The woman walks. Tonight, she’s in the shimmering green dress, and it turns the streetlights into disco-ball pebbles that roll down the sidewalk with her. She walks with a purpose, imagining she dents the concrete. Her pulse is quick and silent. She’s waiting, and she’s stopped at a corner. She’s glancing around, left then right then kitty-corner then right again. She glances then at her left hand so she can find the veins on the back. The veins tell the story of her night. This is when they pop the most. There is pressure in anticipation. Off beyond her hand, which is still her object of fixation, a small dog trots without an owner. There’s a three-toned jingle with every step. It’s wearing the collar. She approaches. With care, she kneels down, conscientious of her dress that doesn’t want to bend and her cream shoes that want to scuff. She takes her left hand slowly toward the doodle, approaching from the front. She’s learned over years of the same maneuver that this technique keeps the little things calm. It might keep her calm, too. With a hand bent as though she holds a conductor’s baton, she runs her fingertips through the gingerbread-brown hair on the dog’s head (though it’s too dark for her to see its true cinnamon) and onward down its back. She brings her hand again to its head, and again to its back, enjoying the way her fingers occasionally make their way into tight cinnamon curls and sometimes flatten them. This, the work of a typical night. The dog nuzzles its head down for more, responding softly to the lessons the green dress woman has learned. That, at least, is the story she tells herself to explain the dog. She moves slightly to its left so she can have the leverage she needs. She now moves her left hand transversally around to the dog’s belly, and her right does the same thing in the opposite direction. With two hands around the creature who has—mercifully, it’s fair to say—been bred to into copious ignorance and therefore proper bliss, she scoops the cute thing up into her arms and rotates it so its back is towards the ground and its face towards hers. She looks into its eyes for a long moment, and she longs: this creature has won the lottery. Its life exists for love, by design, and it has not the mind to know that nor the mind to question. It simply is, and doesn’t know that it is, which makes it all the more. She sees the two expected objects attached to its collar, each rather light, supported from underneath by the breast curls. On the left is a three-bar contraption, the dinging ringing thing she always hears and whose distinct tribunal presence she’s developed a complex emotion towards. This emotion is something somber and excited, something sweet since there’s a sweet creature involved, and something bitter, too. On the right is a small locket. What kind of dog owner attaches a locket to the dog’s collar? A dog owner of a particular sort, the type of owner she’s found herself acquainted with through this blissful dog. She’s never met the owner, just the dog. She pops the locket, distinctly feeling its two opposing halves, one on her thumb and the other on her bony index finger, a finger on which she swears to herself she can sometimes see a blue vein, and which vein tonight looks rather striking against her disco-ball green dress. As always, a piece of paper flutters out of the locket. She picks it up off the ground and reads the address scrawled in scratch. Another night, another life.
For Joshua
For Joshua Saying goodbye is like pushing for hysteria’s eternity on a cold wall that won’t ever bother budging even a bit and taunts you like the photographs with folded corners and faded tops that have caught fire from staring too hard for too long. And using your legs won’t help— they were supposed to carry you so far in your life and support the others, too; too heavy to move and you'll break before the wall will tiptoe toward maybe a more comfortable place just a few inches away; inches are space to breathe in. A wall, like the past, cannot ever move; time doesn't deign to that, so sad-blue and powerless it dares make us feel with a grip that’ll only scald and not burn because the masochism would be an out and the past does not permit us the treat. Listen, though, because goodbye is a reckoning to about-face and notice, then greet, the rest of the room, waiting as it always has and true—that it's unchanged is so full of sorrow for you, the fullness so hidden to all those unknowing backs. Know that in your greeting you can find a way to cheat time in a manner you'll need to make into a familiar friend who you've been to hell with and back but you are here now, ringing, the bell in conversation. You listen politely to what time has plattered for your counterparts while you knowingly wait your turn to turn ‘round to that wall you know stands behind you with illuminated and illuminating photographs whose dancing corners will cheer you all now, and now you have more eyes than just yours looking straight-on at the wall that only you can see— and that's okay, because we all have walls and one day we’ll all be walls, stationed forever: ‘o guardian— you melt into the frame and you wear his smile on your own face and ours, and you laugh, and so do we.
Fourier Transform of a table
Fourier Transform of a table 1. They are pint-sized and abounding in spirit, the girl and the boy, who now launch themselves in a leap across the room of her parent’s home and into the wooden chairs at the inherited table they’re just this year tall enough to sit at. Their parents know it’s normal for such young bonds to form and to break, certainly with expectation of the latter but they’ll never say that aloud; let childhood love run its course, for run fast and free it does. 2. “Charlie,” her mother inquires, “OJ for you?” He sits a moment and ponders, everyone wonders at the inside of a child’s mind, longing for it without even a semblance of surreptitiousness. “No, not today!” he chirps like a bird, very much so still under wings in the nest. “And for you, Annabel, love?” “I want oranjuse, mommy!”— Annabel, too, a birdsong. Back around they come for lunch, a day of preschool done, the afternoon open as a sky waiting for clouds to float in. “Annabel, sweetheart,” catching her half a bite into a turkey sandwich with mayonnaise she’ll need a napkin for, “What should we play this afternoon?” Charlie answers; Annabel lets him. “Tag.” “You’re it!” Sweat dried then baths taken, they’re back now, dinner served, a pot pie and potatoes, glass of milk for the bones to stay strong. “Let’s watch a movie!” they – somehow – say in unison, a monovice, they speak as one. “Upstairs or downstairs?” “I want to sleep on the couch!” “But we fell asleep there last time!” “So what?” “But you snore!” 3. Far in years and wisened in spirit as they come, the old man and the old woman slowly walk to the table for a simple breakfast of coffee and a newspaper. They’ve seen many things; the paper brings back memories, doesn’t make new ones. “Should we walk or should we drive?” Annabel looks down, noting sunshine that warms the back of her left hand. “Let’s walk.” He nods. “I’ve found over the years that sun helps with funerals.” She nods. For lunch, still a sandwich. For all that’s changed, she still needs a napkin for the mayonnaise. They’re both reflecting; they just watched a friend descend into the box and ascend the stairs. Charlie speaks. “What will you miss most?” “We won’t miss anything; that’s almost the worst part.” “Or the best part.” Dinner is steak. Red, rare, with rosemary. Fragrant. They have memories from that smell. They’re lost there, and don’t mind it. “You know what I’ll miss?” “Hmm?” “I’ll miss going to bed with you.” “Well then I guess we’ll just go to sleep together and then we’ll never miss a thing.” A pause, feeling gravity. “Where do you want to sleep?” A pause, a quick and light leap. “Somewhere over there.” “Where?” “There—,” a nod,“your arms.” 4. The little house straddles a line of longitude, a narrow kitchen the stage for many scenes of a play that still runs every day with the same cast and an audience of two. Generation and generation again the table sits like a canvas, each morning the sun paints a bright rectangle onto its eastern edge, yellow fingertips tracing the wooden swirls they could have drawn in sand when they were kids; and each afternoon the sun warms the slate shingles who don’t like to let it go; and each evening it sets and onto the west the sun drizzles its orange and its pink. The sun comes and it goes, and so does the cast, on and on, weary but in some ways more alive, until finally they sleep. And so the sun sets.
Cynic
Cynic Please gaze out and wear a light smile for those of us who’ve misplaced ours— whisper back to me and narrate what comes through your wrought-iron gates, those eyelashes, you’re still young and no cynics yet roam the castle’s halls— Your eyes are earnest and interested, in some ways unquestioning, the advice against which I question because truthfully for bliss you need ignorance— no awareness, just push your hand forward with enthused force and grab onto those dolloped moments, dripping on by one-by-one, bye, you shouldn’t think to say, don’t regret their passage since passage is sad if you let the cynics in and thankfully you haven’t yet. Show me, then, please, with your young eyes, I want to see that light again— just that it is, not what.
Birthday wish
Birthday wish I waltzed in a haze through a birthday today more in reflection than celebration since life’s nearing inflection, adding force in some direction, not yet clear to see whereupon the next year will fall. And fall is apt in its leaves that melt colors like exotic orange flavors, red for passion (oh, I certainly hope passion) and light pink for the flickering affection I think we all generally think of when a friend or maybe not pulls out their spell book and spellbound in expectation wishes us a magical year.