Saturday, October 23, 2010

Quiet Place

I find myself in a room, warm, flooded in blues and oranges. Friends come and go and there are some others I do not know. I notice that when the door opens, someone closes it each time. I see no one making any sudden moves. We are at ground level, no stairs. Soft fabrics hang from the walls. Sounds of voices glide in major scales, but they do no echo.

No one asks for money or tells uninvited stories. The how-are-you's are not followed by complaints or any other form of twisted words. No one asks for anything to be fixed. I, myself, have no need of repair. No rule in this quiet place other than as-is.

Each of us moves across the wooden floor and not once do we collide.

October 24, 2010

Monday, October 4, 2010

Day by Day

It comes through as a blast of emotion, face reddening - tears squeezed forth - I am knocked out of a day to day procession into a recall of sequence, unimpeded from inception to finality - a reckoning of my precise vectors combined with recollection of how I have come from you - your sudden emptiness the result of my shining, screaming shape. I am born.

Here, now, you come to me (though miles away), touch me through a short message, declare that you were imagining me just then, getting up, going to work, doing nothing special. A moment out of your rush for an inhale and a pause within mine. This fact proves sufficient to bring me to a stand still - to bring forth a memory that my body holds - that, through you, I exist, separate in some small way from all the many others - distinct for as long as you hold that thought.

You do not need to send me an answer. I do not need more.

October 4, 2010

Friday, October 1, 2010

Swimming With You

I am floating in a backyard swimming pool when a memory comes back to me. . .

That you and I swam together in a pond formed after big spring rains - that I floated in the cool black water, and then I fell silent, listening to your strokes rumble in water-bound echoes. I can see you popping up from below the surface, bright brown-eyes, blinking sunrises, locking with mine.

Then you went under again. In the wake of your movements, I bobbed and sank a bit, moving just enough to hold position. I spoke after your submerging body in words that swam from my mouth like aimless fish.

A more complete quiet interjected itself as a witness that watched me as I watched you. You surfaced and called my name, making the sound of it ring from your full pink lips, telling me that the pond was deep. Your words tugged on me. What did I want to tell you? To ask you?

I know how water thins the membrane between body and mind. I can see backward into that time and feel its scratching pass, a subtraction, the drift of something escaping. Your wet skin- an image that shimmers. I can see you pausing for an instant. Then, gone.

This swim proved to be our last for that year. Weeks passed and, by August, we couldn't swim the brackish pond. Grasses choked even the deeper parts. And floating here today, I have come to find what I had wanted to tell you.

I let the words lift up to the sugar blue sky.

October 1, 2010