Alchemy

Water to wine?

Lead to gold?

Nah. Go more precious.

Master plastic to soil!

Chronic

The sheer weight feels like it will break my skull.
The sadness infiltrates my bones, calcifying my skin as it erodes my strength.
I fight back, flailing my fists against the air,
Screaming silently.
It is not enough.
It is never enough.

Dora's Hope

Words hang in the crisp air, abandoned by their previous owners,
The skeletons of the wintering birches hang back, leafless limbs held up in silent shock.
The pre-dawn field's snow is unbroken and pristine
Except for the two sets of footprints in
and the one set of footprints out,
And the tentative tracks of a winter-thin deer.

She sat propped against the trunk of an elder birch,
eyes gazing north in apparent disinterest.
Her left arm crooked around the blanket in her lap,
Her right hand clutching the crumpled page,
sodden from the landing snow.
A Dear Jane letter, we postulate as the paper edge whimpers in a passing breeze.

She is young, was young, and the shivering night has made her
a shade of blue unknown to the palette of mankind's skintone brush.
Mascara has bled into each crease around her eyelids,
Raccoon eyes rimed with frozen tears.
She wept, we can tell, before she died, though
no bruise mars the youthful blue of her neck or bare arms.

A few paces away south, Jackson finds clues -
Her name is Dora, was Dora, per the soggy envelope in the muddy-snowy thistles,
And beneath her thumb, inverted ink spells the sender's name as Robe..
We speculate the RT as Jackson trudges back from the marshy creek edges
Bearing a thin blue jacket and a crumpled pair of sodden gloves.
The gloves would fit the tiny blue hand before us.

A radio squawks from the distant county line roadbed; we turn toward it
As we stare back toward the elder birch in unspeakable sorrow,
and await the ambulance which need not hurry.
The town is small - she is one of our own - one of the children full of promise, as all children are.
Her death, a rift, will be a gaping hole in our smalltown continuity of life.
Her auburn hair riffles in a passing breeze, and -

The blanket gives a kick and an angry squall!
A fire of hope is sparked in each of us, and we stumble over our feet
To make it back to her side through the snow covered tall grasses.
An infant, shivering and irate, inhales shrill chilled breaths and exhales rage,
As we disentangle her tiny limbs from the icy folds.
Bert races to his squad car, barely touching the ground in his haste, and back with his rescue kit.

The ambulance, frantically radioed, now races up the county line road,
Crime scene be damned, a dozen snow boots trample the dead wheat stubble in a mad rush.

We name her Hope, and Becky and Jackson's wife Jan squabble over who houses her first.
Jan wins, but Becky is across the street and at the side of the loaned crib each day for hours.

Neither Dora's folks, long gone from our small town, nor Robe-RT step up.
We bury her out by St. Thomas' and all of us at the firehouse chip in for a small granite stone.

reprinted from my old blog - August 2005 - where it remains untitled

Missing Girl Emily

I drift to sleep, cat on lap.

Short, scrawny, street-dirtied brown shoulder-length hair intertwined with stray ribbons, half braided, half tangled. Hands are short, narrow, tattooed with pencil lead across the knuckles of the left peeking out from beneath the edges of an unraveling gray half-glove, nails bitten distressfully.  

Clad in a two-sizes-too-big battered leather jacket encrusted with layers of dust, age. Tatters and threads hang from where patches have been torn away.

Sniffles on the corner of the dark street beneath the paleness of the street lamp, her companions taking on the vampiric hue, night-dweller pallor.

The smell of water, the fog of a nearby river or ocean, throat-clogging cloud of weed mingles in frigid sour air. Aroma of blackened fries, slow glubbering of cooking grease from an emptied deep fryer dumped into a half-open blue drum near an alley back door. 

They huddle in twos and threes, gazing outward, passing a minuscule joint, waiting in silence. A boy coughs faintly, painfully.

A girl, teen aged, dark hair with a small side pigtail tied with electric pink ribbon, breaks away from her huddle near the base of the streetlamp, and crosses over. Runs her fingers through her .. my .. hair, smirks as she tugs with playful roughness, her lip piercing rising snidely to one side. I smell stale pineapple lip gloss within a cloud of heisted cologne. 

Plants a friendly kiss in my cheek, then hooks a black-painted fingernail past my bangs, rips a ribbon free from my hair. ow! 

There is a subterranean anger, tension within the pack. I glare back and flail with one half-gloved hand. Her taunting laughter echoes against the thick night-abandoned industrial block walls as she raises her prize enticingly over her head, out of my reach, then hooker-steps back to two other girls. She spins the silvery ribbon over her head, then bestows her prize on the smaller of the two, the queen of the hive, beaming smile to her, a glare back over her shoulder at me.

I look down, retrieve the grimy leatherette wallet dangling from a chain attached somehow to my waist. Open it to emptiness. I wet my finger with spit, rub it over the face of the cracked plastic over the ID card. Emil. Mil. Emily? I can't tell much except a heart caps the printed i in faded red ink. I don't know who I am.

The bitter breeze whistles through a long tear in my black leggings, flicks the hem of my skirt.  I look down at the thin kneecap poking through a hole in the leggings, tug a torn and worn pale blue I Survived the Hurricane tanktop down hard across a waif-thin midriff.  Am I anorexic? I'm too hungry to tell.

I regret the belly ring as it catches on the itchy fabric and tugs painfully. I pull the front flaps of the jacket around and hug myself tightly, cursing the broken zipper.

I inhale the last of the grease scent, falsifying nourishment, gathering what strength I can. I bend to retrieve my belongings, a pink-purple pack with a poor excuse for a blanket dangling from one strap. Heave it over my shoulder and break from the pack. Head around the corner, kicking scuffed heels against lonely concrete. Head for the rise and climb up a ramp of wooden slats embedded in the levee side, pretending to be steps.

At the crest, I look back over my shoulder, down to the dim street below, to the huddled teens who have begun to follow me in slow distracted slightly stoned clumps.

I start down the other side of the dyke toward the river's edge.

A dozen wooden docks comb the stretch of leaden water frosted with mercury whitecaps. They reach out in narrow diagonals, I'm guessing south to southeast. I think I'm facing south as I rest a few yards up from the boardwalk's edge, perched daintily on a weathered stone half buried in mossy muck.  From above, the docks look much smaller than they must be, or they're landings for fairy boats.

I plant my hands firmly on the mucky hillside and push myself back up to stand, walk carefully downward, feet sideways, gaining footing on small stands of dying grasses. There's a hole in the side of my left sneaker and I feel the gummy muddy dirt push its way inside, through my thin socks and between my toes. Suddenly I miss my dad, my mom, a real bathtub. I choke down a lump of sad stuck in my throat.

I walk the length of a few of the docks, half skipping, favoring my dirty left foot, jumping lightly from plank to plank, from one dock diagonal to the next.

The waves kick up, heavy silver mist that coats the planks, slick and canted. I watch the residual wave water slide from the warped pine boards and back to the darkness beneath the dock next to me.

A hand on my shoulder startles me as I begin my next leap; I spin midair to confront its owner. Balance lost, I windmill my arms and topple backwards.

In the split second between the time I start to fall and the moment the back of my head collides with the edge of the decking I was leaping for, I look up into the face of the scrawny t-shirt clad boy, mouth frozen in a permanent 'Nooo.'  His hands reach futile and grasping, to pull me back from far beyond his reach. Thin blond strands fall over his horror-stricken eyes. 

As the dock edge splits the back of my head open and the water closes over my face, I watch him fade, shimmer through the lead and mercury waves, and vanish from view.

I struggle back to wakefulness, ignore the mutterings of the dislodged cat, reach for the pad of paper and pen, and scrawl a name in the morning dark. 

Misery Despises Company

I used to love to write music. Country, mostly. Lyrics that whined, clung, hung on the outer edges of a memory, dusty and faded. Something that sounds like you've heard it before.

But I had to be miserable to write lyrics, or at least be any good at it. Plain ol' sad doesn't cut it. Bouts of depression just aren't the same. Downright miserable has no substitute one cup of baking powder for one cup of soda.

Miserable like the artist who starves to paint, bound inexorably to his craft as if it is welded to his shoulders, moved forward only by dragging it all behind him. Ecstatic in his misery. Shivering in a garret in Paris, far from sight of the Seine.

I haven't been miserable in seventeen years. No lyrics are possible. You can't fake misery.

Spirit-Walk

Thin threadlike tendrils, ether, tether attendance to the task at hand.

An epic or a nursery rhyme? One and the same, perhaps?

I glance at the cat, curled upon a brown corduroy pillow in the corner of the far chair. Snoring.

As I gaze, she awakens, stares back at me, 'Get back to work.'

I comply and she nods approvingly, stretches, goes back to her napping position.

The backdrop of civil indoor living fades.

Bookshelves shimmer and melt from wood and steel to stone and limb.

Brown shag becomes a patch of parched brown ground, overgrazed, hungry.

Dirt speckled lizard skitters between burnt stalks of eriogonum,

Blending rapidly into the granite-limned dust.

"How am I here," confusion scatters like frightened ants

As the thumping of a skin drum lumbers across the desert floor

Up the scarred gully, past brittle bone baked by decades into little more than tracery in the hardpack.

Skittles of sand drift from the sandstone outreach looming to the south.

I stand, dust off my butt, and attempt to clamber up the gully wall, to see.

The desert sky is harsh in its cloudless blue, so bright it is dark, a dome inverted over endless tan

Miles of gentle slope broken only by distance, dull copper at the far edge of it all.

Behind, the desert hills rise as foothills to a scoured, jagged range,

Its face pocked with yucca, Joshua tree, stunted juniper, the promise of pine.

I teeter, balanced just beneath the gully's edge, eyes seeking landmarks. Anything.

The drums stop. A puff of dust down-gully rises, dissipates slowly

As if a thousand feet have halted in unison. 

Silence, but for a gentle breeze rattling dried seedpods that shiver at its passage.

The breeze whispers as it passes overhead, dislodging a ribbon of sand

That cascades down the gully wall to the long-dry wash below.

A solitary anguished scream! echoed by a drawn-out skreee of a suddenly circling hawk...

I duck quickly down down down- I can't have been seen! -

Lose tenuous hold and footing, and go clatterstumping backwards into the wash.

The silence hangs ominously in midair. 

I hold my breath.

Exhale slowly, slower than the sand-making process, slowly, silently.

Eyes squeezed shut against the dark brilliance of the noonday desert sky.

Breathe out. 

Begin an inhale quieter than the dreams of a mouse.

I cannot be seen. Not here. Not now. I don't know why, but I must not.

I open my eyes painfully, slowly as the drums begin a departing cadence -

Boom-bum-bum-huh BOOM-bum-bum-huh -

Open them in time to watch the hawk spiral down and land,

Fold white-tipped wings against its sides and crouch,

Then shudder its head and return to human form.

Perched upon the gully's edge above, toes curled, he slowly rises, stands,

Stares south toward the squatting coppery hills, squints carefully,

Eyes aimed at the sandstone outcropping, then,

Waist-length black braids slapping at his midriff,

He leaps into midair, morphs, flies.

I blink, disbelieving,

and my desk returns to view.

The cat yawns, performs a full-body stretch, turns in place,

and sleeps, smiling to herself.

Compelled to Write

We are all supposed to write.  We are all compelled to write.

It is why charcoal sticks to fingers, cooled embers from firepits scrub off into pictographs on cave walls.

We document our existence, our selves, our pasts and our futures.

It's in our DNA.

There are messages being passed forward

Ancestor to child to adult to ancestor.

Each of us is tasked with carrying the wisdom

One step further. 

One mile further.

One life further.