sort of preview

He was pulled from the oily river by an old man, oddly familiar. Sputtering and sucking at the air he blinked through his wet hair as his feet found their grounding and he stood. The old man had him by his coat still and, when he was able to stand, released him and stepped back. Owen wiped the hair and the water from his face and gazed at his apparent savior.

The man was older than he'd realized, crouched over, his thin and crooked hands wringing the water from his pant legs. His hair was thin and grey and wispy, ruffled by the soft heavy breeze. Owen didn't think to thank the man. Only gazed around at the strange dusky sky.

The old man finally looked up and when he did something inexplicably clicked for Owen. He stared at him, bewildered.

"Grandpa?"

The old man chuckled and shook his head. "Not really. Not yours."

"What happened to me?"

"You fell into the river and I pulled you out."

"But I wasn't in a river." He looked around again. "Am I dead?" he shivered.

"Not quite, no."

"Am I dreaming?"

"Not quite that either." Grandpa smiled. "Follow me..."

Freedom?

I am an unholy mess of unholiness
And the stink of it is overwhelming
I am whelmed overly

I want to choke on every follicle
Of your glorious mane
And every inch of your pewter frame
Inch by inch
By inch.

I want to be your colonel mustard
And you be my miss peacock
Without the pea.

You told me inaudibly and unwritten
That you’d be my orgy
An orgasmic, triumphant cacophony
Of light and wet delight

I thought to myself that
If I were a tree
I would stick you with all my branches
And soak your blood through the earth
With my roots

Call me over these electric lines
So I can feel your electric delights
Even if it’s just with my wrinkled palm
And what’s left is a flushed face

That’s gross but it’s my mess
And I can’t clean it by myself.

I want to glue your clue
With my dice and my cardboard chart
Until the light in these five candles
Is a corkboard of all that is childish and wildly radiant

The way our dreams became a reality
But only in our minds
That’s how I think of you and about you
In fictional retelling of our facts
But in verse. And not paragraphed very well

Because I don’t know how.
I don’t know how to cross these borders
With their rebel machetes
And glassy eyes
Staring at my arms deals and my
Array of purple blood diamonds

I am the god of war in our melting world
And you are my liberating force.
Here in controversy and against popular opinion
So feed me a grain of rice
Which is all my swollen belly can take right now.
And I will cry out for more
More, though its taste will kill me.

You will kill me with two grains of rice
And the blinking gaze of your carbine
But it will be a slow and swelling death
And I’ll rejoice in its beauty
As my innards burst and the hole
In my chest bleeds slowly
Because my pulse is low and slow
Like the dying dog my mom hit with her car
As I watched from the backseat

Even if its not your rifle or your well-intentioned feeding,
Its you in the backseat watching
With a morbid curiosity and a touch of sorrow
Because I have curly hair and sad eyes
As I gaze at the fender and the parts of me
That are stuck to it still.

These are my inner feelings taking shape as I breath
and watch my fingers coming together.
Over me. Over me.
I roller coaster with an early warning
Even though I don’t know what that means.

I walk through a desert of clichés,
Searching for your drink of water
And its your puddle that leads me
To the darkly paved road where your mother
Where you are driving.

I’m trying to turn this spasm in two
Something beautiful but its just not coming to me
You are, though only halfway because your mind,
It’s else where. Where else?
But maybe its you bleeding into
The puddle.
And my tire tracks over your torso
Who knows but the owl watching from the gnarled
Spiny arms of that desert tree
With its biblical shape and its biblical name.
It’s violent shape and its violent name
But the beauty that sits amidst those spines
Is a beautiful cacophony
Of feathers and soft hooting.

I wish I could take its place
With the crows and the carrion
Birds that seek out
The smell
Of decay
Maybe it could be me that eats your carcass
Instead of the opposite.
Maybe your bones in my scat
Instead of the opposite.
And I could walk away full
With satiating death
In my gut
Instead of that grain of rice

So shake your head
Until it spins around
I’ll wave my arms
Until I float away.
Either way,
We’re both still stuck here
With each other’s blood mixing with
our roots and our rain water.

V...

Later on a Tuesday night all misty and cool we drove to Bible study and she sat beside me in the passenger seat, her feet up on the dash, toes pressed to the glass. Writing in a book and slouched in the seat, she would smile occasionally and I would glance at her from the corner of my eye or watch her reflected in the windshield like the specter I was afraid she was already becoming.

We stopped at the house and walked through the front door. She was greeted and touched by smiling sad faces and led to the living room. I felt her awkwardness, knowing she didn’t like being the center of anything, especially attention. We sat beside eachother, me in my best shirt and she gave me the lightest touch on the knee.

The room was dark and filled with more people than was usual on these nights. All here to pray for her as if we could raise our voices in unison so that God might hear our mutterings and cries more clearly. As if he had the weak hearing of the old man we all pictured him being in our youthful ignorance.

There was a reading from the Psalms. Then a song of petition and we led her to the floor where we gathered and our pastor washed her feet and she hid her face, so shy and serene. Then we laid our hands on her as she lay amidst us supplicatory and we prayed. Some aloud, most, like me, silently. I whispered to myself and stared at her feet all washed and white and hiding the decay beneath and I thought that when Christ called them white washed sepulchers, he really meant us all. That we all decay from the inside with the most lovely and loved of us doing so at a swifter pace. How I wished my own would quicken as well.

After, I drove her home to her father and she slept while I drove and blinked until the road blurred before us. Only the days ahead would show to me more clearly then ever that God is indeed hard of hearing.

IV.

In the evening we sat with coffee in her kitchen at either end of the rough wood table, our hands wrapped around our mugs and warm. Her father was asleep upstairs and she was tired but wouldn't sleep herself. There would be time enough to dream later she figured. So we sat and spoke. Of the past and our previous hopes for the future.

She recalled the time I wondered what she would look like older, as a mother or a grandmother. Later when we had both grown and moved on, together or not. The former had been our hope since we met in school. She figured that she had her mother's face. Her mother who had aged little physically and, if she had lived, would have still been youthful in her old age. These were her father's thoughts as well who spoke of his wife often in hopes that his daughter would grow up with the feeling of her presence if not the actuality.

I wished to change the subject, so she began to talk about her thoughts about God and eternity. How she was beginning to believe that all would reach heaven if they truly desired to please God during their life. She thought that truth was too far-removed from human understanding for God to hold man accountable for their ignorance. I don't see that as justice, she said.

I told her that I hoped she was right although I knew that there were many we knew who would disagree.

-I'll find out soon enough, she said, half smiling.

-We all will, I said, and she smiled again.

We both were quiet for a while after because each subject seemed a reminder somehwo of the short time she had left, but anything ordinary seemed inane and shallow. I was sad and picked a pomegranate from the bowl at the edge of the table. I sliced it in half with a knife, glad for the distraction and hoping that my sullenness wouldn't affect her. She reached for one of the halves and we sat for a while, silently picking out the red jeweled fruit. Stripping the soft flesh from the tiny seends and spitting them into a saucer.

There was something comforting about the shared repetition. I watched her pick a clump out of the shell and separate each seed before putting it in her mouth, one by one. Like the fruit, I felt that she too had jewels, waiting to be pried out and enjoyed. I wanted to be the one to taste them. I pushed my portion aside and watched her until she too stopped. She reached for a napkin and rubbed her stained fingers. Then she took my hand in hers from across the table and told me that things would be alright for me and not to dwell on her or the inevitable. I told her she should go to sleep because I didn't want what we had to be reduced to such cliches.

So we got up and she walked me to the door and out on the porch and we stood in the dark for a while, quiet. I felt that things were changing too fast for anybody to adjust so we could only think of gestures and words we had seen in movies. I would rather be still and silent than be dramatic even though I had no defense for this sort of thing, but before I left I kissed her on the mouth, knowing the complications it would bring.

III.

It was morning and i woke to the sound of turning pages. The shades of the window were drawn open and a hand's width of light was shining into the dark room. I lay twisted in blankets and pillows and it was still early but she was awake and sat reading in a chair by the window.

Her brown hair was pulled back and tied with a band but it was long and draped down over one soft shoulder. She wore sweatpants and a loose sweater, unzipped towards the neck and her feet were bare despite the cold.

I turned and watched her but she didn't look up. She was reading and the book was held in the path of light from the open drapes. It came through the pane and over the smooth bare skin of her shoulder where the sweater draped low and askew. From her shoulder it shone across the book and brightened the white pages, then trailed across the end of the bed.

She was reading Thomas Merton and I smiled as she frowned slightly and her brows knitted. I watched her ponder glory and love and the mysteries of contemplation, all thigns that seemed so fruitless considering that all her questions about things eternal would soon be answered in full.

II

II.

When her father called it was the first time I had spoken to him on the phone but despite our distance and differences, there was a fellowship of shared grief. He spoke to me of her doctor's visit. She had insisted on going alone. The news was bad and now she was home sleeping. Can I go see her? I asked. He said no, that tomorrow would be better and then his voice cracked and I was silent.

Finally I asked if he was alright and he said yes, that he was going to take a drive. Collect his thoughts. So I hung up and sat in my room next to my window. It was late but I couldn't sleep so I thought about the wedding and how nice she had looked. How soft the skin of her bare arms felt around my neck as we danced and watched the bride and groom. I wondered about marriage and about love and happines and all the things your hear in songs and see on screens.

There is value in fiction and if an artist can look at life and see the good that should have been and write it or paint it then perhaps one day our hopeful expressions will begin to look more like reality. Those were my hopes and I thought on them until the sun began to brighten my room and the dried flowers outside. Then I dressed and walked to her house.

She answered the door in her nightdress with her hair straight as if she hadn't moved once during her sleep. There was nothing in her face or her walk that suggested that she would be dead by spring. That deep in her bones something was spreading that even her smiles wouldn't be able to stop.

We need to find my dad, she said. So I followed her to her truck and sat behind the wheel. She sat next to me, still and quiet. The morning was gray but as we drove through the woods and over the bridge, we witnessed the rest of the world subtly awakening with short flights from limbs and shivering bushes along the road. We drove and drove. Through town and the industrial plants, until we came to the shipyard where he worked and there we found his car, parked at the end of the road, overlooking the water.

We stopped and got out. I stood by the truck and watched her walk slowly to the car, wondering what she was thinking. She tapped on the glass and I saw her dad sit up in the back seat. His thick black hair disheveled. She stepped back as he opened the door and I heard her ask what he was doing. Why he was out there. He said he had slept there. That he didn't know what else to do. She hugged him as she asked him why. He wrapped his thick arms around her and said, "because I'm so so sorry."

Fourteen Scenes About the Death of a Loved One

This is a story i've been working on based on a Sufjan Stevens song....As always, feedback will be appreciated.

I.

It was a cool fall evening, the sky gray and the air still. The goldenrod tied with a blue ribbon and held under my chin as i walked, wrapped in a coat and a scarf and just beginning to see my breath in the air. She lived six blocks away and was sleeping, but i wouldn't wait until morning. She needed something bright when she woke.

It was dark when i arrived and so was her house. I went to her window and her curtains were drawn so i laid the bright little bundle on the windowsill where it would draw all of the East's early light. The defiant yellow flowers, growing in the wild and the cold, seemed to speak good things about the end of a year when everything else was closing and falling.

I wanted to tap on the cool glass because i knew she was there, eyes closed and breathing, and i wanted to see her, but instead i pressed my palm against the pane as if i could feel the warmth of her heart or the lingering smile from her dream. Then i left.

I walked slowly for a while, in the middle of the street, following the reflectors and staring up at a sky framed by branches. I felt that, despite its infiniteness, there was a sort of intimacy to space and the heavens. That perhaps it was that feeling that caused things to grow upwards, like trees and men.

As i neared home i picked my own yellow flowers to put on my sill, hoping there was something symbolic in the same light warming different windows, but mostly i too wished to wake to something bright.

Untitled

A string of lights in the sky outside
this boy's window.
Some ordered migration to heaven.
Are you waiting
like I am?
or are you already there?
If so
what becomes of me?

I wished for a light at night,
a beacon
to where you laid your head.
I wished to follow its glow
no matter how far.

Sibelius said of his sixth,
"this reminds me of the smell
of winter,
the first snow."
How it glittered and shone
and chilled his nose but
awakened something as well,
when all else slept.
Something slumbering too most of the year
but
out of hibernation
spoke beautiful notes
and the harmony of the world
would flow through his creased fingers.

I wish you to be
the smell of the first snow
to me.
That light in the sky
that purposes my wanderings.