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This morning, on the way to school, I stopped for a bite at Hardee’s. It was a quarter to seven, and my first class didn’t start until eight, but I left early to ensure I got there in time and also because, although there is a bus system on campus, I prefer to walk to class. At least, I think, I am getting some exercise, and even if it doesn’t appear to be doing anything for the size of my stomach, I will have some well-toned calf muscles (all my classes are in a close cluster of buildings, but the nearest parking lot is probably about half a mile away and is a severely uphill journey).
I sat near a window still dandruffy with last week’s snow and looked outside as I bit into my sourdough breakfast sandwich. The sky was a purple ululation, and I thought of a poem I had written probably eighteen years ago. There was no purple in the poem, no wailing clouds, but somehow the poem leaped immediately to mind (there is painting mentioned in the poem, so there’s that). Maybe it was the perfect melding of inconsequential things that form something full of consequence. I was in a Hardee’s, which is where I first worked and also where I first met my ex-wife, who the poem is peripherally about. Although it’s not really, somehow. Now I’m not sure, but that probably explains why I gave poetry up as something I would never do much beyond playing Chopsticks on, so to speak.
Here’s the poem, in one of its later revisions. The original is lost somewhere in a computer gravesite. I believe the original was probably its best form.
***
For Alicia by the ocean’s edge,
where misted waves melt in black
sand, among bleeding white rocks
and dead fish.
Under a glutton moon
I slept, beneath the pier,
while brine lapped at my face
like that dog I bought you last year.
For Alicia, whose painted toes dangle
in the water,
I wrote a poem in the sand
with my toe, calloused and red.
The tide swallowed my words
and etched them across the beach,
like your streak-splatter paintings
I never understood.
***
There was more after that, but mostly it was the result of a professor trying to make more of a poem that what it was (not that I think poems can’t be made better, but, again, I realize I do not have the stuff of a poet, and this was best as it was, red hot from the pen).
I found myself needing to find the poem today. Not exactly sure why. However, tonight I searched for it. Like the transitive connection from Hardee’s window to eighteen-year-old poem, my search made me feel like I was wandering in a life-size version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.
I guess I have to explain. Both my wife and I pack rats, although in different ways and of different things. There have been times when our two powers combined have made things difficult (like my search tonight). I have almost everything I have written over the last twenty years. I also have every card or letter that I’ve received over that time (just remember that if you want to get snippy with me; I can go back two decades and use your words against you). Unfortunately my stories, poems, cards and letters are no longer as organized as they were years ago, so I didn’t know exactly where they were.
In my search for this one poem I found many other embarrassing poems (“poems”? Well, no, not really, more like Henry Rollinsish bon mots that essentialy were “my father is a dick and let me explain that graphically” and “I’m lonely”). I found cards and letters that highlighted my short marriage and the subsequent divorce, plus my exhausting and futile effort to make the mother of my child be a part of her life. I found letters that slowly and decisively led up to an eyeblink of a relationship I should not have gotten into . No letter exists to commemorate the death of that relationship, but there exists somewhere an e-mail that spills some liquor on its grave. All that remains is my nickname.
I have two letters and a card from my friend Cory. In the first letter he writes me from his deployment to Italy. He told me about the awesome food he was eating and the great hotel he was in, and he enclosed some money to pay his phone bill (I can’t remember, but I assume I paid it, since he didn’t kick my ass later). The card is for Christmas. There is not a date on it, so I can’t say for sure what year it is from, but probably not 1995, since that is when I received the last letter from him. I bought his computer from him before he separated, and he had a problem with my check, so he was checking in with me on it (I got the money to him). He wrote about the troubles he was having with the Air Force, both with getting his household goods and with them saying they overpaid him and they would like his money back. “Hope things are going to rough for you, Scott. Don’t party too hard and have a joyous holiday season.” He signed his name and wrote his address then included a P.S.: “Have you talked to Sarah recently?” I had. We met her as she was working at a snack bar during one of our exercises. She was a colonel’s daughter, eighteen, and a high school senior. We flirted with her outrageously and for some reason kept calling her “Susie Q”, borne from an original name mistake. I called her house and asked if Susan was there. Of course not. I hung up and then realized my mistake, screwed up some courage, and called her back, explaining my mistake. We dated for six weeks. We had broken up (she had) after my squadron’s Christmas party. She was eighteen. I was 25, a single parent. Of course we broke up. I called Cory and talked about the money, letting him know it was getting to him that week, and I talked about what went down with Sarah. I was going TDY to Las Vegas for three weeks in February and then to Italy myself for three months before I moved back to the states. Things work out that way. I knew about Las Vegas when I talked to Cory, but not Italy. I don’t remember the last words we said on the phone, so I guess it’s going to be “have you talked to Sarah recently?”. We got off the phone, I closed the book on Sarah and put that relationship to gather dustily with others. A blanket of snow brushed one year to the next and life moved on. Nine months later, Cory killed himself.
I look at these papers, these poems, stories, cards, letters, scraps of a life five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road. There is a small part of me, a very small part, that wants to put all of these in a cardboard box, take them outside, and fire them up in the burn pit, to watch ashes battle with snow. There’s also a small part of me that wants to strap a backpack on and walk the world like Kwai Chang Caine. Both of these would be a mistake. Maybe releasing the past, letting the footprints on the beach be washed away, would be good. Maybe a clean slate is good, as the cliche suggests. But in the pain, embarrassment, fright, disappointment of memories, there is also beauty and strength and wonder, hidden like a flower in the hand of a small child.
I sat near a window still dandruffy with last week’s snow and looked outside as I bit into my sourdough breakfast sandwich. The sky was a purple ululation, and I thought of a poem I had written probably eighteen years ago. There was no purple in the poem, no wailing clouds, but somehow the poem leaped immediately to mind (there is painting mentioned in the poem, so there’s that). Maybe it was the perfect melding of inconsequential things that form something full of consequence. I was in a Hardee’s, which is where I first worked and also where I first met my ex-wife, who the poem is peripherally about. Although it’s not really, somehow. Now I’m not sure, but that probably explains why I gave poetry up as something I would never do much beyond playing Chopsticks on, so to speak.
Here’s the poem, in one of its later revisions. The original is lost somewhere in a computer gravesite. I believe the original was probably its best form.
***
For Alicia by the ocean’s edge,
where misted waves melt in black
sand, among bleeding white rocks
and dead fish.
Under a glutton moon
I slept, beneath the pier,
while brine lapped at my face
like that dog I bought you last year.
For Alicia, whose painted toes dangle
in the water,
I wrote a poem in the sand
with my toe, calloused and red.
The tide swallowed my words
and etched them across the beach,
like your streak-splatter paintings
I never understood.
***
There was more after that, but mostly it was the result of a professor trying to make more of a poem that what it was (not that I think poems can’t be made better, but, again, I realize I do not have the stuff of a poet, and this was best as it was, red hot from the pen).
I found myself needing to find the poem today. Not exactly sure why. However, tonight I searched for it. Like the transitive connection from Hardee’s window to eighteen-year-old poem, my search made me feel like I was wandering in a life-size version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.
I guess I have to explain. Both my wife and I pack rats, although in different ways and of different things. There have been times when our two powers combined have made things difficult (like my search tonight). I have almost everything I have written over the last twenty years. I also have every card or letter that I’ve received over that time (just remember that if you want to get snippy with me; I can go back two decades and use your words against you). Unfortunately my stories, poems, cards and letters are no longer as organized as they were years ago, so I didn’t know exactly where they were.
In my search for this one poem I found many other embarrassing poems (“poems”? Well, no, not really, more like Henry Rollinsish bon mots that essentialy were “my father is a dick and let me explain that graphically” and “I’m lonely”). I found cards and letters that highlighted my short marriage and the subsequent divorce, plus my exhausting and futile effort to make the mother of my child be a part of her life. I found letters that slowly and decisively led up to an eyeblink of a relationship I should not have gotten into . No letter exists to commemorate the death of that relationship, but there exists somewhere an e-mail that spills some liquor on its grave. All that remains is my nickname.
I have two letters and a card from my friend Cory. In the first letter he writes me from his deployment to Italy. He told me about the awesome food he was eating and the great hotel he was in, and he enclosed some money to pay his phone bill (I can’t remember, but I assume I paid it, since he didn’t kick my ass later). The card is for Christmas. There is not a date on it, so I can’t say for sure what year it is from, but probably not 1995, since that is when I received the last letter from him. I bought his computer from him before he separated, and he had a problem with my check, so he was checking in with me on it (I got the money to him). He wrote about the troubles he was having with the Air Force, both with getting his household goods and with them saying they overpaid him and they would like his money back. “Hope things are going to rough for you, Scott. Don’t party too hard and have a joyous holiday season.” He signed his name and wrote his address then included a P.S.: “Have you talked to Sarah recently?” I had. We met her as she was working at a snack bar during one of our exercises. She was a colonel’s daughter, eighteen, and a high school senior. We flirted with her outrageously and for some reason kept calling her “Susie Q”, borne from an original name mistake. I called her house and asked if Susan was there. Of course not. I hung up and then realized my mistake, screwed up some courage, and called her back, explaining my mistake. We dated for six weeks. We had broken up (she had) after my squadron’s Christmas party. She was eighteen. I was 25, a single parent. Of course we broke up. I called Cory and talked about the money, letting him know it was getting to him that week, and I talked about what went down with Sarah. I was going TDY to Las Vegas for three weeks in February and then to Italy myself for three months before I moved back to the states. Things work out that way. I knew about Las Vegas when I talked to Cory, but not Italy. I don’t remember the last words we said on the phone, so I guess it’s going to be “have you talked to Sarah recently?”. We got off the phone, I closed the book on Sarah and put that relationship to gather dustily with others. A blanket of snow brushed one year to the next and life moved on. Nine months later, Cory killed himself.
I look at these papers, these poems, stories, cards, letters, scraps of a life five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road. There is a small part of me, a very small part, that wants to put all of these in a cardboard box, take them outside, and fire them up in the burn pit, to watch ashes battle with snow. There’s also a small part of me that wants to strap a backpack on and walk the world like Kwai Chang Caine. Both of these would be a mistake. Maybe releasing the past, letting the footprints on the beach be washed away, would be good. Maybe a clean slate is good, as the cliche suggests. But in the pain, embarrassment, fright, disappointment of memories, there is also beauty and strength and wonder, hidden like a flower in the hand of a small child.
