9.29.2012

"i'd love to kiss the backs of your knees..."

Nothing was sacred to you, was it? Never, ever... I think that's where it all went wrong; you dealt in realities, I traded in clouds... You preferred the day, I was more at ease in the dark. .. Not since touching the earth meant something, not since the future could be told on the scent in the wind, not since blue and gold and fire and violet were elements that made up our lives, not since the lure you cast in the freshet of my turning from that winter in to that spring... I rose like a trout on the feed, taking the fly, putting up a fight because I was supposed to... you looked me in the eye and made peace with what you'd done, but only for you. only ever for you... not since then have I lived... not since then had you let me.
In the late afternoon gray, with dark clouds pinched by the wind and ringed with the silver of the hidden sun, my hands shoved in my pockets, my holed sweater hardly separating me from the October air, I kicked my way through the leaf covered walks through the good side of town, leaving a trail of my breath in the air, my cold busked face and watering eyes feeling both good and wrong at the same time, I made my way to your house. I turned off the sidewalk, up the three steps that led to your front walk, brushing past the overhanging pines, whose aroma made me remember the summer times we spent in the forest, those quite moments that now seemed like something I read somewhere, rather than something we actually did... black words on old brown paper, edge worn, and turned over and over... I slowed as I approached your front steps, your porch was dark, as were your windows and the house within... I mounted the steps and crossed the porch to your front door, tall and round topped, iron hinges and peeling paint that was once red, now chipped and curling, streaked with the green of moss and age... I loved that door, if only because you were always like a surprise behind it. I raised my fist and knocked. Three times...
And only three times... I stood and listened between the stir of the world on the Autumn winds and, nothing. No footsteps within, no hurried steps like the days when we first were two, nor the measured steps of these less than alluring days... nothing. You were not there, I guessed. I wasn't surprised. I was thinking that I'd heard that door sing on it's hinges for the last time some time ago, that, now, you were on to some better and more challenging things than I. I was only your knave, your harlequin, to serve, to amuse, I guess, now cast off, now dismissed. I brushed the pine needles off the old, weathered church pew you had on the porch, fished my cigarettes out of my pants pocket, flat and bent, and some damp matches. I sat down, put my feet up on your porch railing, lit one and settled back.
Once, a long, long time ago, when we'd been together for a quite a while, you showed up at my door one Summer's twilight, holding a bottle of wine and a guitar. I remember being shocked, because you had never told me you played the guitar. A twelve string, at that. It was a big one, like a movie cowboy's guitar, and we sat out under the big tree in my back yard, smoking dope and eating a submarine sandwich from the shop down the street, drinking wine from the bottle and you played your big cowboy guitar. First, a song by Dylan. Then a song by Neil Young. Then some Beatles tunes and something by Cohen... Then, as the darkness fell full on you bade me lay back and look at the stars and you played a sonata by Molino, and a fandango by Boccherini and a piece of your own that sounded like birds crying because their song would never match the beauty of the song of the stars and when you were done, we lay together in the field, and, in spite of you saying it scared you, you asked me did I mind if you loved me and would we do this all the time and would I ever love you, ever, no, don't tell you, you didn't want to know, and then you fell silent. It was good...
I smoked a few more cigarettes, hoping that every pair of headlights that came down your street would slow and turn into your drive, but they continued on by, casting yellow discs on the roadway in the dark, stirring the leaves to fly up into the air and settle back down like ashes from some cold fire. You weren't there, and neither was I. Oh, well, I didn't expect anything more. Rising, I lit one more smoke, walked down the porch steps, ducked the pines over your walk, down the steps to the sidewalk and headed back to my place next to the river, never looking back, mostly out of fear. I never put much stock in over the shoulder glances, anyway. In and out of the street lights I traveled; dark, then into the blue, then dark again, over and over until I got to my end of the world where the streetlights were something of a novelty and the clouds were breaking a bit and the moon jumped up and down on the wind stirred waters. I reached my little place on the riverside and I sat on the top step of my porch, lit one more cigarette and blew the smoke into the night, the chill breeze taking it away.


1 Comments:

Anonymous more here said...

Nice post. Keep sharing more.

12:39 AM  

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