Connection of a different sort.

There is a boy. He is on medication. This boy has no strength to conquer anything, even the father who has conquered him his last 18 years. But this boy likes oranges, (hordes them from what I know) to look at, to hold, but never to eat. He only stares blankly at the dimpled skin. Why?

There is a girl. She is on medication of a different kind. This girls does not fidget with her hair, pens and pencils, or even hair sticks and the like. This girl likes to use her hands with objects such as knives, razor blades, and other sharp instruments. Why?

-Feel the air-electric with potential collision: she whispers to him as she pulls the orange from his grip. Perhaps she explains to him how she likes to peel oranges, the delight under her fingernails (like skin), how she savors the tender meat. Above all, how she takes pleasure in squeezing the dimpled skin, feeling the sweet juice running over her hands and down into her hungry mouth.

His eyes fall to his feet, which shuffle nervously, forever in the day trying to shuffle away the abandonment, the isolation, the medication. She smiles at him, although he doesn’t see her.
There is gentle conversation between them; hers filled with delectable words, his with silent wishes and head nods. There are internal technicalities at work here that can’t answer why, so I will not ask.

-Become involved: smell the fruit as she peels the skin, releasing sweetness, slowly like her encouraging words to him. Listen as each peel falls to his once nervous feet, you will hear the slight and essential sigh of one who has been released from fruitless isolation. Watch as she divides the produce, handing him the fullness of self in a half –with affective words, with compassionate action, with such simple tender involvement in another human. He smiles.

Father: an obituary

1984- My father threatened to leave the family. I was in my room as he stormed about the living room, collecting useless objects, such as the TV remote. He looked at me and told me that he would come back for me. He would not let me go with him, and I went to bed sorry I was ever born. The next morning, a Saturday, father came in as I was eating cereal and watching cartoons. He was tired and unshaven, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Everyone was still asleep from the long night before. Father stood in the door, in the early morning bright sunlight, both of us staring at one another in understanding –his from age and mine from innate feelings. I was to learn at that moment what capitulation looked like. I saw it in his face, a man not destined to have a family, not to be tied down to one woman or one town. I could see in his dark native eyes a man not meant to be a father to a sensitive son. I got up spilling cereal and hugged him, welcoming him back to our home. He smiled, rubbing my thick hair and handed me the remote. I flipped channels as he went to sleep in the bedroom of endless apologies.

1990- You are old father! This breaks my heart to contemplate. I can only conceive you as the fallen Colossus. I consider you crumbled into shards, a bulking leg there, a clenched fist beside, all of you lost beneath the watery memories of both our youths, your body worn slowly away, your mind wrapped in the mushy green haze of your thoughts, thoughts cut from the light of the sun, far and deep beneath.

1998- I go to visit my father in prison. He has been transferred from Pennsylvania to South Carolina and is closer now. It is the summer and humid, and I shiver from sorrow. I arrive in the waiting room of the prison, waiting for my father to appear. Prisoners come in to see their family members. There is no sight of him coming in, so I scan the room, looking at all the people and their hushed conversations; there is an old prisoner with no hair in the far corner by the door. I feel sorry for him, feeling what it feels to be alone, no one for a dejected man. The old prisoner turns and looks in my direction and I at him. It is my father and I wave at him to come over.
“Do I know you?” He asks.
“You are old father. You talk like a child. It’s me, your son.”
Although his mind is old, his physical shape is good. He looks as if he bench-presses an extreme amount of weights. Later, after we eat, my seventy-five year old father tells me he is bench-pressing 300 pounds every morning. I do not recognize the man in front of me, nor does he recognize the man I have become.
I leave him, he waving at me; waving like a father from the front door of his house to a son leaving for college. This old man has bars on the door to protect others.

2002- I see my father when I visit him in a few years after he has gotten out of prison. This is what I witness: he has the essential heart conditions of a seventy-nine year-old. He is an old man of native leathery skin, with brown eyes searching and wondering what God, if any, will greet him: Cherokee or White? There are dark purple veins tracing along his arms, bulking globules under his skin; veins that remind me of a cold river, pooling, forever pooling until they will pool and overflow. Rivers will overflow when the banks have given away . . . overflow from his heart into his lungs, into kidneys, into his brain. He has all of the possibilities of his arteries splitting, snapping, or wearing away at anytime. His body is dried, brittle, lacking luster, almost it seems, hard to my tender touch. He is not the warrior I have always known. He is dying slowly, dying cruelly for the man he is. He and I both wished he could die a warrior’s death. I look at him, a cracked and crumbling colossus, and envision when he dies, people will come to me and say, “Your father is dead.” I will look at them confused and remember my remarkably marked childhood and then thank them.
- - -
I have been to the edge of his world, and he has always taken me to the next ledge of falseness. I was the boy who sat in the imprint of his heart, the insignificant correction of the editorial. The boy who sat under the newspaper, looking to him, and him seeing the paper instead. -I have learned the art of reading social commentaries in reverse. Perhaps I was lost on him as much as the 6th page obituaries. A splendid and colorful son covered arbitrarily by black print. -Under the recliner, at your footstep . . . under the footstep of your recliner. I was the boy who played with match-cars under the insensibly well-informed mind of a distant father.
- - -
December 7, 2004- There is death and there is re-birth. You were a good father. You will be a good son.

The Sky Between a Pale Existence and a Wild Heart

Portland bodies are pale and mild. Mild bodies need milk and honey—reduced in heat—drink and let it overflow from your mouth, your heart.

- - -

When the sun radiates through the grey here, it might be delightful to devour something sweet and tangy, pull and tug with teeth, rub the frosting from lips, smile.

- - -

There is sweet desire: a young lover feasting on her pale thighs. There is bitter yearning: a promise of such an act. How to choose? Both fill the gap between a passive, pale existence and a wild, honeyed heart.

Smithereen McClure in Portland

Smithereen paces back and forth, stopping to glance at the picture of the woman on the mantle. She is young, with long dark black hair, her lips sanguine and living. Every so often he will stop and hold the framed picture. He traces the face of the picture with his thumb and forefinger then rests the picture face down. This is Smithereen’s wife, Adele.
She left him several months ago to “find” herself on the west coast. First in San Francisco, and when that didn’t work for her artistic and spiritual pursuits, she hopped a train to Portland.
“Portland?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think it holds the key to love and longevity.
“What does that mean?
“It means,” she chastised, “it’s the perfect creative energy field.” There was a silence in the line, and he thought they lost a connection, then, “it holds a mystic power.” She whispered the last word.
“So do I.”
She laughed pleasingly and told him she loved him. That was the last time he heard his wife. Adele laugh so freely. It was also the last time he heard from her again.

The doorbell interrupts his pacing. It is the cab, he thinks, but when he answers the door there is no one there. He steps out on the porch to see both ways and steps on the corner of a book that has been laid there. He reaches down quickly and picks it up. “Visit Portland” is blazoned across the top —a cruel joke, no doubt. There is a honk from the cab he called earlier; he motions to the driver that he’ll be right back.
Smithereen enters the room and regards it like a stranger. He walks around as if he has seen it for the first time. Countering this feeling, he moves to the mantle and holds himself pious in front of it, stares at the downward picture, decides to turns it up. At once the room feels familiar and warm, and alive. He waits, closes his eyes, wishing her beside him and when it is not realized he lets out a sigh and slowly pulls his things together, suitcases and such. Reaching for the picture, he pauses; thinking I know what she looks like. Known it all my life. He leaves in no great hurry, lingering as if this is his last sanctuary, his last sacred place of refuge.

Places In Which I Dream

These moist lands, haze with forgetfulness. Daytime is like dusk, everyday slumbering grey with someone’s immediate drunkenness towards abandon. Where is my father? This is not his land. He was baked in his brown and dusty home of Okalahoma. His people cleared dried and caked sorrow from their mouths, to utter powerful and mysterious words that would release them from their captivity.
No, this must be my mother’s land, more like it, emerald isles, where, too, they drink to die, for a while. Is this the place I belong, on her side?

Port, land too lush with life, the seizing of a young man’s ideas. Me caught in a battle between the ocean and mountain. This is the land where the living come to be buried in a grey season for a thorough war of dreariness.
---
Portland, you green, lush whore, something to be recognized in my own bed! Quit me, or I you, before I take the living to my father’s land.