There is a place just beyond our knowing whose name has fallen from our tongues, but is sometimes spoken of (in low voices and desperate tones) as "The Island of Summer Snow." On that island everything is lush and green, and so beautiful it was impossible to believe. Flowers like fireworks fallen from the sky grow in hot clusters at the bases of dancing trees. Birds with feathers of filigreed frost speak sonnets back and forth through the leaves. Yet this is no rainforest. The Island of Summer Snow is something much more extraordinary: a snowforest. Every day of the year, snow falls and falls and falls forever. Like a falling dream. Like the kind where the ground never comes but sooner or later you start to want the crash, bad. 

It’s bona fide snow, too; no trick of the light, no warm soft rain. So cold it makes the dreams turn to ice in your head. Your thoughts are stiff glass dolls with their arms raised and their faces caught in awkward contortions, as if Midas fucked the Ice Queen and their powers got all mixed up somehow. And let’s not forget: so cold it makes the desire curdle in your stomach.

Ordinarily when there is snow like this, summer becomes a mythical realm, the sort that parents tell their children of in bedtime stories. When the cold becomes oppressive, you clench your eyes so tightly shut they sting, and conjure up a parade of mermaids. Water slicing over smooth bare backs. Salt everywhere, in the air, in the sea, crystallizing like rock candy on our skin. You say: summer, my love, is the grass unkempt and the salacious winking of the fireflies. It's the sky laid bare and filled up with stars, the sky showing off its pierced naval. It's the fervid clench of your hand in mine and the way the heat makes the world waver, so that everything seems a mirage. 

But for now summer is Atlantis. A distant dream. A sunken thing.

That is only ‘ordinarily’, however, and if there is one thing that the Island of Summer Snow is not, it’s ordinary. On the island of summer snow, a perfect equilibrium is maintained, so that the snow may fall and the grass may grow with equal ease. The air is warm as your lover’s breath in your ear. The cold of the snow doesn’t hurt at all; in fact, it feels like a blessing. 

Because of this curious phenomena, there is no one in the world who understands the true duality of human nature better than those who have lived on the Island of Summer Snow. These voyeurs know that flames can be blue as well and red, and that anger and love have the same frequency and transcribed into song. And on this island, people loved like Aphrodite and fought like Aries. 

And when they whispered, the whole world leaned in close to hear whatever secrets they might say. And what secrets there were held the fate of the human race.

And when they shouted, glass shattered.

When they died, they died they liked the phoenix herself. They went up in flames and took the whole world down with them. But that part doesn’t matter, really. What matters is the before. What matters is that they made love under the dancing trees and the heat from their lithe, writhing bodies created a radius of melted snow, and beneath them the grass was green as the poisonous tree frogs who watched the whole thing happen.

And when they loved-- on second thought-- they put Aphrodite to shame.

And when they screamed-- I’ll say it again-- glass shattered.

In the Land of the Summer Snow even the pettiest of incidences was performed with the utmost passion. Everything had all the flare and exaggeration of theater. We lived a life there that could be described only in superlatives.

And we went down in history.

And though we died, and though the language that our history was written in died too, the story remained, both as real and as unbelievable as summer, as winter

as The Land of Summer Snow, as You, as I. Somewhere our ghosts laughed and laughed, saying, “We never wanted this immortality.”

Zora Neale Hurston, who had herself spent some time on the Island of Summer Snow, turned to us with a wry wink in her eyes and said, “I wanted a busy mind, a just life, and a timely death-- but I didn’t exactly get that either.”

So we stayed a time, playing at tortured artist and snow-struck lover and court jester. 

as I.

I Would Have Done It, Too.

You were there wearing flannel, not the trendy new pastel kind but the kind from back-in-the-day, torn at the elbows and soft as silt, missing buttons and smeared with mud. You were there with your hair in unraveling braids, there with your head somewhere else, not the clouds, oh no, but maybe the ocean. The bottom thereof.

You were there with a stitch in your side and a fist in your gut and sharp stars screaming through your forehead, filling you up with light and pain. You were there, at first, with your heart in your throat, but something startled you and you swallowed it, and then who the fuck even knows where it went? 

You were there on the porch carving toothpicks with a pocket knife, not because you needed them, or even wanted them, but just because you could, just because it was something to do with your hands.

Those hands. Those hands. Those hands.

Something to do with those hands to stop them remembering all that they knew.

You were there when I came home. I saw you from across the street and stopped dead. Stared like no one'd ever told me not to in all my life. I felt like a highway with too many cars. There was this shuddering weight, this terrible speed, this artificial thunder, and flow as unstoppable as a freestyler's rhymes on a good night. And I could hear the highway too, everywhere, the purr of it filling up my ears until it spilled out into the rest of me. 

You sat up straight and gave me a look that meant nothing. Then a nod that meant the same.

I thought about going home to someone else's house. I would have done it. I swear, I would have. Walked right into Anna May's and fl0pped down on the couch just like it was mine. Worn her clothes and drank her gin and made love to that boy with the chestnut eyes and chipped tooth who was always hanging round her place. Never missed a beat or glanced over my shoulder. Anna May could find somewhere else to stay, because I sure as hell wasn't going to walk up to the porch with the whittled whittling girl on it. No no no not ever. Well. Maybe not. But sure as fuck not today.

And right then you said, "Hey"

And I didn't hear you; you were all the way over there and I was on another planet, but I saw your lips move and I knew, and before I could stop myself I said it back.

Then I said it again, louder, so you'd hear me with your ears, not just your eyes.

And I thought: Fuck. And: You've got to be kidding me. And: Well now what do I do?

You said, "Come on over then, and have a seat," like my own porch was yours for the offering, like you'd already had the idea about taking someone else's house, and already acted on it.

I sat down like a kid in detention. My throat already felt full of chalk dust from writing the same sentence one hundred times: I'm sorry I did what I did to you.

I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

I wish you had made me write it. I'm often complimented on my penmanship. In high school my wood shop teacher once me told me that he'd never seen anything like it. Actually, his exact words were: "You have beautiful handwriting. It's like nothing I've ever seen. I mean, it's borderline crazy-person handwriting, but I like it." He smiled to let me know it was a compliment. He looked a bit crazy-person himself, his teeth alternating black and white like a game board. But he was a good man.

Not like me.

You patted my knee and I cringed with all of me, blood and bones flinching just the same. It felt like stepping on a jellyfish. I closed my eyes. There was wind, suddenly, damp on bare back. Then there was something else; your hand on my knee. Tender and terrifying as a kiss of death. I didn't know what to say.

What you said was, "Patrick."

Just that.

But on your lips it didn't sound like my name.

Mud Things

There are certain catalysts. Every city has its vagrants, its panhandlers, its thieves. Every city has men wearing white, humorless with celibacy, who try to stuff new testaments into your pockets as you walk by. Every city has the barefoot woman who sells hemp jewelry that she arrays on a hand-woven sarong from Taiwan. Every city has the man with periwinkle eyes and the mane of a lion who mutters dark, disorderly poetry to the pigeons.  

Every city has its pigeons.

There’s a park in my city that has all of these things, as well as few more unusual characters. There’s a man, for example, who is missing half of his right arm, but wears every day a sort of extravagant collar from which radiate eight purple octopus tentacles. When he walks they  bump against one another, as if they are trying to dance but don’t know how. Most of them children are afraid of him, but everyone once in a while one sits on his lap, while the mother purses her lips and wonders whether or not she has made a mistake. I think he his good man, if only because he smiled at me once when I sad. 

There's a woman here who sells things made of mud. But not pots or anything like that. Books of mud, whose words taste like mud in your mouth and speak secrets as old as the earth. Horses of mud. They move. They breath. I can't explain it. I think she's a relic from the times before science trumped magic. Her skin is like a wilted lettuce leaf and her hair like spanish moss. She has green eyes and cold hands, the latter of which I know because she doesn't understand that you aren't to touch strangers as if they are family, clapping their cheeks out of urgency or slapping their arms, not hard but not quite in jest, either. Maybe this is also because she comes from a forgotten time, when people had no manners and no morals and no clothes, but  only lust and intuition to guide them.

Once I saw her sell a Man of Mud. He was naked except for a gold chain that looked unholy and misplaced against his gray neck. There were roots climbing his body like veins, making patterns on all the most coveted parts of his body. They forked around his arms and his thighs and grasped his penis. They seemed possessive, somehow, as if they weren't a part of him and had no right to hold him like they did. 

The man who bought him had the meanest face I have ever seen. He was an art collector and wore a suit that not only compensated but overcompensated for the inevitable flaws of the human body, so that he appeared to be some sort of runaway, idealized sculpture. His hair was perfectly straight and the color of oatmeal. Everything about him was clean, too clean. He paid the woman with money that sparkled like freshly fallen snow. I can't say why exactly, but this made me suspicious, and I think it made the woman suspicious too, because for a long moment she held the coins in those cold, grabbing hands and stared at them. Her green eyes were so opaque that no one could have said what she was thinking.

Finally the man, who was visibly growing impatient, asked the woman if there was any special care advice she should give him to ensure that the "piece" lasted as long as possible.

The woman looked blank. "He's a mud thing," she said, "and isn't meant to last. If you want what's best for him, really, let him go with the rain as he'll want."

The man frowned. He did not like this one bit.

"I paid good money for this piece," he said, "And only now you inform me of his ephemeral nature?"

The woman looked disgusted. It was hard to say whether this disgust was directed at the man's syntax or selfishness or some other factor entirely. It may even have been simply the smell of his cologne, which reminded me of gun powder, although I have never smelled gun powder and on some rational level knew that it did not smell this way. 

At any rate, the woman told the man that she had given him the best advice she knew how to give, and that he must be very stupid indeed if he had not known what he was getting into the instant he set out to purchase a man of mud. Mud, she insisted, was something that everyone understands.

I don't think this is true, however; or else I did not know what she meant. I say this because, some weeks after the incident of Man of Mud, the woman was selling ten children of mud. Unlike the man, they were not naked, but rather wearing identical dresses (boys and girls alike) made of thatched straw. Three of the children sold within minutes, to a young couple. I overheard them exclaiming happily to one another that they would go very well on their new mantle. The rest sold with similar speed. All but one.

The One was the smallest of the lot, and the shabbiest. There was a hole in her dress around where her belly button might have been. One of her ears was missing, like Picasso. There was a crusty ridge of crumbling clay where this ear had once been. But now, nothing.

I don't know what made me do it. I felt like I had to, like it had already been written.

I bought the One and took her home with me. For the two weeks of her short existence, she troubled me constantly. Sometimes she looked at me with her eyes full of words, like she wanted to talk, but I think even had she been granted the faculty of speech, I would not have been able to grasp the sad complexities of what she might have said. I was sure, on the other hand, that she, like a cat, understood everything I said better than I did. I spoke to her often. I always made sure that I was speaking to the right side of her head, because it was the ear on the left that she was missing.

I could never tell if she was alive or not.

I'm not sure if she ever died, if she had to begin with that which is taken in death. But she left one night with the rain. I let her. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do-- the woman, after all, had said so-- I have never been able to completely forgive myself for allowing her to disintegrate the night of that shuddering storm.  When she was gone, I missed her. All the next day I grieved, until the sleeves of my only black blouse glittered with salt and my eyes were red and engorged like ripe berries.

After that I avoided the park. It was November anyway, and the whole world was slowing down like a river clogged with ice. The days of indolence and sunlight were passed. The park was full of dreaming trees. Sometimes they tossed and turned, restless, in their sleep.  On the rare occasions that I did go through the park, I felt like I had to walk softly, so as not to wake them. 

The Rushes 1

A chase scene.

Light-speed flashes of the world going by, and then everything jolts to the side and before you can sort out color into shapes you hit the ground.

If this were a movie it would be the unforgivable part where the heroine is in the forest running for--

(Motive: To escape her pursuer, who is that lip-corner-twitching type of evil that makes your stomach feel so peach-pit hard and contorted that sometimes during his monologues you look away from the screen and try to memorize the fraying patches of the living room rug.

Yeah. But.

Alternative Motive: Just to see her legs move like that.)

For one reason or another.

And then there’s this root, dark and crooked like a beckoning thumb. It grabs the heroine’s foot and inevitably, she falls. After all, what was she thinking, those shoes? 

Here the cameramen indulge some perverse fascination with fear. They close-up click on her wide quivering eyes and feverishly breathing breast and the mud on her cheeks. And.

But I can’t bear to watch her squirm. Besides, how gruesomely cliché: the damsel in distress.

Fuck that.

Honey, take off your shoes. 

Tear the slit in your skirt up higher, past your thighs to the smooth plane of secret skin just below your pelvic bone.

But don’t just stand there.

Run.

Run like you traded your soul to the devil for those lean cross country calves. Run until the wind is harsh and honed like a sharpened blade, until it makes stars go through your lungs. Run until your legs have the motion stuck inside of them like seasick. Run until there is nothing left, until everything has been taken from you, until the only thought you are capable of is the contemplation of the tidal force of your own breath.

Running is elemental. It is earth, air, fire, water. It is the intimate pounding of the earth against your feet, the air you are desperately swallowing, the wildfire scorching through every muscle in your body, and it is that unimaginable lust for water.

If you go long enough you reach a point where you can go forever.  Sometimes I want to run until I reach the end of this flat earth.

And then?

Keep going.

There’s a certain glamor to the chase scene. Tried and true, the survival imperative. A gazelle and a wild cat in the deep gold grasses of the serenghetti. A voiceover of a man with an Australian accent as smooth and sweet as molassas, the kind of nature show voice that makes even the grisliest narratives of death sound as gentle as a lullaby.

Or a different take, cars with getaway music blaring, open windows, men with dark glasses and stubble sharp as shrapnel swerving as they turn recklessly to look over their shoulder at the whirling wailing lights of a cop car with a bullet wound spider-webbed across the front wind shield.

And meanwhile your heartbeat-- and same the heartbeat of anyone watching-- is loud and erratic like stomped morse code, as if your own body is trying to tell you what to do, how to move, only for the life of you, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know--

A single thing. Except:

The Fear.

The Rush.

The Run.

Pause.

It wasn’t always like this. 

I grew up in a Charlie Chaplin film, all hat tricks and innocence. Then somewhere along the way, the genre changed. To Coming of Age, first. I fell in love with a boy named Jake who could light a match off the fly of his jeans, and he smoked me up from a hollowed apple in the rushes by the pond a block from school. I liked it there. There being, yes, the rushes. What I liked best was the smell of the mud. It was rank and intoxicating like sex and life and death all in one, turning and churning one to the other, microbes multiplying, fishbones frying, lovers like quicksand pulling and sucking and sinking and sighing. All of this was somehow there in the mud, and not secretly either. You could tell. Like I said, you could smell it. You could feel it, too. If you closed your eyes, you could even see it. Everything, that is.

It wasn’t just the mud, though; there were other reasons to love that place. Like the way the grasses whispered conspiratorily to one another, or the way the sky always seemed more open there than anywhere else. Unabashedly naked, and blue like the beginning of the world, when all there was was a sphere of ocean restless with storm.

Like that.

And, yes, I liked it there, there being the rushes, there being the place I got to when the smoke rushed all up in my sinuses. There being: No Man’s land, Never-Never-land, and did you know that shit is legal in the Netherlands? The rushes were a liminal land, a floating island, an underwater mansion, a field of flowers on a planet whose atmosphere should never have supported such lush, such green, such dreams.

And then just when I started to feel like I could sink down into the mud and float there for the rest of eternity, as if even quicksand would move slower with the weed in my lungs, something terrible happened.

Something terrible happened.

All the symbols of my youth shattered at my feet.

I woke up. Sobered up.

The genre changed again.

And there we were, in a full-fledged film noir. There were down-and-out men and femme fatales and renegade hijinks on the tops of train cars. I'm not kidding. This all happened. Everything I'm about to tell you is true. Or at least the truth is there. Like if you took this story and ran it under boiling water for a while, eventually everything would be burnt away except the part that, whether or not anyone wants to admit it, is as real as a mockingbird egg is false.

The hard boiled facts. The hard boiled men.

Too easy, I know. And I apologize. But things won't stay this simple for long.

They never do.

Not in the rushes. And not in the real world either, not when everything starts to rush by anyway. Think: Kinetic Energy. Think: Objects in motion stay in motion. Think: hold on tight.

Think: Hold your breath and count to three.

And then.

Go.

Play

And we're back. A chase scene. 

Reading things I know I wrote but can't remember feels like flashbacks from a past life, that distant, that bewildering, that fascinating (morbidly or otherwise). 

Pitchfork

I keep flashing back to flame-colored confetti and too many bodies too close for comfort. Air without oxygen, filled instead with the summer smells of sweat and weed. Pink laughing eyes and slow bored smiles. Chests, elbows, hips, groins, thighs, knees, ankles. Feet in converses or hemp sandals. Plaid as far as the eye can see.

Earlier a woman with too-tan skin but impishly bright, green eyes asked us if we were still in college. We nodded. Someone said, "Class of twenty-twelve."

The sky was blue and cloudless. The grass: trampled. Everything was smudgy with blonde dust and indiscrete smoke. A few yards away, a gaggle of teenagers nonchalantly shared a pipe shaped like a blowfish in the broad, omniscient daylight.

The woman asked if we were from Canada.

"Everyone is," she said. "I've met three people and they're all from Canada." Turning to Nick, she added, "And you're the only one of them wearing a Canada shirt." She was slurring; it was sloppy. But her smile was pure.

I wanted to say, "Dual citizenship."

It was beside the point and I knew that.

Once a man at an Ontario tattoo parlor asked me if Iowa was the place that was pretty much just a cornfield with a house in it. He was painting a dragon (red, eastern style) on the beach-browned flesh of my skinny right bicep. Beside me, my Canadian friend, waiting patiently for her own green dragon, giggled. The States are a joke when you're not in them. I told them, "Not really.." I made myself laugh, but I didn't think it was funny; at least, not at the time.

The dragon, subjected to constant assault by Lake Heron waves, faded to nothing more than a scabby freckling of pigment in three days, and vanished completely by the end of the week.

But I digress.

So:

There we were, in Chicago. After M83, the crowd surged, tightened. We got caught somewhere in the middle, unable to breathe, let alone fidget. We waited and whined, bobbed up and down in restlessness, boredom, and anxiety. Night fell when we weren't looking. And suddenly, after an eternity or two, the waiting was over. 

Pyschadelic montages of naked dancing women crackling across the jumbo-tron. Giddy drunken crowd surfers almost falling, almost falling again, being saved at the last available second by clumsy, anonymous hands. Sometimes my own. Balloons orbiting the crowd like planets. Flimsy rectangles of orange and red paper swarming down from the stars. Not just confetti guns, but bona fide confetti canons. Even if I threw my head back as far as it could go, so that my hair tickled my waist and neck strained, I couldn't see the end of the confetti. It could have come from the heavens themselves for all I knew. I held my arms above my head and opened my hands, fingers wiggling. It felt like dancing in the rain. 

Grinding with strangers was inevitable, unavoidable. In that moment: Innocent. Natural. Easy. Singing along was a matter of breath. Being there was being young, being free.

The "livened up" rootbeer stung only once it reached the back of my throat. It kicked a little too strong but a little too late.

I was itchy like other people's dreadlocks.

I could feel the music equally in the tender palms of my hands and the calloused soles of my feet. Instead of blood we had that beat.

It was a maybe a cliché. I am maybe a romantic: it was classic.

There would be fireflies winking selatiously back and forth across the yard. Your hand in mine. In the grass a few yards away, something moving. Midnight whispering against itself. The sound of spray paint in an alley. Like breath. Like ours. 

friend

In your youth, you were an emblem of youth. The sound your legs made as they moved beneath your skirts was a secret language, in which they bragged of their own strength and dared every boy and girl you passed to make their way up your thighs. When you laughed, you threw everything into it: stomach, lungs, shoulders, eyes. The conviction with which you spoke made a riddle of every contradition, and a saga of every lie. Your breath burned like a high in my throat when we stood close enough to trade secrets.

I'm not going to say that I loved you, because I hope you can make up your own mind. 

In later years, I no longer knew what to make of you. It seemed incredible to me that you retained the same electric blue eyes. You were a stranger and I missed you so much that sometimes at night got sick to my stomach. Once or twice I vomited in the kitchen sink by starlight, always missing a strand or two of hair when I tried to hold it all back.

I felt the same self-righteous disappointment with you that I felt with poorly cast movies made from the beautiful books that I had kept under my pillow as a child.

"No but she was suposed to have wavy hair," I would whisper to my bored companions in the listening dark of the theater. Or else I would scoff, "He would never have worn Adidas!"

With you I thought the same sorts of things, only there was no one there but you to whisper to. And that, of course, would never do. I think I bit my tongue until it bled.

Seven O'Clock at the Quad

In the morning the quiet is a hotel kind, hinting at the breathing of others, at the shuffling of their limbs on borrowed beds, and at their wanderlusting dreams.

from "The Phoenix Tree"

The Phoenix Tree grew from a rock that slanted precariously out to sea. Children loved to climb it. Their parents loved to scream. No one had ever fallen from The Phoenix Tree, but it was a cautionary tale waiting to happen. Someday someone would. And then that someone would die with their lungs full of green water and their skin starry with salt. Everyone would cry and shake their heads together, bitterly saying I told you so, and, no, I told you.

Then a man would come with an axe.

But for now the Phoenix Tree stood, tall and strong and calm. Each night it cut its silhouette out of the sunset. Tourists took pictures that always professional postcards, because The Phoenix Tree was particularly photogenic, even for a palm. 

In the Dessert (Take Two)

In the dessert, if you go too long with only sand to eat and drink and breath and see, you can go no farther with only sand. So there is water, shimmering with the same erotic, untouchable sheen as the golden circles dangling from the costume of a belly dancer. You can only get just so close-- never closer. Never there. Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet? Now?
Never.
It's like a dance, or a chase scene. (You can't decide.) You take a step forward; the water laps a wave back. In your throat and your gut and your limbs is a feeling that falls somewhere between thirst and lust, and you think that maybe they are always, in the end, the same thing.
You want to cry, but there is not enough water in your body to wet your eyes.
In the dessert, you inevitably lose your mind.

from "Elsa On the Subway"

Sometimes in the subway Elsa did not mind the iron maiden press of strangers against her sides, and this was how she knew she must leave the city. A pale man shifted to make room for a woman carrying a baby with balled fists and closed eyes. In doing so, he moved so close to Elsa that she could feel the contours of his body beneath his clothes. It occurred to her that this was how they would stand if they were lovers. Suddenly, she wanted very badly to cry. The only thought that stopped her was this: if she did, she knew, no one would turn to ask her what was wrong. They would instead continue to stare dully out the windows at the muddy blur of the tunnel flashing by. 

Midway between San Fransisco and Berkely, the subway goes underwater. Elsa had taken this route many times and knew by heart the moment when the land dropped away and the ocean gripped the train tightly with both hands. She closed her eyes exactly when. 

Her ears popped like popcorn.

She leaned back.

The man standing behind her smelled like rain and old paper. He was wearing a dark pink jacket made of cordoroy. It was soft and fragile to the touch. His name, Elsa decided at random, was Jackson.

She wanted him to ask her if she knew where they were.

She wanted to be the one to say, "The sea."

In the Dessert (Take One)

1.

In the dessert, there are more stars than there are freckles on a red haired girl in the summer time.

I am going to step out of character, so to speak, for  just a moment. This feels something like cheating, and also scarily like actually blogging, but I promise not to make a habit of it. I just thought I might add some pictures to break up the visual monotony of this blog. First off, here is a postcard I picked up at a Simon Van Booy reading. (Eloquence and elegance. I'm certain that was the best reading I've ever been to.) It's part of a contest that harpercollins is doing right now. I'm not going to go to detail right now but I might later. The photograph is of date palm trees, which I now know much more about than I ever expected or planned to. All date palms, for example, belong to the phoenix genus. The fruit ripens at varying rates and so must be picked one by one, by hand. There is also a variety of date palms, Phoenix theophrasti, that is found only on Crete. There are very few palm forests on Crete, but one of the few is located at Vai. I might be deluding myself, but this still seems very auspicious as Vai was one of the first places in Europe I ever visited. I think about it often. My trip to Vai involved, among other things, a shady chaffeur named Spyro who dressed like a Nascar racer, an exhilerating but also, frankly, terrifying high-speed trip through the mountains on gravel roads that seemed to be only a few inches wider than the car, a myriad mountain goats, and a mysterious pile of brightly colored cubes abandoned at the side of the road miles from any other sign of human life. All somewhat off-putting at the time, but excellent to have to recall. And Vai itself was very beautiful. I never knew that "seagreen" was a real color-- I thought it was just more cutsy Crayola nonsense-- but it is. At Vai the water is green and so perfect that it makes you wonder why water is ever blue. But I digress.

On Running For Your Life in the Dim Before Dawn

We ran until stars went through our lungs.

Until our legs had the motion stuck inside of them like seasick

A burn both sharp and blurry in our calves.

The feeling of drinking gin too fast.

And we knew, as we had known for years--since ninth grade science class, to be exact-- that the first law of kinetics is this: objects in motion stay in motion.

And all along the diving hills there was no use holding back.

Lady

(a little something from the archives. this is pretty old...)

It is easy not to trust Felix.
Easy when we see him off by himself, his shadow the only thing that deigns to be near us. It stretches across the cold ground, blue and thin like a sliver of darkest ocean. Easier still when he tells those...stories. His tongue so fast but his eyes so slow.
"I knew a lady once," he'll say, "Little and firm with mischief in her stride. And black, black eyes. For weeks, I'd longed to take her home with me. Then one night she put her hand on my arm and said, Felix. Just that. When we got to my apartment I flipped on the light and the fuse burst in a little shower of sparks, so I'll understand if you think I just saw what I did because of the dark. But let me tell you. Under that lady's fine red coat was a fine red gown, and under that lady's fine red gown was a fine red fox tail, lush and sweeping and curled towards her bare white hip."
We don't believe him, but of course we have to ask,
"What happened then, Felix?"
"Lady turned tail and fled."

from "The Good Gimmick"

"The metaphor may be a tired one, but damn it--" Frank said, one hand moving along the waist of his guitar as if it were a breathing thing and might stir beneath his touch, "It's nearly impossible for a man not to compare the things he loves to the women he wants to undress."

Frank Gray. All ruddy cheeks and florescent white hair. Heineken foam and tobacco smoke. Worn plaid shirts sloppily cuffed over hands whose fingers, despite their swollen, purplish appearance, could dance like no others. All up and down the frets in a way that was so fast but so smooth that it started to look slow.

Sometimes in the evening it got so that we could hear the music in the floorboards. Pelvic, guttural crashes of purr and static that should have blasted from the speakers of some brow-beaten brown car with the bass turned up too high. If I hadn't known him myself, I never would have believed it was just Frank, alone in his room with his second-hand amp and tenth-hand electric.

Medic, Medic

Jamie was citrus on a split lip, but you, my dear, were a purr in a hurting throat.
                  

French Trip Nostalgia

  One day we went to the sea. It was a Thursday, I believe, but walking down the narrow, shadowed street to the Lycée we could feel the sun trying to find us, like an offer and a dare. The sky that day was a blue so proud, so tender (as if, ripe) that it looked like a show put on to attract a lover. And not just any lover, of course, but a lover fit for the longings of the sky.

Bruna had a test; we parted ways on the school steps that morning. She told me to meet her back at 17:00, and wrote her phone number in perfect palmer method handwriting on a blank page in my notebook. I said O.K.. On after thought, bonne chance. She smiled; she dimpled; she disappeared through the doors. 
The students ebbed around me, pressing cigarettes feverishly to their mouths, laughing nasaly laughs, kissing (in greeting or otherwise), clapping one another and even their teachers on the backs. For a moment they seemed a crowd purely of strangers.  I saw Dan first; his hieght, the blonde streaks in his hair, and the brightness of his shirt all gave him away. Then I spotted Sarah, Molly, Theresa, Céline. Dan and Sarah waved, Céline winked, Molly pretended not to have seen me, and Theresa smiled uncertainly. I went to them, kissed where kissing was appropriate (where one of us was french). We said simple things back and forth in one language or another. Céline lit a cigarette off of Sarah's; they smoked with their spare hands on their hips, blowing truncated gray plumes towards the sky, speaking hurridly in between drags. Dan asked where Bruna was. I said class, a test, then asked why Theresa was with us instead of with her host brother Ludavic. Dan said Ludavic had a test too, same as Bruna. I nodded. Sarah ground the useless part of cigarette into the concrete. Around us even the stragglers were straggling off one by one. Finally, Céline shoved his hands into the depths of his unnecessary coat, something apolagetic in his posture. "I go," he said simply. Sarah nodded, told him not to be late. Then she was alone with the four of us, the Americans. For a moment she was silent, surveying us with a look of cryptic amusement. Behind her, in the ramshackle apartment across the way, the old drunkard we had been told to ignore on the very first day leaned out of his window to shout a slurred profanity at an irritated passerby. Sarah rolled her eyes in his direction, then said, "So."
"So," I said back.
Dan laughed (good natured, compulsivley; Dan was always laughing.) "What are we doing?" he asked.
"What do you want to do?" Sarah retorted, her dark eyes gleaming with mischeif and promise and a million other less definable things. (She was like that. Like this: sturdy, agreeable, impulsive, what one might call a force.)
At first nothing creative came to mind. There were the stores, and there was the café -bar where, it seemed, Bruna and her friends passed more time during school hours than they did at school.
And then, there was the sea.

"Johan is sick today," Sarah said, as if somehow this decided things. "We will go visit him." Then, off our looks of mild confusion, she added, "He lives by the beach. It will be fun. And he's not really sick, he's...what do you say?"
"Playing hooky," I offered.
"Hickey?"
"Haha. No. Hooky."
"Hooky. O.k. On y va."
And we did just that. On the bus Sarah told us that Johan hadn't come to school all week. The way she said it it sounded like pride, like boasting. Molly asked if his parents knew. Sarah, in lieu of answering, laughed. "Johan is my best friend," she said affectionately. For a moment no one spoke. Then, with a startling, appealing lack of elegance, Sarah scrambled onto her knees, and pointed out the bus's faintly tinted, not-so-faintly dirty windows. "Look at the lavender," she said, and we did, at the shimmering, stretching ripple of silver-purple blurring past. When the beautiful fields faded from view, Sarah settled back into her seat with an air of absolute satisfaction. "We're close," she said. 

Johan lived in a town filled with kitschy stores selling lanyards and pornographic postcards, keychains and umbrellas and novelty martini glasses, bikinis and shark tooth necklaces. Presumably it was sometimes filled also with tourists, but it wasn't the right season for that. On the contrary,  the only people we saw seemed more than content to pretend that they were alone, an illusion we likewise maintained. From where the bus let us off, it was a five minute walk through the naked streets to the beach. Everything felt wide and silent and empty--until we reached the sea, which, though wide (infinite, in fact), was loud and alive. And blue. So blue. Not the same blue as the sky, but a different blue, a blue worthy of the sky's efforts and affections.
We took off our shoes, our socks, our tights, our jackets. We piled them on a log close to the sidewalk. We dug our toes down deep into the sand. We wiggled them. The wind took our voices and ran off with them. It brought us the taste of the sea. We walked along the beach, slanting towards the water. Beneath us, the sand grew darker and cooler. Eventually the waves reached for our ankles. We cringed from the cold but refused to shy away. We cuffed our jeans. We bunched up our skirts in our hands. We waded.
There were shells everywhere.  It was easy not to notice them at first, but if you wanted to find them, they were there. Pink shells and purple shells and strange, cylindrical shells that looked more like magical flutes than like any other shells I had ever seen. Sarah and Molly and Theresa went to lie in the sun, but Dan and I wandered, following one shell to the next, lifting them gingerly, fighting over some of them, hardly talking,hardly even breathing, maybe letting the sea breathe for us... until finally we heard Sarah shouting for us and realized that we were almost too far to hear her at all. We turned back.

When we reached them Sarah called Johan and told him that we were on our way. It seemed criminal to put the rest of our clothing back on, so we carried everything in awkward bundles. It was O.K; it wasn't far. It seemed we had barely lost sight of the waves when we came to a white, two story house with a balcony and a blue roof. Its stucco-esque walls reminded me of an adobe, and a fenced-in patio was fiiled with small palm trees, potted cactuses, and exuberant flowers that stuck out their long, pink tongues at us as Sarah keyed in a number she knew by heart and the gates clicked open. 
Stepping through, Sarah tilted her head back,and thundered, "Johan? JOOOHAAN?" 
A moment later Johan appeared on the balcony. He was tall and bony with a long forehead, deep-set gray eyes, and gelled light brown hair. He was also more sloppily dressed than I'd come to expect of the french students; although it was hard to say whether this was habitual or simply because he hadn't been planning on leaving the house. As I watched, he tapped ash carelessly over the rail into the garden below, bit back a smile and regarded us silently.
"We came to visit you," Sarah said. "Because you are sick."
Johan laughed.
"Playing hooky," she added.
"Comment? Hocky, comme sur la glace?"
"Hooky. Comme quand on ne va pas a l'école."
"Ah. Hooky. I am playing hooky."
"Yes. But you said you are sick so we came to visit you, to make you better."
"Actually," said Theresa, "We would really just say skipping school."
Everyone looked at her. Everyone blinked. Up until that point, Theresa had hardly spoken at all.
"O.k," said Johan. He tossed his cigarette butt over the fence to the neighbors yard, and promptly vanished from the balcony. A moment later, he reappeared at the front door.
"Drinks?" he asked. "Alchohol? Jus?"
"Je vais mourir de soif," Sarah whined. "I'm thirsty. Lemonade."
Dan and I exchanged glances, raised brows. There was something fundamentally unnerving about Sarah picking fruit juice over alchohol. It seemed strange, too, (though not unpleasent), when we were, some minutes later, seated on wire chairs around a wire table, drinking limonade from stout, colorful plastic cups. In the last few days we'd grown used to the artistry and rituals of eating and drinking, and to the omniprescence of wine. I sipped slowly, at once enchanted and apalled by how much sweeter the soda tasted by contrast. How quickly we adapt.
And yes, right then it felt so easy to be there, so natural. The sun, the sea, the smoke, the bread, the wine, kiss hello, kiss good bye. Playing hicky, hocky, hooky, whatever. Everyone speaking one language, then everyone speaking another, botching both, sometimes the feeling of understanding neither, but even then...
Laughter. Lavender. Love.


The bus came and went without us, humming down the street just close enough that we turned our heads.
"Fuck," said Sarah, grinning. Theresa squirmed. "I said I'd meet Ludavic..." she trailed off. Sarah shrugged. The next bus came in an hour and there was nothing we could do.  Theresa looked annoyed, but it seemed impossible not to smile.  In that moment, the feeling of freedom was absolute. The wind was soft and balmy and sweet, like a breeze borrowed from a shampoo commercial in which topless girls lounged luxuriously in the tropics. The limonade was going to our heads like wine. Time was different here; time was on our side. Twenty-four hour time was slow and meaningless and kind. We doddled on our way to the bus stop, stopped at one of the homogenous stores to fill a white paper bag with licorice, happy cola, and creme brulee gummies. We tossed the bag back and forth, licked sour sugar from our thumbs. When we reached the bus stop, we  lay on the benches on our backs and stared up at the sky. We taught each other to be vulgar or charming in english or french. Sarah made it a rule that for the rest of the day no one could speak in their own language; for the most part the rule was followed. Dan and I sang the repetitive pop songs we'd learned from the radio on the drive to Mont Pellier the day before; Sarah filled in the blanks we couldn't remember. Eventually the bus came, not quite on schedule, but close enough. It was our last night in Bézier, and even paying for the bus ticket felt sacred and sad.


Dinner that night was strange, wineless and crowded. Since it was the last night, it had been decided that all of the exchange and host students from the Lycée Henry VI would eat together at a traditional restaurant. As our trip the sea had somewhat delayed us, we arrived last, and Dan and I got seperated from our host sisters and their friends. We were seated at the end of the table by the door. It felt cold and sequestered. Around us were other American students, mostly from West High. Sometimes they tried to speak to us, but for the most part, we refused. I was struck by the realization that Dan had somehow become my friend, and then immediately after by the realization that he would not remain so for long. I sulked, folded my napkin into a crane, then a flower. Dan fidgeted, skated a knife down his arm, laughed when I told him to stop. Aaron Heise asked if we liked France. We said yes. Aaron said something else and I'm sure at that point my irritation was plain across my face; I wasn't in the mood to humor anyone. I felt like time was running out, like it had turned against us. 

It was and it had. 


On the train the next day I would stare out the window, speak to no one, and dream. I would wander behind my wavering eyelids to the place where sea met land, absently turning a little pink shell over and over and over again in my hands. In three days time I would be home, and we-- these people whom I felt so deceptively close to--would be no one to each other. The inevitability of this was thick in my throat. I thought about trying say something about not wanting to leave, but knew that whatever I said would come across somehow as both understatement and exaggeration. Dan turned to me and muttered that roquefort is better with wine and that it was a shame that we couldn't order any as tu sais qui was sitting with us. Aaron glanced up angrily and asked what we were talking about. Dan rolled his eyes at me and said, "Nothing."
Then Sarah came by, as if to save us. Dan said something that neither of us heard. "Comment?" Sarah asked, kneeling between our chairs.

And I thought: but for now, we lean in close when we speak.  ~

from "Bone Setting Basics"

Zach moved to her city, and thought it would be good to catch up. He called Lissa, hung up on her, called her back. They agreed to meet at the park, by the magnolia they used to talk philosophy and Saturday Night Live under. It had been so long that neither could remember what the quarrel that kept them apart had been. Besides, they weren’t only friends; they were cousins. Third or twice-removed or something; Zach wasn’t entirely clear, but anyway, it didn’t matter. They say blood is thicker than water and Zach, being not only a doctor but a supersitious one, was particularly prone to believing metaphors about blood. 

When Zach got to the park he found the magnolia immediately. But something was wrong. It was bigger, to start with. It had thicker limbs. It cast a deeper, gloomier shadow than Zach remembered. It used to be such a delicate thing, just taking hold. Zach had always found that charming; he had felt a sense of solidarity with the tree and its youth and its insistance on beauty. Now it was it was so firmly established. Suddenly Zach felt old. 

Lissa wasn’t there yet, so he thought he might take some flowers from the tree and give them to her. He broke off a branch but all of the blossoms were battered and most were bruised, covered in brown smudges the color a half-eaten apple goes when left too long unattended. He was going to drop the branch on the ground, but Lissa walked up just then, and, at a loss, he handed the flowers to her anyway. 

“Zach!” she said. She raised the flowers to her nose but, as far as Zach could tell, did not bother to inhale their fragrance. “It’s been too long.”

This was not the right thing to say, but in all fairness Zach did not know what the right thing to say was, or if there even was  a right thing to say at all. So he said, “Yes,” which was also not the right thing to say. He looked at the flowers in her hands and thought that that had not been the right thing to do, and also that even if it had been, those would not have been the right flowers to give.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Lissa asked, and that, Zach thought, was perfect.

So they sat and they talked and slowly the sun went down behind them. It was all very nice, but hopelessly stiff, and at times quite boring. After an hour or so Zach began to feel as if he were trying to discuss in detail how much he loved the finger sandwiches at party with the President. This was, obviously enough, not an experience Zach had ever had, but the image was so clear it felt real. He considered telling Lissa about it, then discarded that idea but toyed with the new idea of asking if she wanted to go somewhere with finger sandwiches, then as a joke asking if she wanted to go somewhere with the president. Finally he wound up staring blankly into the space behind her head.

“I do prattle on, though, don’t I?” Lissa asked. 

Zach was supposed to say ‘No, not at all,’ and he knew it, but he didn’t. He gritted his teeth instead and waited for her to look offended but move on, which she did with admirable speed.

“You never told me what you’re doing back here, Zach,” she said.

Which was when Zach told her about the job, which really was the only thing he’d meant to tell her in the first place.

When Lissa first learned that Zach was teaching at the other school, she made an inventive noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh and asked, in all apparent sincerity, “Well that’s nice, Zachary. Are you sleeping with any of your students yet?”

Flabbergasted, Zach ran a hand through his thinning hair and said, “Of course not Lissa. Why would you even ask a horrible thing like that?” 

Lissa shrugged. “I do know about those places, Zach. They’re like that there.”

“Like what, exactly? I don’t even know what you mean. But at any rate, they aren’t like that. And they certainly aren’t like that.”

“Maybe not all of them. But everyone heard about--”

“Manny? Manny was a snake. They fired him.”

“They hired you.”

“Exactly.”

Lissa raised an eyebrow, a taunting but oddly tender smile dancing briefly across her lips. “Yes,” she said softly, “Exactly.”

“That doesn’t mean I--” But now Zach was flustered. He had to stop. He put a hand on his forehead. The heat of his own blushing felt exactly like fever. Lissa was good at this. Too good. Perfect. An artist. He couldn’t decide if he hated her or loved her for it.

“Anyway,” Lissa said, “It would be easy. For you, I mean. You’re young, you’re handsome, you have good teeth, you hold doors open for women carrying babies.” She laughed a little, into her hands.

“You make that sound like a ploy.”

“I believe it is a ploy, more or less. Which isn’t a bad thing, per-say, just something to keep in mind.”

“You always were the cynic.”

“You always were the charmer.” She grinned, suddenly. Added: “You always were the cad.”

“I--”

“Well  congratulations, at any rate. It’s hard to find a job these days. I mean not for you, I’m sure. You’re a doctor for a Christ's sake. In fact I’m not very clear on what you’re doing at the Grassman School if you didn’t just decide that the students were more attractive than your patients.”

“Lissa, you’re horrible.” 

She was other things, too. Beautiful, for one. Today especially. All got up in an old-fashioned blue dress with a white apron. A few stray magnolia petals caught in her hair. She looked like some fantasy version of life on the Oregon Trail. Through most of college Zach had had to work very hard not to fall in love with her.  Yet try as he might Zach could muster up neither affection nor attraction towards the woman before him, only a cringing kind of hatred that he didn’t know what to do with. It was a flash. Red and hot and ugly, but then--thank gone-- for the most, gone. 

Without missing a beat, Lissa said, “But I see you didn’t answer the question. Anyway, what are you teaching? Biology?”

Slowly, Zach shook his head. “Not exactly.” 

“Arithmetic? No, I’m not thinking about this the right way. Basket weaving, maybe? I mean it is the Grassman--”

“Jesus, Lissa, will you stop? I’ll tell you if you’ll just play nice for a moment.”

“O.k. What, then?”

“Blood letting. Bone setting. The basics.”

Lissa looked blank. “Those are doctor things,” she said after a long time.  Then, “Do they really let you teach that there?”

“It’s required, actually. It’s a pilot curriculum. The idea is that there are basic mechanical methods of survival that every human being has a right and a responsibility to know.”

“You’re quoting something.”

“The mission statement, yes. But I think they’re right, you know. I think it’s a very good program. Besides, most schools already teach children CPR, why not how to stitch and disinfect as well? They may never have to use what they learn; in fact I very much hope that none of them ever will... but they might. It isn’t even entirely out of the realm of possibility that they’ll end up on a dessert island some day and...” he saw the way she was looking at him and stopped. Almost smiled. Said: “I’m still young, you admitted it yourself. From time to time I’m allowed to indulge in flights of fancy.”

“Oh Zachary,” Lissa sighed. (Zach did not know what to make of that.) She checked her watch, clucked her tongue. “I’m running late, actually,” she said; “Sorry.” She leaned forward and kissed his neck, very quickly and very lightly. 

When she had stood and was in the process of smoothing out her skirts, she added, “We just never know what to do with you.”

That was the last Zach saw of Lissa for many days. 

He sat alone in the park for several minutes, distractedly dissecting the sexual organs of a trampled magnolia flower with his thumbnail. It was dark, he realized. And he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It would be  a good idea to stop at the grocery store on the way home. Tomorrow was the first day of class so he felt he was allowed to treat himself. He could buy a midrange bottle of wine with a dusty label to calm his nerves. A carton of strawberries because it was starting to be the right season. Ingredients for finger sandwiches. Maybe a box of cookies to share with the kids. Or was that too much like bribery? 

This, it turned out, was only first thing Zach did not know about teaching.

///as always, this is just a clip. if you are interested in reading the rest of this story, let me know.///

Star Vs. Star I

1.

It's just that sometimes when I look you in the eyes I get the feeling that I'm seeing a constellation of dead stars whose lights have, so deceptively, not yet faded from the sky.