|
On the Eve of Your Surgery
Six and a half years ago, you in the hospital with a spiral fracture in your leg. I came to give you get-well flowers, a humorously innocent portent to a future neither of us could have predicted... The steel rod they placed in your tibia stabilized the fissure that formed long before you hopped on that skateboard; the crack in your bone that extended into my universe began when you slyly pulled your cell phone from your pocket to lasso my seemingly elusive contact info; You---all 18 green years of lusty, over-confident attitude and over-flowing potential, and I the ungrounded woman of complex 27 year old searching, potent cocktail of disillusionment and hope, with a generous amount of cocaine and alcohol stirred in... Some people use the term "making love": not a noun; a verb; a creative act What else could we have made? The alchemy of fate turning beer mugs into oracles deep in the urban desert where everything changes at dusk and movement is tectonic these moments disguise themselves in mundanity... Yet this is still not the whole story of our star-crossed correspondence, the accurate picture of when our eyes (I's) met. I suppose now that we were, in our own ways, equally clueless and optimistic, romantic in our ignorance of what some call "practical"...both of us finding what we were by no means looking for---a treasure, a riddle, a tenuous peace, a thousand paths to yearning, an expensive reckoning... "Fuck" is also a good, rich word; and appropriate in hindsight... You on your back, glowing like a precocious radioactive angel, writhing with your own sweet metallic power I helpless pulsing, a storm. water and gravity. the acequia that flowed between us like some diabolical magenta springtime... Of this, I have no doubt. I listened to Our Song, you know---the one about dancing and noah's ark and wine—and somewhere in my shredded psyche, I knew that this was not an illusion. The complications of time: I thought that our walking hand in hand down these shadowy compass-spinning paths was an act of weaving together the fibers of our souls. And when I wandered off course, floating around in my air-sign kind of way, you pulled me back. Back into some fated faith. Into dreams. But you eventually mistook me for those twisted trails, dropped my hand, and left me for the open highway... Now, you schedule an appointment to remove the rod from your leg, the piece of steel that held you stable for years, but for which you no longer have a need... A big part of grief is the fear of forgetting, my mother says. Despite my best efforts, I remember many things....like you in the half-consciousness of newly awakened mornings, bleary eyed and vulnerable, finding me in the kitchen and wordlessly folding yourself into my arms, as if you needed my help to gently usher in the daylight... The movement of your body, shadows of cottonwood branches slowing tracing the day's course, the weight of you grounding me. You sang and I danced. Finding and unwrapping me easily, teasing out light with deftness from every surface, shading and creating depth, cubist reverberations, glass and satin and rose petals, prismatic, diastolic... You and I at 12,000 feet. The late evening clouds whisper by to reveal galaxies. The silent indigo lake. The wind and the big horn sheep... Now you wake up next to someone else. You are 24 and I 33. The sanitation campaign has been effective. What we have made is now history. But I will remain inside that part of you that connects with the earth each time you take a step, the part of your bone inside all that new healthy tissue. The part that is empty space and echoes. And I awaken to something raw, like a dull hangover in an unfamiliar city, and these early hours just tipping the cup of sunlight over my opening eyes, are the only witness as I ease weight onto my faithful feet and begin to move, unblinking, elemental, and the voice of the earth vibrates up through the asphalt and into my body, and it sounds like strength, saying "Good bye..."
11:26 AM
-
0 Comments - 0 Kudos
- Add Comment
|
