A road is only this pale reflection of the present; the flat expanse between two points.

Years Through Ordinary Time

The birds in my neighborhood circled the pigeon toed morning of the off kilter day plucking lavender blossoms like they were olive branches as the sky faded from yellow to blue to gray. And the lawns looked at rest from the summers green growing season as they sat poised for blankets made of leaves and the feet of Thanksgiving Day children. That particular morning the air felt familiar and I knew that it was why you had called; some vague temptation from a September friend here to tap my weakness for cool mornings. And it was all so familiar as the dog days fell asleep on the sidewalk of the calm and quiet Tuesday. The summers overgrowth sat, now in bags, across the street and I rifled through sleeping sweaters hidden in hibernation through summers long sprinkler afternoons. These were the days when the sky could pull you along; walking outside in front of the broken screen door that always slammed too loud and stole my ageing neighbors attention away from the horse races that played throughout the day and reflected in the window. But I would think nothing of those minor moments of quiet that were murdered by the doors fatal blow and would instead look west towards the mountains that seemed to presided over these mornings repeating to themselves or to each other “and it was good, and it was good”.  These mornings were mountaintops, the crows that circled all took the shape of doves, and somehow everything looked beautiful but ready to collapse.  Those mornings were the closest it got, the brief beating of wings before the night would come in with booze on its breath.  And there is a lesson to be learned, down the line, that these things repeat like the seasons and the rain will come back year after year.  Years later things would bronze over and entire weeks would reduce to one warm morning when everything seemed to fit.  So I would find myself, on certain cold mornings, shivering with the ice on my windshield and wondering what the hell I was doing here.  I would drive to work cold with no great voice in the distance to remind me that it was good.  And so as the years would continue to repeat, counted off by Sunday after Sunday in ordinary time I would remember these mornings and wonder when it would be the time that we would do something extraordinary.

 

4 winds

Days like this the world was a grey yolk encased within the shell of a clouded sky.  I was walking home because there was nowhere to go, home to pose some question to the dirty ceiling of some dim lit room where the walls held fresh paint.  I was a wreck of some train, a ghost of a whistle on a line that no longer ran through the mountains to the sea.  You had wrecked me, but maybe it was not you at all.  Maybe it had started some years ago, a flood of warm air from the vents inside a broken car on a drive I would learn to revere with equal parts love and hate.  Nights then smelled of spring, but maybe they did not at all.  Maybe it had started some years before that when the strongest man in the world lay helpless and hairless in some woman’s bed.  It was time again to question, to rage, to throw, to break, to burry, and to build.  A photo album from 1973 or a book about the war times were opened to show the images of a time when men were noble and babies were born.  But the dust was waiting to blow into our lungs, the sky waiting to fall, brimstone waiting just behind the winter rain.  These were the mornings when I woke up and could feel the end of the world waiting just behind my chest, locust and fire waiting there to burst forth and burn away the day. I woke up to rain and I cursed the sky, I woke up alone and pounded my fists singing a tune that said, “You could be my Babylon if you would only show your face”, saying, “the night will come and I could fall just a little further from grace”.  I was waiting on something, a train that didn’t come, remembering the days when I lived alone and learned to feel nothing at all.  Count costs, carry a cross, keep company waiting.  Sleep in the bed just as it’s made, burry the broken yolk in the west field, or visit the gypsy and trade fortunes for firewood when the winter is coming, beg a broken chariot for a free ride home then stand on the corner fighting the rain.  Days like this the world was like a gray yolk encased within the shell of a clouded sky.  I work up time and again with that feeling there just behind my ribs, the four winds waiting to tear me apart.  But we were not the end of the world, no, the world had ended years ago and we were just a feeble afterthought, the children God had planted with an apple seed. The kings had crumbled and the women and children turned to salt before we could save them. Mornings like this I would wake up to curse the gray sky, mornings like this I would wake up alone to beat my fists screaming, “you could be my Babylon, I am ready for a fall.  But mornings like this God would wake up before me and send the crows to mock my anger.   So the world was a gray yolk inside of an egg that seemed about to crack, the train whistle blew but the train never came, and the locust I felt stayed there waiting just behind my chest as I learned day by day that the world was not going to end here with me. 

The Fig and the worm

“I’ll be back”, it was a promise or a threat from across the sleeping street, but it was nothing I would take to the bank.  Days passed with a vengeance, the plants had died and the weather had turned.  On those days I wanted to pass through the fog as if I were not even visible, to shut doors and keep out of the light.  By six P.M. the sunlight had broken a hole in the sky and shown down on every unholy thing that the fog had concealed; it was the wrath of God.  “It’s all on the table now”, I would think to myself, a deck of cards where all the kings bleed.  Broken glass and a photo of the sea were graced by the ashes of cigarettes that burned merely for the sake of duty, of need for fire, of desperation for light.  There were no windows and no one to watch the night disintegrate with an appetite to destroy.  Entire calendar cycles were dissected as a single thread to pull from the tapestry of things we had wrapped around our years.  The days were collecting, piling one upon the next and with each one growing large enough to spill onto the next sharing stories and comparing mythologies.  But it all reduced to this, broken glass, a photo of the sea, and a pile of ashes.  The glasses shattered with earthquake force as they spilled their smell of old liquor into the air.  I wasn’t ready for this sort of fire, I wasn’t ready for this vigor that could slay a thousand profits but crumble in the shadow of a woman’s shape.  I would lay myself in the shadow of some fig tree to put these thoughts to death, I would shatter glass just to hear it break, I would burn a picture of the sea from some other life I had lived in sunlight.  There was an orange glow across the room so that I could not distinguish the direction of my fury.  “ I could destroy this whole place right now” I would say, but  I  knew I would destroy myself first.  I was matching myself drink for drink.  The night had spun out of my control as I examined the table by the light of a cigarette.  It was then that I saw the blood on my hands and the only threads I could pull from the scene, broken glass, a photo of the sea, and a pile of ashes that burned out of desperation for light.   

“how come I shout “goodbye” when god knows I just want to 
make this white lie big enough to climb inside with you”

Harvest moon, summer sun

Its fall time on the ridge, I know, I have seen the leaves by the zoo; they are the first ones to go.  These days I’ve been walking, walking back and forth along the ridge knowing that the walking days of summer are numbered.  I woke up this morning with the chorus of a Damien Jurado song stuck in my head and it still has not gone away.  So from the kitchen table and though the open window I play the song on repeat for the new morning to hear.  These days I’m going cheep; I know enough to know better than to believe what settles on me like a fog rolling in from some deep ocean where bad ideas are born like waves.  Still I wake with the strange sick feeling from a feeling that has no name but takes the shape of a pit and sinks though the middle of me.  These days I’ve been walking, walking up and down the ridge and these days I have noticed that at the perfect moments of the early evening I can see the day as if it has been split in the middle by that very stretch of road, moon to the east, sun to the west and me in the middle.  I am walking the line but I’m going cheep.  

The bus to Georgetown.

The kid had been out of control all night yelling into the oncoming traffic as his mother sat idly in the bus stop enclosure her mind on a phone call, or a trip to the store for some cereal and cigarettes, or how badly she wished she was home and not sitting downtown in the rain at this late hour.  The busses were irregular that night and with each one that came the child would scream and shout with excitement only to be watch it pass by as they waited for the 131.  On the bus the child squirmed in his seat restless while his mother continued to look occupied and oblivious to the minor scene her son was creating.  Seated near the front behind the bus driver an old southern woman watched the whole things biting her tongue until the boy started jumping from his seat into the aisle.  At this point she could take it no longer and barked out “sit down, we are all tired and it don’t help us non to watch you carrying on like that”.  The boy appeared shocked and returned to his mothers side to begin trying to wrestle her cell phone away from her so that he could play with it.  As the bus turned near the stadiums a man in a wheelchair approached the bus yelling for the driver to lower the ramp for him.  As the bus halted for the ramp to be lowered the boy began to sigh and expressed a visible amount of agitation with the delay.  At this point the old southern woman began again looking him up and down then telling him to hush up, “you hush up now and count your blessings that it aint you neddin help on this here bus”.  Again the boy recoiled to his mother who had no become pre occupied in conversation with the old crippled man.  “What you need is a shower curtain, wear it around like a cape on a night like this so your legs don’t get wet”.  The man didn’t know how to take this interest in his wet legs as he, like most cripples, didn’t enjoy talking about his misfortunes and resented the ladies preoccupation with it.  “Or how about this, you take a garbage bag and cut a hole in it for your legs, wear it round like a skirt, that way your legs won’t get wet”.  To this the man simply answered that “yes, that would be smart” then tried to change the topic to the recent string of foul weather days, but this was something that the lady was soon board with.  Before long the lady’s attention was back to her son, as they argued about where they would get off the bus.  This conversation was short lived too and soon a silence fell on the whole bus. The fringes of town were a different world and on a rainy Tuesday the buildings looked ominous and empty.  Warehouses lined most of the streets and the bus stops here were sparse and had all been vandalized so that on one ever knew when a bus was to come.  It was during this extended silence that the boy scooted close to his mother on the seat and ask her quietly, so that the old woman would not hear, “mama, what’s a blessing?  

The Salt Sea

Something someone’s great grandfather once said was that a man is never stuck if he was near the water.  This proverb, however, was no more than a war story to me as I watched the fog rolling across the Puget Sound and knew damn well that I was many miles from the salt sea.  That summer, on days that passed slowly, there was nowhere for my heart to go, no swelling influx of passion on any front, only a dull anger that rested there behind my temples and seeped slowly out as the day progressed.  Still around the corners of a city built upon my memories of some string of perfect but lost days, rain water would collect in small pools as if to haunt my mind with old wisdom that I would seldom believe.  And the bees on the bushes traced a lavender scent that always caused me to feel as if I were surrounded by the lost prayers of Sunday mass that burnt in the hearts of sinners as the incense reached for the holy fire above.   So I would fall down and plant my knees in the dirt, awestruck and breathless with the coming night, and there as the lights were switching on in the houses on the ridge I would weave my tapestry of better plans and lavender blossoms.  “It’s a bar room town” that was something we all knew, we knew it because we had watched as the drains swallowed night after night and carried them away down towards the salt sea.  So I would piss away evenings just to make the scenery change burying bottles until the room would spin fast enough to look like a carnival ride bright enough to bleed one night into the next, it’s Whisky for redemption from the pit in my stomach, its wine to pass careless and wasted landlocked days.  But in the morning in blue and pure light on the hilltop bees would dance across clover fields as ships whistles would blow to tell of their travels to and from that distant salt sea.  Those days the sun would feel as if it had been stolen, dulled by the cool breeze but would shine regardless on the neighborhoods and hotel doors.  That hillside was laced with all the elements of every town I had ever passed through as if its simple grass knew that it could grow anywhere but had somehow landed on this hillside to root down forever and watch those narrow channels where the fish swam to make their way back, back to the salt sea.  And on those days I would pose a question, though mostly to myself, asking “can you even imagine all the places you have been progressing exponentially from the point where you left them?  The answer was always no.  The kids are all grown and the yard sits empty, or you have changed and only your crystal eyes look the same in photos, or the old town is changed and you’ll never go home again.  Something someone’s great grandfather once said was that you were always free when you were near the water but something I knew was that I would never be home with one foot always yearning for the salt sea.