Once upon a time, there was a man who played guitar with all his heart and all that was within his soul. Word of his singular talent spread far and wide such that whenever he'd play a show, he'd draw a crowd the size of a small city. And they would listen, rapt in awe. Women would swoon and men would cry and call their mothers between sets to apologize for stealing quarters from their purses when they were young.
But one day while writing a new song he went in search of a chord that would not come. Interval upon interval, he tried them all but none would satisfy, none were right.
Tours were canceled. Fans went wondering and rumors sprung up like weeds. His critics said he was done, washed up, expired.
And then one morning upon waking, he found it - the secret chord. The one jazz artists strive to find night after smoky night in empty bars. The one composers try to find at the bottom of flasks of bourbon. The one rock stars try to find between lines of cocaine.
It was a chord like no other. Bird, Bach, and Hendrix would have, all of them, traded their left hand for those notes. But it was Rocky Green who fished it out of the collective unconscious.
He took this chord to California, back to his love who was waiting for him there. And though she could not fully understand the weight of his discovery, she knew - deep down inside, where wisdom is born - that the chord was her's and that he had searched far and wide for the sound of it.
And she held him in her arms all night long as he played her song.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The Silence
She was ill and he wanted to go to her, to sit with her in silence, to read her stories, to watch DVDs together. But there was a mountain between them and though he knew he could brave the peaks, there was a guard at the gate and he didn't know the answer to the riddle that was posed.
And so he wrote her a story, pinned it to the legs of a carrier pigeon and released it into the air. But it didn't know the way or maybe the story slipped on the way there. He didn't know how but he knew that she was there, alone, in bed, in silence. And that her story was lost along the way.
And so he asked the guard again and the guard replied
"You soar when you fall
When you don't fall, you fracture."
And he tries hard to understand but a fog has fallen and he's lost his way while pacing for the answer. and so he returns home by dead reckoning. Once there he sits at his Remington typewriter and tries to remember the story he had pinned to the pigeon. He thinks of a line and as he hits a key, instead of typeface striking the page, a bread crumb ricochets back at him, hitting him in the face. Oblivious, he continues to type until he's up to his knees in crumble and crumb.
"Damn the mountain, damn the silence," he thinks. And he falls into bed wishing it would all just go away. And he closes his eyes. And he prays himself to sleep.
And so he wrote her a story, pinned it to the legs of a carrier pigeon and released it into the air. But it didn't know the way or maybe the story slipped on the way there. He didn't know how but he knew that she was there, alone, in bed, in silence. And that her story was lost along the way.
And so he asked the guard again and the guard replied
"You soar when you fall
When you don't fall, you fracture."
And he tries hard to understand but a fog has fallen and he's lost his way while pacing for the answer. and so he returns home by dead reckoning. Once there he sits at his Remington typewriter and tries to remember the story he had pinned to the pigeon. He thinks of a line and as he hits a key, instead of typeface striking the page, a bread crumb ricochets back at him, hitting him in the face. Oblivious, he continues to type until he's up to his knees in crumble and crumb.
"Damn the mountain, damn the silence," he thinks. And he falls into bed wishing it would all just go away. And he closes his eyes. And he prays himself to sleep.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Neglect
News flash:
Kindness was found, alone in her apartment, near death. She was dehydrated and malnourished. Odd, because her refrigerator was full of food and water and her pantry shelves were stocked with soup tins and spices.
When they found her she was lying on her side in the middle of the floor, unconscious, in a fetal position, with wilted fruit and flowers in her hands.
She is recovering now in a hospital bed. IV needle in her arm, EKG patches on her chest, electroencephalograph electrodes on her scalp. A pillow. A blanket. The television tuned to an info-mercial promising clear skin.
She has no visitors, no cards, no balloons, no teddy bears with stethoscopes - the sort they sell in hospital lobby flower shops.
The doctors are baffled. It's not a coma. As far as they can tell it's simply sleep. A sleep without dreams - her EEG shows slow wave sleep, never REM.
Outside, the world goes on without her. No visitors, no calls, no one filing a missing person's report.
And the world goes on just fine.
Kindness was found, alone in her apartment, near death. She was dehydrated and malnourished. Odd, because her refrigerator was full of food and water and her pantry shelves were stocked with soup tins and spices.
When they found her she was lying on her side in the middle of the floor, unconscious, in a fetal position, with wilted fruit and flowers in her hands.
She is recovering now in a hospital bed. IV needle in her arm, EKG patches on her chest, electroencephalograph electrodes on her scalp. A pillow. A blanket. The television tuned to an info-mercial promising clear skin.
She has no visitors, no cards, no balloons, no teddy bears with stethoscopes - the sort they sell in hospital lobby flower shops.
The doctors are baffled. It's not a coma. As far as they can tell it's simply sleep. A sleep without dreams - her EEG shows slow wave sleep, never REM.
Outside, the world goes on without her. No visitors, no calls, no one filing a missing person's report.
And the world goes on just fine.
String Theory
Down every street, in every room, on every station. Her memory, like fingerprints, are everywhere. And they won't come off, not with prayer, not with alcohol, not with holes in the drywall.
It's like half his world's been stolen from him. Nothing's sacred anymore, it's all tainted, stained, etched by association. "We walked down that sidewalk, that's her favorite color, it's raining, it's sunny, and there's the constellation Orion, fighting Taurus - the bull with Seven Sisters on his back. She's breathing this air, still."
A red light. Not at this intersection, not in this car, but at a red light, they kissed for the first time. And despite himself, he laughs at how the kiss was broken by horns blaring behind them, and how they were the only ones to make it through the yellow light.
It's like some grand conspiracy of grief, everywhere but invisible to everyone. But he sees all too clearly.
He drives around trying to find somewhere, anywhere away from her but they had so much in common and what was not common they made so. And now there's no where to go, nowhere to hide.
He thinks to try the opposite - to return to the bookstore where it all began, but it's past midnight. The doors will be locked and the lights out and besides, they've moved the new fiction shelves to the opposite end of the floor.
To the place where it ended then. But the car won't go, it knows better (it knows about the hole in the drywall). At first he's maddened by this minor rebellion but in a rare rational moment he sees that it's for the best.
In an apartment across town she's at the foot of her bed with a shoe-box in her lap, once a makeshift hope chest. The sides are decorated by unseen hours with scissors, glue, and vintage gardening magazines (a box full purchased at some random garage sale). Once a hope chest. Now? Tonight? Two weeks apart?
It's garbage day tomorrow and she had planned on emptying it out, piece by piece - the cards, the shirt button, the fingernail, the movie stub, the orange plastic spoon, the miscelanea of memories. She was so sure and she started with such determination. But his handwriting. She didn't see that coming but it's all so clear to her now - those hours spent deciphering the scrawl and how the most important parts were the least legible. All the fury and anticipation and the glorious instant when the translation revealed itself.
She reaches for the lid but pauses. One thing. At least one thing must go or she'll never get through this. She needs to perform this one act of self-determination and so she closes her eyes and reaches into the box. And her fingers tell her before her eyes do, what they've found. So before she opens her eyes she remembers the park and the pages and this one thing. She smiles and she cries because she's no longer afraid of feathers.
He's parked. He's home but it hardly feels that way anymore and so he stares at the number of his assigned stall, a yellow "14" stenciled onto the wall. The cold is beginning to creep in and he knows he can't stay here much longer for fear of falling asleep - in the cold, in this car, forever. But he can't move or he doesn't want to move. He just peers, deeper and deeper at the number - past the pigment and the binders, deep down into the soup of molecules and beyond. He's subatomic now, in the realm of Heisenberg's uncertainty where Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive at the same time. But in the macroscopic world where his car is parked, his eyelids droop and then close. In his mind, he continues his descent, deeper down past super-strings and their symphony of quarks and electrons and Tau-neutrinos. At the Planck level he takes a seat and wonders at the chaos of design.
His body is in the hospital now, comatose but alive. She is sitting beside him, holding his hand. In this way she comes to understand how meaningless the argument was that severed their love, how pride on both sides widened the divide, and how in the grand scheme of it all they are better off together with their conflicts and their compromises than they are apart.
As she strokes his hand, she whispers this newfound insight into his ear but unconsciousness is sitting on the synapses and he cannot hear. And so after she's done her best to reason with his silence, she prays feebly, desperately.
On a bench across the street from a Mediterranean restaurant an angel stirs, purpose and passion coursing through her veins. She takes to the sky, sword aflame, armored for battle.
It's like half his world's been stolen from him. Nothing's sacred anymore, it's all tainted, stained, etched by association. "We walked down that sidewalk, that's her favorite color, it's raining, it's sunny, and there's the constellation Orion, fighting Taurus - the bull with Seven Sisters on his back. She's breathing this air, still."
A red light. Not at this intersection, not in this car, but at a red light, they kissed for the first time. And despite himself, he laughs at how the kiss was broken by horns blaring behind them, and how they were the only ones to make it through the yellow light.
It's like some grand conspiracy of grief, everywhere but invisible to everyone. But he sees all too clearly.
He drives around trying to find somewhere, anywhere away from her but they had so much in common and what was not common they made so. And now there's no where to go, nowhere to hide.
He thinks to try the opposite - to return to the bookstore where it all began, but it's past midnight. The doors will be locked and the lights out and besides, they've moved the new fiction shelves to the opposite end of the floor.
To the place where it ended then. But the car won't go, it knows better (it knows about the hole in the drywall). At first he's maddened by this minor rebellion but in a rare rational moment he sees that it's for the best.
In an apartment across town she's at the foot of her bed with a shoe-box in her lap, once a makeshift hope chest. The sides are decorated by unseen hours with scissors, glue, and vintage gardening magazines (a box full purchased at some random garage sale). Once a hope chest. Now? Tonight? Two weeks apart?
It's garbage day tomorrow and she had planned on emptying it out, piece by piece - the cards, the shirt button, the fingernail, the movie stub, the orange plastic spoon, the miscelanea of memories. She was so sure and she started with such determination. But his handwriting. She didn't see that coming but it's all so clear to her now - those hours spent deciphering the scrawl and how the most important parts were the least legible. All the fury and anticipation and the glorious instant when the translation revealed itself.
She reaches for the lid but pauses. One thing. At least one thing must go or she'll never get through this. She needs to perform this one act of self-determination and so she closes her eyes and reaches into the box. And her fingers tell her before her eyes do, what they've found. So before she opens her eyes she remembers the park and the pages and this one thing. She smiles and she cries because she's no longer afraid of feathers.
He's parked. He's home but it hardly feels that way anymore and so he stares at the number of his assigned stall, a yellow "14" stenciled onto the wall. The cold is beginning to creep in and he knows he can't stay here much longer for fear of falling asleep - in the cold, in this car, forever. But he can't move or he doesn't want to move. He just peers, deeper and deeper at the number - past the pigment and the binders, deep down into the soup of molecules and beyond. He's subatomic now, in the realm of Heisenberg's uncertainty where Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive at the same time. But in the macroscopic world where his car is parked, his eyelids droop and then close. In his mind, he continues his descent, deeper down past super-strings and their symphony of quarks and electrons and Tau-neutrinos. At the Planck level he takes a seat and wonders at the chaos of design.
His body is in the hospital now, comatose but alive. She is sitting beside him, holding his hand. In this way she comes to understand how meaningless the argument was that severed their love, how pride on both sides widened the divide, and how in the grand scheme of it all they are better off together with their conflicts and their compromises than they are apart.
As she strokes his hand, she whispers this newfound insight into his ear but unconsciousness is sitting on the synapses and he cannot hear. And so after she's done her best to reason with his silence, she prays feebly, desperately.
On a bench across the street from a Mediterranean restaurant an angel stirs, purpose and passion coursing through her veins. She takes to the sky, sword aflame, armored for battle.
Sunday, August 7, 2005
The Birds and the Bag Lady
They're walking down the sidewalk and decide to take the shortcut through the park. Halfway through, they come across a riot of birds, pathway-wide, roosting on the bushes beside and the branches above. She hesitates for a moment and he remembers her odd, yet endearing, fear of feathers.
He makes a run at them and some of them disperse but these are city-park birds - they'll make a mess of your umbrella and your hat, but apart from that, they really don't give a shit. He makes a spectacle of himself, kicking his feet and flailing his arms, but outside the circumference of his reach they just go on pecking at the unusually delicious crumbs left by the strange bag lady - the rich one who lost her home in the divorce; the stubborn one who refused to use her millions in settlement cash to buy another house (arguing that no house will ever be home again), choosing instead to stay at a hotel penthouse; the philanthropic one who buys pretzel-croissants, made to order, on Tuesday mornings from the city's best cafe; the lonely one who spreads them in the park all afternoon, whispering her husband's name under her breath, sometimes longing, sometimes mad.
He's still working on the birds when he feels a tap on his shoulder. At first he thinks that he's just been shat upon but when he turns his head to check, he sees her smiling face - a timid, uncomfortable smile burdened by the weight of her phobia. Her eyes pinball between face and fowl. He holds her close and tells her to close her eyes.
"I can hear their wings," she says, calm but nervous.
"No," he says, "those aren't birds, they're old, manual typewriters - Remington, Royal, and Underwood machines -spewing out stories all by themselves."
As he's telling her these things, the birds jump and scatter as Olympias and Smith-Coronas appear beneath them, pages filled top to bottom with text spilling out over their carriages. After the last bird has flown, he tells her to open her eyes and when she does she finds the pathway white with paper. He picks a few of them up and walks her through the park, reading letters from the bag lady to her husband - some of them longing, all of them sad.
He makes a run at them and some of them disperse but these are city-park birds - they'll make a mess of your umbrella and your hat, but apart from that, they really don't give a shit. He makes a spectacle of himself, kicking his feet and flailing his arms, but outside the circumference of his reach they just go on pecking at the unusually delicious crumbs left by the strange bag lady - the rich one who lost her home in the divorce; the stubborn one who refused to use her millions in settlement cash to buy another house (arguing that no house will ever be home again), choosing instead to stay at a hotel penthouse; the philanthropic one who buys pretzel-croissants, made to order, on Tuesday mornings from the city's best cafe; the lonely one who spreads them in the park all afternoon, whispering her husband's name under her breath, sometimes longing, sometimes mad.
He's still working on the birds when he feels a tap on his shoulder. At first he thinks that he's just been shat upon but when he turns his head to check, he sees her smiling face - a timid, uncomfortable smile burdened by the weight of her phobia. Her eyes pinball between face and fowl. He holds her close and tells her to close her eyes.
"I can hear their wings," she says, calm but nervous.
"No," he says, "those aren't birds, they're old, manual typewriters - Remington, Royal, and Underwood machines -spewing out stories all by themselves."
As he's telling her these things, the birds jump and scatter as Olympias and Smith-Coronas appear beneath them, pages filled top to bottom with text spilling out over their carriages. After the last bird has flown, he tells her to open her eyes and when she does she finds the pathway white with paper. He picks a few of them up and walks her through the park, reading letters from the bag lady to her husband - some of them longing, all of them sad.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Wishful Thinking
My phone rings and when I answer there is silence on the other end but it doesn't matter because I know it's her (caller ID). And I know her well enough to wait.
And the pregnant pause gives birth.
She tells me she's read my latest writing and she goes on and on about what she's found tucked between the lines. Her insight, as always, amazes me. She finds layers and textures within the text that I didn't intend but her reasoning is sound and the examples she sites are efficient in the way that only the truth can be.
But she doesn't stop there. She goes on to tie her findings to myself and though I've operated within this skin for all my life, she seems to understand what brews beneath better than I ever did.
I fight my tears because I want to savor the moment - to draw a bowl of glass around this space and time, pinching the ends closed so it's airtight, preserving the essence of it. But the tears come anyway because I feel I've been found - adrift in the populous sea, she found me.
The irony amuses me because I thought it was I who did the discovering - I thought I was the one who noticed her in the New Fiction section, lost in pages. And as I stumbled through the small talk and asked for her number, I thought I was the brave one - but it was she who took a chance and told me the truth (one digit off, she confessed to me once, that's all it takes to turn them away).
And she doesn't ask why because she already knows. She just smiles (over the line, through the wires, I can see her smiling) and points out a typo and a misplaced comma.
And the pregnant pause gives birth.
She tells me she's read my latest writing and she goes on and on about what she's found tucked between the lines. Her insight, as always, amazes me. She finds layers and textures within the text that I didn't intend but her reasoning is sound and the examples she sites are efficient in the way that only the truth can be.
But she doesn't stop there. She goes on to tie her findings to myself and though I've operated within this skin for all my life, she seems to understand what brews beneath better than I ever did.
I fight my tears because I want to savor the moment - to draw a bowl of glass around this space and time, pinching the ends closed so it's airtight, preserving the essence of it. But the tears come anyway because I feel I've been found - adrift in the populous sea, she found me.
The irony amuses me because I thought it was I who did the discovering - I thought I was the one who noticed her in the New Fiction section, lost in pages. And as I stumbled through the small talk and asked for her number, I thought I was the brave one - but it was she who took a chance and told me the truth (one digit off, she confessed to me once, that's all it takes to turn them away).
And she doesn't ask why because she already knows. She just smiles (over the line, through the wires, I can see her smiling) and points out a typo and a misplaced comma.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
The Angel and the Argument
There's an angel sitting on a bus stop bench across the street from a fine dining restaurant (Mediterranean, if you must know). Her wings are tucked away, pressed upon her back such that (a marvel of design) they're barely noticeable laying against her dress. Even upon close inspection you'd think it was merely some strange fabric - that is, if you could see the angel at all.
She is looking through the window of the restaurant, but these are the eyes that never knew the fall of man and so they see clearly and deeply as if telescopic. And she listens with ears that can reach out through the clutter and the white noise. Angel eyes and ears focus on one table towards the back where a couple is arguing over an issue that has nothing to do with them.
The angel observes, with equal part sadness, equal part anger, the words that are hurled across the table. She is sad because she sees the words for what they are - daggers and poisonous darts, back and forth in a meaningless battle of attrition. And she is angry because she knows that they will continue to assault one another until one buckles under the barrage and the other tries to savor the emptiness of the victory.
But there is also fascination and envy, for these are passions that she cannot comprehend. That's not to say that she doesn't know passion, because she does. All angels carry with them an insatiable passion for justice, for beauty, and most of all for God. But this thing that drives this couple to claw at one another with these words - there's no explanation for it. What, she wonders, could so saturate a man that he sets aside his love for this woman, launching him straight at the chinks in her armor - weakness that she revealed (finally, able to reveal them) to him in moments of soft, safe intimacy. And what could so posses a woman that she turns her dormant maternal instincts inside out - dismantling the thing she loves with example after example of error and inadequacy.
A snap, a click, and the angel draws an inch of sword from its scabbard. The sound of a sail catching the wind, and tongues of flame ignite and lap at the length of holy steel that has been exposed. But only for a moment. A click, a snap, and the flames disperse into thin air.
Later that night, a student on his way home from the college library passes the bus stop bench and wonders when it was (and why) the state thought to install this strange bronze statue with the strangely textured back and the sword that seems so out of context.
She is looking through the window of the restaurant, but these are the eyes that never knew the fall of man and so they see clearly and deeply as if telescopic. And she listens with ears that can reach out through the clutter and the white noise. Angel eyes and ears focus on one table towards the back where a couple is arguing over an issue that has nothing to do with them.
The angel observes, with equal part sadness, equal part anger, the words that are hurled across the table. She is sad because she sees the words for what they are - daggers and poisonous darts, back and forth in a meaningless battle of attrition. And she is angry because she knows that they will continue to assault one another until one buckles under the barrage and the other tries to savor the emptiness of the victory.
But there is also fascination and envy, for these are passions that she cannot comprehend. That's not to say that she doesn't know passion, because she does. All angels carry with them an insatiable passion for justice, for beauty, and most of all for God. But this thing that drives this couple to claw at one another with these words - there's no explanation for it. What, she wonders, could so saturate a man that he sets aside his love for this woman, launching him straight at the chinks in her armor - weakness that she revealed (finally, able to reveal them) to him in moments of soft, safe intimacy. And what could so posses a woman that she turns her dormant maternal instincts inside out - dismantling the thing she loves with example after example of error and inadequacy.
A snap, a click, and the angel draws an inch of sword from its scabbard. The sound of a sail catching the wind, and tongues of flame ignite and lap at the length of holy steel that has been exposed. But only for a moment. A click, a snap, and the flames disperse into thin air.
Later that night, a student on his way home from the college library passes the bus stop bench and wonders when it was (and why) the state thought to install this strange bronze statue with the strangely textured back and the sword that seems so out of context.