Writing is breathing.
December 3, 2011
I will write. Prescription, albuterol! Asthma pump against my lips…I can’t not write.
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This here is an embrace forever captured in time.
November 17, 2011
upon the pass, where i had walked so long, alone
rocks and grit pressed up into the soles of my feet
(it became painful to walk, and i walked)
weary and lonesome, peering into the starless night
i had continued to walk and i was walking to you
i clutched my arrows and water sticks and i walked
i lie down at night in the damp earth and asked the moon for you
in the morning, i rose and walked again, then again
half-blind and cold, i came around the mountain to a pond
where you had walked and brought the sun and waited for me,
lilies clutched, like beacons, in your hand.
(On the banks stand the arrows of lovers who once stole a moment here – E.A.)
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The lady and the dolphin.
November 15, 2011
Breathing…typing…breathing. From the rocks, the lady trails her fingertips into the water, then over her keyboard, her instrument, eager to tell of what she has seen reflected in the depths of the ocean.
She is laying out her soul to write the story of their love, just as was done decades and decades ago, when whale watchers spied from atop their lookouts the mermen playing songs for their lovers. She is adding their story to all those great love stories of the past. She is typing a siren calling forth the sea creature’s and her fate. She is typing out all she has to give and placing it where her dolphin, her water lover, can swim up and peer close, read her words, flip around in the great waters and shimmy through all the life, vegetation, barricades, obstacles, details. Him, the dolphin: confident and courageous in the water, refreshed by its cool depths, invigorated by the easy swimming and the freedom to lift up and breathe and see his lady devotedly watching him; he plunges back into the saltwater fulfilled and strong.
She is playing out on a keyboard the songs of their respective dreams, the things they innocently believed back when all fables and all fairy tales seemed possible, when happy endings seemed not just possible but were the way a story must end, or it must not end at all. She is breathing…typing…breathing. She is writing for both of them, a keystroke, that becomes a tune, which becomes a ballad, that culminates in their lives coming together in a great symphony here in the waters at the end of the Year 2011. Somehow, in ordinary time, near the ruined sandcastles of dashed hopes and elusive happiness, up here against these rocks worn smooth by the incessant battering of life’s waves, here is joy and grace. Here is the grace of how two beings, apart, facing all physical and practical impossibility, how they come together.
The lady and the dolphin. They have been set in the light of the sun. She is writing outside of time, outside the lines of water and sky. Her faith in their love story is suspended in air, waiting to be loosed into the world, just as sea-spray is shot into the pale light that breaks through fog in the early dawn.
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The all.
November 8, 2011
“Seven year ache?’ That is all he asked, that very first time. He asked a question, somehow moved by an oblique message she put into the Universe.
378 pages later. 50, 511 messages later (she counted), led her to this place, where she must work to understand what it is she has on her hands.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau of Santa Fe will tell him a couple hundred reasons why the city is beautiful, but she will give him several more. She will explain in vivid detail, if he needs it, how a forest can arise out of a desert. She will explain how she wishes to understand him, the trajectory of him, the motivations, the reasons, the realities, the fantasies, the light eyes on dark eyes, the dreams, the movements, the moments he falls short, (the moments she falls short), a passion that is built on the bricks of admiration and hope, the fleeting wings of hopefulness, the seconds he moves forward, the heart of him, the predetermined course they cannot deny–not even if they wanted to, (she is too moved, deep inside, by him…there is no denying this), the soul within his self, the conjectures of amazement, the realization that he has this one life, the grappling with her one life, the locomotive of fate, the periods of abject wonder, the brakes of the lumberjacks, the complexities, her head upon his chest, the sweetness of hope, the the the the…The all.
Thank you, God!
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The universal ultimate agency by which the order of things is presumably prescribed.
November 6, 2011
What happens when she can’t write? When even words, her very best friends and the marchers who never break ranks, when they won’t come? Then, she falls into the most indulgent contemplation, the most abstract romanticism, where Gustav Klimt and all the Romantics resided.
She remembers contemplating fate once, imagining that fate (grand destiny) must play itself out, and if it does not, that all the clocks in all the world must simply come to a stop and time will start to go backward, for minutes, then years, then eras, finally eons, until the moment is discovered when fate went off it’s rails. And then, fate corrects itself, lifting itself back onto the treads, and time resumes. All is right with the world again.
Every moment since she was born, every step, has led her to this place. And those around her, to their places. Where they converge, into fire and into brilliant light and into an understanding that only the very fortunate ever get to glimpse, in their one life, this one. She is thankful she gets to see it.
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They want to know everything. Panic. Radio. Acceptance.
November 2, 2011
The animal lit upon the the panic button, paws and fur and limbs pressing upon it hard, helpless against the threat of being at the mercy of the lion who may embrace her, may desert her. (Depending on a series of decisions that are not to do with her.) Here in the great forest, she only reacts and trusts. She does not have any power, and so she alternately hopes, and alternately hides.
The animal exhibited all the typical responses, fully in Fight or Flight Mode:
Acceleration of heart and lung action
Paling or flushing, or alternating between both
Inhibition of stomach and upper-intestinal action to the point where digestion slows down or stops
Constriction of blood vessels in many parts of the body
Dilation of blood vessels for muscles
Inhibition of the lacrimal gland (responsible for tear production) and salivation
Dilation of pupil (mydriasis)
Auditory exclusion (loss of hearing)
Tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision)
Shaking (the interminable shaking!)
The animal tells herself to gather her courage. Be brave.
Listening to 30 minutes of a voice that she can’t help but admire incredibly, it is so candid and strong and assured. At one point the lion said “hearts and heads” – he lives that way. He knows there are different dimensions from where we make our daily decisions. She is a small animal, licking her small paws, waiting for him to call her to the glory of his audience…he, the host of the kingdom.
He thanked her for listening. As if she could not listen! As if she would not study his every utterance, the animal has cast herself as the lion’s most devoted pupil.
She realizes Fight or Flight is real. Which will win, she wonders? Which will he choose, she wonders?
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Solar energy has the highest density of generated power.
October 31, 2011
“The future is now!”–Photovoltaics are the way in which one energy, solar, is converted to another kind of energy. The vibration of such power makes their hearts beat faster, their fingertips tremble upon the keyboard.
And so it is discovered that energy, conduits, ions of feeling are still alive after such a long time lying dormant…he closes his eyes and imagines…takes a deep breath and then another, he imagines their hands touching, the spark, the rhythm of her heartbeat, his…pulling together, they agree, they synchronize…a photovoltaic transfer, airports, a nervous flyer who said she wouldn’t go into the sky again (she will, for him), baggage collection, steps forward, pulling back, a rental car, B&B room, 1,000 thread count sheets, pretty flowers in vases, pastries like gold on little silver plates, heartbeat matching heartbeat as the curtains are pulled closed against the lumberjacks, light eyes meeting dark eyes as the sun sets, hands a-tangle. In this place, he sees inside her, past poetry and words. She sees past the conventional him, into where he really lives, where he says, quietly, “I want the joy of being in love.” All the bravest lovers from all the most typical places, for all time, have sought to find this very place.
Hope, it is the thing with feathers*, it soars past the earth, into the heavens, up up, higher, above…
Photovoltaic…indeed.
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* Emily Dickinson
At sea.
October 27, 2011
The word he used was “strife.”
strife: /straɪf/[strahyf]
She was a girl who played library as a child. At the kitchen table, she quietly opened book after book and pretended to stamp a due date into their covers. She solemnly slid the books across the table to the invisible borrower, and would say in an authoritative voice, “Please do not be tardy returning your books. Enjoy reading this, it is one of my favorites.”
He was a boy who had a brilliant thought as a child. He climbed to the top of his mother’s house, to the roof. With faith born of magical thinking, he jumped off the roof, believing a garbage bag would be a suitable parachute. Perhaps he imagined his small form floating softly to the ground.
They had big imaginations, once. They didn’t know Webster’s entry for strife. They knew the particular latitudes of freedom, where the ocean met land and they could find their landlegs. She knew of books of poetry and stories where heroic acts take place. He knew the dizzing freedom of flying through the air without knowing what the landing would be.
(One life. You get to live it.)
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Scent from up above.
October 25, 2011
At the mirror, watching herself. A shimmy shake, a quick twitch of the hip. Grab the thick cut glass, the aromatizer, and feel it’s heavy weight. It is weighty, the glass is square and thick, belying the sweet, round light within.
Her perfume is mainly floral in its nature. It’s roses and ivy. And it is shadows and violins, a watercolor of a sandy beach, and beautiful old gospels and darkness and fading dreams and sometimes it’s tired but grateful motherhood and hopeful woman–it is a perfume of so many things. Her scent is a flower left in its early days, not burst open. It is captured, bottled sun, distilled hope and happiness, fragrant appreciation of the sweetness in her everyday life. It is the smile that covers over her heart. Her perfume lies in a bottle, it’s pretty messages waiting to be told.
The thousands of times she has held the bottle to the nape of her neck…the ritual of perfume, it has a voice. It says: come into view, be alive, be real, attract, act, be conscious of self, help, notice, show up, give, stay awake. Don’t give up. Be lovely. She watches in the mirror as she lifts the bright glass again to her throat.
(She indulges herself, imagines him lifting her wrist to his mouth, eyes open and inhaling. She is a hopelessly romantic perfumer. A dreamer. She knows this.)
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Magic tree.
October 24, 2011
Like a thousands-year old tree before it clear-fells in the forest, they are rising out of the earth to meet a sky, to show their faces to the sun. Their hopes and desires are timeless. They only want what hearts thousands of years ago also wanted.
A lumberjack, burly and bearded, swinging an axe, the heft of it comfortable and fully real in his hand, he approaches the majestic ringed oak and with a roar that scatters all the birds in the forest to all the corners of the heavens, he heaves the blade into solid trunk. He feels the reverberations in the handle of his tool, it travels up his arm, it finds the top of his head.
He repeats his labors. And in time, the tree succumbs, it is brought to its knees. (Does anyone hear its cries? The calving? If there is nobody in the forest when it finally acquiesces its fate…that old question…)
And so it is with them. If their story isn’t named, it still is. (The lumberjack for them is reality, or it is details, their lumberjack is time and space.) Their experience still exists in the verdant and loamy forest. There isn’t the need of spectators, of observers, it is a quiet meeting. It has no fury or direction. Their meeting carries itself in the natural world, outside of society, inside the beats and special tempo that nature commands.
Alive, their blood moves quicker, here in the woods where sun streams its lovely incessant amber heat down through all the green. They are sumptiously warm, here.
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