Water in a Bowl

From the ongoing works, “Untitled, Love Stories”

“You might be my soul mate, but I’m looking for someone here on earth.” Her words remained motionless.  Even after the expressions began to fade, he recalled touching the water in the bowl, look at her while she spoke, his fingers brushing against the taut surface of the water, trembling. 

The glass sat hunched on the table. 

What was divine was the idea – the thought that entered him in the night and left him during the days, from his hands, the actualization of a piece of something he could not determine the origin but knew right then that he needed to find its form.  It was lost.  It was lost in time and in memory, the folded layers of it, prying into the present, hoping for creation, the process of finding what is lost, building it, and giving it a name, which is, in fact, just recreation.  Over and over.  Water in a bowl. 

Her words reached him in those startling moments earliest in the day.  It was then that he could put an image to her face again.  Her expressions escaped him, and startled that he had forgotten her so quickly, he searched for the allowances that forgetfulness gave him: a soft smile, a deep longing, a tear, “someone here on earth” (For the optimists, the greatest achievement has been to keep heaven beyond earth, to put it outside and away, so as to say, “This is not all of it.  Have hope.  Live with your head burrowed in the sand and your heart facing the skies.  Carry on.”  For the other type of optimist, it was the myth which tethered and chained the spirit to a rock that sank beneath the river of inaction, anxiety, and most dangerously of all, ambivalence.  To those others, they wanted to shout, “Be free!  There is nothing but chaos!”). 

He looked at the water in the bowl.  It was motionless.  He sighed on it and watched the surface tease, relax and then tremor again, looking up at the moon, then at the stars, then at the sun, and finally at the grey clouds which turned into night.  De profundis clamavi. 

That night he dreamed that he was falling through the ceiling of his room, and as the walls swallowed him, he grabbed onto the tapestries that clung to his windows, light things he hadn’t noticed before.  And as he grabbed onto them, the tapestries wrapped themselves around him, and he fell, slowly falling through the walls, while the tapestries began to dance on him, touching his hands, feet and neck, brushing his collapsed torso and sliding along his body (a rock fell in the pile of ashes, and as the rock hit the ash, the ash kicked up into a dance, rising.  The ash always rises; the rock always falls), until suddenly, as he was falling, her image rose above him entangled in the tapestries.  He clasped at her.

That morning, he woke with the feeling that suddenly, he had lost a thing infinitely loving, infinitely touching, and never once a thing he could call his own.

The Hyacinth Girl: from T.S. Eliot's, "The Waste Land"

From the ongoing works, "Unedited, Love Stories".

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;  35

They called me the hyacinth girl.” 

 —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence. 

Öd’ und leer das Meer.

-The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead, T.S. Eliot

It was late.  Even as I write this – it is late – the late when the edges of the night intertwine with the beginnings of the morning; silent coldness.  I remember that garden.  And every morning, I sit here in my room, hearing the breathing, all too familiar now, a mechanistic thing lying on her side, only to wake in two hours and begin the day with, “I’ll put coffee on, but you really do need to take out the trash.”

It is only during these hours in solitude that I can remember the flowers and the leaves from the garden, the wet grass from the night’s goodbye and the soft smell of melting, which is when you came to me.  You stood there, and I handed you the flowers – the blue hyacinths – you took them from me, and as we walked along the soft grounds, you whispered, “Should we go look at the fountain?”  We walked to the fountains, your hair still wet, and me, glancing at you from the corners of my eyes, pretending that I was leading you but really just listening to your slow footsteps behind me.  And we would sit near that fountain, on overgrown benches, lost behind last year’s leaves and this year’s moss, and you held those flowers close to you and said, “I think these will look nice in my room.”

You looked at me with your wet hair and your eyes, waiting, waiting for me.  I was silent.  I could not speak.  It was the silence that filled me, inflating, a fear, I knew nothing.  I had nothing.  My words emptied, and I searched somewhere in the memories, somewhere inside me, and I could not find them.  In short, I was afraid.  I was ashamed. As I looked into you – heart of light – I had nothing but silence.    

Thirty years later, and I am an old man with unstirred desires and a handful of old regrets, what’s left after thirty years of slow understanding, a prize for my ambitions.  I do not recognize the woman asleep next to me, and my memory fails me even as I try to retrace the way you looked at me, your eyes staring and waiting, and my words, lost.  Were you really there, waiting for me?  Could I have held you, had you, been with you, or is that, too, an old memory stirring wasted, empty thoughts of a desperate man, regretful man.  I do not know.  I do not know.  Wisdom plays chess with selective memory.

But you had stood there, your arms full, the flowers I had given you cradled like a child, and you had looked at me.  In that sliver of time, which moves in one direction, the moments became irretrievable, like one moment lost after another, one word unsaid after another.  The most terrifying thing of all – love – to say it, to actualize it, is to create a thing that can be lost by the pure existence of the thing itself; which is to say, we cannot lose what we do not have.  And I looked at you, looked into you – heart of light – and I was silent.  Old man with old regrets.  Sliver of time after another.  Where have you gone, my hyacinth girl? 

I lie awake, my eyes on the ceiling, listening to the thumping breathing beside me (who will wake up and say, “Well, it’s another day.  What should we have for dinner later?”).  Wasted, deceitful memories, tiresome things, stirring the dead desires of the past of old men. 

When we looked at the fountains, you had brushed my arm with your arm, and you whispered, “Is that a blackbird there?  Drinking that pool of water?”  And you laughed, and in your laugh, you said to me, “Forgive yourself, my dear, forgive yourself.  Time only moves in one direction.”  I look at you, now in my memory, and retrace the steps you took behind me, holding the flowers in the mossy woods near the fountain, sitting on the bench next to me, laughing and whispering, “Is that a blackbird there…”. 

To Say I Love You

From ongoing works: Unedited, Love Stories

To say I love you. 

The stillness in place of movement

is still in its placement and its

placement alone.  To say I love you. 

Again. 

The words flutter, etch, shake

fly and move.  Still

moving. 

Words, bounds on this thing that grows, filling

the cavity, inflating, reaching, seeing the edge, looking at the walls,

to say, “I love you”.  Shake those whispers from me,

bound it with a memory, wrap it in a song, and send it to me again,

packaged, tied up, and say, “I love you.”

The first order is a placement.  The second,

a movement, and the third, a movement

of a movement. 

The stillness, that’s made a movement, the love

which is made a past, the past, which is a second order

present, the future which is the third,

a movement of a movement.

To say I love you.

The Soldier's Mother

From the Ongoing Work: Unedited, Love Stories

How can I say this, but, expression explains where rationality struggles, like a watercolor, spreads into my memory and smells like petals on a clear bowl, clear bowl on an empty table, clean.  “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  The root of cowardice is not from fear; it is, in fact, the contrary; apathy and forgetfulness breed cowards.  And with finite emotions comes an infinite set of combinations and permutations of actions, the manifold of the core substance, trapped.  The artist expresses.  No, this was not very good at all.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

* * * * *

She sighed and looked out her window, wondering when the cars would come today.  They came yesterday, one by one, and they offered her gifts and their tears.  As they embraced, she let them cry, sit with her, drink coffee (which she had burnt when she sat looking out her window, waiting for them), and she watched them as they left, one by one, just as they had come. 

The first thing she had done when she heard the news was throw away all the onions, beef, carrots, and potatoes.  She was going to make his favorite stew, but somehow, hearing the news, she couldn’t bear the sight of them in her kitchen.  Ordinary things, they were.  They reminded her of the smell, and the smell reminded her of him, of him running down the stairs, and chasing fireflies outside her house in the yard, of showing her what he’d caught in a jar, lighting up her kitchen.  But now the ordinary things sickened her, so she did the only thing she could, and in one sweep, she threw them into her garbage and threw the garbage out onto her porch.  Then she sat at her table and looked out her window at the bright sun lighting her hummingbird wallpaper for a long time.  She did not cry.

* * * * *

A man skinned alive will cry.  You’ll hear nothing like it.  A man cries; the bloody stump that cries.

He felt himself leaking, heard the sound before he could realize what had happened, the ripping of the air.  He panicked, screamed first before he felt it.  Then it came.  A stake in his mind, right between his eyes, the something ripping another very soft thing, soft and warm, from inside him.  He was leaking.  And all around him, he felt the pressing hands of a pain he could not understand, and so he screamed, and it was a scream he did not recognize.  He kept thinking, “Who’s screaming?  Make the screaming stop!  Stop!”  He screamed – a desperate sound – while he held himself together, his insides leaking out, and he felt the warm, tender things as they left him.  He was shredded, torn, his blood painting the ground around him.  They upset him.  Those, who were already dead, their cold bodies that smelled of old iron, old blood, the sulfur in the air mixed with old iron.  The smell of decay and sulfur, the smell which tells you, “Yes, this is war, my friend, you smell the decay of rotting meat – which may be your own rot – and you smell the sulfur which hurries the rotting!”  And when he closed his mouth, his screams tiring, he tasted metal, which tasted like blood.

He called for her.  He screamed the only comprehensible words he could find in his blindness, “Mom!  Where’s…my mom… Mom…”  As he held his insides together with his bloodied, wet hands, falling and crouched on the bodies of the decaying, jealous that they were dead, he found his thoughts running to her. 

He longed that the nightmare would end with her soft touch on his sweat-filled forehead and whisper, “Darling, wake up now, you were just dreaming.  Mama’s going to put you to bed now. Hush darling.”  So he screamed louder for her, in case his nightmare was deep.  But the soft warmth covered his hands and his body, and he realized the smell of rot was his own rot, and he realized the sounds around him had ceased, that the skies were quiet, and that he was the only one screaming.  And so he imagined her, as he screamed singing, “Hush little darling…Don’t say a word.  Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird…and if that mockingbird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” 

“You!  Hypocrite reader!” 

Blood in your conscience, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  Do you forget?  Or are you afraid that his insides are your insides, that you hold yourself together, Mister and Misses, decaying, bloodied stump skinned alive? 

Hush little darling.  Don’t say a word.  Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird.

* * * * *

She remembered looking at him, wrapped up in a blanket, a child, a child to be protected and held.  She had put him in her bed every night, sang to him, woken him during his nightmares, touched him to remind him she was there.  Now she sat in her kitchen, waiting for them to come, to tell her, “How brave he is!  Your son!  The soldier.  You must have been so proud.”  And all the while, she sat looking at her window, her child, her child.