Song That Reminds Me of Someone…

Circa 1975, it was, I think. I was seven years old, on an Arkansas-bound Trailways bus with my mom and little brother. My mom sat next to John, and I sat across the aisle from the two of them, stretched out between two seats and looking out at the deep indigo sky as the silhouetted landscape zipped by.

At some point the bus stopped to pick up more passengers at a brightly-lit terminal somewhere around what I think was Idaho, and my stretched-out reverie was broken when a woman stepped on to take the second seat on my side. I politely shifted to the window seat while she took the aisle.

She made me nervous at first; just because I was a shy kid, too young to understand females in general. Strange, floral-scented aliens, they were, I thought. But after a few minutes of silence she noticed the book in my lap–Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea–and asked me how I liked it. I started talking to her about how full of strange and wonderful things it was; how different it was from the Walt Disney movie I’d seen a few weeks previous, and yet how similar it was. And she responded in kind by talking about that book and other science fiction books she’d read. She was going to college, she said, and loved sci-fi.

After awhile my shyness began to thaw some, and I looked up at her. She was slender; with long, straight blonde hair and alert-but-kind green eyes. She wore a pink T-shirt and faded bell-bottoms, and laughed a lot. She was older than me, but younger than my mom and most of the other adults I knew. In the course of a few minutes time she was talking to me like an equal, engaging me in conversation and addressing me in a way that no adult before ever had.

She began telling me stories about the highway down which we sped. At one point, an illuminated cross pierced the night horizon, glowing about a mile away from the road; and she told me how it had been erected to commemorate the passing of a sports star who’d perished in a plane crash. She told me a lot of other stories, too; about places she’d seen, books she’d read, people she’d known. She looked young, yet seemed to know so much about the world.

Every now and then, she’d lean over me to point out some building or unusual tree. My eyes would follow her finger as it pointed against the window, and occasionally I’d find myself looking at her as she described the world beyond that glass. Little kid enthusiasm would play against her features, and that exhuberance was infectious. It was the first time I’d met a (pretty much) grown-up who possessed that kind of energy. After what was probably a good couple of hours I began to get drowsy. I stifled a yawn, and she smiled. “If you’re tired, you should go to sleep,” she said serenely. Truth be told, I wanted to talk with her some more; but exhaustion overtook me and I drifted off.

The next morning I woke with a start. In the place of the blonde girl who’d kind of enchanted me was a heavy-set Mediterranean-looking man with a jet-black cookie-duster of a moustache. The blonde girl was gone.

My mom gently needled me at breakfast about chatting up the girl the night previous, a concept that made my seven-year-old face flush slightly. That flush turned to full-blown tomato redness when a middle-aged African-American woman who’d befriended my mom on the bus said, “Tony found himself a girlfriend!” with a restaurant-filling chuckle. Of course I was embarassed: I was crushing hard on a girl–a woman–for the first time, and it was pretty uncomfortable being outed.

Days went by. My mom reconnected with close family, and my brother and I experienced a humid, fulsomely green land of adventure. We stayed at my great-grandparents’ house, a two-story white structure that looked big as a southern plantation to my child’s eye. Katydids chirped deafening choruses amongst the trees at night; John and I walked along the sidewalk shaded by oak trees as the sky drenched us with warm rain; my great-grandma fed me beefsteak tomatoes the size of my head; and my brother and I sat in a paddle boat with our Uncle Dane one hot spring night, watching a creek bed that teemed with masses of tadpoles and watergrasses that seemed to descend to infinity.

Then one morning my Aunt Brooke packed my brother and I into her giant station wagon, and she drove us to a burger place for lunch. On the way, a song came on the radio. And for some reason, that tune instantly took me back to being on that bus several nights previous. In about two-and-a-half minutes I found myself reminiscing on the conversation, on the world that stretched beyond that bus window, and on the pretty college girl who’d opened my eyes to that world for a couple of hours.

The song that played on Aunt Brooke’s AM radio was “To Sir With Love” by Lulu. And long story short, it still makes me think of that girl on the bus every time I hear it.

Varla on the Mind

We’d been driving down the highway for a good hour, and we were just a mile or two from the Nevada border. A red/orange slash of cloud cover sliced against the ebbing blue sky. I navigated the car around the automotive husks littering the asphalt, and every now and then I’d glance at her, appraising her as intensely as I could without rolling off of the asphalt.

She was reclining in the partly-lowered passenger seat of my Mustang, cigarette propped between her white teeth. God or the Devil—damned if I knew which, damned if I cared—had poured her into a pair of snug black jeans, and I navigated her every mouthwatering curve with my eyes. She looked up at me, a lazily-sensual hedonist’s smile lighting up her face. An inch or two of her taut midriff peered from beneath her black T-shirt; and her restless, stilettoed right foot kept pulsing against the car floor. We finally hit a clear patch—only a few stray vehicle carcasses blemished the largely open highway ahead—and I was ready to open up the engine. Her sweet vermillion gash of a mouth drew back a deep drag of smoke as I stomped on the gas.

The tires tore into the pavement with a falsetto scream, and the car rocketed forward.

‘Til Eyes 2 avec les Spectres of the Year

A pattern dances on the curtain so inconspicuously that I forget its color and structure the instant my eyes leave it. No matter. The ghosts are here, filling my eyes and (accidentally, imagine that) my head.

The two bulbous-nosed rounders laughing and embracing fraternally as they’re showered with halycon celebration and the realization that the frozen moment is the most joyful either may ever experience;

Mom sitting on the steps dreaming of the man who sired the children peppering the weathered wood around her like sentient mushrooms;

The two troubadours, one who only opened his mouth once and the other who laughed off his heart because to not do so would leave the wound in its place gaping and stung by the open air;

Him, smiling and wealthy but doomed to never want or need to fit;

She with the gorgeous profile, next to the man she’d loved and still danced with once the kisses ran dry;

The Muse of the man whose chaos lived in the rest of the world’s eyes (nothing compared to the one that’s breathed life here);

The younger-than-yesterday girl surrounded by ebony-skinned wraith-angels who had no idea she’d join them soon;

…And the last one who reminded me that I wasn’t too old to steal a kiss

                           sans fidgeting.

‘Til Eyes 1

It was the perfect adjective as the mist slicked the pavement and caused scars of white light to slash across the surface. I walked over to the grass just

 

beyond the sidewalk and laid recklessly in it; placing my hand to the moist earth,

 

deliberately stroking and fondling the moist blades, feeling the wet soil as my fingers dig

into it and that silty earth insinuates its way under my fingernails.

I’m still psychic;

 

saw your dark eyes as they surveyed a figure televised in a messianic pose. Rain rolls down my face and runs into my eyes.

 

Then you gaze upon her angular face with the huge all-encompassing eyes. I sent her to you because I knew you of all cosmics would see inside in ways that no one else would.

Her dress could’ve been any color really but your mind fills in the gaps as it should be; swimming? No. It’s just the wind winging its way through her hair and the folds of the dress; dark but ambiguous in hue because you’re dreaming and for once there’s no color

 

                                                        just fluid linearity and a slender shoulder upon which her chin rests. Maybe I throw down the gauntlet to whisper or scream or dance ridiculously while my shirt clings to my sodden form

 

and I fall back into the mud.

  

  

 

 

Basic. Touch your fingers to earth; the back of your head sits in the silt, ringlets of brown curling tentacled around your face like octopus halo. Camera in your eye stares heavy-lidded upward and you see the battering rain steering currents that make that succulent brown mass  of  hair move and cling fortuitously to that forehead and cheeks

 

Call

                                                    Response

Captain Fantastic and Bennie and the Forest

I was grade-school age and my face was pressed to the window of my dad’s orange Chevy. It was my window to the world during our family outings. My parents never had the money to take us to Disneyland or even across state lines when I was little, so we saw as much of the state from that rolling orange bear of a car as a full tank of gas and my dad’s behind-the-wheel stamina could bear.

Ma and Pa never were much for music: It was always background to them, as it was when we drove through the Cascades (or at least that’s where I think we were) that Sunday afternoon. My brother fidgeted in the left passenger side next to me, picking purposefully at the black faux-leather seatback like it was an especially itchy scab. Fun and funny as he was, he sometimes didn’t have the patience for the long drives. Me, I liked letting the scenery and the music carry me at their own pace.

The piano galloped on the AM radio, echoing throughout the car because it was too chilly outside to roll down the window, and because my parents were too preoccupied to turn the radio down. So I associated–for years–the grandeur of those conifers jutting from the countryside, and the winding roadways opening up to increasingly spectacular vistas as the car glided along the ill-tended asphalt, with those loping ivories and the way the clapping and drums loped along.

Frankenstein in glittering platforms, stomping through the fuzzily-scenic woods.

They didn’t really have any literal connection, the forest and the massive beauty and that song, I guess. But it all made sense and still does to my insides; the part of me that knows that the song and that drive celebrated something alien-beautiful and silly and wonderful about what my eyes and ears were absorbing that day. I remember the taste of the glass and the condensation of my breath on the surface as Elton John playfully hissed out the S in Jetssssss, and it spikes directly from the little kid sitting in that car to the ostensible adult occupying this particular space during this particular Now.

Underneath the branches of a faintly-moss-dusted and winter-bared tree I sit on a picnic bench in Seattle, listening to the song and remembering. The night sky’s draped in the same gauzy beauty-haze as it was that afternoon in the Cascades or wherever we were, all those years ago. A full moon stares down (he can always be counted for memory spikes, no matter what the hour). And it’s the exact same temperature–I’m sure–as it was that day, when after what seemed like ages I cranked down the rubber handle of the Chevy’s rear window and stuck my head out.

I feel the air in my lungs, and in a slow-motion replay of that afternoon long ago the rushing breeze is buffing my cheeks to a numb sheen; nostrils and mouth flooded by the coolness so headily that I chomp at the air like a dog, gulping oxygen and shivering slightly. And I realize that the balding sparkle-adorned imp singing those alien-silly lyrics in unearthly falsetto and tickling those grand piano keys was some sort of an angel for five minutes of my life.

InkwellofUnknown

The familiar blue ether of my office chair was enveloping my back; fluorescents wove their dull rods ‘round my optic nerves. I glanced outward, over the beige partitions tacked with phone extensions, office cheat sheets, and random cartoons printed from the ‘net, and through the tiny cube of window two hundred feet west of me, to the world outside.

Sunlight sinlight prowled jauntily over the street corner, and just beyond it a park with its pocket of vegetation beckoned. A figure moved along the grass there; female, barefoot, curvature silhouetted by the brightness. A well of ink rested in the palm of her left hand, and a pen sat elegantly in her right. Even at this distance I could make out the ink that swirled in its glass container; a strange tincture that caught refractions of light and spat them back into my retinas in multiple hues at once earthily natural and unaccountably alien.

She twirled the writing implement between her fingers, dipping it into the well, and removed it with a flick of a slender wrist. Then she began flicking the ink-impregnated pen at the earth, grasses, plants and trees around her.

Droplets of the fluid splashed against disparate points of the vegetation, and I could see organic forms erupt from the earth in reply. The first droplet initiated the arrival of a lush pod which swelled and unpeeled its husk to reveal a full and layered orange bloom, multiple leaves curling and undulating as traces of red ran through the petals like capillaries. Several smaller sprays of the alien tincture alighted on an unremarkable clutch of weeds skulking between the broad green leaves of a rhododendron bush; globes of syrupy moisture grew from the shriveled nubs at the weeds’ ends, and each of the balls of fluid gradually slid open, pink-irised eyes orbiting their pearly encasement and surveying the world they’d just been born into.

Blossoms and plants previously unknown to this modest island of the organic overgrew the simple greens and browns; some curling and clawing at the air like gaudily-painted and famished animals fixing to devour the pedestrians who strode by insensate; others, floating and bobbing sensually against the wind in an attempt to seduce the anesthetized passersby from their torpor.

Even from the box that encased me I could see them;  smell them; taste the odd fruits that fell lazily from their stalks and buds to the earth to regenerate progeny even more exotic and sweet than their elders. Time to walk out the door and to elsewhere, my mind said in between the words the whole swirling mass of botanical strangeness sang in syncopation with the afternoon air.

Many Bubbles

Because It Sang with alien Taste

How I dream it

Her voice and maybe the way those damned orbs, windows as usual; all round and enveloping,  jettison sadness as

she drags her fingertip across the spiny alien surface; pulp glistens. Nail through skin juice sweet or bitter or vegetative (Russian Roulette of sensory)

threads, pregnant serpents full of sweetness, between my teeth and hers challenge to extract that milky white fiber or satchel of juice from between hers with swipe of my tongue. Lizards—no. Or maybe.

Just her id and mine; the latter stronger now than previous and taking her hand wrapping my arms around licking dew with her shoulder and the smell of her I’ve been there before never tire of it capacity infinite she knows and in time it will open and she’ll arrive too

emphasis on second-to-last two-syllable utterance

Scorpion

It hid amongst the caramelized and crisp leaves; armored form of efficient menace coiled and waiting.

Its black eyes stared at me as my face

 moved closer. Bound and determined, I was, to face it and drink the fear of its poison like some hard liquor. It unwound its tail, stinger glistening with venom and afternoon dew. I opened my mouth and smiled.

One lone drop of its poison beaded and dropped upon my tongue–the bittersweet tincture heated the inside of me.

Stung less than I expected

Unconventional Way

Uneasy

would be the sensation, I reckon.

Seems straightforward enough to me but for the superficial obstacles laid out by all without:

I’ll get there by all that is

Summer will tell