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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4633 Registered: 11-1998 |
Poem of the Week Portrait of a Memory – A Memoir in Lyric Prose Wes Hyde {Preface—A Leaf Falls I will present this to you as a painting: a leaf falls, green, natural, earthy—Lucifer fell from Heaven not yet scorched. The impression of heat shimmers, alludes to passion, resurrects red layers of sandstone from the sky down to a stream. Blue reflects salvation, carves its sadness with the flow of water, carries the burden of a leaf through a canyon onto this lonely page.} I. Baptism Parallel to the marriage of sky and earth, fragile as a ship through Gibraltar, a horse colors the canvas and is a woman. — Water accepts the color of time and space, reflects the ideal of clouds and plants along the shore, distorts the position of objects it contains. Here, the foliage bows down, a spider balances on the surface, darts for safety beneath the bank. Water sings its own song, pulls its current into the paint. Things that have color express what they are, shape-shift the mind, and recreate themselves in memory: this silvery fish was a spoon that slipped from her fingers, handcuffed the mind it dismissed before it touched the floor; for time loses its color, forgets itself as quickly as it is swallowed. She notices negative space, the missing outline of a spoon, bends to retrieve a flash no sound has betrayed. It is gone. Between my fingers the spoon becomes a rhyme that I forced to please her. I felt my way through passages of roots, shadow branches and the Unreal City. I have never been there. I have been to Alaska. I can imagine nothing more unreal than snow, mountains, silence, Aurora Borealis and the cracking air. My only real memory is of frostbite. There is no wind in Fairbanks. I wrote my fears on paper: a list of lost cassettes, highways and wet matches. I don’t remember the year. Another list at the base of Bradshaw Mountain, I drove to the top, burned them, offered their bodies to the wind. These lists, always these cruel lists. They brighten the flame of memory with tired lines and images used too often. Thou shall not steal: one of ten my father preached from the pulpit. I took what was needed when no one watched, made plans for 18 and moving westward while Love dreamt of being and I slept, dreaming of dreaming of dreaming of… Stones about my neck sink like shadows and fall like wanting toward warmth. Then I met her. II. J’adoube Prefigured in blue, brush touches become buffoon, harlequin, a horse in the mouth of a woman where illusion is a freedom of origins and ends. — It was Phoenix, 98 degrees at 10:PM with asphalt running through my veins. I had no idea where I was going or what I would do when I got there: that was growing up. The sign read, ‘Live Music Tonight!’ I stopped in, found salvation in a storefront church. The congregation shouted Hallelujah when I was baptized, changed into swim-suits and had a pool party. She was sixteen. I still remember what she were wearing the night we met. The music was loud: (rewritten songs from Van Halen and Bad Company) I had never heard gospel like that. I went home and prayed, put her down on canvas, learned to sleep on the right side of my bed. That was the year my father found a real job. I recall the lights in her window, make-up as an art, cheap cologne that made me sneeze, deserted midnight phone booths, looking for gas cans— my car was always running out of gas. We held hands, matched our steps, tried to time our heartbeats together. We celebrated celibacy, had all night discussions on the use of contraceptives, named unborn children awaiting marriage. Love was a can of cola at the end of a long walk. A pulse where dreams beat backward between two shapes of the moon —a white dog, which is death imagined, and a white worm, which is death adorned— both like two drops of blood. Pavement was the pace we walked toward love, but love was a poor kid, a Yeehaw! a cowboy that rode the moon across a hot-breathed popcorn sky. I lost her: Cactus rarely grows in Phoenix. They plant eucalyptus and grass, import water from California, kill the air. I threw away my rhyming dictionary, grew my hair long, found work in San Francisco. The ocean is a long way from Arizona, but she always talked of going there. My mother gave me the gun, insisted that I take it. I should have taken a crucifix, quoted from the Bible, stayed out of jail. I was asked if I wanted a queer cell or a straight one: they gave me a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a condom in case I changed my mind. The contractor never paid, never found the tools I hid inside the walls— the cops searched my car, found the gun in my suitcase. I told her California was nice that time of year; told her I was going to church, not to worry. I never was a good liar. She felt you couldn’t love me, thought I shouldn’t love her in return. III. Graphite and Winter Evening A red path continues from wheat field to universe, where a horse discloses the world in the movements of a woman and absolves the error of human freedom. — I sit where I always sit, window opening on the forest, golden last light, frost of dry grass. I linger here before turning back, picture a curve of breast against the page— the day shuts its eyes like a girl, parts it’s lips to the night. She dresses her sleep like a man, in cool blue winter where clouds come to wound the grass, their teeth of stars and claws of shadow, white mouth, white flesh, eyes filled with iron. She sleeps where fog is a corpse along the bay-shore, where gulls keen over an ocean of empty shells, where a fiddler plays and I pay in waltzes, sometimes with a tango, a black rose in her teeth, the flesh of memory gone. I open my eyes to bones and ashes, sift the soot for tears. This is the paper that was her eyes: Majora: a page mixing the pulp of madness with palpable silence. This is a vein of prose where she curled on the sill behind Roget’s making comparison of tears. Minora: delicate rice, haiku, a dog-eared page of Fleurs du Mal. I was in love with the words, won her back, drove into the desert, wrote sonnets, lost her again. I secretly slapped Chagal’s goat for rituals of ink and poorly tuned violins. Chagal understood love, deified it, gave shape to four-leafed suffering. I reinvented myself, raged, raved, Rand McNallied my way across a landscape of agonies and ideals, peeled off outskins by degrees of evaluation through angles of jaded perception, moved into a new apartment. It was while I unpacked I found her memory. The box was labeled, ‘FRAGILE’, and I had taken a marker and written, ‘Do Not Open!’ in bold black strokes. I don’t know why I kept the box. I don’t know why, after all this time, I opened it. Cathy, I woke up breathing your name; it was your absence that woke me, and I rolled into the warm depression of your leaving. I now avoid mountaintops, dream on egg shells, fight back papier-mâché eyes with citron candles. I’m a believer. I don’t have to convince myself— I loved you. IV. The Left Side of the Bed The green pigments are a horse, realism on a background of two deuces where I sleep, upside-down in the morning paper, and a horse lives in the heart of a woman. — My friend Billy makes six figures now, insists I call him Bill. We shopped for America on the other side of curtains, spent nights in pursuit of our dreams, drank coffee in the mornings with the same crush on the same girl. Billy calls me on weekends, tells me how his boys are doing, that he loves his wife. His daughter from a previous marriage is coming to visit next week. I’m still trying to paint Cathy. I need to clean my apartment. There are a dozen empty cola cans waiting to be thrown away, a glass of milk souring on the coffee table, mail to be opened. I don’t know why I haven’t thrown away the box of tampons left beneath the bathroom sink. Later, I’ll go buy more paints and a new ¼ inch brush. I need to bleed this asphalt from my veins. After all these years of matchbooks and misguided roses, I look back for her reflection in my mirror, buy flowers that blacken on the kitchen counter, hear her voice when I’m alone, sleep on one side of my bed—moths come in at night; I have no screens, only this candle. Snow melts on sodden earth exposing rock, drips from my roof leaving jagged teeth along the eaves. Tomorrow there will be no snow, yet I will still leave spaces bare where seven lean cows swallowed seven fat. No matter how many colors I wear my bones still show through. |
