Tonight I sped out across the dry August fields, eager to get out of the city, to the familiar worn road over the bridge through the stable– home. Home and the kennel flanked by silver poplars caressing the sky, unaccountably prolific in just that space— a canopy over the cluster of pens, the small red barn that once housed fat Golden puppies.
We wore ourselves to the bone back then. Now we just talk, and part to rest and reconvene, sipping fake beer, listening to jazz. Today, we noticed locals in costume milling around the micro-brewery and clogging the roads in some arcane fete. Tonight we speak of raccoons in the dumpster, the raccoon summers ago that tried to climb into my arms.
We listen to black mama blues and jazz and the saxophone and the keening obo of Phillip Glass, and more blues and jive and the poetry of jazz we imagine unfurling its blue smoke from the doorways of city clubs….
We are not there, we are here, and I remind you of the day you looked at diamond rings in Monkey Wards, and that I was terrified. Why, you asked. I don’t know; it was just scary that we fell into it at two weeks out from the day you draped yourself over my picket fence and said you were proud of me that I was a published poet..
Engaged and then wounds and broken trust and now some kind of detentes cradling us and giving us back to one another. Out of the chaff left by heartache gilded moments when it worked, nuggets in a flower-covered box, at the back of a drawer.
If there isn’t a lifetime and a half of water under the bridge that we cross daily, poised to fall, mood indigo of water wandering away, tributary and moon river and old secrets, tiny bones and forgive me the ring itself, tiny sapphire flanked by two tinier diamonds, in the muddy bottom.
We aren’t on a front porch in side by side rockers yet but it feels like it; you put the cats to bed in the study they’ve demolished, and the soft pale golden with the dark eyes plays with her slobber-covered bear and we keep talking. What we haven’t said and don’t think we should say stutters away across the carpet, residual shadows from an imagined Eden.
Then it’s time again for me to pack it up– pack over the back, walker out and down the steps and into the truck and out again Tess beside me to the highway, a clean black unwritten slate, the lights from state patrol cruisers far off– safe for now.
Always a game to get home in one piece, gas gauge on empty how many days and nights left, better not go there and so I come in and put my fingers on the keys to see what improbable vision of redemption might crest in me so that I distract myself, writing of the ordinary but it isn’t, is it, nothing ordinary about my having landed here right next to the nursing home I fled from wondering if she’s still alive my comely Kathleen, she who stole my heart two years ago, dreaming in her bed across from me.
Intolerable to think that she’s just feet away behind two brick walls and a privacy fence, curled up, withering up, and I just can’t go back in there just now. I can’t. I was there and I sang to them and made them laugh and I wept in the dark in the arms of a nurse and then one day I fled to try to come home to the stronger version of me I prefer to be, but it’s often impossible, to reach inside and turn off the switch on the doll-baby within, she with her incessant demands.
Time to go, time to distract the eye, the mind, the heart–, then dance, obos and trumpets, seduce the clouds over the foothills so that they soften and bring to the point of surrender all unforgiving ground.
of roads taken and not taken…
Not far from here is my home of a number of years and the companion who comes along with it. There are horses and dogs and cats that make up something like my family.
Several nights ago, having resolutely made myself adjust to and live in my new apartment, I started to lose sleep and feel so very unsettled. I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking of them, or of my room still set up there, my companion.
Stoical me. Bravely writing on when I’m tired, suddenly only sleeping at intervals, downing more coffee, launching another draft, throwing myself back into writing .
I managed to calm and soothe myself and rest into the morning, without letting my homesickness propel me out the door.
When I woke I packed up a few things, and took Tess, my Golden, and fired up the Ford Ranger, which I hadn’t started in a week, and off we went, into the day.
We drove down to pick up Highway 287 north, past Los Pichones, calling to me on the west side of the road, Jax Surplus, where a crew of Boy Scouts was spilling out of an SUV, heading in to look at camping equpment.
Smokeys rolled past me, splattering my windshield with ice and mud on the way to the Colorado Wyoming border checkpoint. The Ever Open Cafe parking lot was crowded with pick ups and I knew that Maud would be serving up the breakfast burritos, Saturday morning special, as she had for thirty odd years. I kept on.
I bumped over the easement through the boarding stable, up our driveway. My two grey Arabian mares were arguing over the last of their breakfast hay. They lifted their heads when I called their names, and kept eating. One is 27, the last living daughter of one of the most famous stallions in the world; I had rescued her from slaughter. The other was given to us a few months ago on the same day we had to put our oldest mare to sleep.
I went up the steps, into the house and was greeted by four tiger striped yellow cats. Doug came out, sleepy, and started some coffee. He let Mandy, the Jack Russell, out of his room and she leapt into my lap.
Out of habit I started picking things up and dusting. He quietly said, “You’re making me nervous.
Yes.
We sat in the pale light of morning, with our coffee.
Are you sure you’re o.k. that I’m here?
Sure, he said.
We had our second cup of coffee. He went in and turned on the little heater in my room. I went in and shook the dust off the comforter.
I came back out. “Mice have been living in my bed.”
No they haven’t.
Yes, they have. There were little mouse turds all over the place.
Good gravy, he said.
I brushed them off. I’m tired. If there’s a nest of mice in the mattress, they’ll just have to stay put.
He laughed.
He went off to resume reading a Hemingway biography I had bought him on e-bay a few weeks ago–
I went into my room with Tess, turned on the fan and lay down. I let myself sink into the familiar embrace of my old bed.
The furnace clicked on and off. I could hear someone at the stable fire up a tractor, and to the West, the 3 p.m. Union Pacific coming through. I slipped into deep rest.
After I got up, we had coffee again, talking politics, books, Hemingway’s demons, until it got late. As I left, he had begun peeling potatoes for supper.
Tess and I had our little treat at Burger King and then headed back to town on the straightaway I have driven for many years, every fencepost known to me.
I’m back in my apartment, blues on the radio, Saturday night
Once upon a dream we were going to marry. Now we are traveling along side by side separated by a few miles, winter’s high oblong moon lighting the way.
1 comment | tags: acceptance, detaching, love, relationship, self | posted in Politics and Commentary, Prose-poetry, musing, Uncategorized