Man with the Red Beard
When the red-haired man re-emerged to write his story
on the sky
of my mind, I had forgotten the bundle of excess
he arranged at my back door,
how those wild mums
he gifted always staged an uprising of deranged love.
Neither of us mattered.
We swallowed weekends, and walked around in thoughts.
Every morning rose with a shout.
I offered to learn to love him.
For four months we climbed the San Francisco hills.
Four months of slipping down.
Four months of boiling our second chances.
I left town to get away from the incline. A slow trip
on a plane combing the earth toward some other continent.
When I returned, a cold silence
and I got comfortable under the sheets.
The phone rang.
I answered, holding a scythe.
He spoke to me
in his favorite gloomy voice, all dressed in black.
There was a blade of truth in what we said to each other.
I still lived in that place by the ocean, and he lived over a bridge.
But after time, a face disintegrates: his trimmed beard, his arms,
the satisfying blankness of his room.
Every lesson in remembering has been removed by someone else.
Back then, I was a mourning dove,
a woman counting how many sorries it took to stand up straight.
Sorry was how I said love. Love moved the days along.
Now, twenty years later,
the man drives a truck through the perfect shape of shame,
drives to my email box and leaves a letter,
drives to the split oak several times with a box of nails,
banging my name on the centermost ring.
(She allowed others)
She allowed others to calm her hair from its small garden,
dividing the dark commotion into calculated lines, branches of braids.
So tiny the movements, but her scalp rejoiced.
The requiem of touch insisted, and she listened more to that
than words spilling from mouths. These small things, the layers
of tresses, and how someone held each narrow strand,
the comfort as it grazed her earlobes, tickled and draped
over the bones of her shoulders. She heard the eloquent rhetoric
released from those hands and began her addiction to touching.
For millions of days, she would remember the strokes.
From One Hundred Hungers.
Looking Around These Days
Tiny ants began appearing in my kitchen last week.
The same day, the market closed down 200 points, the thermometer
outside the window reached 98 and everyone’s humor came unsutured.
Men behind freeways collided with bent bodies, lengthening the list of
things they needed toward the magnetic field of the moon.
Dogs began their daily barking.
In Albuquerque, a man devoted his existence to anxiety. He argued in his
sleep, begging for exoneration from foreclosure and insolvency.
His wife’s eyes staggered about as a family of quail hobbled past.
That day, a doctor lost four patients in the stitched light of ending,
and I ate small ants with dinner.
At the café downtown, a man drifted off in a martini sleep, glimpsing
random riddles of his creator as if the world mattered only in shades of
skewered olive. He waited for a phone to ring, ears listening in another
world. And a man with pistachios in his blood sold energy down every
street, reminding himself that he was not a failure. He tallied doors and
locks as justice.
In Hollywood, a woman in a kingdom of children knit a thousand white
sweaters. The day moved forward with six dropped purls of tension and
the small necklace of caloric content. In her overheated bedroom, her
face tightened.
Somewhere, a man perched on the side of his body going in and out of
fear. Each room of thought filled with cancer. To the hospital, people
sent pink cards of chance, and turtles dropped their eggs slowly on the
myopic glass beach where repentance was again missing.
The ants keep reappearing. To keep the kitchen clean, we wipe,
then drown them.
Lauren Camp teaches writing at the Southwest Literary Center, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, writers’ conferences and other creative places. She has published a book of poems, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010), and is working on her second collection, entitled One Hundred Hungers. She is also an accomplished visual artist and a radio host for Santa Fe Public Radio. She lives and works in a rural farming village near Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
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