I don’t know why I craft these entries.
(alternately titled ‘You Fucker’)
“…And I hold you close in the back of my mind; feels so good but, damn, it makes me hurt…”
I couldn’t begin to tell you how many prayers I’ve floated skyward regarding you. Thing is, they’re not your standard prayers: Not the typical “Take care of this one, if you would,” or “Bring it around again, please, please, pleaaase.”
Nope, none of that. They’re more like, “Just let me forget, let me forget,” and “Help me leave this to the past.” It’s not sane to torture oneself this way.
I was reading something somewhere one time (can you get any more vague than that?) and this young woman about my age was talking about how she was the one to clean out her grandmother’s house and wrap up her legal matters after her grandmother had died. She said she learned more about her grandmother in those couple of weeks than she had known about her for all of the thirty years they shared.
She went through books, papers, letters, photographs. She found a picture of a young man in a Navy uniform over and over when she went through albums and boxes. On the back of each photo was simply a first name: Clyde. There was one photo that he had inscribed,
“I miss you every minute of every day.
“Love, Clyde”
in one corner.
There was a locket with Clyde occupying one frame while the woman’s grandmother sat perched in the other, a sweet smile gracing her lips. There were letters –and oh, my, the letters…the words flung between the two were amazing.
The woman marveled at all these things. Who was this Clyde? Why had her grandmother never, ever mentioned anything of him? Not one thing.
And there was no resolution to be found in all that correspondence. Nothing hinting as to why the demise of this elegant passion occurred. Later on, there was an ersatz journal found. It had snippets of poems, favorite quotes, brief thoughts from its keeper. There was one entry, some two years before grandmother’s death, saying something along the lines of, “Even now, I miss Clyde. I wonder about him often.”
I don’t want to be that person; that’s why I pray for it to be taken from me. Even still, this dance of wills will follow me to my grave; I suspect it will linger around yours, also.
::: :: ::: :: ::: :: :::
The summers when we lived
    heartbeat to heartbeat, you and I
The dry-fire click of the screen
    door the surest of punctuation
On the rambling run-on sentence
    of hazy day after hazy day
You’d say,
    “Okay, forget for five minutes
    that you’re beautiful.”
And me:
    “How do you forget things
    you never knew?”
The frogs whispered at the tops
    of their lungs, drunk with bugs
The rocks would flirt with the water’s surface;
    they dropped down to kiss it five or three times
~Once even a miraculous seven~
    before dipping into the wet dark without fail or flail
I’d say,
    “My arm’s tired and I’m satisfied,
    you ready to head on?”
And you,
    “I’ll carry your sandals if only
    you’ll hold my hand.”
Fella once told me (drunk as he was and drunker’n I was)
    ‘the tides in your blood, your heart proves you got in you’
Making me nearly fall over from shock and almost fall out from relief
    because you can’t doubt words of a drunkard evenifyouknownottotaketheiradvice
And sometimes, even though you know it…well
    you’d just as soon hear somebody else say it
He said,
    “he already has”
    but you should know that was after
I’d said,
    “you know, there’s a part of me that says
    this boy will wreck me like the titanic.”
