waters rise. To know of flooding, of how it comes and cannot be stopped, to know of nature in this way is to know of passion and desire unleashed by her absence. I ask not for this. Seek not this force of want and need just as one seeks not the hunger between meals or the thirst between drink. She has become necessary. Vital. I bloom in the sunshine of her smile. And although wilt is too strong a word, I am not the same when she is gone.

So she leaves, as she must. And the hours slow, the cottage silent but for ticking clocks. In this way I know of two times. The time of her and the time not of her. They are not the same and this is where I know math will not explain the universe, cannot manage the ticking of a heart or comprehend the seeking of a soul for union. Too, I know the essence of oneness by its breaking, for that is how it feels when she leaves, a breaking of wholeness into pieces and the feeling is of incompleteness and where before with two legs I could run, now with one, nothing is the same, every step a hop, a struggle and where before there was grace and elegance and dance, now there is only longing and sitting and waiting.

790. through the door

2010-08-22T12:24:00.005-05:00

Trev's journal . . .

She walks through the door and what happens next is hard to explain. It starts with a look, of eyes that see only the moment, that see from someplace known not of sight or touch or any sense. The eyes look as if the soul is looking, as one looks for what was lost and is now found; and what is seen is raw, naked, without artifice, without facade or agenda, pure as hammered sweat upon the rail. The seeing is felt as one feels water when swimming or diving, as from the bottom looking up and all around beams of light refract minnows among beige and blue. The looking is of life alive, of a train coming to station in the night, inevitable, of a wait ended, ending, of a journey about to begin, of time and watches jettisoned or stopped or broken or just not applicable. Everything fades and vision is as sunlight, which is to say everywhere and nowhere all at once. Most of all, past and future exit. The looking is pure present. And what flows forth, time and time again, day after day, only grows, deepens--and this belies explanation, as looking seems afresh, new, like every day was the first day of school, every kiss the first date, every hug as a hug a thousand days out.

The above was crossed out. No date given as to revision.

She walks through the door and what happens next is hard to explain. It starts with a look, of eyes that see only the moment, that see from someplace known not of light and shadow or form and shape. They look as if the soul is looking and what is sought is not something other nor something of human hand or mind. She is the math we are yet to know.

Upon the distance closed, within musket range one might say, the things of this world slip from bound and moor and past and future fade with all earthly delusions. Gravity, too, treads not on this sacred ground, this place of harp and wing, of skies beyond the pale blue of terrestrial life.

There is breathing, to and from, warm, heated between lips tender in desire not of body or mind but in union of what once was, before sight, before thought. And light blurs as with speed, as through a portal of life in reverse, of childhood, of birth, womb, and then, weightlessness. There is nothing heavy of this place. And there is nothing separate. The moment is eternal. The feeling is of home, of a place known just beyond our consciousness.

1944 (of little feet and little hands)

2010-08-20T10:59:00.001-05:00

Virgil was neither the first nor the last. But what I have known of others has only furthered my belief in divinity; and, if I am honest, and right now I am too old to be otherwise, of imperfection in the divine. With Virgil, I had eyes I never had before nor since. Others have told me I am crazy, some think insane. But they know not what I know, they have no template to hold what I have said and their eyes remain hollow and blank to my story.

To speak of a visit to heaven and to know that what is said is neither heard nor comprehended carries its own sense of loneliness. To know that what you know will forever only be yours, can only ever be yours is a form of torture. So when I walk the storefronts a little slower than I could and I visit the museum a little more than I should and every Tuesday I drink my coffee with two cups, well, I’ve learned to stop trying to explain.

It has been more than forty years now. My memory is not what it was, or perhaps I should say, my memory of recent events, of the last decade or so, seems fuzzy and often I have to remind myself of what I did last week or even of yesterday. The memory of that winter, of the snow and the mud, of the men and their wool, where everything was green and brown, red and white, however, remains as sharp as a dream upon waking. We had but a couple days. And yet, how can I not say he has lived within me these forty some odd years, has shaped my life and all that I know by those few hours he held me, looked upon me and whispered just a handful of words. And I think, how is this possible?

When I go into town, every Tuesday, my heart aches of past and present not by memory of what was as much as the echoing hollowness within me brought by little feet and little hands at play with smiles and laughter. I have no little feet in my life. Neither did he. And I think, how could that be? How could a loving God not grant to us what surely he must wish upon all creation, of life born in the light of love. Yet I sit and I know, he did not. My knees no longer ache from kneeling as a heart no longer bleeds from having bled out. A part of me died with Virgil that cold December day in France. The rest of me, well, it has died a slower death, one without end, one summoned to the block with little feet and little hands, every Tuesday, as I sit with my cup and his.

many ways

2010-08-04T10:22:00.002-05:00

There are many ways to love. Showing sincere interest in another is one. To pour yourself into their cup and fill it with listen, care, concern. To look as if in all the world there is nothing else to see. Seems so simple, doesn’t cost a dime, yet one would think that to give of this is to give of gold such the hoarding. Or perhaps there is confusion in the way we confuse the beauty of a sunset with just another sunset, always to come as if we were immortal and our god-given right was to the eternal movement of the universe. And like a young child, each day, to, for or from our neglect or acknowledgement, that beauty is there--whether we are or not.

I think I can . . .

2010-08-03T13:16:00.002-05:00

Can I know that I know nothing; and be comfortable with that? Can I enjoy the mystery of existence as children do the sun? Can I place my opinions and thoughts into a jar like butterflies and be content to smell of honeysuckle without reason and why? Can I leave my shoes at home and again walk as once I did among green grass and clover? Can I see a cloud and actually see it as it is within my imagination unfettered of the letters arriving of want and account? Can I again return to a joy once lost and acknowledge that I know that taste as one knows the aroma of home? I think I can.

789. near and far

2010-08-03T09:27:00.002-05:00

Sigh. Miss you too. Want and need you. I am not the same without your arms around me and your lips upon mine as starlight on the ocean glittered. I need of your smell, of hair and shampoo, of neck and nape, soft of the day, of you within me by breath. I need the fit of you against me as if in all the world there is no other to my half, no salvation but through you. You live in me, near and far. But I need you near, as a diver diving needs air, again, soon. Let me know when we can talk. When I can hear of your day and know you are okay.

788. not as now

2010-08-02T20:01:00.002-05:00

In the woods lived a lady, known, it seemed, to Papa and I alone. We didn’t see her much in the summer when berries were plentiful, but in the winter, the path between her hut and Valla remained warm of our feet, the stones rubbed of snow, polished by our labors, through the wood, up the hill.

She lived alone. The food we brought, her only sustenance against the low sun and short days. She was about the same age as Papa and he had said they had known each other many years ago, for from the look in her eyes, she knew of no one any longer. Papa spoke of another time when what was tangled flowed over her shoulders like wine, and what was now yellowed in neglect, were as white as stars. She was then, he said, not as now.

When we walked that walk between the snow laden firs, and our hands strained with pot and pan, our backs with sacks of rice and grain, nut and berry, we did not speak. The sound of our labor, of breath neighing in the cold, of feet searching for traction, of backs silently aching of weight borne, this and this alone is the memory. Our prayer he said, although I suspected more in the way of penitence, for what was carried seemed more than necessary, more than vine and victual.

He said she had suffered. Her pain immeasurable. His advice sought. And given. Let go he had told her. Release judgment. Unattach from that which does not stop. Sit with the energy. Do not dam it or even try and direct it, but just sit, be.

So she did. Severed every relationship she had. Let everything she ever had go and walked into the woods. He spoke of it once and never more. But for as long as I can remember, every winter, we spoke with our feet. It was the only time I never saw him smile.

tone and mood

2010-07-31T13:32:00.001-05:00

I sense tone and mood like others see color and hear music. Each room, moment by moment ebbing and flowing, a unique texture of energies, mingling, creating ripples unseen as root, forever reaching for water, nutrients. Every look, smile, frown, touch or non-touch alters what was into what is into what will be, endlessly into being, unfolding with no beginning, no end. So this battle wages of label upon what cannot be labelled, of pails holding the rushing river no more, of wave and ocean arguing as parent and child, ever unmindful that what appears is not what is. The eye, forever seeing, never sees itself directly and we know not by the great unity but by light and shadow upon an endless series of mirrors, each generation, a distortion of the one before.

Then there is the issue of noise. Used as shield, double-sided to protect to and from, them and us. Addictive these sonic walls, barriers, erected subconsciously to hide what is too direct to experience upon tender hearts and souls--silence. For upon this platform and this alone can we hear what beckons to be heard, forever tolling, patient, enduring as stone through time.

787. ecosystems

2010-07-31T13:04:00.000-05:00

Everything you say matters. Each word a pebble in the cosmic lake. Each ripple lapping shore. The eye sees no change. But those few molecules washed from moor, taken from sun to shade, of root less rooted, of salamander quenched. They know. The universe is nothing if not a great accounting, endless pristine spreadsheets, forever calculating.

Don't believe me? Then run. Go. And when you can run no further, where are you?

You see Kyra, a thing cannot escape from itself. And there is only one thing. Only one universe.

_________

Von, you know what I could never reconcile? My parents. On the one hand, they understood this principle better than most. Their whole life was spent studying the minute changes of clime and climate and they knew the disastrous affects of even the smallest changes. And then, there was me. How could they not know of the ecosystem of me in their world? To see so clearly in one direction and be so blind in another. I think Papa spent his life trying to make amends, a father for the son, healing two in the act of one.

786. brush and canvas

2010-07-30T09:03:00.001-05:00

On Papa's nightstand was a paintbrush, chestnut lacquered handle sprouting bristles never used. It was never not there as it was not ever used in the traditional way of oil and canvas. A reminder he had said. To know of the day as canvas and of our hand as brush; and too the night, that which started the day blank, would be of yellow or red or some combination thereof, always not blank, this creation creating, of life weaving as pen writing, as brush painting.

So each day began with sunrise, of light bringing color to life. This was the natural way of all things. Know it or not know it, what started blank would never finish blank. The halls of our life lined with the work of our hand, that brush, each day creating, touching, influencing light and dark, reacting or responding, holding or letting go.

When asked by Von of the brush upon her nightstand, ever present, she smiled and said, he lives within me still and not a day goes by I don't remember the brush of my grandfather upon my life. Then she paused before adding, and the brush of my own parents.

random scribbles

2010-07-29T10:38:00.003-05:00

I live in two worlds. Three days there, four days here. Each is as different to the other as any two opposites and to know one is to see the other more clearly. Each is a creation of choice or choices, decisions made upon assumptions unasked, unspoken, these silent shadowy jail keepers. But I know this. One can choose to say good morning, or chose to remain silent. And likewise, one can value and honor relationship not by proxy or thought or blood, but by the law of the farm, as significant as the food upon our table and the water in our glasses. Each day we choose by the choices we make and by the choices we don't. Each day the root of relationship either grows deeper, stronger, or withers and retracts. There is no carry-over. No roll-over minutes. No compound interest. There is only dawn and dusk and all the choices we make, each day, between the two.

So I say to you, this day: Do you know what you chose? Do you know what you don't chose? By your hand the rudder of choice guides you down the river. By your action you say what cannot be said and you build the life you live, whether you know it or not.

__________

There is this issue of effort I refer to often. Or, as I like to say, effortlessness. As with all language, where each word by way of tone and definition and context can shoulder seventeen different meanings, miscommunication is ever present, especially in the medium of the written word. To speak of effortlessness is not to speak of no effort. The universe is nothing if not a constant flow of energy, always in motion, forever not still. So, one could say, always in effort. But there is the natural flow of life living and there is the unnatural flow of effort efforting. The two are not as brothers.

__________

And too, there is beauty. To speak of it is to miss it, to misunderstand it, to debase into language, into note and space, what has no separation. The river is not a train.

__________

I can remember acts of kindness visited upon me when I was seven years old. That is forty years ago; and still, they live within me, influence me, affect the fabric of my day. Acts of cruelty too, I remember, and they too live within my memory going on four decades, and before long, half a century. To think of what is within me, I find humbling. To think I have a choice, kindness or cruelty, each day. And to think, perhaps in forty years, some child, now an adult, will sit as I sit, and write as I write, of one or the other, planted so long ago, by my hand, my choice, today.

785. the universe is a lot older than you

2010-07-28T12:11:00.001-05:00

Kyra: Papa, what do you want to do today?

Papa: Something new. Something different. Something I’ve never done before.

Kyra: Oooooh.

Papa: Our bodies grow old with time, but the mind is different. As long as we use it, challenge it, to our last breath, it will grow, expand, forever creating new neural pathways. It is, unlike the arm or leg, forever vibrant; but only as long as we water and sun the root and leaf.

_________

If there is a rhythm to the universe, you will know it not by effort, but the lack thereof. What is, is. Everything else, the unknown nightmare of illusion. And between the two, friction, pain. As one feels when holding desperately to a branch against the raging current. Let go, my dear one. Stop trying. The universe is a lot older than you. Trust it.

784. rounding the bend

2010-07-28T11:13:00.002-05:00

They rounded the bend, the lake as coffee before the quiet rising sun. Trev sat upon a boulder and begin to write. Em stood behind, watching over his shoulder, occasionally kissing the top of his head. The cottage was a pastel blur from across the water and only the sound of birds accompanied the sound of his pen on paper, a sound Em had come to love, a sound unlike any other. When he finished, he tore the sheet from his notebook and handed it to her. With bowed head, she walked to the edge of the lake, soaking in the spaces between the words, swimming in his vision of present and future, of them as an us, of life blooming as only they knew it to bloom. She would later say, nothing was ever the same again.

I love you dearly. Miss you like crazy when you leave the room. Can think of nothing else but your arms, your lips, our home humming with activity, the energy positive as sun. I need to swim in your eyes and wade between your legs within that dewy blossom pink and red, tight and taut. I need to see your hair flow like rivers over the pillow as your cheeks arch before my kisses sweet. I want you in ways that would make you blush and take the words from your tongue and throw them out the window. I want you speechless of lip and expressive of face when you are asked of coffee, of us, of sheets that sing in morning light. Most of all, I want you pregnant. With our baby. I want to make you pregnant, to paint your world with colors you don't even know exist. I want you to know joy and happiness not as some occasion here and there, but as something abnormal by absence. I want you to know love, my love, as from a well everlasting, bottomless, of water cool and fresh on summer days. I want to walk us among maple leaves and stare upon the sky blue of winter to come, of autumn rustling, of hands held warm. I want your lips in the crisp of winter and your breath as plume upon me before bird and branch. I miss you. I want you. What more can I say.

love

Trev

783. just walking

2010-07-27T12:27:00.002-05:00

Papa: What would you like to do today?

Kyra: Take a walk on the beach.

Papa: I’d like that. Anything else?

Kyra: Nope. Just you and I.

________

Em: We’ve been walking for close to an hour now and you’ve not said a word. What’s up?

Trev: Nothing’s up.

Em: Really?

Trev: You know, sometimes, I don’t want words between us. I just want your hand, your smile and the quiet of the two of us, walking, slowly.

__________

Yul: Hey Rog, want to go for a walk?

Rog: What for?

Yul: What do you mean “what for?”

Rog: Well, where are we going?

Yul: For a walk.

Rog: I know that.

Yul: No, I don’t think you do.

Puppies for Sale

2010-07-26T21:27:00.000-05:00

I've posted this story before. Felt the need to do so again. Do you like the way I state the obvious? ;-)

A farmer had some puppies he needed to sell. He painted a sign advertising the pups and set about nailing it to a post on the edge of his yard. As he was driving the last nail into the post, he felt a tug on his overalls. He looked down into the eyes of a little boy.

"Mister," he said, "I want to buy one of your puppies."

"Well," said the farmer, as he rubbed the sweat of the back of his neck, "These puppies come from fine parents and cost a good deal of money."

The boy dropped his head for a moment. Then reaching deep into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of change and held it up to the farmer. "I've got 89 cents. Is that enough at least to take a look?"

"Sure," said the farmer. And with that he let out a whistle. "Here, Dolly!" he called.

Out from the doghouse and down the ramp ran Dolly followed by four little balls of fur. The little boy pressed his face against the chain link fence. His eyes danced with delight. As the dogs made their way to the fence, the little boy noticed something else stirring inside the doghouse.

Slowly another little fur ball appeared, this one noticeably smaller. Down the ramp it slid. Then the little pup began awkwardly wobbling toward the others, doing its best to catch up. "I want that one," the little boy said, quickly pointing to the runt.

The farmer knelt down at the boy's side and said, "Son, you don't want that puppy. He will never be able to run and play with you like these other dogs would."

With that the little boy stepped back from the fence, reached down, and began rolling up one leg of his trousers.

In doing so he revealed a steel brace running down both sides of his leg attaching itself to a specially made shoe. Looking back up at the farmer, he said, "You see, sir, I don't run too well myself, and he will need someone who understands."

With tears in his eyes, the farmer reached down and picked up the little pup. Holding it carefully he handed it to the little boy.

"How much?" asked the little boy. "No charge," answered the farmer, "There's no charge for love and understanding."

782. she cried, he left

2010-07-21T13:24:00.003-05:00

Mairi had returned and her story filled the cottage through the night as if round a campfire. She had searched, village by village, town by town and he was nowhere to be found. Sitting in a small cafe one morning, he found her. They talked of what was and what was not and could never be. She cried. He left. And a cold wind seemed all that remained.

781. don't sigh me

2010-07-21T12:03:00.003-05:00

Well, it is what it is and then it is what you think of it, said Trev.

What the hell does that mean? asked Em.

I think you think too much of things that were and things that never had a grounding beyond imagination.

Really? Is that what you think? You think my eyes deceived me? You think I don’t see what is not said between looks and touches?

No, I’m just saying there is nothing.

Look at me. I know nothing. Lived with nothing for a long time. And what I see, ain’t nothing.

Sigh.

Don’t sigh me.

780. upon the door, came a knock

2010-07-21T11:44:00.000-05:00

They sat around the table and joined hands in silence, heads bowed, eyes closed. Ariel spoke the words of grace, her diminutive voice filled with a serenity and wisdom of word and tone beyond her eight summers. All were present save Mairi. Until, that is, upon the door, came a knock.

creation creating

2010-07-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

To be in her arms is to be in the light of ten thousand suns, beyond heat, beyond radiation, absorbed seamlessly into the great solar wind, one again with the unfolding universe, one again with untethered being, someplace beyond you and I, this and that. Life wants to live. It wants to grow. And mostly, it wants to express through its greatest joy--creation. The purest act of life eternal.

growing together

2010-07-20T12:24:00.000-05:00

The more we grow together, the more bitter each separation, the more poignant breathing one’s solitary air. We were not made to live alone. Sleep alone. Wake alone. You know. There is nothing natural about it.

upon the curve

2010-07-20T12:15:00.002-05:00

She is my sun and with her the warmth of day. Without, the bitter cold wind of night. On the dark side, I know, I know somewhere that light is shinning, somewhere there are smiles, of hearts filled of her joy. So I run in place, my feet upon the earth, each step pushing, pulling rotation, to bring that light upon my horizon, see the sky lighten in mauve to pink, to know again what it is to breathe.

sigh

2010-07-20T11:52:00.002-05:00

She is there and I am here. So don’t lecture me on hell.

BE THE ONE

2010-07-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

779. attention

2010-07-20T09:54:00.005-05:00

ed note: conversation between Kyra and Von, on the porch of the cottage

Papa used to take me into the woods at night. We didn’t camp. Just a long walk to a clearing where we would sit in total darkness and I would see his face only by the light of stars. Sometimes we would talk and his voice, as too mine, sounded so very different wrapped in that darkness, where the voice was for you and only you, where the only thing happening was union, connection, of one person to another. In that cocoon of night, wrapped in the heavy cloak of hushed fir, there was no multi-tasking. No talking while performing some other task. No clock of a to-do list ticking away the words. No eyes looking over your shoulder to the door or upon the desk to paper. In that place, there was just him and me, a grandfather and a granddaughter, talking.

The voice is different in that environment. Sacred. The way voice is in the great cathedrals. On some nights, of cloud, there were no stars and when Papa turned out the light, you could not see your hand in front of your face. So we sat without sight, as if with the switching off of the lamp, we had switched off our eyes, becoming blind as bats. The voice then becomes everything. The darkness is absolute. And the feeling is of sea, adrift on the great ocean. And that voice, his voice, was my tether, my belay--the words, his words, washing over me like warm waves and I floated on his stories, his lessons, his ability to paint with the tongue. Those nights, just the two of us, of attention so purely devoted of one to the other, were, then and now, as fingers in the soul, gently caressing, nourishing, healing.

As you know, Papa was one to show, not tell. Yet, on those nights, from the outside looking in, with sight taken by utter night, one would think all he had was tell. (Long pause)

But all the talking wasn’t telling, was it? asked Von.

No. The talking had nothing to do with talking. The stories told on those nights have faded, some forgotten. The lesson wasn’t in the words. It was in the act. Using the darkness to connect not person to person or grandparent to grandchild, but heart to heart and soul to soul. The power of that connection, of pure unadulterated attention paid and given, was as communion solemn, of grace bestowed, of love flowing as love can only flow as if when we sat, our two energies begin to flow, circular, from opposite directions. And at some point in the night, the circle connected and where there were two energies before, now, only one. I think he knew this. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. And you know what?

What?

It didn’t have a damn thing to do with what was said.

778. this idea of get

2010-07-19T19:13:00.000-05:00

Into the night, long after the talking had stopped and Von had retired, Kyra rocked and her mind drifted from Trev and Em, to Papa, to Hyneria:

Where there is energy, there is motion, movement. Where there is life, too, nothing stands still. The sun rises, then sets. Rivers flow. Flowers bloom, give of themselves before fade and fall, from soil to soil, so they might say. So place your face to the sky and the warmth you feel is real. Likewise, your hand in the river or your nose to the petal. These things you can trust, this natural order of motion, of life rising and falling, living and dying, the eternal circle of infinite loop, innocent as the skipping child. In this we believe; in this we align. For in the action we find not fiction or imagination, device or design. And know this, Kyra, life wants to live, to flow, to express that which comes naturally, before there is thought, before there is want and need, lust and desire, greed and gluttony. These things are added upon. Do not be deceived. They are not part. Not life living but rather something added, like a barnacle to a ship.

This too, you must learn. Where there is effort, there is misalignment. The sun does not strive nor the river pant. With effort is friction for what fits, fits effortlessly and it is by this shadow of things that we know, by the ease and peace of fit that mirrors the ease and peace of dawn and dusk. Many will tell you otherwise. They will point to what can be achieved, constructed, built. Accumulated. Be wary. What does not move is not life. What does not move of natural ease is outside the eternal movement. You have the gift. Others will see it. But more important my dear one, you must see it. You must know it. And I say to you, you know it not by effort, not by accumulation. You know it by the unlabored flow. Release yourself into this stream. Swim with the current. Leave behind this idea of get.

777. feels good

2010-07-19T12:40:00.002-05:00

Von: You see what I see?

Kyra: I do.

Von: Feels good doesn’t it.

Kyra: Feels like home. But yes, feels good.

Von and Kyra are sitting on the porch when Von brings up the subject of Trev and Em. She tells him about the night of the fireflies with Papa back on Valla, of how Love (with a capital L) is not an idea but an energy, something that exists beyond the mind while also in the mind. It is both within and without. No separation. As Papa might say, electrons don’t orbit without it. This Love has a heat signature. It becomes a force multiplier. The atmosphere takes on a charge. Cells reproduce as if in joy amplified, of life living as water flows and fish swim. When this Love is present, the air is perfumed with its drug. Even the most jaded quaff.

776. happy

2010-07-19T12:32:00.003-05:00

Em: Are you happy?

Trev: Yes.