You feel it first in the ribs. A tickling vibration. Then the ground clamors before you see them, these roving juddering leviathans, rumbling like buildings broken loose from their foundations. Sherman tanks, unbuttoned. Covered in sandbags. Leather heads popping from hatches like nervous gophers from their holes. I wondered how many we'd see, returned to us by truck, unloaded on stretchers. Their waves and smiles as gone as the arm or leg or legs they were missing. And I wondered too, how many we'd never see again, outside of a photograph. And if upon this day, someone back home felt ill at ease around the dinner table, or watching a sunset over the mountains from a front porch, rocking the day into night. Just the rocking and the crickets and maybe a few lightning bugs.They tear up the narrow village roads with their steel tracks, the fetid smell of fuel, of exhaust in the pre-dawn mist, of ruddy lives within those olive drab coffins. We've seen our share of burned out hulks pushed to the side of the road and we've seen the burned out bodies smoking from the fire of recent battle. Like blackened mummies failing to escape, bent from hatch, fingers clawed, faces fixed in rictus agony. They say smell holds the high ground in memory. I won't argue the point.
As quick as they come, they're gone. The jarring, however, remains. As if your bones are still resonating of some deep frequency. Even today, some twenty years later, I still feel those juddering clanking tanks, still see those ruddy fresh boys, in the memory of my spine. You feel it like an ache before a change in pressure. And you stare at your cup of coffee, waiting for the ripples. But there are no ripples. Those tanks aren't coming, no more than those boys are coming back. So it feels, caught in the crease of a memory, in that darkness of yesteryear, of a time you'd rather not speak about.
___________
I died a little bit today. But not beyond the threshold of pain. His memory leaves me like the tide. And what washes anew is not the same. My eyelids at night, flash with the lightning of my dreams and my head aches with its thunder. My nights are this way. Lost on the ocean, riding the swells to nausea; and when I wake, the sheets are wet. And I smell the stale stench of sweat.
13 comments:
Tree, the imagery is incredible... have you ever experienced this. And if not, how on Earth do you write about it so beautifully?
Love it,
Smiles
Sue
Thanks Sue. I've had this experience only in my dreams where my overactive imagination likes to play. And then in the mornings, I spit it out. Thanks for the smile. Not often does one have a scene like this (of war) described as 'beautiful'-- that you have looked beyond the content (or plot) and seen the writing as something in and of itself, pleases me more than you know. You've made my day. :-)
Sometimes you have an idea that you can never quite word right and so the idea dies. I wanted to paint the picture of the ground shaking, clamoring in the way of protest as if these tanks had been town buildings broken loose from their foundations and they were coming down the street the way that a house might if swept away in a flood. I wanted to associate the ground and buildings, the shaking and the tanks while trying to put into perspective just how large these vehicles were, home to four or five men. If I can figure out how to do it, I might revise this post. But it seems perhaps overkill.
I agree with Susan, Trée. It's as if you've lived these moments and now writing of your recollections.
It's magnificent as it stands.
Thanks S. :-)
sordid...
makes me wonder ...how many times i've died...
"And if upon this day, someone back home felt ill at ease."
I would imagine that someone did. More than one someone....
The writing in this piece is so clean and crisp - like a lense that's been fully focused on it's object. Thank you for helping us all to experience this...
Grace, thanks for the kind comment. I had to go back and read it again to see "clean and crisp." Sigh. All I saw is what I would edit, revise, change, delete, rewrite and rework. If I could have one wish it would be to see my writing as if I hadn't written it.
For example, where I talk about the burned out hulks on the side of the road, I think it would have been more elegant to parallel with the image of the burned out bodies still smoking from the fires of battle. The Sherman tank was known as a fire trap. Those that survived a direct hit were often horribly burned. Those that didn't survive were often burned beyond recognition.
Mona, thanks for stopping by.
Final revisions made.
Sometimes life and death aren't elegant, Trée, as you know. Sometimes it raw. blunt. staccato. like machine gun bullets tearing up everything it touches.
Are you familiar with The Artists Way - and Julia Cameron? Just this morning I was reading on a blog that's on my Roll, about blocked artists. Do you know that many of us - when we are blocked - manifest that in a sort of frenetic perfectionism? If you have time, I encourage you to read it: http://owlsdaughter.blogspot.com/2009/09/pop-quiz.html
xoxox
Thanks Grace. I'll check that out. I actually have her book but I've never done more than glance through it.
I cried goblets, when I realized how many of these posts, I had not written a comment for yet. It occured to me now is perhaps not the best time to be making up for it, to hear comments on past posts at a time when you do not have the desire to write, but I hope you do not mind for I cannot bear it for one moment longer. Today it begins anew.
I sit with this post as I have with so many before it, wondering how to define in words the conclusion of pure genius, that fell upon the soul in conviction with every word like raindrops from the heavens. Clean, pure, perfect. How does one describe the grace by which your sentences flow into the consciousness, I've never found a way to do so, perhaps never will I, this thankfully does not deter the ability to keep calling your work as it is. We are all capable of reading, of determining whether we enjoyed what we read or not, such things are subjective to personal preference, the kind of talent that you possess is of its own league, anyone capable of reading English would recognize the unique quality of pure genius. When a gift is so authentic, so natural, predilection has no bearing on the ability to recognize it as such. For more concrete evidence, think of this: We may be a select group that have read your writing, but has there ever been a response that was not overwhelmed in the presense of such beauty. In the study of a particular piece of writing, a play, a novel, a poem, we may point and pick at particular features that contributed to the merits of the work as a whole, and the process can be rewarding, the dissection informative, with your work however the desire abates as one sentence follows the next, the spell cast too seductive, the magic too extraordinary to want to subject it to such an exercize, to pull any one feature from the group would seem to neglect the others. Reading you is an experience unlike any others. Reading you is unlike reading any other. As I have said before, in the reading of others, I have experienced many moments that were as consuming, as powerfully affecting as yours, the difference, the aweinspiring difference is that in your writing, it is as constant as the passage of time, as unchanging as the beauty of your soul.
I read again, for still I want to say more, though the desire is there to just hold this piece in its entirety, I do yearn for the ability to describe to you, for I know you read own words differently than the rest of us do, with simplicity and clarity so that you might see it as we do precisely how the magic is created, but as with all things in their purest form any other terms would be substandard.
The best way I know how is to say your posts are not read, they are felt, with every fiber, with every heartbeat.
I was overwhelmed by this post the first time that I read it, only to be so again. The same I know will be true, when I do so again.
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