What love?

I sit, in thunderstorms that bring back new memories, and write of love. But what love, where, how, can heal this time? Is it even love I so desperately want to slide inside of, or youth, or you and your bear arms, the promise you made to meet my young. Some kind of comfort that knows no road; that is barred and barriered, no matter how hard I throw myself at it, beg its opening of our skies.

In thunderstorms, I remember curling at the bottom of your bed, a shaken puppy, so protected that wet would curdle my skin, make me pull back as if bruised or broken, bent by a slivered sun.

At times, you, or Hannah, would drag me out into the rain, or then the boy I loved with each small part of my heart; and there, shivering, shuddering, I was only afraid of the cold.

Which is strange, as now no cold touches me, not inside. No rain makes a racket that I cannot laugh at, shed as sheep skin, leave behind. No, no rain, no love can numb this fire, so alive and so hurting when all I need is gone.

I try not to think of you now, which makes me guilty. Because even a small thought, of our bunny fur trip north, of a pelican or a big, uncooked burger; of small tips at restaurants, those tiny fish with beedy, broken eyes. They undo me in a way that leaves not shaking or crying but a stillness, motionless, the inability to feel for anything or anyone else. The inability to look beyond the roses, mounted in their glory, in their moments of blooming and never decline.

Which makes me afraid. For I know, that despite its own deficiencies, despite my need for you, it is only love that softens these small falls, whether my romance or my nephew and his new top teeth. Whether a best friend sorting through our childhood games, the familiar howling laughter, or the cutting humor of my mother. Whether you, where ever you are or have been, and the loud, unmistakable, daily declared love that you wrapped around me, your soft arm, my sheepskin throws and rabbit furs. Whether I can accept, or somehow live with, that, only that raw, rare love as your legacy, as a shelter, as the shoulder that once flattened my fears.

On lemons, and lashes

And now I will write of you, my slate-eyed love. For the curls of wine on your tongue, on mine, the wires of freckles, pebbled paths of your young skin. I will close my eyes and there, beside me, belonging to a night of violet skirts and penciled portraits, of spins to castles trapped in clouds, of walled windowsills, of the tooth I love the most, I will have your head heavy on my pillow, wet eyes, willowy wanting, quiet curls your curtains to push back.

I will close my eyes and we will reflect what has not been easy but brought by bargain with our slippery selves, Irish musicians falling faster. Our plastic cups stained pink or tangerine, our tongues all wanting, our eventual melding in the wake of mint tea and too many cheek-kisses goodnight.

Your thumping heart, of course.

I know this as our non-fiction rendition, fraught with life, that lived, livid experience that has broken both our hearts.

Having faced a devil, not ruby, but raw in the quickest of kidnappings, that opening to other worlds or other, dimmer, skies.

Then and now I am calmed by the still-present scent of you, so safe in the softness your skin, your mouth, your hands aligned on the fleshy cheeks that mark me home.

I imagine you and the silver-skinned fish above your mouth, your hand catching my sleeping head, our bright white beers, small parts of me in you: suckling lemons and jugs of coffee, couched creases of witches, white chocolate renditions and the flattening of pretense in loving, but never needing, fine wines and blankets, the softest, most forgiving lines of life.

If I were home, it would be an overcoming, like those southern melodies that gave my ancestors might, and beyond that mountain of mine, a falling, finicky, full flailing into love. And for you, maybe, it would be found in the achy tones, those bold bellows of women, show singers selling truth in throaty tears.

You and your lashes, your toes. Your spots, the markings that construe your past. Or the shared smiling eyes laid down, those whiskers having never pierced my skin.

I will write of you to make you real, to bring you back beside me, all licks of licorice and the custard cravings of your tongue. I will write of you to delay the aching, biting, to stare back at these familiar rains when you are hours, miles, skies away.

Rememory

I have never before looked at obituaries. Such key pages not an age I want to deny or defy, but now in a vague, virtual world of New York Times Guestbooks, I click and click, scouring the world, the web, my widened eyes for others' memories. Of course they entertain records of his street corner, saunter, his (blood-?) orange coat, the cool of cigarettes at his fingertops. The laughters--his, theirs, all streamlined by a leveled city wind.

Maybe this Morisson's rememory. When I try to picture him young, preceding me; when I pull at portraits o his own expeditions, soothing, somehow imagining that if I cannot go forward, I can fall backwards to him. Maybe in my mind I can relive ripe renditions over Korean barbecue or those speckled arms. Maybe if I squint hard enough to forgo bifocals, I will see not stars but steady, other eyes.

Roses

It wasn’t the anniversary that bit my neck, that broke open the wounds I hide well under summer dresses and the scant scandals that blister my toes. Not the memories of rooftops and such blue skies, or you and your camera bored by sun. It wasn’t even the photograph of chocolate and sunflowers, the square cake of buttermilk that brought tears to your eyes. When I had expected to be in torrid tantrums. When I bathed in coffee, sipped wine and waited for the wash of wanting to end.

What hurt the most this time, when I was supposed to hold you warm and smoky, feathered with chocolate and cappuccinos we sought out by the park; when I should have bought my millionth tie for you, were the roses in that garden I could not exit. I wonder why I walked inside, the green trellis too familiar, the scent once dreamy but now sour and syrupy in wet air. It was the roses, really, those fat, French flowers you so loved, withered at their stems, sad renditions of all romance and prose. It was the roses of ashen pink, flushed faces gone dry, that made my heart break in the cold of day with my children soft and laughing around me, a decadence of beaming teeth.

It was the roses and then the dreams, not the nightmares that frighten me, that leave me lying in my own arms awake, but the dreams in which you are living; or the dreams, even, in which you are dying but we have days. When I wake up it is days I want; just days for you to know that I need you. Days in which I speak the words I dream, ‘I can’t go on without you.’ In my dreams I ask you how I will survive you but there are no answers on your tongue; you only tell me that I will. And it is because these dreams are mine, not yours, that there are no answers; because I do not know deep inside.

It is only now that I realize moments not yet lived; of babies I cannot throw high enough in the air; I no longer want to write, really. The world is muddled, mute, so much less beautiful than what I saw before.

The flowers then, live, dreary at their deathbeds, make me run. I can walk through the trellis, but breathless and ill, want out of this blooming garden where small lives replace each other, where all vines ripen and rot.