I have to wring out the light.
The fact that this love will one day leave me empty is not enough to stop me from speaking soft words into the rough bark of trees. Weekends will still find me bent over the lighted glass sorting seeds the size of pepper grains, my hands transformed into spring grass in a long forgotten field, swaying and dipping, beholden to nothing, certainly not the face of a ticking clock. Some evenings, long after the watering and weeding have been done, I will wrap myself in silence and watch the stars above my crumbling adobe house and it will feel like the very definition of abundance.
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“What you need to do, son, is to find something you really love.”
The boy gave the no-fire sign, and sprinted off into the field to setup the targets one more time. That morning, he’d tied a rope to the handle and dragged the box from their back porch through the woods and into the cornfield. It had started off full, but was now reduced to just a few sharp tin cans riddled with holes. The targets were a mix of metal cans and glass bottles, collected all year in a box under the basement stairs. They both had merits. The cans made a satisfying thud and could be reused, but the bottles exploded in a glorious spray of glass, especially if the sun caught them in the right way. When he returned, his father was still sitting on the tree stump, smoke trailing from both nostrils. He didn’t hoist his gun up to his shoulder immediately, but looked to the horizon and said, “Do you know what I mean, son?” It was if no time at all had passed since he’d made that statement twenty minutes ago. He was onto something and wouldn’t let it go until he was satisfied. “Huh? I don’t know what you mean, Pop.” “I mean, life ain’t easy. You’ve had it easy, Spike, but I don’t want you to think it’s that way for everybody. You don’t want to spend your life doing things you hate, or being around people you hate. Find a good woman. Maybe not the prettiest one, or the richest one, but the nicest one and the girl who thinks you are the best boy around. You got that?” He knew he wasn’t going to get away without agreeing, so he nodded. He wished to be a little bird, flying free. It was a crisp autumn day, perfect for shooting and he was eager to get back to it, but old man didn’t budge, just took a heavy pull on the cigarette hanging from his lips and looked square into the eyes of his younger, paler doppelgänger. Smoke rose from his nostrils in lazy braided ropes and caught in his eyelashes. “Think you can hit that can from here, boy?” He nodded off in the direction of the middle bottle, upside down on a wooden post in the ground. “I can.” “Let’s see you do it then.” The boy turned to adjust his stance, sight down the barrel, and aim, but the elder grunted, jerked his head impatiently, and flicked his cigarette butt off behind him. “No, from here. Don’t move…don’t aim. Just shoot the can.”” “But, I was…” “But, nothing. When I count to three you shoot, got it?” His voice had taken on a timber timbre that Spike heard many times before and he knew better than to try his luck. The last time he’d heard it, Uncle Trix had ended up in the emergency room. “One…two…three…” The crack of the gun echoed into the afternoon. The bullet rushed off and landed somewhere in the sagging cornfield, never even approaching the target. Before the gun’s report had a chance to clear the air, Spike shrugged and began a litany of excuses regarding why the bullet hadn’t hit the mark. “That wasn’t fair. You didn’t let me aim. There ain’t no way I can hit something without…” His father cut him off sharply, grasping his arm and pulling him closer until he was half standing and half squatting. The boy had no idea what he wanted and couldn’t imagine how the day had taken such a turn. Wasn’t that always the way of it? Everything starts out sunbeams and sparkles, and then turns to shit when you blink. “It’s the same with your life, boy. You can’t hit the mark if you don’t set yourself up right and aim properly. Girls are the same way. You think. Think, I’m telling you.” Spike heard the words, they were clear enough, but he had no idea what was expected of him. Not really. Was he supposed to say something? The tone of Pop’s voice told him that this was important, but he’d be god damned if he could grasp why. He would remember this conversation years periodically over the years; the glowing afternoon, this advice which was surprisingly good considering it was the only time he ever remembered Pop trying to give him wise council. To be more accurate, it was the only time he remembered Pop possessing anything resembling wisdom. He’d also question the phrase – you’ve had it easy, Spike. He’d question that many times. Easy. Compared to what? Still crouching, the boy glanced around to see if he could spy a jar of moonshine nearby. Pop loved moonshine; his family had been making it and running it for decades. Everyone in town had seen him stumbling, swearing, and making no sense at all. Collectively, they thought it best to stay away from him on those days if at all possible. He wasn’t making much sense now, but he wasn’t drunk. He released the boy’s arm and lowered his head, fists braced against his forehead. Taking a step back, Spike straightened his jacket where it had been balled it up. He looked at his father, really looked for the first time in ages. He seemed worn out; he didn’t move, just sighed heavily. When he did raise his head, it was as if nothing had happened at all. He patted his sides for the pack of cigarettes he always carried, and removed them from his inside pocket. “What you waiting on boy? Let’s get going. Today’s your birthday. I got something special. Meet us in the barn when the sun goes down.” Glass crunched under his feet as he walked off through the field. Spike collected the cans, tossed them into the box, and began pulling it home. --- The barn had been hand-built years ago and according to Owen family lore, it had been used to birth a human baby and a calf on the same rainy night in March. It had also been used to store many things, most importantly the family still, which was well- known in neighboring counties, but had been moved some years back to an undisclosed location in response to an upcoming raid by the authorities. The barn had been used to grow marijuana so many times that it was impossible to count. Once, it had been the home of Harold, an odd job man and family friend, until it became evident that he was simultaneously involved in two undesirable activities; he was romancing the youngest male cousin, who was thirteen at the time, and skimming money from the moonshine operation. Harold Gunner was ousted and sent on his way with a black eye and a limp on his right side which would persist throughout the rest of his life, but he lived on in infamy because he had carved his name deeply in one of the upper rafters. Oodles of animals – goats, chickens, horses, and sheep - had lived in the shed, and at least two children, one of them Spike himself, had been conceived within the shelter of those four walls. Today, though, it was just the barn, and not nearly as exciting as the stories associated with it. They didn’t keep animals anymore, and hadn’t for as long as Spike could remember. For one thing, they couldn’t afford them. They were lucky not to starve themselves to death, so it didn’t make sense to add more living creatures to an already perilous situation. The boys, known collectively as the Owens brothers - Pops, Trixie, Sonny, and Bones – plus a motley assortment of friends and associates which changed frequently, depending on who was in jail or owed one of the Owens’ money, had taken to the task of fixing up the barn with far more zeal than they had ever applied to any paying job. Items were pilfered from god-knows-where and then carried out to the barn in the dark of the night. They built a table on hinges and affixed it to the south wall for euchre games. Last year, when Dody Wilson owed the brothers some money, electricity had been run out to the club and the debt was called even. This meant a radio, a refrigerator, and a dual fan/heater gadget had been liberated from their original owners and found their way to the club. Just yesterday, Trix had smuggled in a red lava lamp, still in working condition. By the time Spike had trudged through the mud and arrived at the barn, they’d had been drinking and playing cards for hours. Seems several of them may have gotten started early, judging from their condition and the truth was, some of them never really stopped. He was standing in the door, the setting sun warming his back, when the gunshot sounded. They’re not my words. The words come from the spouts and sprigs in my garden. They are rooted deeply in the warm brown earth, waiting quietly, pulsing impatiently. They have always been there and will always be, witness to clamorous striving and calamitous fear. They know the collective unkindness of human beings but they have also seen the steady hand of a gardener. They know the soothing power of cool, clear water and they understand that things take time. They know my heart is a fool, weary but still hopeful so they stay with me when the light grows dim and the only sound is the scratch of my favorite blue pen in a notebook fat with poetry and a reminder to pick up the really good olives.
The words wait for me to find them and then graciously step toward me as if accepting an invitation to Sunday picnic replete with fried chicken and cold salad. As if they know there is lemon cake. They urge me take more time to think and remind me that my pen and my heart are inextricably tied to the melons not yet budding to the left of the rosemary bush, to the rattlesnake pole beans stretching their necks up the homemade trellis which flashes silver in the sun. Yesterday, when I cupped those two blackberries carefully in the palm of my hand and then swallowed them slowly, I was self-medicating against selfishness, stupidity, and stubbornness. I need so much more practice. And now I am holding wisdom inside of my body and I know that it is right to let it flow down my left arm, the one with the rose bush scratch, crooking around the elbow bend to spill like seeds onto my clean white table. It’s after noon and nothing of note has been done. The sound of the dishwasher foaming, keyboard tapping, and nothing else at all. I can’t tell if this sounds like the heavy drop of heartbreak or whispers with the stillness of possibility. Some things gather slowly. Remember the way people used to wind clocks with a key, bending time backwards with each tiny tick, until the gathering came alive as loss and exploded forward with barely controlled violence? None of us can stop that so we pretend not to notice, paying particular attention to the tomato seeds on pale green plates, the misshapen water spots on fat bottomed wine glasses. And most days, this is enough.
My writing is dappled sunlight sifting through buckeye trees on an autumn Saturday morning. It’s blood on the concrete in the church parking lot on that day when no one was coming to the rescue. The sound shifts without warning from the murmuring one makes while holding a newborn baby to the howling of brakes as a train comes to a full stop on tracks alongside the Erie canal. It’s grass so green it hurts your eyes. The edges are wet paper in a heavy downpour, icy raindrops big enough to sting your skin.
My first literary love was story. The Wind in the Willows, Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gone with the Wind. As a young girl, I carried a paperback book everywhere I went, stealing sentences, paragraphs, and if I were really lucky, entire chapters as the day marched forward. The summer I turned twelve, I volunteered for the library’s youth reading program and I felt like a powerful princess each time I walked through the glass doors and pinned on my badge. I didn’t yet know that the town was small, the library woefully underfunded, and the high school graduation rate dismal. For the next several summers, I volunteered and when I wasn’t busy with the children, I buried myself in the stacks. I decided to read every book in the young adult section in alphabetical order but when I got to the B’s, I had to stop. We were a town of corner bars, bonfires, and Saturday parades build upon the foundation of football and baseball, in that order. I’m fifty years old and almost a continent away but I still remember that there were 37 baseball books and that was a chasm I was unwilling to cross. I kept reading. I became aware of the Holocaust and read everything I could find on the topic. I stayed awake too late, suspended in horror and sorrow while the cold seeped in around the windowsill and turned my nose to ice. I had already learned firsthand that people were cruel but the scope of it, the sweeping blindness of it, the factual nature of the words on the page, tore my heart into pieces. Then poetry found me. I was seventeen and had taken a a wild adventure, a bus downtown to the main library. It had three floors, escalators, and throngs of homeless people camped outside on the front walk. I wandered through the dry smell of books for hours, my bag growing heavier and the sun slanting through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The poetry stacks were heavy with classic American poets. Walt Whitman, W.S. Merwin, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings. I’d probably read poetry in school, but that was the day a furtive relationship with poetry began and would never end. How I ended up there I don’t recall but I sat on the smooth concrete floor with books piled around me and read for hours. In order to observe the book checkout limit, I emptied my enormous bag of my previous selections and filled it with poetry instead. I still love a good story, but poetry is my constant companion and the form that my writing most often takes. My writing was born in a library. I used to sleepwalk.
Throughout my childhood, I rose at odd hours, took to my bare feet, fled through the kitchen door and into the moonlight. I don’t remember it, but I understand it. What I wanted then was a mother who was sober, if not all of the time, then at least some of the time. I wanted to curl into soft blankets and wake to the smell of pancakes and quiet in the house. I yearned for a cool glass of water on a clean white tablecloth. It was not to be. Until these days of quarantine and face masks, I had forgotten about my need for safety. It was buried deeply in the fine sifted soil of university, covered over in the frail gauze called 401K. I have found safety in distance – social and otherwise. This city encircled in mountains is 1600 miles from that kitchen door. and I am still not sure if it is far enough. Today, I can hear that little girl’s voice. She hisses like a teapot gone to boil, high pitched and impossible to ignore. She cries and I try to soothe her but she knows better. She knows that my solution is to sleepwalk my way through it and she is wise enough now to know that this is not an answer. Still, she wants to be held by someone stronger than her. Upon this altar I place
the sweet honeysuckle of those ponytail days, truth or dare behind the neighbor’s shed, the color of your hair that lies somewhere between sweet honey and the blazing butter of fall leaves burning through that railroad and graffiti town. I give you this freight train of hysterical despair carrying us to pregnant too young and married to hard-fisted men. I place my closed heart next to your silent misery. Take my blindness and guilt and all those cold days kissing boys who tasted like cigarettes. Let’s waft the scent of lavender and fresh linens, listen for the sounds of our babies laughing on the rusty swing set, the dirty lake lapping at their tiny toes. Pay homage to the way you could whip up dinner with crumbs from empty cabinets, the food stamps long gone for the month. Popsicles and sprinklers, the sound of storms creeping in like cloaked men in the night. The taste of lemon drops and whiskey tongues, sound of quarters dropping down deep, pool balls clinking like bullets loading into the chamber of a 9mm. Heap together the damp carpet and the quicksilver bugs, the mice shuffling through the silverware drawer, that tiny, useless, crooked air conditioner, and the back porch that nobody ever used. I place my heart pounding with so much fear. I place the home that raised my sister to learn not to want to live. Take these mud pies on Plexiglas as an offering. Let’s pray together to the gods of old folding chairs and appreciate how they scrape the concrete floor of the church basement and the way they leave permanent marks on my heart. after Archibald MacLeish's poem of the same name
A poem should be smooth, worn slick as supper plates waiting in warm water going cold as the night wears itself out. Damp as a basement with graffiti-rough walls, no college degree in sight. A poem should shoulder the burden. A poem can't do the dishes because it’s too busy doing nothing. A poem is the time between when I realize I don't love you and the day I say it out loud in an empty room. A poem takes its time. Running, as the mountain pulls me close, boulder by boulder, my legs gasp poetry under their breath. Leaving, as the elk bounded from the meadow the night of blazing vodka stars. A poem should be equal to: open windows. The way the curtains catch the sunlight, paint a perfect slant across the linen. For love the crooked house and two hands in the dishwater - A poem should not mean but be. And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom from In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden Wander the towns of America, and ask are you free? I asked this of a woman in the Dollar Tree parking lot which had been wilting under the sticky Cleveland heat for weeks. My head was a donut just out of the fryer. She barely looked my direction as she gathered small children set them right in the cart, tied a shoe, patted her purse. Her hair needed a wash. With a heave, she drove the cart, rusty and listing to the right, up the ramp. The door opened out and I watched as she maneuvered through with a hard twist of her shoulder and a quick two-wristed shove. I followed. But what I want to know, ma’am, is are you free? She turned on me then. Her eyes were broken bottles against a backdrop of painted bridges, blackened three times and counting, and held enough hope to kill a man. free The sound she made wasn’t a laugh or a cry, it was the sound of supper time forks clattering but not enough vegetables or meat. It echoed with the resolve to save beloved children from war and the knowing that you will fail. It was blood and spit, looking your enemy right in the eye. It rang with the hammer beat of labor camps and the slow seep of gas oven deaths. Without one word, she spoke of children who aren’t safe even in their own homes, held all the too-early deaths of the falsely accused and unjustly persecuted. It sang from a hymnal clutched in rosary hands passing baskets of money. It held up choir boys forever changed, and looked down upon televangelists just in it for private jets and swimming pools, amen. It broke her heart. It shouted poor is bad and I will kill you for that, one way or another. Her voice was heavy smoke, rising right there in Aisle Four between the Pringles and five dollar frying pans, and it threatened to burn the place down. And then it was gone and in its place, a soft breeze. She patted a startled child on the head, smoothed his porcupine hair. We have never been free, she said, sliding a box of Strawberry Frosted Pop-Tarts in the thin space between a son and a daughter, you just like to think we are. It’s not normal to cry over an egg salad sandwich.
I know this. Three days ago, he called to say he was clean but hadn’t eaten in nine days. I’d heard from him maybe five times in the last quarter century, but I knew exactly who he was. You don’t forget a thing like that. The day I met him, I was a screaming fucking maniac throwing all of my douchebag boyfriend’s clothes down steep stairs into the street. I was 17 and hadn’t been home in months. He parked that piece of shit motorcycle, and without a word helped me pitch a six-drawer dresser to splinter in the green grass. Guns and Roses raged from the neighbor’s porch and suddenly it was all rain in my face, wind in my hair, strobe lights down there. Come on, baby. Give it to me good. Cocaine, fat joints. Fists and I’m so sorry. You know I love you, but we should put some ice on that. It’s just you and me – except when it’s me and her, me and whiskey, me out all night. Bruises, band aids, motorcycles sliding on asphalt. World by the balls and small, small town. Eight ball, stripper pole, black lights, shots of Jaeger before each shift. All I wanted was for him to love me. And love me he did. Some people love with fists and fat lips. Then it was crack cocaine, sharp fear in the night, that glass table in so many knives on the floor. I remember watching his tattoo as he cracked five eggs, each shell shattering itself again and again on the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. I had red lipstick and cleavage, both a little too much in the bright light of the kitchen. We were still drunk with the power of youth, didn’t even suspect the devastation to come. No way to see the son, the daughter, waiting quietly beneath his skin. Only his stark beauty and the fact that I’d never before eaten egg salad, which explains why we two left the party, boiled water in a stranger’s pot, and spent the next five years loving each other almost to pieces. Now those kids are older than he was then. Now it’s been 23 years homeless. Meth, heroine. I can’t stop, baby please help me. Snow, ice, batteries from dumpsters, cardboard signs, dirty, dirty beard. Old man face, brain a cluster fuck of need and regret. Four fingers, two toes gone. Staph infection and no ride to the hospital. The stench of bridges burning to the ground. So yeah, I sent him money the other day because nine days is a long time and your first love is an addiction worse than any drug. When the hospital called to say he’d stroked out, that he sure as fuck wasn’t clean, never had been. That those two kids, grown now, are next of kin, and could I ring them up on the phone? I happened to be eating an egg salad sandwich and I couldn’t help but cry over those five dead chickens. |
Who am I?I’m a systems engineer and creative coach living in ABQ, NM. I believe that we can intentionally design our lives to align with our deepest dreams and desires. Archives
January 2023
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