Somewhere In The Midst Of It
We spoke privately, in a language that didn’t travel far; hushed vowels and consonants that danced like Japanese lovers in white silk. Passerby’s didn’t know of the little secrets here in the bay. They would wander through, their faces looking, eyes grabbing hold of its surroundings, though abandoning the feelings imbedded within them. The birds would come back around this time each year, when the weather got warm again, when the earth showed its arms again.
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He smelled like the lake, burrowed deep into his fur; at night as his body lay against my nose I would smell the salt and the sand, and the cry of the swan over the water would lull me to sleep. He looked like a figment from a dream, laying by the orange of the fire, the abyss of night behind him, fleeting and fragmentary, temporary; a figure passing through a memory still in motion.
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From the sky plummeted the dark feathered wings of an eagle, the sun eclipsed behind it, as the bird passed by in a scene of fervent rapture. The boys across the bay reeled in their lines, and trapped the body of a fish between net and metal. As the day receded into the cavernous dwelling beyond the curving of the earth, silhouetted against the falling of the sun, I found myself underneath the trees, the leaves above capturing the scraps of deep blue left over from the day, fallen into their hands, and held like secret whispers.
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He said don’t hurt me like your brother did; bruised like a drift of sand with the imprint of a foot; don’t worry, it’ll heal. Open windows where figures moved quiet, catching the already archaic substance of a night already gone.
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“I’m reading something” her voice in no hurry, playing strings in the throat that held it, “and I thought you’d like this part. It’s not like your Waugh or Bronte, but it’s sweet like an orange.”
She read it to me slow, something I think was habitual, if not mechanical, in coordinance with the ordinance of her family, picking at the second hand habits handed down from them. I couldn’t make it to the play; “after hours?” she asked me, could I come then?
She was in the coat room, her eyes like a keeper standing at the window of a lighthouse, her hair against the faux fur that kept the cold from someone’s mother. She kissed me quietly, though in the silence I couldn’t hear a thing else but the symphony of her soft breath. She said her ride was outside, and that we’d see each other soon. I told her she’d have to tell me all about her aunt, the one in Lisbon, translating tongues so their words can become ours.
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It wasn’t long before the war hit. It started with the wind, moving silence around to make room for the noise. The shutters spit when the wind crept in, tossing clay and wood to pieces on the floor: I cleaned it with the same brush our mother cleaned the house with after the marriage. The shells came after the natural sigh of the earth, sounds too far to mean a thing, too close to mean we were safe. Mother held son, while the blood came too fast, while the wound was split open, “please close it, he’s just a child. “
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I sat with bruised lips before the lettered glass of M. Abbey. What’s that blood on your lip? “It’s only mine” I said, not sure why I was still holding the messenger bag, “because of what’s inside it” I said to myself. He asked me what I was mumbling. I showed him it, stained pages with rings of coffee made from a twelve year old who was relearning how to speak.
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I saw her for the last time while sitting in the cabin of the train. The landing held passing faces, hers a still figure in the mess of it all. She raised her arm, extending her fingers from her palm: the last image I have of her, before the blurred tunnel walls passed by as the train kicked forward, before I found myself several days later in a studio somewhere in the southwest of France, a short brown stubble chinned man tracing the naked figure of a man as he sat in a chair in the center of the room.
“Could you get a new glass?” he asked me, handing me a clay cup with water that mixed colors together.