The smell of cigarettes clings to her too tight jeans. She sits alone, drinking a rum, with just enough Coke for color. She hates the taste. She hungers for the buzz.
She thinks: "I should have been the character, on the pages of a book." Typeface has always taken her to a place where she was somehow better... prettier, smarter... stronger.
"The band is getting worse," she thinks. Angry, jarring notes beat at her head. If the song has words, she can't find them.
By now she's had her fill of one-liners. Sighing, she slides off the barstool, drops a twenty on the counter. She's forgotten what she owes.
Poised to fly, or scream. I hadn't decided which. I felt alone, standing too far above, that perfect blueness.
The lifeguard stared, his silence speaking volumes. "Get on with it. Go home."
My companion treaded water, fifteen feet below me. Watching, waiting, hoping that some break in my resolve, would send me back down the ladder. Hoping, perhaps, my easy failure, might bring us closer.
Slowly, a kind of numb focus replaced my fear of heights. This was not daredevil courage. Rather, it was...acceptance.
The calm, harsh face of the water rushed towards me, the 'twang' of the board, a split-second roar, No time to scream.
Then chlorine filled my mouth, my nose, and stung my eyes.
I saw a statue of a dying centaur. A bleeding stump, once his arm, stretched out.
He was small, half hidden behind two larger statues. One was of a mournful-looking Jesus. The other of Einstien's head.
Nobody else looked at him. I could not bear the eyes of the Son of God, or Einstien's cheerful genius. I also, perhaps, felt small, standing among giants.
What drew me to him? This picture of defeat, this warrior, once so proud? That stump. Why could I look upon it, but not the God I love?
I then did the forbidden. Reached out with one finger and ran it along his dark, smooth back.
I wish it would rain tonight as I drive down this highway which rises over the neighborhood like a shelf over my old dollhouse. I still see her, lingering over our dinner, her glasses falling down her nose, she pushing them up. Strong in her faith that this time, they will stay where they belong.
I see her smiling at me, that smile that always managed to make me follow suit even when I had almost every reason not to.
I'm tired of watching that old moon glide alongside my window trying to cheer me up, as if its presence could somehow make up for her absence.
A part of me will always be there, sitting across from her at that dinner table, at all our shared tables.
The other part willingly hugged her good-bye, slipped on my shoes, got in the driver's seat and turned the key.
The engine roars in my ears like a crowd at New Years eve. joyous for another chance, another page turned.
Still, my windshield is blurring like an impressionist painting -- and every star stands uncovered in the sky.
I stretched out my hand offering solace, healing. She hopped quickly away, Her shattered wing dragging through the mud, the fallen leaves.
Even wounded she was faster than I. It seemed she found me no better than the cats she knew to be about. So I let her be. Courage, even foolish, always demands respect.
Later I found her nestled between the roots of an old oak tree. Her body untouched save by the wind which ruffled her down. Perhaps someone was watching over her after all.
He stood among the stones that would outlast him. and their meaning. The Last of his kind.
Something like the feeling before a storm-- neck hairs prickles as something-- something unholy shrieking through the air, all brewing deep within the Druid's eyes.
I hear a triumphant yell. Rome comes. Gasp for breath, if you can! Have you the will to fight? Do you even know the war is on?
Decades of memory cried out one last time to the raging winds. For They will remember. And all will echo down.
It was a beauty. And so it was truth. Across the sky it flew trailing little bits of frozen goo that once made life and us.
And then some died. Alien technology could not, I guess, withstand the song and power of life.
"Take us away!" they cried. I understood too well. I guess I've asked that something I feel but do not see the same question. I've asked often enough.
And someone did take them. But not as they expected, just one small ship of white for each rolling in a strange parade down white, white steps. I think a bystander stopped to laugh.
He isn't touching death now. Instead, he's rooting through the McDonald's "to-go" bag I tossed aside just minutes ago. The fry hanging from his wicked beak makes him now a child, now a middle aged dud with a cigar.
In seconds, his eyes move from dark, broody, gleaming to flashing laughter. He ruffles his feathers, his call switching from indignant squaks to a high pitched chuckle.
I'd been wondering about the old things, reading old stories, legends about spirits, and how sometimes they guided people. How they took the forms of Bears, and Wolves, and Snakes, and birds. How sometimes they chose a person.
I wondered if there were spirits anymore, and if there were, who would choose to guide me. So I asked the questions aloud figuring the spirits would hear, and answer if they cared to.
Then he came to feast on my discard just as if he'd never stolen the sun.
I learn to look past the wood when my classmates hold up the board. I learn to look past the wood when my teacher commands me to break it. I flash back to church, to Peter, commanded to step upon the lake and walk.
I at least am expected to scream. Even if it is a tough scream, what we call a "spirit breath." A scream to cow an attacker a scream to drive fear from myself. My hand goes crashing through the square of wood to prove that I can, if I wish, break a bone. For I fear to face some future danger armed with only a prayer.
She said, "write about your own life, your real life." I think she meant for me to find some meaning in the stack of cheese-encrusted dishes waiting at home for me to clean them or my trudging steps down the halls of learning, to sit, staring, with hungry eyes, at the window, doodling in a parody of note-taking. Getting gas, cooking my meals, hunting for jobs. Paying my bills, and worrying about money, listening to the soft click-click of quarters as I feed them into someone else's washing machine.
So I left my poem about druids at home, for I have never been a druid. That man, painted by my words, exists only within me. I could argue he's part of my life, his lightnings perhaps more my real destiny than grocery shopping. He's part of a landscape in my head, the dust of a faint world.
So I can, and do, find meaning in making coffee, sipping it and savoring its dark smell as I read a book. And I can, and do, know the miricale inherent in the chill of frost against my nose as I revel in the feel of my love's warm slumbering body, or the blankets, soft upon my bare skin, all to be enjoyed moments before I spring into the seizing November cold.
As soon as October arrived Mother would fly into our closets excavating boxes marked WINTER CLOTHES in heavy black ink. She'd demand that we pull the sweaters over our heads -- despite the fact that each was too small, long out of date, and stinking of their stifled long imprisonment behind cardboard walls.
Today I keep my wool sheathes of winter packed away. Protected only by a light tank top, slick black short shorts, I run through a park with the sudden chill breezes of fall dancing lightly across my skin. Such relief, after the hellish summer heat and the rivers of sweat I was forced by the faceless sun to bathe in. I fling my arms out turn my face upward in sudden kinship with winds, laughing at the secrets found in the wet autumn leaves that cover my toes.
One after another I bring each round, red, tomato up to my nose. I know to do this only because my momma always did. I'm guessing I'll know the right tomato to take home when I smell it, even though I don't know what I'm smelling for, even if they all smell alike to me.
The bruised ones were pretty easy; I knew to sort those out right off. And I rulled out the ones with yellowish tops and bottoms and the squishy ones. But after smelling every single one that looked o.k., I'm left taking a leap of faith. I pick three that passed the visual inspection and hope for the best.
The baliff had piled over half of Miss Amy's living room beside the street. Then he stopped to wonder why she'd stopped paying her rent in June.
So he stopped and wandered through the debris of her life. A table, scratched and battered. A mother goose book with scribbles in orange crayon.
The pictures of her children and her grandchildren pressed heavily around her answering machine. There were no messages.
They did not look like bad children. Just sons and daughters who had stopped calling. Tense eyes. Gritty smiles. People who were over-mothered. Her flowers, too, had the look of things drowned by kindness.
In the bedroom he took the smell of decay deep into his lungs. He gave it a place to live beneath his sweat slick skin. He touched the face of a life which to the world, had stopped, only when the money had.
The sun punches my head
and slaps my face.
My brothers are frantic --
zipping, darting in the minute by minute
survival crisis. My feeble cries
just "buzz buzz buzz"
meaningless in their ears
though I know when they pause they love me.
Here I am, see how it clings to me?
Hot, deadly, beautiful,
this amber that is trapping me.
I twist and writhe
pathetic in this golden death.
I cry out, the words bursting
from my chest: "Give me more blood to suck
so I may fight my fate
just one more minute!"
You admired me...
when the winds were my friends,
when I sped to catch prey.
As long as I sat, aloof,
on branches far from your reach.
When I stayed away from you,
I was something like a goddess in your sight.
But when I came near
and tried to share this glory
you hooded me.
You strutted around, for now you had the right
you thought,
to display me.
Your respect and awe evaporated
as you closed the doors of my cage.
I dared to trust, and now
our only conversations
revolve around the tricks I do --
never, ever the wind we once loved.
Why are you so bewildered, knowing
that if your vigilance slips
I will try to rend your flesh
as if you were one of my rabbits?
And those rabbits! Yet another thing you steal
and return to me in stingy chunks
as if you had caught them and not I.
And not only as if you'd caught them,
but as if you'd created them as well!
When you, the author of my kingdom
stretched out the knife in desparation
I, the mother of your race
and unwitting author of thy curse
should have spoken differently.
I should have said:
I too know the burn
the flame and ash
of touching threads carefully woven
only to feel them
snap and dissolve beneath my very fingertips.
