| Fiction | Essays | Poetry | The Ten | On Baseball | Chapbooks | In Memory |
|
I I found myself lying naked on the cool dark tiles in my upstairs bathroom one important afternoon not long ago. I had been there nearly all day, letting my mind consider it all, not talking, just lying and waiting for a decision. I needed something, I had decided; I needed all of the demonic chattering monkeys in my mind to hush. I didn't think I could escape demons, but I was convinced that I could not continue wrestling the same ones, nearly as old as me, plaguing me most of my life, darkening me while I watched from behind a thick blurry glass. Those demon-monkeys preyed on my happiness, battled it, constantly plotting its assassination. They had become like parasites painfully sucking at my soul. My demons had been with me since my very first informed thought of death. That thought burst forth while engaged in a fierce acorn war when I was nine years old. I sat crouched in the cool dark corner of my parent's front porch behind the adult- sized wooden rocker. The fat, smooth slab of concrete was covered by a high, deep awning that provided constant shade even in the evening when the sun shone directly on the front of that house. A grandfather oak was wrapped and gnarled around the earth center justified in the front yard. The ivy at its base and the smooth soil beneath the massive tendrils of thick wood and leaf made the ground as cool and dark as it did the porch slab during the last hours of the day. I sat in the corner breathing a bit heavily while my friend, Eric, hurriedly restocked his munitions. My acorns were packed into both pockets, and I looked down at the bunch filling the cupped bowl of my shirt. It looked like a smuggled bounty of emeralds and I like a breathless smuggler hiding in a dark corner to examine his loot. I looked out onto the lawn, where Eric swiftly gathered acorns without apparent anxiety like a fawn in cross hairs; he being simply immersed in one beat in the rhythm of a game we had played every one of the six autumns since the end of our toddler awkwardness. He was exactly where he should have been as the sun fell that evening. He was alive and joyful about his existence, yet not even conscious of his ever-present joy. He was a boy, innocent and pure, doing what a boy should do. He was playing. At one point he was very near the curb and then had one foot in the drain-way lining the road, the other on the grass in our front yard. Seeing him there, half in the black street half on the green waxy lawn, I was reminded of the boy who had been hit by a bus the day before. The boy was my friend. His name was Matthew. Matthew was hit by a charter bus carrying senior citizens to the museum. He was hit attempting to sprint across the interstate to the side where he knew his neighborhood lay. He had just turned nine two weeks before. As I watched Eric at his gathering, I thought about my dead friend's bowling party. Matthew and I had shared a blue bubblegum snow cone. I had signed his complimentary bowling pin, "You're awesome!" and drawn a picture of a football beside my name. Matthew was my friend. He had always been my friend, and the absence of his almost constant smiling was something I definitely felt. Everyone felt it. Matthew was just as beautiful as Eric there, alive in my front yard, I thought as I let my eyes drift back to where he was straddling the curb gathering acorns. I reckoned I too was as beautiful. All kids are. But, Matthew was dead. I realized then that all living things, beautiful or not, must die. I remember my childhood from that gathered insight forward as one haunted by death. All things must die. Something much larger than me had crept in. I was terrified not of dying but of knowing that it must and will happen, even to always smiling children. I had seen death before, even caused death. I used to burn ants into oblivion with the freakishly thick bifocals I wore as a child. I played God; that was dangerous because I believed that God could not die, that He would never die. Matthew's death made me realize that somewhere there was a coffin out there for me, just my size. I realized back then that I was not God. I was not that big, not even close. Inside the coffin would be so very dark. Would I know the darkness? When? How? Maybe death was nothing but darkness? I remember during the time just after Mathew's death that I was grieving as much for him as I was for myself, for what I had lost and what I seemed to be losing. It seemed that even my favorite activities like playing in the stream beside my house, or climbing my cedar tree outside of my bedroom window had become strange, dim versions of what had before seemed magical. The stream became exactly what it was, a drainage ditch. The tree seemed smaller and sickly. Its scent was not as strong and delicious as before. Not long after Matthew's death I found myself in his front yard. There were several pine trees there and the pine needles had become stacked up in patches here and there. I remember that Eric had been chasing me down the street, and I was far ahead of him, so I slowed down to a fast walk upon reaching the yard. It was early dusk, and I walked across the grass looking up at the pink sky where the sun had disappeared behind the house. I kept walking and looking up at the sky until my right foot went into a hole softened by thick pine straw. I heard a sound, a squeak. I quickly lifted my foot, cringing at the sound and looked beneath my hovering sneaker but could not see what had squeaked. I dropped to my knees and carefully scooped small handfuls of damp, almost black pine straw from the hole. At the bottom of the hole was a tiny bird. I realized later in life that it was an Eastern Bluebird. As a young man, I had noticed the blue only, the way it shined in the pink light, the patch of amber on its throat, the liveliness of its eye, and the stillness of its body. Had I broken its back? Was I to blame? How did it get here? I was sure that I was to blame. From where I knelt over the little bird, I looked up at Matthew's house. I felt like a criminal. There were no cars in the garage, only his bicycle, just like my own but blue instead of black. I looked at it for a while. Has it been moved? Who rides it now? I covered the poor bird, thought of stomping on it, but instead ran back out into the street and all the way home. As I grew older and harder, my obsession with death went under the surface. I was not consciously aware of the reasons for the darkness that seemed to hover all around my person, darkening my countenance so that the radiant shadows surrounding me were apparent in yearbook pictures and family movies. I seemed always in the corner of the shot, my shaggy hair clouding my face as I always looked on. I was never the protagonist in the image. Death tainted even the most joyful moments of my life with fear, but I had forgotten the reason why I was fearful. I just felt it all of the time. Friends, lovers, graduations, great books, bad ones, joy and pain all passed before my drowsy eyes like a dream set to tragic music playing sleepily behind my eardrums. I was tired all the time, yet I slept often. Mornings seemed to mark the beginnings of twelve hour odysseys gone horribly and tragically wrong. Sleep is how I killed those days, going to bed sometimes before the sun had set, drawing all the shades, turning the fan on "high," creating night and loud steady wind, deep dark night, wind blowing sand across the desert, parting it like Moses parted the sea. My jaw was sore each day from clenching it too tightly as I gnashed my teeth at my horrible routines. My throat was painfully tight too, as if I were perpetually on the verge of tears. In this way I plodded through what I believed to be a meaningless world, I as insignificant and terribly normal as the guy next door. Most recently, my adult life seemed inescapably marked by an excruciating sameness. My business, the teaching of poetry, however much I loved it, was in love with it, had become horribly wrong, and I would often find myself staring out my classroom window at blackbirds coming and going in the dim light of gray day after gray day, my students at their desks writing Haikus, sonnets, and epitaphs, smiling at their papers behind my back. "Dr. Sessions?" asked a pretty wren-like blonde from the back row. I turned to face her as she walked toward where I was standing by the large gray window. She held her poem at her side pinched delicately between her tiny fingers, and her brow was wrinkled from concentration and the question she had formulated in her mind. The rest of the class was focused, faces down turned at their work like seamstresses in some foreign sweatshop. I had come to face her now and turned my back on the monochrome scene held in the window. I held out my hand for her poem, and she placed it there looking all the while into my eyes. "Dr. Sessions, is this anything like what you had in mind?" I did not even read the poem. I looked at her for a long moment not saying anything, the question still confidently written on her utterly open face. I thought of Rilke's, "Death of a Poet," and his mask, which now fearfully dies, is tender and open, like the inside of a piece of fruit that spoils in the air. I swear she smelled of warm peaches in the hot sun. "Susan, it matters not one bit what I have in mind. You are the one writing the poem. It is your poem. Let it be your voice." I heard myself say the words I had said over and over for years and realized that I had truly become the teacher and ceased to be the poet. I was giving advice that I had not followed for twenty years. I suddenly awoke from the tragic dream my life had become. The sad yet soothing music stopped, and the sounds of life came to me, but all too quickly. The effect was vertiginous. Then, all things passed, memories blurred and hidden in dark pools of my mind came suddenly and vividly into focus like an evil epiphany. This sudden awakening sent me home early that day. I drank two bottles of the best wine I had, the stuff I had been saving, and I slept a night full of forgotten but no doubt apocalyptic dreams that left the taste of iron in my mouth as a reminder of their bloody themes. The next morning I found myself not headed to work but to the hardware store in the next town. II I was wearing my old, now too tight, overalls from back in college. I basically looked the part, though I could count on my fingers and toes the number of times I'd actually visited a hardware store. I roamed about the store refusing to be helped, examining the random objects I would occasionally pick up with seemingly deep interest. I studied PVC elbow joints, nuts and bolts as if they were ancient artifacts that through sensory examination might lead to answers never before imagined about the nature of our civilization. I was the only one in the store, and it seemed that all of my sideways glances at the clerk, where he was slowly making boxes, were met by an amused faint smile and numbly curious eyes. He watched me, it seemed, like a child examining dogs humping, almost fascinated, but mostly confused, amused and disgusted. I too felt like a ridiculous child and quickly gathered a random assortment of wares, some intended and some as a mask of those intended. They included: four three inch bolts, six 10d galvanized nails, an elbow joint, ten feet of nylon rope, Drano, a four pack of neon razor blades, a funnel, and some duct tape. I brought them all up to the counter ready to be done with the store and gone. The clerk was moving excruciatingly slow. A cigarette smoldered in a brown glass ashtray. "You find everything you was huntin'?" Beep. The clerk, "Randy," asked me this as he held each object up and close in front of his face, he squinting at the object from behind his thick bifocals and then squinting at me from over top the lenses, the lines around his eyes like dried out rivers on a barren planet, a touch of gray hair above the ears, as if the rivers in his face had channeled all of his smoky, silver exhalations around his ears staining the oily hair forced back and close to his scalp. I felt put on the spot, and wanted nothing more save to be out of this place, to be a crab scuttling across a cool ocean floor. "Yeah," was my reply as I sheepishly returned his glance. He moved slowly and deliberately as he scanned each item. There seemed to be a debate happening in his mind. I could imagine him thinking, "now, what in the hell is this fruit doing with all this shit? Three-inch bolts, six nails, one elbow joint, rope, razor blades, funnel, duct tape and Drano! Moron's probably rigging up some kind of plumbing something or other.... or." His mouth was partially open, head cocked a little to one side and he was drawing a long slow breath. Then, he looked at me, this time with less condescension. He seemed somewhat disturbed when he asked, "What you makin'?" There was a pained look on his face as he stood there squinting into my eyes, a look of confusion and concern written on his face as he held my last object, the rope, above the scanner. It seemed he would not complete the sale without a response. He stood there frozen as I thought of my reply. "I'm just a weekend warrior trying to fill in some gaps," I said accompanied by my best innocent moron's smile. Finally, after my answer was given, the air seemed to return to the room and he nodded as he scanned the item. Beep. It was apparently at least a satisfactory answer. He seemed glad to be back in the normal rhythm of his work. He picked up the cigarette and took a drag; a cylinder of ash fell on the counter. I think I took too long in formulating my response and broke from some of the customary and comfortable conventions of clerk to patron chitchat. He gave me my change and I was on my way. I put the red bag full of useful items in the back seat of the jeep and walked into the liquor store just next door. A high pitched electronic, "Bing!" announced my arrival as I crossed the threshold. "Good mornin'!" The clerk virtually yelled this at me. His hair was still wet from his shower. It was very thin on top, though he looked to be no more than thirty. There were dark circles of thin, delicately wrinkled skin beneath his transparent blue eyes. "Morning," I replied as I made my way to the back of the store, where amber liquids in old-fashioned bottles were beckoning to me. Last bottle of whiskey, I thought, this is important. However important it was, I did not have many top-notch brands to deal with. This liquor store catered to the common man, basic essentials like Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, George Dickel, Crown Royal, Kentucky Tavern, Old Crow, and on down the line to the "dirt," Heaven Hill. However, they had a few bottles of decent whiskey, Makers Mark, Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, and a few others that I had never seen before, but I could tell by the price that they were also some of the best "The World of Wines Package Store" had to offer. At first, I was disappointed with the lack of selection. Then, I thought about the physiological response to death. I realized that one of the last acts one involuntarily carries out after his systemic control is defeated by the manifestations of death is to piss and shit himself. So, I thought, what does it matter if my last bit of feces and urine contain traces of top shelf whiskey or the blue-collar variety? I looked around a bit more and finally opted for J.W. Dant Charcoal Perfected Tennessee Whiskey, my favorite of cheap whiskey, not sweet, not bitter, smooth. I bought a liter. "Be good!" the clerk said again with too much enthusiasm and volume. "You too," I replied and strolled out to my jeep, looking here and there as I loosened the cap, the wind cold and gusting. The force of strong wind against the taut canvass top of my jeep caused a loud intermittent, flap!flap!flap! I cranked up the engine, a loud angry grumble, covering the, cluck, cluck, cluck, of whiskey down my throat. Liquid courage. I had finished nearly a quarter of the bottle by the time I pulled into my driveway. It was a little bit after 11:00am. The day looked and felt more like a gray December morning than one in late March. When I stepped from my vehicle, the cold wet wind blew hard across my flushed and hot face. My eyeballs felt like they were floating in thick, hot blood, while the top of my head felt as if it had been unscrewed, the cold air seeming to be blowing across the tender, warm insides of my skull as I walked with my bags to my heavy oak front door. Inside was warm. I felt my upper cheek with the back of my hand. It was cold and too soft to be the cheek of a grown man. I set my bags down on the table in the foyer and looked in the mirror there searching for the boy I once was. I looked deep into the dark pools in my old dead eyes where I thought he might be trapped. I looked for a long time and saw, or imagined, my twelve-year-old self, lying down beside the Christmas tree smiling up at the lights. The image disappeared as I realized that perhaps that moment and the memory of it were all that I had, memories, liquid scenes of my past, the good old days lingering on, something irretrievably lost, a factory closed, a forest cleared and sold for college tuition. I went into the kitchen, unplugged the toaster and with it and my red bag, containing the liter bottle and my motley collection of future junkyard inhabitants, I went up to my bathroom. I started the shower and began arranging the different objects in my bag into little killing stations. I created a sort of strange science fair held for the desperate and forlorn. Surrounding the faucet were the razor blades and Drano. The razor blades were the kind used for scraping off bumper stickers and had handles of assorted neon hues. I arranged them beside the toothbrushes like a fan of bright playing cards, the extremity of its curve pointing at the one whose face was in the mirror as if one's reflection was asking with phantom hands behind its back, pick a card, any card, the one in the mirror reduced to a hesitant and shyly smiling child. Above the mirror, I balanced the long slender yellow funnel. It reminded me of a shepherd's horn, or a trumpet used to signal the arrival of royalty. On the toilet I placed the silver toaster. Condensation was streaming down the sides of it. Personified, it seemed to be tired and sweating profusely. I tucked the cord behind it and looked down into the bag I was holding from underneath in my left hand. Nails, bolts, I placed these on either side of the sweaty toaster. I glanced at the sink. It looked like a post-industrial altar, the first of its kind, and I straightened the objects on the porcelain into a neat religious symmetry. I backed away admiring my arrangement and noticed my smudge reflection contained there above the sink altar. I could not see my face only my dark shape amidst the fuzzy colorful objects. Steam was thick in there and becoming thicker. The walls are glacier-blue, and standing there it seemed I was in a warm heavenly room amidst sky and misty clouds. I was enveloped by the mist, and was traveling in my imagination to a room just below the atmospheric lens. I stood there and stared at nothing, still holding my bag in my left hand, thinking about those with whom I might share this cosmic space, Aphrodite and I rolling around in the delicious warmth not suspended on air, but more fluid, like sharing the same beautifully painted womb. A Norse god and I sailing his boat called Time across the inner heavens, never pausing, always moving, marking the days and the nights, chasing the sun and moon across the sky. The old plumbing began to scream like a far off locomotive, and I awakened from my trance, feeling stuffy and tired. I walked over to the shower, and placing the bag on the toilet I turned the water off. The soggy red bag held only the length of nylon rope. I took it out. Looking around, I realized that there was nothing in there strong enough to hang from. My best bet was to tie my noose on one end and then a knot around the shower curtain rod. If I decided to use this method, I would have had to jump out of the window above the tub with the curtain rod trailing hoping that it would lock on the inside of the window and hold fast. If the rod does not hold up, the two-story fall will likely do the trick, I thought as I peered out the window at the top of the house across the street. It looked very cold and dark out there. I turned and took a final survey of the room, pleased with all of my options. Sleepy and heavy from the effects of the whiskey and humid warmth, I took off my robe and lay down on the cool tiles. The air was thick with steam and I sipped the whiskey. Putting the bottle down beside me I lay back, became still, and shortly I was asleep. Before I slept as my eyes closed nearly involuntarily, I had decided that when I awoke I would go through with the final part of my plan. I would join the angels, or the gods, or maybe just the darkness. Had I not dreamt what I dreamt, perhaps I would not be recounting this story. Perhaps the room where I lay amidst the deadly objects might have been more inviting had I not had such a potent dream, but as it were I dreamed the most important dream of my life. God, or Whatever, stirred my pooling imagination and invited me into a figurative glimpse at vocation. I had never dreamt anything so real. God, He, She, or It invited me to action. The dream went something like this: It was warm, sunny and bright as I walked along on a long white sidewalk cutting between expanses of waxy dark grass. Ahead, at the end of the walk stood a bulky red brick building. I felt that it must be some sort of medical building. I walked slowly towards it as if I knew what I would do when I reached it. The doors at the entrance were glass and the speckled white linoleum on the other side was shiny, with black specks throughout. Inside, at the end of a long foyer was a beige elevator. As I came closer, not walking but gliding as if across an airport skywalk, I noticed that the elevator had no buttons. I came very near the doors; they opened, and I moved in. Again there were no buttons. The doors closed. The walls were all dark faux wood grain, fluorescent light buzzing overhead. The car jolted to a start and strained noisily upward. It was not long before it came to a rocking noisy halt. Then, all was momentarily silent and still. Gradually I heard a cacophony of cries, shrieks and moans fade in as if a stereo was steadily being turned louder and louder, and just when I thought that the noise would shatter my ear drums, the doors opened. On the other side was a seemingly endless white room with infinitely long rows of fat white columns and the floor more speckled linoleum. There were all manner of friends, colleagues and acquaintances there, wearing white hospital gowns. Some shuffled by slowly in a catatonic daze, shaking their heads, mumbling something in a hellish broken language that I could not make out. Others, were less fortunate and were missing an arm here, a leg there, eyeballs hanging here from a long shiny tendon, the afflicted shrieking and dancing spasmodically, blood and gore splattering all around them. There was a sea of such characters, and none responded when I called out to them. My voice sounded strange and far off. None, would meet my wide eyed stare, until I noticed Dr. Allen, a fellow teacher, come by close to the door cutting his eyes in my direction. I reached for him and when I did all of the fiends roaming about turned my way and anger flared in their eyes like a pack of crazed and hungry wolves. They moved swiftly toward me, shrieking even louder than before, infuriated by my presence, all eyes fixed angrily on mine, and I caught hold of Dr. Allen's arm, barely able to pull him in as the insane shadows of my waking life closed quickly upon us. At this point time accelerated along with my pulse, and the next scene was of me running through the foyer with Dr. Allen's dead weight upon my shoulder. When outside, I made my way to the top of a hill, far below which the interstate coursed by. Dr. Allen and I lay there on the hilltop panting and squinting at the fiercely blue sky. I could smell the gasoline from a mower barely audible as it was sweeping slowly down the median far bellow. Dr. Allen sat up and looked out at the interstate, the hundreds of cars filled with people, the light posts, utility lines buzzing along toward the city, just visible in the distance. He looked bewildered and was weeping. I sat up and could not help but weep myself when he buried his face in my chest. I held him, rocking him in my arms like a father would with his child awakening from a nightmare. He said over and over again angrily, insistent, yet joyfully, "They said that none of this was real!" He paused, looking all around. "They said that it was not real! They told us that we were where it ended, that the world was dead, that all of this," he violently gestured at the world buzzing and beeping by below us, "was dead, but look! People are in those cars...," he pointed and looked at me like a child might after spotting his first ever flower. "I can see them! I hear birds!" A dream-bird fluttered by very close behind us. I could hear its wings beating against its delicate body, the sound filling my head, bouncing around my skull. "You're here! They told us it was done, that it was all over! They told us...." He was sitting looking down at the river of life coursing by below and he was angry, his face was red. I wept with him. I shared his anger, his joy. I glanced back at the big brick building imagining those inside, ready to act, to save another. We sat there, I rocking him in my arms, his damp warm tears seeping through my shirt warming the skin beneath, my own tears rolling hot down my cheeks, and the dream darkened as I got up, dusted myself off and walked back toward the building, into the foyer, the elevator and up again, and again, gathering those who would come on the hill where they slept, and some wept cradling one another. And some had begun to laugh like a child staring up from his cradle watching a mobile slowly turning. I looked down at them and smiled as the dream finally evaporated, and the dreamer heard a nearby click, which brought him back to his own world. The click I heard was the front door opening below. I thought that I should get up. I could not. It was my wife, Martha. Martha is ugly. I am ugly. There would be very little beauty in our deaths, I have thought. Martha and I are not model material, but we, she especially, have beautiful souls. I think I can say this because we believe intensely in a divinely inspired soul. She is a Methodist minister. I am a poetry professor and have come to realize that nobody but poets and English teachers care about poetry anymore, but it is one of the few things of this world that still has the power to mystify me. A man's sickness is a very complex thing; one might not imagine that something, as I have described it above, could have helped in sending me to where I lay then, pale and clammy, considering the worth of my life, but down there I lay looking up at the soft white globe and the spackled ceiling, beached on those cool tiles surrounded by deadly wares, and it was poetry, or the fact that I was to date a failed poet that helped to get me there. I thought, as Martha shuffled about below, that I should rise and read a sensuous almost criminally arousing poem about initial carnal knowledge, harness that energy and glide soundlessly down the stairs like a large cat to where Martha was innocently straightening the den. Then with animal quickness, thrust myself into her from behind pumping furiously until ejaculating into a roar, licking her face between labored pants, my body slumped over her warm, wet back. That is what I thought I should have done, as I lay there still as the crumpled robe beside me, but I did not. That was my flashing intense thought as I heard Martha below, but I filed it away. If I had, I thought, the image, the idea would have ceased to be, an idea become animal. Flesh would cover the bones, and I would have had to deal with the drama brought on by the heart and soul of that creature. Something in my mind would die. So, I just lay there on the cool tiles listening to the muffled cleaning sounds below, a voyeur in my own home. The sounds stopped briefly, and the refrigerator opened, clanking glass to glass, a bass pop and I heard the clucking of wine being poured into an earthen chalice. Martha moved to the couch and clicked on a lamp. Paper rustled. It opened and closed, the brittle crackling sounds seemingly constant, as she settled on an article and began reading. Every half minute or so the paper cracked abruptly, and I imagined watching her throat move as she swallowed her wine. I liked lying there listening to her and imagining that the sounds were the ones of a poem read by its author, or better, his actual imagined speaker. Music and poems danced through my head, poems and songs filled with images known to no other man save me. My mind teemed; however, during my sleep my body had become increasingly inert and as dead as the cool tiles pressing against me. At that point in that important afternoon I had slept nearly four hours. Upon awakening I knew what I would have to do. I would have to write again. As a young man I had been more ardent and confident. I wrote then. It was not good, but I wrote from the top of my head freely in a state of wonderment as it spilled onto the page. I thought, no, I knew that I was brilliant. Once, when seventeen as the last orange thumbnail of day disappeared below the flat horizon while examining the tree line edging my parents farm, I, by way of hallucination, saw a man walking with a pack on his back, long hair, furry beard, and a staff in his hand. This shape developed like a Polaroid in a mix of leaves and sky. The man had my gait. He was I. The vision had made me smile that day. It made me hopeful and I was changed by that hopefulness. I became this vision's doppelganger for most of my young adulthood. Darkly, broodingly and eagerly I sought to follow him. I felt destined for something that lay at the end of the tunnel of rhododendron down which my twin was leading me. The path was branched and varied, at times random or seemingly counter intuitive. The way to stay hopeful and refreshed had seemed to be that I kept moving, to see all that I could see, explore each new path. Eventually, inevitably, I slowed down. Lying there that day on my bathroom floor over twenty years after meeting that vision, considering the worth of my life, I was hopeful again. Again, vocation had moved in. That morning I had seen a bushy skull silhouetted across my suburban and spindly tree line behind my house. Every time I took a glance that way it appeared increasingly clearer as it took shape again and again in the frail weeping Crepe Myrtles. I tried to shake it. I looked for the lonely traveler, the one from my youth. He would not appear; nor I guess did he even exist anymore. I looked too for the pudgy child I had been, sitting under my parents awning looking at the dark smooth acorns gathered in my yellow Vacation Bible School T-shirt, just before death's heavy presence washed into my soul. However, all that I could see was the persistent, unshakable image of that skull, hollow, bone-white and black, that had worn me down to the naked puddle I had become, wondering if I could ever rise from those cool, damp tiles. But, somehow my dream had erased all of that. It had chased it away. I heard Martha's newspaper being crackled into a rectangle and was slapped onto the coffee table the sound reminding me of her presence. I imagined that she had become a bit perturbed by the article in the opinion section about gays and marriage written by a retired Baptist minister. He spoke of sin and perversion. His tone was severely judgmental, "God damns this...God damns that...," theology she could not handle, one of her mottos being; "the only thing I can not tolerate is intolerance." She is a social justice warrior type and openly speaks her mind about hot issues, sometimes from the pulpit. She's small in stature, but her voice booms through the sanctuary she filled, she might say, by the power of the Holy Spirit. I have felt deep admiration for her strength and authority and also her recognition of from where it is derived. While lying there, I tried to picture the Holy Spirit, thought of cherubs and gushing warm breezes, and I began making snow angel movements there on the floor, my soft naked flesh sliding across the tiles bumping ever so slightly over the grooves of grout. It sounded, I imagined, like the slow but persistent thrashing of high, dry grass, or a constant breeze through the tops of live oak trees. I smiled at the images so bright and pure, not dark in any way. I was better now, but I did not want to get up from my spot on the floor. I was awake but heavy and still reeling from my dream. I knew that I could lie in my bathroom undiscovered. Martha has her own bathroom. She never uses mine because it has no tub or vanity area. But, I like my bathroom. The shower is like an ice cave. The tiles covering it are glacier blue, and being in there is like being in a strange, steamy, rectangular igloo. The towels hanging across from the toilet have my and her initials on them. Someone gave us monogrammed towels that matched anticipating that we would share a bathroom. However, we never have. Anyway, Martha hates those towels. Also, I felt safe because she thought I was at work. Most Thursday evenings I taught a graduate contemporary poetry class at the near-by university. I love some of the poetry being written today, but the art form seems to be dying as quickly as the family farm. Martha loves poetry too, but has as healthy a relationship with it as she does all things like it, things of this world yet touched by the eternal. She understands and accepts that things die. Even beautiful things must die. Poetry will not die today. It will not die at the end of my lifetime, or at the end of the last poet's life, but it will die, and like Matthew's smile, my friend whose smile no longer exists, it being stolen by death, poetry will be missed. I have always been in love with poetry, but never so anxiously in love with it as I felt then. I feel about it like I did my wife when I first fell in love with her. Back then, it was as if I could not get close enough to her. She was open physically and emotionally. "Why does it feel so different with you? Where did you come from?" Martha and I were lying on my mattress in the old barn where I lived when I first met her. We had made love and she had cried and smiled all at once while we held each other. The look on her face while I labored on top of her was the most genuine and unique expression I had ever known. I too was crying before we had finished and we lay on our sides smiling and wiping the tears out of our eyes. "I don't know, but I think I know what you mean." I answered her as her face looked up at the dark rafters above pointing at the sky. It was not the first time we had made love, but it may as well have been. She was thinking about something, started to say it, stopped and looked at me. "It's like a prayer, a perfectly said prayer." She was right and I have never forgotten those words. We made love then like two people praying, together. Some of this feeling remained between us. We have held onto some of it, but it had become a flickering or simmering version of what we once felt. I heard Martha again. Having finished with the paper, she was moving toward the stairs. I could hear her shoes clicking across the foyer, and then she started up with quick little thuds. It became a bit nerve wracking being in such a compromised position naked on the tiles, she so close now. She won't come in here, I thought. She never comes in here. Why would she ever come in here? I was sure that she could not have known that I was home. My car was at work, she knew I had a class in the evening and besides, I was being perfectly still and quiet. When she made it upstairs, she went in the direction of our bedroom. I was relieved and began again to relax. I was not ready to rise from my cool smooth floor. I had had a big day and needed time to shed that stress. I was decompressing. I heard Martha open our bedroom door. It has a specific creaking sound. The hinges are very tight and the door is old oak like the ones being made around the turn of the century. The shower came on in her bathroom. The pipes inside the wall behind my head were coursing with water. I imagined my wife as she might appear there in the shower. I called her ugly before. She is not ugly, but there is nothing very exceptional about her to anyone other than me. She has a beautiful body; her curves have always made me think of Modigliani's women, they with their perfectly shapely idealized lines, strong and sturdy. She has always been able to get me going. I looked up at the rope dangling a few feet above my head, at the razor blades, the poison; all of it seemed ridiculous and wrong. The dream was with me. It's meaning, from where it could have come, I'm not sure, but I knew that it held meaning. It holds meaning. It was the answer to the unspoken question of the day. It was purposeful. After her shower, I again heard our bedroom door open. Where was she going? Her feet fell hard and fast on the oak floors and before I knew it she stood naked and dripping in my doorway, I lying naked on the blue tiles looking up at her. She jumped back and covered her nipples with her forearms and looked hard at me to make sure that it was I. Our eyes locked and her right eyebrow was raised, as she looked first at the sink-altar, the sweaty toaster, the whiskey one-quarter full, the noose and then back to me. She grabbed one of the monogrammed towels, wrapped it around her and lay down on her back beside me. "John?" she asked staring up at the ceiling. "Yeah." I replied with a sigh. "You haven't done anything stupid, have you?" "No." "Are you going to?" She asked grabbing my hand, the first human touch of the day. "No, I've decided to live," I answered as she nestled her head into my chest. "What are you doing then?" "I am decompressing," I replied feeling as if steam were literally being dispelled from my ear canals. She flipped over onto her elbows, her face in her hands, looking into my eyes, she asked, "Do you mind if I decompress with you?" Puddled there in her wise yet innocent eyes were all of the reasons why I fell in love with her. "No," was my reply and I turned to kiss her. We made love. We made love like a prayer, that we might truly become one. Our eyes again locked like lasers. I wrote poems in my head and imagined the creatures that they might become. They were beautiful and ran across my mind, her face and body. They lived. I was glad that I too was living. Since, the little spawns have become flesh and one day they might live in books with my demons, my dreams, coupled in the hands of the eternal who stirs this gumbo and causes us to lay on cool tiles, to build death altars, to be dream saviors, praying love-makers, and to walk precariously always on the edge of life and death. ©2005 by Joseph Hegwood
Joseph Hegwood lives and teaches in the lower Mississippi Delta, with his beautiful wife Corinne. He enjoys hanging out with her, running, cycling, and pitching horseshoes. This is his first published story.
|
| Home | Contributors | Past Issues | Search | Links | Guidelines | About Us |
|
|