Of a Mutual Bright Burn

When I was young 

I loved a black sky,

cold grass and the swirl of sunrise—

and those things still, as an old man,

but now my toolbox and machine-cut metal,

or a chair and a pill and a drink.

My parents divorced after twenty years;

they said, "Son, do well in school."

"For what?" I thought;

“A good grade never made her look my way.”

I admit, I'm a sleeping man,

searching for the roots of a dark Eve.

I would say I'm sorry to my mother,

I could never be a Navy man,

and an apology to my father,

I could never be a scientist.

I may have traded my birthright 

to a revenant, or a delusion.

I'd say we should tremble at our existence,

burn till we ignite another,

and sleep like old ships—soulful; 

I believe there is a mutual bright burn,

a source of all life and madness 

sought by both aborigine and pilgrim.

Frost From Fire

I put my love's bones in the black furnace,

watched the roaring fire like Jonathan Edwards

once described flailing fear for the school children,

or maybe it's a sermon of John Owen, which instilled in my soul 

a despair, eyes-of-a-bird hollow.

And so I thought of calmer fires:

winter fires, camp fires,

or even the high fires of Wuthering Heights

which also roared, 

but with a wild dance.

These were not the Puritan abominations that sent

screaming angels to heaven;

and I thought how different the same

transition from lightning to death,

entropy turning life to black,

warmth to new soil,

and was that difference simply an overflow?

I would say I want to open my mouth,

take in light by the starful

until I'm burned into a new being...and yet

I stretch these thoughts back around

to once again walk the forest paths,

chilled night paths, with my love

as she flowed like water through the crackle

of leaves under an old moon.

I held her hand when life was possible,

and that memory calms these modern anxieties,

takes me briefly back to The Grange, where I remind myself

I'm not and never have been Edgar,

but nor am I Heathcliff 

...or Lockwood.

How might the plot have been different

had instead of Edgar Linton there was 

Edgar Allan?

“Catherine! Catherine! At my chamber door!

I walled up memories in the wine cellar;

Help me forget my love, this inner war,

And forevermore not speak of lost Lenore.”

And so I am...a ghost without a raven;

I walk the moors, always in between

the settings of this fairy tale

long after the author's spirits went

to rest quietly in the earth.

1g

After a long sleep

I named the black glaciers,

stretched my stride onward

toward Ursa Minor,

seeking the sylph who woke me.

I remembered the blood dust

of Martian canyons,

the thick folds of nitrogen

in the eidolon shades of Titan,

where I trekked in dreamscapes,

swelling as Ganymede through approach. 

The sylph smiled once before 

vanishing into her bed,

where she lay Nymphaea lotus petals

for her skin, for her lover,

before becoming wind.

And I woke from this dream

no closer to the stars,

but moving once again.

(Originally published in Sand Hills, Vol. 46, Sept 2022.)

8-26-2021

I watched a movie about a man

who knew faces, bodies through touch,

who tripped in both the dark and the light

to fumble and discover;

and I thought about your legs,

your stomach, your cheek bones

your hidden ears, and your laugh,

how I'd love for us not to fuck

our first night alone, but talk

and touch so I could lay with your curves

and hear mellow sadness drip from your mouth,

learn you with my hands while you tell stories

of how you longed to be loved

in some way that made you feel whole,

and I would tell you I broke so many rules

just to find you, so my eyes could know

the right darkness. My ears, your laugh,

my hands, your body—

you, the woman who walked, explored, 

loved, guarded, fell, and succeeded

for thirty-five years

so I could touch you to know you

the way a blind man shows 

he's in love.

A Morning Ferry

Clinical speak detailed the science 

of her death at 6:02AM EDT

in a cold-linen hospital bed, fourth floor,

lights traversing a sole aperture of declination;

I imagined her spirit on a morning ferry

crossing thick currents in liquid luster

where the cresting sun poured out

reflection after reflection,

scattered rays birthed and rejoined 

as islands of flowing fire, 

cast in abundance toward a land 

supine in its day-to-day.

Doctors of a steady bearing warred,

minds ablaze by blade and vow,

while the prosaic calmly tossed pills

behind a mask of plain and distilled humanity;

I felt small in my chest

as she was languid in sterile hands,

when they folded her clothed and naked body,

pulling and bending as the clock slowed,

then stretching her anew

like black robes of the bronze age

preparing their offering 

to a burning salt lake.

She once told me she would paint a new earth,

dip brushes wildly, soak canvas at the ecliptic

because gravity left long ago;

she said she could love in totality,

melt the old worlds, distantly resplendent

as the chaos of an O-type star appears 

like serene sparkle light years away;

she showed mathematically and

through collimation, a life after death,

and diminished the parallax of our perception

when we watched the way orbed fire 

sank gently into the transpose.

At dawn she slept in the truest way,

a tallowed hull, gliding on a glass ocean 

blooming with citrine at the horizon,

while Mnemosyne and Ourania composed notes rising

from the tide-pulled seas, upward and onward,

her spirit destined to pass the skies

and the dark expanses and through

star after star after star,

beyond dimensional boundaries

where all is coded and quantified and known,

and where the eternal light from her body

returned peacefully to the source.

Four Minutes

The fine gentlemen at the clock shop

don't take credit cards—

ironic, as their clocks know the time.

I bought a weight from them

that doesn't quite match the other two.

But I know no one will notice

as long as time passes by.

I adjusted the escapement

a fraction of a millimeter;

the grandfather clock stops

after no more than four minutes.

It's the clock my father built

when I was just a child

before I understood

what it meant to build,

what broken means,

or the relief and curse

of time standing still.

(Originally published in Hive Avenue, Vol. 5, May 2022.)

The Architects

I know you as well hear the refrain

of maple limbs stretched beyond resolve,

in an old forest with bonfires in its lungs—

a madrigal cracking of branch and bone,

where we waded time savagely,

filled with music at solstice, and at equinox

listening for a remnant of past footsteps

when we used to roam delicious and wild.

 

We soaked in sunlight before wisdom,

summoning memory of elk, their majestic crowns,

calling fountains of forest song

as we made wine amid a reckoning of eyes.

The rock gardens cut our skin, bled our bodies

into offerings full of flowers, hidden desires,

before a denouement of hands gripping steel

forged in our quiet moments.

 

Remember that woodland builder,

a terrestrial architect, deliberate in his ways,

an understudy of the river, but mute of the sky.

He kept our faces moving till twilight;

you burned the black roses,

while I tasted honey between rises,

lost in constellations and elations, searching

for sentients of the bright.

 

We forgot our destination was somewhere else,

far beyond borders where we laid,

as season shifts blended dreamscapes with salt

and smoke rising from winter fire to sparkled seas;

and when our legs gave to the day’s burn,

we could only melt solemnly in the night—

two celestial architects,

sketching stars and new worlds as we slept.

Wheelbarrow

I remember

hammer, wrench, and bones

pulling a pneumatic wheel

from a cavernous metal shell

 

as Superman and I stood

on a wooden plate of sunlight—

he died a dozen years later;

took me a year to hear

 

my own voice

as it gushed rainbows

until The Ripe

complained about color saturation.

 

"We want cold truth," they said.

"Why must it be cold?" I asked.

"Entropy, young one," they said.

They told the divine to fuck off.

 

Now Superman, who I once saw

dive over a badminton net,

sketches memory in reverence

of old Georgia and Appalachia

 

while I blend a warm brew

with cream and ice

and color just enough

to show I'm not dead.

Oubliette

We can’t stop here. This is bat country. –Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

When I was in grad school, people would ask me what I wanted to do with my degree. I’d tell them, “frame it.” Why such a  tongue-in-cheek response? Well, to put it simply, it started with missing wedding rings. Let me explain.

 ***

I was sixteen. The halls were colder, but wider than the ones of my high school. The students stood, mostly quiet, with their glances fixated on the cork board postings of roommate requests, large televisions for sale, and one motorcycle ad. I watched the professors move up and down the hallway in the same determined motion that wooden ducks move side-to-side at carnival shooting games. The professors’ eyes fixated on the floor, their fingers bare. There was no wedding band for most of them. Their clothes fit awkwardly, their gazes, if they made eye contact, projected something missing that I couldn’t quantify.

The students in my physics class showed up one-by-one. One was a man who must have been in his early thirties and who looked somewhat like a body builder, but with Bill Clinton’s hair. Another was Dennis Jackson: a younger man, strong country accent, shit-eating grin, vocal and jocular. And there was an attractive girl; maybe her name was Melissa. 

I felt excited. The first day of my first physics class was about to start; it was something that I had looked forward to throughout the summer (as Randy Pausch said in his Last Lecture, “I guess you can tell the nerds early.”) But it would not be long before my observations extended beyond those of undergraduate mechanics.  

As the semester progressed and the cold reality of equations and simplified diagrams passed through my purview, I began to wrestle with my own relativity. Melissa sat only a few seats away. But to a sixteen-year-old, alone at university, she might as well have been a galaxy away. And a subtle inner voice began to speak in tones of gray, without lyric expression or musicality:

This is what we have for you. You will explore with the logical recesses of your mind. One day you will confine yourself to the lower levels of a windowless building, exhuming ideas from the mix of the universe, eating your lunch in a one-hour time slot—the same every day—and when you come home, the rooms of your house will be echo chambers for silence. Don’t worry if your heart is dead. That’s not what we value. –The World 

***

When I was eight years old, I wrote my first paper on nuclear fusion. I thought then that I wanted to be a plasma physicist. There’s a certain simplicity in the unchecked idealistic notions of youth. Images of science and research likely resemble something closer to a comic book movie than the climate-controlled diligence of a lab. But I knew that The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory had made great strides in nuclear fusion research. It was a glimmer in my eye—unlimited cheap clean energy. And the magic of the science fascinated me: a one hundred million degree compressed plasma, contained only by a magnetic field. 

In only eight more years after that first paper, I’d notice the missing wedding rings. And not just the rings, but something missing on a deeper level. Perhaps it was a reflection of something I feared missing in myself. In truth, I can’t judge them. Marriage isn’t important to everyone nor does everyone balance intellectual and emotional pursuits on the same scale. But in my sixteen-year old mind, I was already on my way to a fate I feared, found in reflections of the lives around me. I walked the halls alone. If my eyes were to keep off the floor, it took a conscious effort. And there were piles of books ahead, years ahead. I craved something...less certain. 

When you stumble upon a path that seems right, look as far down the path as you can see. If you see an array of lights, a resplendent city on a hill, and signs along the way, then stand and contemplate. If the road looks manageable, if it looks certain that you can make it, and if the signs all point the way, then go no further. Be certain that it is not the right path... because you can see too far, the road is too certain, and most of all, it requires no faith. –An Inner Voice 

The world is full of voices, and so are we. It would be years before I learned to discern them. As a wide-eyed teenager, confused into fullness of possibility, I felt the sharp stagnance of choice. And not long after, I felt the failure of paralysis. In my twenties, motivated by the fear of Stephen King’s Langoliers at my heels, I blazed through university and ran straight into grad school. I pushed the lab cart up the incline until I could finally hear that voice again. 

The irony does not escape me. As much as I felt I was fighting the world, I was at least as much fighting myself. And my own finger is still bare. But I know I couldn’t have gone any other way. Had I gone the way of the world's voices, I may have found a ring, but I know the fit would have been wrong. 

And while I swing my machete, carving out this path into the unknown, those professors may still roam the cold halls where the fluorescent lamps flicker at sixty cycles per second. Their hands still unadorned, bereft of any sparkle or unity, painted only by the white dust of their trade. Perhaps for them, they reached the destination they always wanted. I hope that’s true. But for me, my destination remains hidden, and I continue to walk the only path I could ever walk, no matter where it leads.

Undertow

A voice swirled through the trees, deeply harmonizing. I saw a young kid—a kid my age—strolling down a diverging dirt path, passing to my left. His eyes gazed upward, his throat vibrating in a steady rhythm that seemed to match the confidence in his eyes. He wasn’t aware of me and I couldn’t place the song. Maybe it was Boyz-to-Men or All-4-One, but if I had closed my eyes when he passed, I would have thought he was a recording. He moved past in a few seconds and I was alone again.

I walked down the dirt path of the camp, plain Georgia trees spread before me, revealing an event horizon that was only more Georgia trees. I couldn’t say their names and I couldn’t care if they had names. They were just a framework to me, one that I had no choice but to walk through. I was looking for something that stood out, something that would move my mind in a direction with momentum. 

The 4H camp was in a buried part of the state. We were hauled in by the busload, little sardines, packed together, wet and smelly. There was a general optimism on the part of the educators and a precise ignorance on our part. The schoolteachers couldn’t say, “This is as good as it will get for most of you. One day, you’ll be cogs in the machinery, little gears that will be easily broken by the big gears unless you spin in perfect timing.” They couldn’t say it because they weren’t really aware of it themselves. And thankfully, neither were we. We were just the nerds in the Latin Club, happy to be doing anything other than homework. 

I walked several paths that day, including one that rose like rainbow fire on a blanketed hill. Brown was the burning base, the little unnamed flowers were the crackles and pops, and my feet felt the soot as I pressed upward. I walked without regard, lacking destination, unsure of any purpose in my motion other than to move because moving didn’t feel wrong. I’m sure I walked two or three hours worth of miles, how many ever that may equate to at the age of fourteen. I walked as far as I could in order to get back to exactly where I started.

When I sat in stillness in the confines of the camp, I found myself adopted by Griffin High School in an informal ceremony led by a young blonde girl. She put a purple hat on my head and said I could be one of them. Their energy was magical to me, something alien from the closed-quarter walls of my own school. They moved quickly, deliberately, erupting in smiles and laughs, pouring a sense of community and belonging into the air. I thought then that I should have grown up in the country. I should have had a childhood with more rides in the beds of old rusty pick-up trucks. I should have learned how to ride a horse rather than work on a Honda. A cold iced tea, hot fields, a few cows, a country girl with stiff boots and a wild southern smile—I was certain it was all part of a past I lacked. 

At night, I walked through the camp with Brandon, Russ, and Tara…and some other girl I can’t remember. As we sat on the bridge that extended over the lake, Russ had his arms around Tara, while she looked at and talked to me most of the time. I didn’t understand why. Neither Tara nor I knew it, but a couple of years later she’d be a waitress at the Steak and Shake on Barrett Parkway. And after midnight when the Rocky Horror Picture show was over, she’d stand at my table and still talk to me. Russ wasn’t there. 

Later in camp, when I was alone, I made my way back out toward the lake. I found a dry woody spot, elevated from the main path, where I could sit and stare at the moonlight in the rippled flow. I don’t remember what I believed then or what spirit I spoke with in my isolation. But after a time, a girl interrupted my thoughts. I’ll call her Robyn. She was masked by the absence of light, showing only a thin frame, as she moved towards me. We talked for an hour at least, but I can’t recall anything of what was said… except that we’d meet the next day. 

The day we left the camp, Robyn and I met and exchanged a few sentences; they were meaningless words, the kind adolescents say when they know they have nothing else to reach for. But I told myself it was fine because Tara’s smile was still on my mind, because I could still hear that kid harmonizing, and I had been adopted by the Latin Club of Griffin High School. 

The bus ride back to Atlanta was an undertow. I was no longer walking alone, but I was riding alone, further from the lack that lacked what I couldn’t find. We were driving straight, sixty-five miles per hour, but if I closed my eyes, I felt myself moving in a circle. I was in the current of the swirl, being pulled toward the center, down to the sandy bottom. 

Promise

Remember when we were bold,

And we'd steer our vessel firmly,

Whispering prayer-song

As the night-pearl flexed its force.

Remember a salted spirit-forge

From tide's breath to night swells,

And currents from coral to anemone

Rushing by the chromis and tangs.

I'd pull old oars, maple stained,

Through the viscous sea

For hinted-sail of wind and music

Until our feet became thunder on the land.

We'd never avoid town or fountain light,

Leading us to old places beyond home,

With echoes of horse hooves on cobblestone

On a once-broken road, rich with story.

***

I'd call you Savage One,

Tiger's Eye, Feet Prowler,

Dark Rhythm, Lovely Shadows,

And Naked Constellation.

You'd dream as a tiger lily:

Fresh nectar, with memory in your eyes;

Your thoughts like funnel web spiders:

Weaving, crawling, creeping, spinning.

And through aroma of vineyards

And tongue-tip-taste of sweet wine,

We'd find our way back to water

Before last twilight on a sea of fire.

I kept my promise, I brought you home

To the deep celestial, for your ocean soul,

Where we tangled as heavy boat rope

And baked in the warmth of a slow-burning sky.