“So you can fix him? You can fix everything. I know it. Like that time I brought you mother’s necklace in pieces when everyone said it was beyond repair. You fixed it.”
“Well hold on there sweetheart, let me see what’s broken here… Ah! There’s your problem right there: it’s his heart. You can see there’s a fissure right up the middle- leads all the way up to his mind. Jeez you sure did a number on this one! What’d you do, drop him off a building?”
“I… I didn’t mean to… I just wasn’t thinking and I got so angry… I didn’t mean for it to be bad, but he’s just stopped working. But you can fix him can’t you? Can’t you?”
The winds came and with them a quiet. The constant static of the drops hitting tin roofs formed a sort of white noise that made thought unnecessary. She knew she had to leave
Maybe I'll fill up with rain and it won't matter whether I'm wearing boots or not.
This strange saltwater rain- and then I'll always carry the ocean in my curls.
** Note: Quiet smiles or soft, contented sighs if you have them on hand make a pleasant garnish. Sprinkle artfully over and around your memory, and enjoy.
I was thinking of you and I looked out. Saw two people kissing in the rain.
The month is gray fog over the valley and cold rain. It's a quiety time. I'd like nothing more than to curl up close to you because you're always warm.
What interesting debris washes up on the steps after Halloween. The place was transformed in the night, and now we see what the illusions were made of. I went walking today with my eyes on the ground. I found a crown, and a shoe with diamonds set in rows in the heel. And two satin ribbons the same color but different lengths, and a mask with a horrible grin and empty, glaring eyes, which shed glitter and shone light in a million different directions. These among the fallen leaves and discarded rings and brightly-colored feathers all around. And finally an angel's wing, it's mate at the bottom of a curving stair.
That’s what separates summer from fall. The feeling of finality. Fatality. Limits. Deadlines creep up- we feel the stress of winter coming. Even though we long ago found ways around preparing for the winter, gathering food and wood to store, deep inside us we still feel the season’s urgency. Get Things Done, it says. Can’t put off till tomorrow anymore- by then the snows might be here. You can pull the blinds tight against the earlier dark, but it sneaks in around the cracks, tap tap tapping on shoulders, “Shouldn’t you have finished that by now? You know you’ll regret not doing it sooner.” You already regret not doing it sooner but somehow the reminder puts you off. You push away the feeling and leave it later and later. This is what the darkness does.
I found a bone in the woods today, bleached white and so delicate, and then the rain started. I took it home with me and placed it in the box you made me before you had to go. Missing you is getting harder. I forgot to wake up today, but Dr. Queen didn’t get mad. He said meet him later, but sometimes I don’t like the way he smiles. I like your smile better. Too bad you took all the oceans south with you and I’m still here with my paper. Sorry your letter got soaked, I know I promised I’d take better care, but I never remember my rain slicker before I close the door. My mind can’t hold concerns of anything but you.
Today I woke up and something was different. I think I dreamed about you. I wasn't tired when I got up this morning. My eyelids stayed open instead of asking to close again like they usually do. I think my top and bottom eyelids must be in love with each other, because they always seem to want to be together. I do a lot of sleeping here.
Aaron wrote me a poem yesterday. He says he is in love with me, but I know better. So I wrote him a poem back explaining why he shouldn't be in love with me, but I don't think he really understood it. If someone wants to be in love, there's nearly nothing you can do to stop them. And I love you, but you're way aways down south with the storms. You laughed, but be careful please.
It's difficult to get used to the turning here, and I'm very sorry for the lack of posts, but I'm starting to settle in. Time is changeable, you know? But I get to see the sun rise over the valley each morning. Nevermind the early wakeup.
I like morning times because they are quiet. Nights are loud and bright with possibility and silver and hope. But mornings are still, as if the world is still remembering how to fill the place with sound. the world is bigger in the mornings- emptier. Nights are close, but in the morning the atmosphere is stretched out and clean. And if you have time to sit and watch it fill up with a cup of coffee while it cools enough for you to gulp down, well then. So much the better.
I've gone away to school dears, far away to the mountains where Autumn kicks up her skirts early and whirls round and round with old man Winter until they two collapse in a pile indistinguishable. The twilight here feels, as if its always known you, and the buildings watch over us as they have for countless generations. Tradition is the most important thing you can have and the ghosts hold it tight. They creak through the abandoned mill across the river, faithfully blowing their mournful horns, a call to work, though no one answers but us anymore. We go to class with ghosts, go to sleep, eat with them, as many as the living here; the city even a ghost of its former self, struck down by the new age of computerization.
Apologies about the absence. Been thinking about string and how it ties together, leads back to the start. I'm headed towards a new start as the year closes in on its final lap, wondering what needs to be left behind and if snow really does make a sound when it falls. Just when I'm supposed to be letting go, history holds on all the tighter- crumbling family albums and Grandfather so handsome in his uniform and navy cap, no wonder Grandmother waited. Bicycles and army tanks in Rome, and the gifts he brought back sit sentinel on the chest of drawers
Today was lemonshine instead of sun and I hung the wash very carefully out to dry. Been polishing the mother-of-pearl, coaxing life back into the finished wood, can’t let beautiful things die in dust. These days the wind blows harder, pulling and tugging with scents from days half dreamt, half remembered. My heart pushes with it, shh shh a little longer now dear, have to still it just a little longer. Must remember to tie down the shutters when its time to leave, can’t have things knocking about while I’m gone
The sycamore bark started falling in June that year. That should have been the first sign, but no one remembered to watch; expected anything like what came. Ignore the warnings and you stitch your own demise into your hem. The year she left, it was the summer of the coyote attacks. Everyone was scared. The animals came out at dusk- no one knew from where- they hunted in twos with almost human-like cunning from usually solitary creatures. By the start of July, three little girls had been bitten, no older than 6 and as young as 3. None had died but the men touched their shotguns with light hands and murmured that it would only be a matter of time.
No one would remember that the moon had been curiously full for the past weeks, rising swollen and orange above the riverbeds which overflowed with a higher than usual tide. No one would recall the strange wind that blew in from the north that year; hot gusts that made the treetops dance till they moaned and knocked wires off poles. The wind smelled of blackberries and when it blew there were always more stars than usual. Things started turning up- things that had never been lost in the first place: buttons and keys and knives with mother of pearl handles, bits of glass and fine hair ribbons, gold-papered boxes, shells that belonged to fantastic creatures, and on the shore one morning, the delicate hand of a statue, fingers all broken off except for one, pointing out a judgment.
The day was Sunday and, having nothing to do for once, I decided on a spur of the moment trip to Manhattan where I wandered aimlessly until I would up some forty blocks north of where I started at the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I bought myself a student-price ticket and went in. There I spent several very enjoyable hours wandering its cooled and echoing halls admiring the art both visual and tactile, before agreeing with myself that it was time to go. Not being able to find the exit, i eventually fell to retracing my steps through the exhibits, going backwards with a curious sense of rewinding time at a speeded pace, until I finally came to the place where I had first entered. While I had been inside the sky had darkened from blue to the threatening gray that generally heralds summer squalls, but the sun was still shining from the west in that way it sometimes does, and when I stepped out of the museum, the first drop of rain fell squarely on my forehead, like a christening. I didn't reach up to wipe it off. I spent a few minutes sitting on the front steps of the Met which were still quite warm from earlier in the day, watching the people come and the people go until the rain started coming down even harder and I figured I'd better get going so I got up and walked, smiling, back the way I had come
Now, on my walk up I had passed a man sitting on a bench on the park side of 5th Avenue with a typewriter and a cardboard sign at his feet offering poems for a "suggested donation" of $2. As I passed him on my way there I considered stopping but didn't, telling myself that if he was still there when I got back then it was meant to be and I would buy a poem. But I had stayed later at the museum than I had planned and with the rain coming down ever harder I didn't expect to see him again. I started berating myself for not stopping when I had the chance, for though I told myself I didn't really need the poem, I was sorely disappointed, as if I had lost something very valuable. I knew it shouldn't matter, but I was upset in my heart nonetheless.
But when I hit 75th Street going south, there he was, hat over his typewriter to protect it from the wet, hands clasped in front of him as he bent over his knees. So I walked up to him and asked what kind of poems his were. He looked up at me very slowly, starting with my shoes covered in the grime of city streets and transferring some of that onto my feet because they were only sandals. When his rising eyes met mine he said in a voice even softer than mine, "Whatever kind you want." Only a bus was going by just then so I hardly heard him and had to lean in very close and ask him to repeat it once more, which he then did. So I looked down and told his honey-coloured eyes to write "Your favorite." "My favorite," he said, and put his head down on his knees, eyes closed, hands clasped in front of him. He stayed like that for a long time as the rain started to let up, and then as quickly as it had come, the rain stopped. I had had visions of arriving at the station soaked to the skin and suffering through a wet and viciously air-conditioned ride home, but it then appeared that my fears were unfounded. I noticed his hair, soft as his voice and a dark honey colour as well, thin and gently curling. The hot breeze was playing tricks with it while he wasn't watching. Just the my poet straightened up and held my eyes for another long moment before removing his hat from the typewriter to his head and beginning to type. When he had finished he carefully creased his sheet of paper below where my poem ended, moistened the crease with his tongue, gently tore off what he had written and handed his words to me, honey-eyes still locked on mine. I read it through quickly and my heart skipped and stuttered a bit. Meeting his eyes again I said, "It's a good one," and handed him two five-dollar bills. $10, instead of the requested two. He said thank you very much in the same low soft tone and I said have a nice day and even though I knew he was still watching where my eyes would have been, I didn't look back until I was ten blocks south. When I did turn around of course he was far out of sight, and a curiously hot wind from the north knocked about my legs and ushered me towards my train. When I reached the station I was dry and silent. I had made it to my train thirty minutes early. When I looked down at the heart locket on my necklace which perpetually hangs open because the clasp is broken, I noticed that my entire chest (and probably neck too although I couldn't see) was a blotchy red, like my mother's turns when she gets upset or very emotional. I wondered if it had looked like that when the poet met my eyes. I sat down in the second car and turned my body to the window to hide the marks, watching the reflection of my eyelashes in the glass that looked out onto the dark of the tunnel, and waited for the train to move.
I haven't told anyone about this encounter; it feels too... I don't know, too something to speak out loud, but I needed to put it down somehow and I feel like you're the right person to tell. I don't know if I'll tell anyone else...
Oh, the poem that scared me and set me wondering even as I fell in love with it he composed on the spot after looking into my eyes. I'll always wonder how he did:
Spring is settling down at last, driven into the ground with the weight of the air and the heaviness of scent. Graduation was a beautiful affair and I find myself grown. When did that happen I wonder? My cap and tassel now hang with the construction paper star they gave us upon graduation from elementary school. Shall I show you what's been happening?
I graduated
And had friends over for food afterward
Made a box out of a book
Made some friends
Hung the laundry out to dry
And took a leaf out of Siobhan's book playing with pearls and my camera
So the sun still burns and turns the Earth and there is no way of slowing the march but we dance on the way and though the sights flash by we smile and breathe in memory so that the next time it comes around we'll know what happiness smells like.
Thank you for bearing with me these past weeks, I promise to be back with more interesting things to say
Love
Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
