monday morning scribbles

I hated my father from that moment forward. And I would guess he never knew. Not then, not ten years later, not even on his death bed. And as I stood watching him die, that unrepentant bastard, I thought of those black fields, of stubble burned to clear the land, to prepare winter soil for spring, of the stubborn pony and the saddle not secured, of the silly red cowboy hat my mother had smilingly placed on my head along with the black cowboy boots and pearly buttoned collared shirt one wouldn't wear outside of a rodeo. The images exist not as movie, but as photograph; and I can hear the click of the shutter as each moment was captured in that part of my brain quarantined for fear, where I was caught between the yell of father and the bray of horse, for in my mind, the pony was a horse. And there I was, unable to please man or beast, caught, as if the two were at war and I was between them, pulled in their struggle, torn, as I would come to see, on those ashen grounds, the taste in my mouth the way grass would be, in later years, on the gridiron.

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I watch people living their lives and I know, like me, like everyone before them, they will die and all they have will be dispersed, all they've done forgotten, their memory as lost as a grain of sand tossed back onto the beach. And so I ask myself, what is this, what is this life?

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There is not a day that goes by that I do not think the unthinkable. There is no effort to do so, the thought simply bubbles up, usually when in bed, both before sleep and before waking. It comes as a faceless voice and I simply have to say this: it is hard as hell to do anything with that voice.

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I long for silence, which is really not accurate. I long for the absence of all things human. Not forever, but just long enough to heal. And I wonder at the very statement, at the view of life as campaign, as battle, as conflict, of myself as beaten and scarred, wounded and less of what I once was when sun was sun and rain was rain and I knew the difference between the two.

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Along with that voice are ghosts. Events of more than thirty years ago, of moments not more than a sentence long, reemerging, roots long since forgotten having grown through the decades, stronger, I fear, than my ability to uproot them. These memories live as if a life of their own or perhaps as if held by another hand and played now, a flanking maneuver, attacking with strength, a quiet fury, as the boot kicked into the ribs or the fist punched into the gut under a scrum of helmeted young bodies.

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I hear voices from afar. Not many. Not often. But I hear them in the way one drifting out to sea hears voices from the beach, in the way that one realizes, then, at that moment, the futility of words carried on the wind of breath not one's own.

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I wake to coffee each day. And each day the same--I drink till my cup grows cold. That last sip, always cold.

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Maria lies beside my desk, asleep in the light of the window. Her head is curled into her ribs, her neck stretched beyond what seems reasonable. I watch her whole body pull life from the air, expanding and contracting. I find her quiet rhythm hypnotizing. Like watching a baby sleep.

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My father did the best he could. I really have no doubt. And this is where the sadness lives, in that thought, in the sodden reality of that idea, of how his blood courses within me and from some slicing of my own life, I walk down a path he must have known, only this time, I walk alone, to the back pasture, where once the two of us walked, mainly in silence. I never knew what he was thinking except for those times the barrel of my rifle pointed into the air rather than the ground. I was too young to know of accidents that could not be undone. I know them now. But he is gone and the conversations between equals exist only in my mind.