I have been staying away.

Coming back only by force of will; while my mind, my body wrap themselves in a growing fire of reluctance -- black as smoke -- as I come nearer, aching with the half-truth of these stories about the story.

Each interim story is a mask hung upon the central, somehow unutterable story. A story of emptiness -- both an emptiness without that stretches into the unimaginable distances between people; a distance I can only liken to the cold unbridgeable gulfs separating celestial bodies; as well as a cold distance co-existing with the insatiable void of emptiness locked within me. How can any story encircle these voids within a flimsy barrier of words -- no matter how melodic, clever or incise? I attempt this poor telling nonetheless -- one simple story of a life: a story to peel away one mask, to reveal the next mask beneath.

But I am not sure I have truly returned yet, although black flames penetrate the atoms of my being.

I discovered her face in me
like an imprint
on the flyleaf
of an unread book.

A girl with eye for eyes;

I fell into them as they
turned on me, hungry
for void, hungry
for the closing touch
of cold lips.

*

The girl with hair for hair
is a signature
floating like smoke,
ordered strands curling
into a mass of glimpsed memories
not brushing me
but hinting me
toward sunlight quaking
among aspen leaves.

*

The girl with arms for arms
cradling an incomplete book,
her arms collapse
into taut
ribs of growing
desire, a volume closing
under ordinary hands hovering
upon keycaps, flexing
before god's unchanging eye,
turning upward under
a pitiless trickle
of wanting & care.

*

The girl with lips for lips
speak no name I've ever known, but poise
waiting for something
lips do, pressing shut
to cage neat
white bones.

(3/2/99 - 7/27/08)

Day presses upward
smearing a pale band of morning
into a tree-blurred horizon;

Her muzzle lifts to my thigh
nudging at sweat & scent
clinging in smoky bluejeans
worn through dusk’s tunnel
into a nightlong rapture of firelight & talk;
but now, the remorseless wolf of dawn
exhales into graying pools of coming daylight,
as this swath of lawn
resolves from gloom to a khaki crosshatch
of dewed stems & blades;

Now she trots off,
Into darkness thick enough yet
to swallow her progress before coming day --
in this paling hour
I am lost in mourning for escaping night;
but she raises no trace, no sound;
the new sun reveals her mottled wake
where a damp tide of dew
falls into her irrevocable passage
& silence unravels into an unwanted
moment of waking.

I glanced down at my brother’s feet, noticing his shoes -- heavy, buttery-tan boots, scuffed & scarred by work. To me they seemed hot & high for a summer night, but practical enough for walking through the poplar saplings & tough new goldenrod veiling this campfire from the access road. More revealing than a glance into his eyes. Feet touch the earth, & a man’s shoes bear the mark of that long touch.

Someone threw a twisted deadfall into the lowering fire.

“How’s the job hunt?” I sensed he looked across the fire toward my face, so I looked back.

“Still hunting”, I said, catching the moving glimmer of his firelit eyes with my own. His expression evasive. Closed.

“Where did you look?”

“Places,” I said, & dropped my eyes to the dual tan smears of his boots before I could detect any judgment in his face.

“So, did you see Dad before you came up here?” He asked.

“Caught a ride up before he got home.”

“Might have guessed that.”

“Some people -- like you -- just show up somewhere & they offer you a job,” I complained. “I don’t know why it is, but I’m not one of those people.”

“Try cutting your hair & shaving every day,” he said. “I understand that helps.” He reached under his chin & scratched lightly at his neat, ruddy beard.

I had not viewed myself in the glass for days. I probably looked a hirsute, curly mess with dirty glasses. The glasses slipped easily from their perch into my hand & I polished their lenses on the corner of my shirttail. Once restored to my face, the view they provided was blurrier than before.

“Another problem for me,” I smirked, weakly. “Another thing that does not come easily.”

His voice came sharp & judgmental. “It just requires some effort.” Then he paused & drawled, “Just give it some effort.”

Someone’s hound pup blundered around the ring of fire stones, raked my pants cuff with moist jowls; then lurched forward to rest drooling jaws on my thigh.

Who brings a hunting dog to a booze party, I wondered.

The animal looked up hopefully, diffidently into my eyes, then broke contact & shot off clumsily in the direction of a hoarse, masculine call.

The fire died.

I rose, took a step & stooped to an untidy woodpile that had been accumulated before I arrived. Pale deadfalls flickered within the lowering light of the fire. The piled, dead branches reminded me of a giant’s knotted, arthritic hands folded upon the ground: Grisly trophies of a mad knight-errant, cast aside by the displeasure of an unimpressed patron -- or, were they hacked free of immense wizened forearms to bedazzle a stubborn, eternally-disdainful paramour? In either case the outsized knucklebones lay waiting, insensate, until the time came & they were cast into fire.

My knobby thoughts turned upon the woodpile a few moments more, then I turned gripping a twisted wooden knuckle prized free of the tangle. I discovered the Boldens had joined my brother. I threw the branch into the flames & greeted them.

“Hi, Denny. Hi Bill.”

They nodded without uttering words. The brothers were bulky & passive, faces flat & inscrutable -- Algonquin ancestry peering implacably from their features.

Both Denny’s hands were full. His left hefted a fifth of sloe gin, while the other bore a large molded-glass goblet -- something won from a stand at the annual volunteer firemen’s carnival. It was misshapen & dark in the poor light.

He offered the goblet to my brother, who held it steadily before him, nearer to the fire. It was depression-glass blue. A crudely rendered human skull frowned at me from the nearest side as Denny split the paper seal on the sloe gin & dispensed a substantial volume into the waiting receptacle.

My bother tilted the cup to his thin, well-formed lips & knocked back half the incarnadine liquid swirling in the goblet -- which had turned in his drinking somewhat, revealing the image opposing the comically grim skull: A chain mail-clad maiden. A Valkyrie, perhaps. For some reason, however, the designer had twined the maid in heavily thorned vines. Crude triangular thorns threatened to pierce her cold blue breasts. Her tiny face was calm, almost childish, but sensual.

My brother drained the vessel beyond the halfway point before either Denny or Billy uttered a protest. Lowering the blue glass, my brother offered it -- steadily again -- to Denny. My brother smiled slightly & unwaveringly at his friend, as if the liqueur had produced no effect. He appeared no more mutable than cold iron.

Much of the wine was gone now, & Denny reached anxiously for the offered cup, belying his implacable façade. His thick fingers failed to open fully before reaching the cup. The motion struck the goblet, propelling it from my brother’s hand & to the ground, where, unfortunately, it shattered upon one of the hot, rounded stones surrounding the fire.

this is a short memory -- something to start this -- something to get used to this -- one piece of the scattered, shattered glass vessel I'm trying to reassemble

"all dead poets
crowd me like eager friends
hungry for this moment
of fleeting time

all these poets
stand dead like
bare trees aching
with the sun

behind them; they
become shadowed
fingers touching
all time, except

those moments
yet to be"

the first mumble of a long story taking shape from the wide-flung fragments of an increasingly elusive past; each remembered moment a soft ache in my breast where two souls hurl lightning upon one another hoping to obliterate the cohabitation of reason and passion; forsaking one another in an empty hope for supremacy. they forsake the blood, the blood throbbing between them, the blood washing the shattered vessel of memory into the last hour of the last day. informed by my assigned title I become the entry I become the mode of entry I become one spinning, tinny-sounding fragment from lost time to recovered memory to these self-conscious words.