In the Season of Ice

An amber filled shot glass sat on the old wooden bar top scarred and dented with 100 years of service. Condensation rings from recent ice filled highballs fogged the newest coat of bar wax, but the shot glass Joey twirled between her hands was neither hot or cold, it reflected only the neutral heat of her hands “ How long had it been?” Joey gave the shot glass bracketed by her palms a half turn to the left.   “Five years now? No, six.”  She rolled the heavy shot glass clockwise now, so smoothly the liquid inside barely moved. 

God she was tired…… so God-damned tired.  Joey hung her head and a long soft sigh rippled the amber liquid’s surface.   “I can’t think anymore, I can’t even feel anything.”   Joey shuddered in a lungful of breath.  Jesus, it was almost too much effort to breathe.  She felt empty and flat.  “This must be what it is like to be dead” she thought.  Joey guessed that this was a relief of sorts.

There was nothing left of her. Inside, where the all-consuming fear had lived for so long, she could only feel heavy, dull numbness. “When had that happened?”  When had she lost even the capacity to feel fear?  

Slowly, Joey pushed her drink an inch to the right with her left-hand fingertips, paused, then pushed the drink an inch back to the left.  Joey sat in blank empty stillness for a long time, mindlessly pushing her glass back and forth. Then, the acrid scent of whiskey finally reached her brain, offending her nostrils.  Joey lifted her head and wearily leaned back into her bar stool. Movement caught her attention and she met the gaze of a haggard, hunted looking woman in the dusty back bar mirror.  It took her a moment to realize that the hollow looking, dark brown eyes she was being dragged into were her own; fatigued deep into their sockets, bruised with lack of sleep, looking as dull and dusty as the surface of the mirror which reflected them. “Who was that?”  Who was this woman with the dry, dull skin, and the uncombed, brittle hair?

“Tap, tic- tic tap”  Joey heard soft clicking and glanced down. She was tapping her fingernails on the bar top. She needed a manicure. Her normally well-groomed, painted fingernails were chipped in places and her nail polish had begun to peel. Her hands looked like the rest of her felt. 

 Music began to play and Joey interrupted her contemplation of nails and life long enough to look around the old dilapidated bar to locate it’s source; it was an old jukebox in the back, the kind with neon lights, and that old drunk shuffling back to his table must have sacrificed a drink to play the old love ballad now floating on the air. A drink to mute the misery, a song to make it blaze. It was the amber-liquid-fire’s always comforting, vicious cycle in action.

Joey started to turn back to her own gut burning comforter but noticed an old fashioned phone carrel with silver pay phone and paper Yellow Pages hanging from a chain. It took a moment to register what she was looking at. “Yellow pages.” she murmured, “ Let your fingers do the walking.” “Information at your fingertips.” “Answers.” 

“So what was the question?” She turned back to her drink and stared into it like it was a crystal ball. “Was there a question?” “Was there any question at all?” Joey dipped her finger into the shot glasses’ whisky and began to draw wet circles on the bar top. “Circles, cycles,  -  coming full cycle,  -  the fullness of seasons.” Abruptly, Joey stopped drawing and slid off her barstool to stand swaying for a moment. Then, like someone in a trance, Joey crossed the distance from her place at the bar to the phone booth in the very back of the ancient, worn-out establishment. She picked up the Yellow Pages and began leafing through them. “Beauty Salons, Contact Lenses, Drug Abuse and Addiction – Information and Treatment, Fish and Seafood –Wholesale, Glass-Auto, Plate, Window, ……. Ahhh- there it was, Guns and Gunsmiths.” Joey dreamily tore the page out, stuffed it in her pant’s pocket and returned to her seat. Climbing back up on her bar stool she looked at her mirror self, and then, after a long moment, down at her unconsumed drink. “How long had it been?” and after a moment of reflection, “Thirteen years last February.”

Finally, taking a sip of comfort, Joey took the crumpled yellow page sheet of Guns and Gunsmiths from her slacks and smoothed it out on the bar. She stroked it and patted it as if it were a well-loved pet. “A time to be born, a time to die;”  Joey began to carefully fold the sheet of yellow pages in half, “A time to kill,….”, then in half again; “A time to plant and a time to reap.”

Joey made the flimsy yellow page into a tiny little square and put it back in her pant’s pocket. A little jolt of energy suffused her being.  Direction had been decided on!  Joey didn’t know where the decision had come from, or who had made it in the vast emptiness of herself, but she savored the trickle of strength she suddenly felt. Scrounging around, she located a tube of lipstick in one of her jacket pockets, and looking into the dusty mirror, she watched her mime self paint a cheerful mouth. Then, Joey watched this well-known stranger quickly empty the amber laden shot glass into that cheerful mouth, and get up. 

Joey lost sight of her mirror self as they both moved towards the bar’s front door. There, on the threshold of before and after, she paused for a moment’s thought, “ ……NOW…..”, and flung the portal open, rushing with purpose out from the dark, cool, cave-like skid-row bar into noisy July’s hot, blinding sunlight.

The Hot and Cold of It

Let us speak

The Truth,

here,

now.

If we knew

The Truth,

or what Truth is,

we could,

but,

I know only

passing moments

flowing around and through

Me

carried away and dissolved

in them,

by them,

for them;

disjointed and flowing.

And who would we tell

This Truth

if we were to know it,

as we do,

since we cannot tell ourselves?

This Truth of,

“I don’t know what I don’t know”,

(and I don’t really want to know, do I?)

If we suddenly knew

what we already know,

empty being dustdevils,

acts of purposeless purpose

would blow away

like so much

incinerator ash.

Then what?

What would we do

as we look around

and see

The Truth

of nothing

as nothing looks around

and sees?

Truth

flowing, 
ebbing
--- never ending heart beat

Immortal mortality.

And if this is Truth,

why would we tell 
if we could?

Is it not enough to hold a hand,

pet a dog,

water a pot of ivy?

We speak of Life

as if

it were something real

but its not,

its only 
The Truth,

(if we ever could know what that is…..)

I Think There Was A Summer Once

My Own Back Yard

People always talk about how they find stuff in weird places. I heard my parents talk about finding a skeleton in Aunt June's closet once.  They whispered about it and they didn't act like it was a good thing, but I think its cool that she has a skeleton in her closet. I wouldn't be scared if I saw it.  Maybe she'll let me play with it sometime.  Last week, my Aunt Sara, who's not really my Aunt but who is around so much she seems like an Aunt, said to Mom that my big cousin Daniel, the one my Mom always tells me not to sit by or let see my underpants, crawled out from under a rock and Mom said he lived there.  Guess it must be a big rock.  Mom says it's ok to call Aunt Sara aunt because she's too much older than my brother Joey and me, and it's too weird to call her Mrs. Allen like we don't really know her.  Mom says it's like she's family, cause she sorta is even though she isn't.  Wouldn't that be funny, to pick up a rock and see Danny's face looking up?  I wonder where that rock is.

Yesterday my teacher was talking about how folks find things in their own backyards all the time.  She said there is treasure there and read us a story bout how some kids went all over the world looking for their family's chest cause it had all the family fortune in it, and was lost and they were going to be poor and stuff if they didn't find it.  Anyway, after a bunch of adventures and stuff they found the chest buried in their own backyard.  Tommy Skinow who sits behind me and pulls my hair said he found an old metal box with matchbox cars and toy soldiers and stuff buried in his backyard once..... he guessed it had been put there by some kid who lived in his house a long time before him cause the box was all rusty and had holes in it.

Mrs Lafitte, she's my teacher, said the chest in the story also had old-time paper letters in it, and those letters let the kids in the story know who they were, and that had been the real treasure of the story, though if it were me, I'd rather have had the gold and stuff, cause I know who I am.  Mrs. Lafitte said the story was something like an al-le-gory, and that it was really about stuff you couldn't see like faith and security. I first thought she said alligator and couldn't figure out why she was calling the story an alligator., but she really said a new word.... al-le-gory.  She said it meant that no one has to go anywhere to find the valuable stuff in life.  Sheeesh, shes so slooooow sometimes.  I mean, if its buried in the backyard, of course you don't have to go anywhere, but those kids didn't KNOW it was there.  That's the whole point.  Anyway, Mrs. Lafitte says you can find stuff like inspiration and courage in your own backyard. She says everyone has stuff buried there.  I guess it's like Tommy's box he found which made him feel happy and like playing war with the cars and soldiers.

I thought about it all the way home on the bus and after I got there and had a snack, I told Mom I was going into the backyard to play, but I was really going to look for the treasure.  I got one of Mom's little hand shovels from the shed and dug through all the sand in Joey's sandbox and all I found were some of his weeble wobble people and some cat poo poo.   I know it was cat poo poo cause it looks just like what Dudley our cat leaves in his sandbox in the house.   I didn't think any of this was treasure, so I went and started digging in Mom's flower beds.  I was real careful not to hurt the flowers and make Mom mad.  She got really mad at us one time when Joey and I were jumping in big mounds of them. Mom called them football mums........ they were soft and tickled, but we kinda ruined them.  I dug and dug until Dad called me in for supper.  I didn't find anything at all and I was kinda mad cause I coulda been playing with Sally Jane across the street or playing Animal March on the Wii.  But I wasn't so mad after dinner, and I still really wanted to find the treasure, so I got my blue sweater with the hoodie and went back outside. I decided to really look at everything in the backyard, maybe I could see something like a clue.  I looked at everything, I looked into all the bushes, I looked in the playhouse, I looked in the cracks of the wood fence my Dad calls a stockade.  I looked in the birdhouse and then got scratches looking behind the rose trellis.  I even looked under that dumb gnome with the pointy red hat by the birdbath and that's when I heard it...... a kind of peeping.  I thought it was maybe a magic chick that would grow up to lay golden eggs, but I couldn't find it anywhere.  I looked and looked.   Finally I sat down and really concentrated.  I listened real hard and finally I saw it.   It was a teeny tiny little brown frog hanging on the bottom side of one of Mom's lily leaves, the ones that have flowers like white hearts with yellow candles sticking up from them.  He was so small I could have put him inside one of those matchbox cars if they opened up the right way, and he peeped like a chick, but he's not a chick, so that makes him special.  But how is a frog treasure?  I got to thinking maybe he is really rare like those gold frogs Mr. Derby the science teacher told us about, the ones they think might have disappeared.  Maybe he's like that and someone will pay a lot of money to see him.  I tore off the leaf Mr. Peeps was sitting on, that's what I named him, and took it into the house.   Dad helped me make a home for him in the old glass fish box.   We put dirt on the bottom and one of Mom's violets in the dirt. Dad filled a jar top with water and put it in the dirt too.  Then he put in a rock from the backyard and some twigs and leaves and stuff and covered it with a screen.   He said Mr. Peeps' home was a ter-re-ri-um and tomorrow I could take Mr. Peeps to school with me to see if Mr. Darby knows what kind of frog he is.

When it was time for bed, Dad said I could have Mr. Peeps in my bedroom with me and carried his home up stairs and put him next to my bed, by the ballerina light on the round table there.  I like that light cause it has a real bright part on top and a real low, soft part down below, and I can leave that part on so I can see a little when Dad turns my room light off.  After Dad left and it had been quiet for a while, Mr. Peeps came out and sat on top of a stick.  His skin kinda shone but he didn't do much but sit. Mr. Peeps kinda looks like the drawing of the Frog Prince from the fairy tales my Mom used to read me when I was little.  You know the one, where the princess kisses the frog and he turns into a prince?   I liked that story, but I'm a big girl now and I know frogs aren't princes.   It was gonna be soooo cool to show all the kids what I found in my back yard, but tomorrow was never gonna come if I didn't go to sleep and I wasn't sleepy at all.  I kept thinking about treasure and frogs and inspiration and stuff, so finally, I got out of bed, pulled the screen top off of Mr. Peeps home, and reached down and picked him up off his branch.   I held him on my palm and he never moved even a little bit, and in the soft dim light of my ballerina lamp, he just seemed to look right into my eyes.   So I kissed him........   you never know.

Deep Freeze

Winter star filled night tinges deep snow blue. Breath steams into open space from pine forest edge, betraying my presence, if anyone would look. A log cabin, not old, not new, sits in a clearing ringed with dark, wild, tangled conifers, and I stand in deep cold. I stand in white snow stained blue. I stand in murky, pine wild tangled-ness, and am cold. Bitter cold. Yet so numb, I do not mind.

Star blue shades give way to pale yellow light as gaze drifts towards wood soft cabin walls. Brittle glass covered holes pour firelight, making butter islands on blue powder suitable for snow angels or burial mounds, and changes everything, or at least something. Eyeball fog-frost fractures, flakes ice, and I see clearly into the heart of softness.

In the cabin, a stone fireplace cradles flickering fire. An unusual response, a movement on frozen stiff blue lips. How odd. How different. A synapse sparks, “What is this?” I love my still, quiet blues, but this pale urine light melts something, making the beautiful, deathly cold, snow muffled world less alive than it already is.

People bathed in gold enter the picture frame window, and lip curl movement dies, leaving spittle moist corners of mouth to freeze and crack in bitter blue cold. More smoke breath obscures window movie. Stillness. Mind blank, covered in new snow. No wind. No movement. Just stone statue pluming breath. In – out In – out.

Headlight frozen deer

In imagined warmth, a family, or is this just imaginings? Movement of play, and laughter I cannot hear. I see evidence of warmth, but cannot feel what I see, for I stand outside, in blue shadowed snow, under dark brooding pines which hide me from star brilliant midnight sky --- and from what is in the clearing. Here, only breath is warm, alive for but a second before silently perishing, almost stillborn.