Red Rocks

The cool stone enfolds us. Unfolds rumblings of history in smooth crevices and lichen-bathed wrinkles. The water knows to flow around, senses the precious grains to be preserved. We are among the organisms benefiting from the rolling and shaping of the steep striated walls. We scurry through groves and tamp red dirt beneath cloth and rubber, our soles stepping where our souls meet warm air and the cool breath of the canyons.
We inhale with you.

We drift into your riparian slumber and sigh with the pines
balancing
clinging
resting
on speckled ledges speaking volumes of time. I am crying into your creek, my word for the clouds' tears flowing through this artery of the earth. The whispers overtake the silence and we hold the space of the stone in the hollows of our backs. We cradle it inversely, we are cradled infinitely.

Your rumbling slumber awakens my heart and I lay back down to absorb the clouds trees water stone in the place you cracked me open and drained the doubt, the hurry, the fierce sorrow.

I lean into the universe as it envelops me in its beginnings.

The comfort of confused seas

I step from the hills and divots of dry sand to damp. My footprints follow me to the edge of this side of the world. I stand and wait for her to come to me, frothing and licking at my ankles, tying seaweed around my tight tendons and curling toes.
I am pulled in by the lights on the horizon. Fishing boats gleam in the gloomy dusk. That speck of white elicits a sense of excitement of an impending adventure even if none are on my charts at the moment. I face the beach, the land, the US and acknowledge the life I live here. There.
And I turn back around.

Calves submerged, the goosebumps on my thighs soon underwater. There are surfers right and left. I am boardless, wetsuitless. I wade deeper into an area of turbulence. The seas are coming from different directions, crashing into one another in irregular patterns.
One would say Confused.
I feel like a boat being tumbled and fought over by those confused, world-worn waves. I close my eyes and dream of being in the middle of the Atlantic, sails up, saltwater deluging the cockpit as the random waves hit us from behind and slide us off our course. I am that boat, drenched with surprises, pulled and pushed into conceding to deviations from my carefully plotted rhumb-line.
The waves talk to me through the wood and epoxy and say that even if they appear chaotic, each wave has it's own path and purpose. There is no confusion until their is resistance. Yet through that tension the wave is transformed or complimented or the energy is passed on so another wave can make it to Nova Scotia or Portugal or Brazil.
Or once again be sidetracked, absorbed, reinforced.
The energy never disappears.

I dive into the next breaking wave.
Fully immersed. 
Fully alive.
Fully clear on the beauty of confusion.

Fiction: Memories

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You press your memories into my hand, word by word, petal by petal, thistle by thistle. 

I close my fist over the years and hold as tightly as I can. 

Are you giving these memories to me? Am I borrowing them? Are they shared? Like shared custody? Like a dog or child, weekends here at my little shack, memories running over tiled floor as spaghetti boils over on the stove, bubbling frothing blackening the range with unattended flour and salt. 

Or at your place, perfectly moped and dusted, blue green seaglass gleaming in bowls and jelly jars. Light skitters across the pumpkin pine floors and comes to a halt at the edge of the memory’s coat. You pick that one up, cradle the thought of me on Pfeiffer Beach close to your collarbone where the skin is so taut and freckled. You squeeze too tightly and the tiny fading memory slips through your fingers and comes back to me to hold it at a distance, too painful for either of us to cradle.

We will go back and forth for years until the memories’ coats are tattered from delivery, until their shoes are not shoes anymore but mere anklets, soles worn away by trudging through time. We don’t see eye to eye on their keep or care and we argue without speaking until the memories decide to emancipate themselves and be rid of both of our selfish heart homes.

They will pack their satchels of secondary memories (you wore a robin blue scarf that day at the beach) and be on their way into the ether. They will not look back. They will not stop. They may circle around someday and come knocking on our doors when we least expect it, but they will be free to come and go as they please.

But for now, nestled in my palm, they coo and rub and warm themselves in my grasp.

I smile up at you as you fade into the evening.

You are now a memory about passing on memories and my arm reaches out into the dust of your skin.

Words on Strike

The words creep and crawl around the noise filling my head. They put tiny curlicued palms to Courier ears and stomp over the Arials to escape the din. We are in need of swirling silence, they want to say, but the other sounds are too loud for them to speak, so they continue to stomp, to cringe, to stumble around the latticed areas of my parietal cortex.

I stop suddenly as an itch becomes a steady burn in my head. They are getting upset and I can feel it. They are fighting back now, not simply scurrying away to hide in folds and fluid. I put the broom down; cleaning can be done later. Off goes the Spotify, twangy banjo cut off mid-riff. I finish chewing that handful of walnuts I wasn't really hungry for but needed internal noise to drown out the external.

I sit on my stool. It is green vinyl on a painted green metal base. The color has worn away where boots once fidgeted, now my bare feet. I get up from my stool because I remember there is one dish left to be washed, a load of laundry to be done, my bed has not yet been made! Those clothes on the floor should be hung up, organized, sorted, donated. And have I looked at the bathroom lately? Dust on the toilet tank...

I wash the dish.
I know this is a trap. I dry my hands and sit back on my stool. I stare.

It is quiet in this room except for the planes overhead and children laughing in the water and the occasional rumble of furniture being moved upstairs (this happens more than normal, I believe). It becomes white noise as I sit and stare and wait. The words uncup their ears and emerge from their hiding places. They wander and touch and greet one another and start to sing down the lines from the deep gray. They clap and dance and I can barely keep up with their ramblings but am joyously energized by the tumbling of symbols onto the page.

They want to be heard.

I only have to stop and listen.

Another sad fiction (or me writing as a guy)

The fabric tears away in my palm. Cotton and lace, tears and sighs. The threads and fibers remember it all. The way you danced all night in the fog and smoke, the way you dropped to the wide pine floorboards and swam on your back over wood and nail to where I sat watching. You climbed into my lap, dust and dirt and glitter falling from your hem, your hair. You smiled as I have never seen you smile. I always think like that and you always surprise me with the next round of smiling. 
Until you didn’t anymore.   
Until like the ripped sheaves of patterns falling away in my grasp you slipped farther and farther away. Your smile receded like the bay tides over sandbars and through narrow channels, under bridges, scraping the shore of anything sparkling or precious. I am drowning now in that current of your frowns and unease. But then I knew I wanted to be swept along with whatever you were laughing about. It made me happy to see you happy and you knew this and I knew this and that is where the problem lay. You lied about your happiness and I could feel it seeping out between the cracks in your smile, the spaces dark and mucousy between your teeth. You tried to hold it back. You told me we could try harder, hold on longer. Just get through to next spring or summer or fall and then we would get on track again, find each other again. 

You would slip across the floor in another delicate dress, this one silk and linen, black instead of cream like a wedding gown. You would slide towards me on bruised knees and cut up hands. You would hold my head between calloused fingertips and tell me not to cry. 
I didn’t even know I was crying. 
You have that power over me, pulling water and salt and fear from glassy windows I can barely see out of for all the glare of the brilliance of you. How can you tell me these things when we both don’t mean it? You say the words but it might as well be me. But we both know that you mean them less. You said so with the corner of your lips turning towards brown earth. 

The dress you wore is in my hands brittle and giving. It held many more stories than you had to give it. We wandered through those stories with reverence, sitting hand in hand on a picnic bench underneath an Oregon moon, wrapped in wool and wonder, talking into the night of recycled atoms and past lives of found objects. Your story seeps from the seams and joins mine as they fall to the ground and dissolve into the pale gray dirt.

Fiction: Machinations of rememberance

It is your birthday and I didn’t give you a gift this year. 

I didn’t get you a gift.

I didn’t even think of getting you one until it was midnight on your birthday and you came into my thoughts clear and brooding. You always got me a gift- friends, lovers, or not. You sent me chocolate and sweaters and funny typed shirts from small Asian countries. You seemed to think it was necessary long after the obligation had ceased. You asked me what I thought of each tissue papered box, every scrawled note card. It was a little knife in the gut every time to remind me that I wasn’t opening those presents next to you. That you were half way around the world or closer (or was it farther? It always seemed farther) and you weren’t coming back to help me blow out my candles.

There was one birthday when you forgot the cake at the little store down the street. You had ordered it the day before and were supposed to pick it up on your way home. But arms laden with farmers market carrots and the rump of a cow, you didn’t have the extra arms, the hands needed to carry that delicate string-tied package of chocolate and cream home to me. 

You started to cook right away. Glass of wine in hand, pour more, stir this, scratch my back will you? I forgot too. The candles lit, the reduction fully reduced to a blood-red viscous puddle in the cast iron pan, you jumped up, tearing off your apron. You tore out of the house, barefoot, around the corner and three blocks down to the cake shop. You banged on the door, rattled the wrought iron gate until a powdery tall woman appeared and hit the back of her wrist with two fingers. 

We are closed, she mimed. 

You were not having it. 

“It's his birthday,” you screamed through the plate glass. “He needs his birthday cake! It’s not the same without it!”
The woman crossed the shop to find you crying at the door. “OK, OK, how can help?” she lisped in a muddled European accent. She put her arm around you, your spaghetti strapped cocktail dress slipping past freckles and moles. Tears, fabric, every part of you was inadvertently trying to get naked and she wanted you out of her shop so she could go home and watch programs you had never seen in languages you would never know.

I waited for your return, smells of burnt sweet potatoes and roasted flesh filling the empty space around me. You laughed as you stumbled through the door, drunk with red wine and triumph. 

The cake was beautiful. 

My name in marzipan relief on a slick surface of ganache. You taught me these terms long ago. We ate cake first, as we do. You sitting on my lap, feeding me bites between kisses. I love every morsel of you, of your movement, your concern. You make me happy.

You made me happy.

So I won't get you a gift. 

That is my present (non-presence) to you. 

June bugs

Iridescent and flappy I scream into your head, get tangled in your hair, creep with sandpapery legs round and round your skull. I am blind to the greens and blues, I don’t see the reds in the same way you do.

I (simply deeply) feel the fruit nearby and I go to it, my wings clickety clackety clicking closer and closer. I have no other motive, no other care. I’ve been dreaming about this moment since conception in your compost pile.
I was that grub you threw back.

Now I want your pulp.

I want the juice to run down my six legs, the orange flesh of a nectarine to stick to my mandibles. I want bits of fig to cling to my back, purple plum on my belly.
That is my pleasure.

But you are in my way. You smell sweet with fallen salvia petals in your hair, dandelion tufts clinging to your eyebrows. I am amused running through your strands as you claw and whimper at my presence. You are my delay, my delight, my happy pause before the reward.

Your fingers catch and swipe me away, I am free again.

Your peaches are exquisite.