1/25/12

A Night's Work


I stood with the others, gathered as we were around the back of the truck.  Ian stood above us on the lift-gate with his hands outstretched.  A denim clad profit.  The sky was just starting to show a pink hue.  None of us had slept the night for the sake of a few dollars.  He put on his theatrical tone and waved an all encompassing gesture over us saying,
Tonight, we have learned some things.  And we have lost some things.
This was in the parking lot of an abandoned Captain D's.

Sometime around midnight, I had been standing within a thick mist that had settled abruptly at sunset.  Light shot through in harsh angles from unseen sources and made the fog glow with a disharmonious gravity that was as empty and intangible as the vapor itself.  You Dark Night, behind your vale, why do you try to take from us our imitation suns!  Why do you blot out the stars we make for ourselves?  See how even now they pierce your shield and make hopeful our hearts! The night could not answer, for the wind had been gathered into its storehouse and even our voices were swallowed up in the gloom.

Away in other lands, there was truly a winter that could be felt, and held in the palms of hands.  Within the mist was but a chill, a skeletal form of something like a forgotten season.  We moved from that foggy den in a convoy; our headlamps cutting a fleeting course that disappeared behind us in an angry red glare.  Ian led us then, singing over the radio as was his want and his privilege.  I would have joined my voice with his, but my heart was ponderous with notions.  I feared the fog outside would steal my words. 

Hours later, as I drove away through breaking dawn, I wondered what I had learned.  I knew, at the very least, what I had lost.  Every night steals something from you unless you throw your soul before and run behind, grabbing fistfuls of life where it is hidden in moonlight, in starlight.  The mist had thwarted our dash, and we called upon God for His sun to right the wrongs of His night.
Brothers, from the same hands, and always at war.  
Moving towards home, the city lay spread out below me as the beams of day were sent,  fiery gold and full of strength.  All the caffeine was making my teeth clench and wild thoughts were swimming in my blood.  I wanted to write love letters, and then agonize never to send them. To go hunting for my lost poetry and take it all back to give to someone else.  As I mused, I looked to my left where the river bent and wound through the ravine and there!  There the the fog had retreated, hovering over the waters to drown the secrets it had stolen that night.  And at once, my heart was light as though a prayer. 

1/22/12

Triggers


The evenings used to be ritual.  Tea and conversation in Spanish while I mostly listened.  I wasn't the only man in a house of women, but we so seldom saw Karina's father that he remains to this day a complete stranger to me.  Sometimes on Friday nights we would meet at Marcela's and trade tea for rum and wine and Ximena with her sister would pry me open to jab at my sensitive innards.  Now when I drink my tea, it is out of a blue, metal cup and no one forces me to talk about my sentimientos.
The first husband had hanged himself one week before Ximena's first daughter was born.  That's why I had to talk about feelings, and what I missed of home, and how it felt to be heartbroken.  She would not let the men in her life escape the easy way anymore, there was far too much at stake.
I talked about being held up at gunpoint, beaten in the streets, falling out of love.  I told them that I was the happiest I'd ever been.  Back then, the tea had such flavor.

Now, I walk out in the rain looking at the yard, covered as it is in leaves.  The trains howl in the distance; the metallic clack, horns, and the houses rumble.  I think maybe that it is the worst time of the season, and the birds have the right idea to keep passing through to wherever birds go.  You can feel the tensions of the year, her growing pains, in the voices of everyone you know.  Relationships were straining against such violence.  The reminders of the previous Januaries still lingered: the hole in the wall made by one of the brother's fist.  The scars in the paint that ran along the side of my car.   The lone bottle of conditioner left in the shower and untouched.
Friends and lovers are better met in spring; warmer weather, warmer hearts.

It would be good to leave again, but we lacked wings.  The old same shackles still clamped our ankles, and there is nothing more comforting than the familiarity of bondage.  Still, my heart said move and find that next piece of life.  Sleeping alone in the same place for too long is just practice for being dead.

Somewhere I'd find a postcard and in as few words as possible send it off and hope for salvation.
Send Money.
I would address it to some last true soul I knew in the world.

I wrote Brandon for money from the end of the rope when my last pesos were buying cold empanadas.  He was no problem giving it to me.  Of course, he said, how much do you need?
I would have wrote my mother, but didn't.  She had asked what I wanted for Christmas and I had said money.  She went ahead and sent some straight to me even though it was November.  Even so, she had presents waiting for me when I made it home on Christmas day.  One was a new jacket that has saved my life many times since where the money had the once.  She was always doing that, saving my life.  I think she saw that she had as much ownership on it as I did, since she brought it into the world.  Maybe all mothers think that way a little.  I'll never know.

1/18/12

A Winter's Refrain


I would tell stories long into the cold nights about the nights that had been even colder.  About the time in the mountains when my clothes froze on my body so hard that they wouldn't catch flame even as I stood full in the small fire.  Only the tips of my shoes melted.
As I talked, we huddled around a gas heater like hobos around a trashcan fire in some Steinbeck story.  Equal parts artists and the dispossessed, trying to make money out of our nothing.  The security guard later saw us waiting for the ancient elevator with boxes in our hand and told us that there were stairs that might be quicker.  One of us just smiled and said,
"If we liked to work, we wouldn't be in television." And it was probably true.
I knew where I was going in life, but I wondered about the others.  Older, and many long past the days I'd yet to see where past decisions really start to set, and your life becomes a concrete thing.  Some with kids, all with debts.
That same day I had met a woman who stirred my heart; there had been precious few in the last months.  Smiles are often misread, and sometimes sadness is just the way of things.  I felt like she was an affirmation of something, but I didn't know what...and even then, only in passing.  The feeling was gone in a days time and then, even though none knew my heart, I was still embarrassed of it.  Her spoken for, as the best ones are, I had to simply nod my head in respect and thank her for her beauty.

There had been an unusual progression of fascinating women that had passed into my life in that week's time, and I started to worry that I was turning sentimental.  The Big Man at that cold job was near twice my age, and he had just laughed.  He knew the score from long before I had been on the scene, and not even a week later I would be nodding in solemn understanding and wondering if I would be naive my whole life, and if bitter was the only alternative.

In the hectic tumble that is the falling down of days, the first weeks of the year collapsed into new paradigm.  The shift came as though in the midst of a dance; two pairs of eyes meet and then lose each other only to meet again when the rhythm changes and the lights dim.  As Juliet was only eyes before Romeo's heart built the rest of her out of the scattered bits of dreams he'd carried.  We know how that story ends though, and tragedy is only beautiful once.
The joy I had seen in my friend's face had started to fade, and I felt angry.  People around us, people close to us in the city and in the business failed so spectacularly every day at things that should come natural.  It wasn't his fault, and I knew straight away that he would soldier on with his shoulders down against fate.  The fight would be valiant, and they say that's what builds character.  The problem was one of belief, and if we are to hold up a God that asks everything of us, then its seems best to let sleeping dogs lie.  He knew as much, but a cold bed is a hard lesson.






1/10/12

Old Roads


Each story I tell begins the same way, with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  Where once we walked in light and certainty, there is now a tunnel as if in a wood.  Dark branches arch above, pressing together to block out the sun.  This city is a forest.

It was not so long ago that the stars were above us, in the high places somewhere near the world's end.  We lived as nomads, and the people were good to us.  The stranger with his bus who drove us down from the summit and the many kilometers after, past fields of crops and factories that made the air redolent of processed dog food.  The old man with his pick-up, who loved his town so much all he wanted to do was take us up to see the lights.  Not a one of them spoke our language, but they could read our faces.

We came by night to the town beneath the volcano.  It smoldered as it slept, breathing steam into the sky so none would forget its authority.  There we learned to dance to rhythms of a far off and sunny place, guided by hands that pressed into ours and pulled us close.  In the cool of the night, as we lay entwined, the soft dialogue of our breathing held more truth in it than all of our words since.

We would be reminded that we had souls, and of the hands that created them.  On the hard paths that led into the teeth of the mountains, where death would tug at our coats as to toss us to a beautiful death...for everything there was beautiful.  The cold nights, and deer would watch on with more curiosity then fear, and the fox would stand guard by the rocks.  The snow wet us, then the rain, but we never froze.

Somewhere near the end, our paths split and we never saw each other again.  The earth rose up to the sky, and miles and miles later, the city grew and enveloped and choked and trapped.  There are ways out yet, though they are dark.  There are places that wait and people that wait.

1/9/12

The New Year


The weather was balmy, even though the sky was the pale grey of winter storms.  I shrugged myself into my suit jacket, stuck my tie into my pocket, and trudged down the street to where my car was parked.  The previous year hadn't been a failure, not quite, but in any event it was gone.

Christmas trees were already in front of houses.  On the curb of the street.  Lined up in the park, where person after person had taken one degenerate's lead.  Whether the city would pick them up or not didn't concern me, though I doubted it.  They would more than likely burn before then.

Nothing was really different, but I figured I would go on thinking that there was really a fresh start that day.  Things certainly had potential to play out better in the coming months...if I could get some money together.  Poverty had been an interesting experiment, but whatever I had to learn had probably presented itself after a year.

A week later he would fall in love, and the world seemed to really change a little.  He had changed.  Giddy, even to the point of being stupid...but I didn't blame him.  I envied him truly, because after so long he still had the heart to play the games of budding lovers.  I had run out of poetry that last night in Puerto Natales when the dueña of the corner shop had taken pity on me and sold me the beer even though I didn't have the empty bottle to trade.  I didn't know it then, but when I woke that next morning I had forgotten how to be a Romantic.

She wouldn't know any of that, and she still smiled at me from thousands of miles away, in the desert.  If I did go back...I would go back...

It would be cold again soon; the real cold.  It had been the coldest winter of my life when I first fell in love.  I didn't think it would be that cold again, and anyway it wouldn't mean as much.  Snow would be more of an inconvenience, because there would be no music in it.  I smile, still, thinking of Montreal and blizzards.  To me, that will always be a happy memory, and the only real Christmas I ever had.

Y así pasan los días, esperando.  Como siempre.  Para siempre.