That is the lesson in all of this. You have your window. Whatever it is. However long that you’ve been allotted. For all of it. For your passions, your hates, your learning, your feasting, your rock star idolatry. And as situated and stone-bound as you may feel, fate can swirl you up and away you go, onto your new, juicy adventure and all of this, grand and horrific and sublime and stupid as it is, goes away.
Your scar captivates me, the soft bridge on your flexing, fleshy, whipped cream arm, the scar from falling that interminable distance from the apple tree bough’s own break to the ground. I know that much. What captivated you there? Dragged you like a bonded prisoner into heights unknown. Made you taste danger like sharp, unripened blackberries.
So mad they have chase me, they have to catch me, hold me down to screw my jaws shut and then I want to scream so hard I pull the wires apart like some kind of maniac. Break out of there like metal is paper. Like Aeolian gusts are taking hold of my throat. Banshees’ll need earplugs. Like I want to break out of a straitjacket and roam the streets howling and kicking soft things in their faces.
There were epics in which I never uncovered my face,
though I saved you
from the cannibals desirous
of your scalp,
from the Lorelai,
from the mirages in the desert that sung your true name.
We clap out a reveille and sing
against each other
against the braise of the road,
like we are a constant twenty-one
gun salute praising prairie
grass, dogs, and fire.
A muffled noise, the feeling of sheets being draped over and pulled away from his body inch by inch, one by one until the darkness…
It feels somehow, at 11:30 p.m. like you are sitting on the day’s windowsill as the earthly set designers change the scenes around you. Draw in a tree and drape blue and purple leaves on its arms, pull out a curtain of evening sky and stud it with zirconia, paint the middle distance until it pulls the eye into infinity.
I explained to the assembled crowd of family that we could call him Tag…for now. He was a very sweet, almost plasticine baby that glowed ever so slightly like you could only see him through a gauzy, soft focus lens. A baby Jesus-y looking baby. I showed him to my aunt, and her delight with me and this squirmy little thing all swaddled up in dish towels still gives me the shivers half a day later. I showed it to my grandfather and he was just as happy. Everyone seemed fine with the fact that I would turn up with a kid. Everyone seemed beyond fine…delighted.
I just have to get back into the groove. Of everything. So the gross details of my absence are thus: I think I haven’t thrown…
And they, with delicate hands so very rarely seen and never thanked or held, clear away the silver pudding skin of time and throw all of that delicious stuff, the umami of the spirit, the meat that makes a man from a mouse, a woman from a whisper, back in the pot of what might yet be.