| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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the hills flatten and the road straightens and the overcast sky is pulled down from above to sit on the pastures and obscure all horizons. we are alone on the road, in a world of old grey fence posts and green, green fields and the black and white cows standing silently, chewing silently, watching us silently. i roll down the window and the fog is sucked in, smelling cool and salt and ocean green. i could hold your hand now, but i do not, i am waiting for something. waiting for myself. on the right the towers appear, metal spiders strung with wires. radio antennas humming with high voltage electricity. after the radio towers, the right turn, the straight road, the arrow to the coast. it is not long and the car parked and we stand in the fog, out of sight but within the sound of the rumbling, crashing surf. there is a short mud path through woody, rough leaved brush and then we are on the beach. the waves come straight down, big and grey green, hammering into the shore. the beach is not sand but gravel, rocks the size of grapes that clack and crack and rumble with every pound and retreat of the ocean. to our right the cliff rises yellow brown, coursed with scars cut over years of rivulets’ run. to our left, the surf, a periodic churning cliff pushing rounded edged froth towards our feet. we walk towards a wall of fog that advances with us, keeping its constant distance. from the fog comes the sun bleached bones of a tree. a complete tree, on its side, its roots a twisted nest, its trunk a pale wrist producing twisted, reaching fingers. in the then time the child me hangs from a low branch while my brother climbs the sideways trunk and into the highest branches. my mother says something but my brother jumps anyway, landing cleanly, jumping up to climb the tree again. he was always a jumper, jumping off anything in the playground, out of trees, from the roof of the house. my father grabs the branch i am hanging from and bounces it up and down. i bounce with the branch, bouncing and swinging. in the now time we walk among the branches, running fingers over the raised grain of the wood, the silver white trunk, the sand filled cracks. i wonder if you understand what this is, that it is more than the bones of an old tree, more than a physical object half buried in the sand. i wonder if you understand. the ocean crashes and spills and retreats. from the fog a line of pelicans materializes, wings swept and rigid, gliding inches above the roll of watery hills behind the feathered surf. they are black brown like silhouettes, like airplanes in formation, like prehistoric beasts. they fly past us, disappearing behind us into the fog. we walk. there is a space in the cliff where a creek has broken it and now spills into the gravel beach and disappears. the fog has turned into a light rain and then a heavy rain, or a rain of well spaced, heavy drops. giant ice water drops that fall to sizzle in the gravel beach and wet our hair to remind us we are human. in then time my father has built a canopy from a blue tarp and logs and string. now time and then time, we all huddle under the canopy, listening to the rhythm of droplets on the tarp. my father is building a fire, is somehow lighting a fire of wet wood and dry kindling he produced from somewhere. my mother tells us all to hunt for sticks. she tells us the story of how, before they were even married, my father had snapped a stick with both fists the way a strongman would bend an iron bar. half the stick slipped up and into the soft skin under his chin. he was showing off to me, my mother said. the fire is lit, flames dancing and defiant of the rain. my mother passes around hot dogs and we roast them over the fire on the sticks that we found. never before and never since have i had a hot dog that tasted so good. we are eating and my father tells us a story of when he was a boy. they used to camp along this creek, just him and his friends. there were times of the year when the creek would be full of baby trout, smaller than your pinky. they would stretch a bath towel across the creek and catch hundreds of baby trout and fry them in butter in a cast iron pan over the campfire. then time me asks, would you eat the bones? my father answers, bones and eyes and everything. now time me sits back and watches you watch them, and wonders if you understand. |
she could look at me, should could tell me; you could tell me. i am writing this to you now. i have never really seen you; i have never seen you the way i want to see you. i have never seen through you, the lens of you, and into the impossible expanse of everything. we need to stop binding our lives with the mitigation of risks. god, that is so easy to say. i say it to myself every morning before fear rides in on the rays of the morning sun, on its pale horse with skull-empty eyes. you are out there tonight, in your own bed, perhaps, in the poetry of your own dreams; maybe wondering, maybe wishing, maybe thinking about me. does that happen? i had this dream. it was black night, all stars and sound locked behind a thick blanket of fog. i was sitting in the cold sand watching the incandescent waves tumble and foam, spilling towards me, spilling away. rows of waves, seven rows of waves; i imagined poseidon just off shore, laying with his face to the sky, each inhale lifting his chest and casting ripples towards the shore. the glow in the waves the light from his pale green and incandescent scales. my bare feet were buried in damp, cold sand. the cold rode my veins up my legs and towards my heart, the creep of tentacles, of living kelp. i was alone on the beach. for miles, the sand stretched straight and featureless, accepting the come and flee of the waves. the feathered foam lined waves, becoming ghosts as they fled me, north and south, east and west, however this beach was aligned. i closed my eyes. dream eyes closed brings forward a reality within a reality created, a dream world within a dream world. behind closed eyes i pictured rising sun, rising on the ocean, rising from the ocean. a liquid globe of yellow light pulling itself from the black ocean and into the sky. suddenly, night became day, the air became fiery and warm, the waves crashed with the scales of a million golden fish. a voice came, echoing down the beach. a calling, a yearning; a siren song. i opened my dream eyes and it was night again. night, but on the horizon, on the black sea globes of light bounced, like a hundred lanterns on a hundred tiny ships. a hundred lanterns on a hundred tiny ships, and each calling your name. but not the voice i had heard. the voice was on the beach, everywhere on the beach, in every grain of sand. it was your voice, it was your voice, it was your voice. and as your voice rose and rose and rose it calmed the sea and the hundred tiny ships stilled and the lanterns settled and faded into the black sky. i breathed deeply, i exhaled slowly, i woke. “what do your eyes look like,” i want to ask you, “when lit by a window’s square of moonlight?” i want you to wake me gently, to whisper to me, “the window’s square of moonlight has covered me cool and blue like dusted snow; so look, so look, so look.” |