In the Attic Time Passes

 

He sits at a small wooden desk nestled into an attic alcove as northern light flows through the window creating soft shadows.

The click-clack of a typewriter sends echoes careening off of wooden floors and hard plaster walls, his head bowed, back bent.

He smells the ink of the ribbon, the residue of a long dissolved peppermint, and a hint of mothballs from decades passed.

The ideas are flowing freely in this symphony of senses when he hears the door creak and footsteps ascending the stairs.

The top of her head appears followed by smiling eyes.  She has two glasses in hand that she carries to the opposite alcove.

A café-style table is there, southern light sparkles and winks through the ice cubes and condensed water droplets.

***

He looks back down at the tiny black letters on white paper and taps out a few more until the paragraph is complete.

She waits for him to look up again and then playfully pats the chair seat across from her.  He practically prances and she laughs.

The water is cold and tastes faintly of lemon.  His intent gaze turns her bashful which she attempts to block with a gesture,

but his hand plucks her’s from the air between them and he leads her to the sofa that sits in the middle of the mirrored space.

They lie front to front and cheek to cheek as a spiral of pleasure swirls them into one body hovering just above the floor.

Time speeds up, slows down, and then becomes something without form or meaning as breath and life cycle in perpetual motion…

***

He awakens to the sound of the door shutting which extinguishes the feeling of contentment as he realize she has left.

He rolls off the couch, feeling heavy, and descends the stairs only to find an abandoned house of dust and cracked surfaces.

There is debris he must navigate around and a broken bannister he dares not touch as he makes his way down and out of the house.

On the street there is no sign of her, neither East nor West, which leaves him nowhere to run in the search for lost love.

He glances up at the attic window and believes he sees a shadow pass there and so runs back through the ruin to that place.

But the attic is now ruined as well with missing plaster and an acrid moldy smell: empty of furniture, empty of life, empty of love.

My Tree is Gone

 

I will take the tree

inside of me

to show that I can grow.

A single leaf with

shades of grief,

a seed or two to sow.

Simply do what I can

no other plan than

feel the breezes blow.

My tree is gone

I will be strong and 

apologize to the crow.

***

Writing of Pictures & Pictures of Writing

I’ve come to the realization I am not really a writer.  I just take pictures.

Words are almost too abstract a concept for me.  My mind forms the image that leads to the words or, more often than not, the words begin with a picture.  

It is like a cheat code because I am only a writer because I take pictures.

The pictures jump start the words.  More rarely the image starts in my mind’s eye, but even then when the writing is done something inside me cries out for something visual to accompany it.  In these cases I must make the picture after the fact.  It’s like I have to reverse engineer the normal process.

And sometimes the picture itself is enough.  It tells a story and words do not add to it.  These are the times it feels like it is compelling enough I must try to write about it, but as I type out the ideas they keep falling flat until I realize the picture is complete in and of itself.  These are the best pictures.

Thankfully those types of pictures are not common.  If they were I would likely not write at all.  And I like to write.  

The Oak Tree

My wife informs me they are taking down the large oak tree in our front yard tomorrow.  When I first laid eyes on this house 4 years ago it was the first thing that my imagination seized upon.  It is magnificent, likely older than I am, but starting to accumulate large dead limbs.  

It is still there and it will be there when I get home today, but tomorrow when I return a terrifyingly large hole will have taken its place full of air and swept through with breezes finding no resistance.  The sun will hit full force on the face of my house for the first time in decades.  

To be honest, I want to cry.  The earth seems to quake beneath my feet, so few things to hold on to to stabilize myself these days.  My son is leaving home soon.  I will be moving from my hospital in the Fall after 15 years of thoroughly enjoying the people and culture there.

My parents are making a slow exit that will be sudden when it arrives, but that oak tree was supposed to stand for 50 more years as the king of our neighborhood.  The squirrels and crows love it.  I love it.  Denial is still possible, but tomorrow the king is dead, long live the king!

 

Driving Down Town

 

Driving around

down town

lost and found

face a frown

silence a sound

in which I drown.

***

Milan Kundera Gone at 94

 

Sad news today of the passing of Milan Kundera at 94 years of age.  

When I hear his name I am immediately transported back to my mid-twenties, newly graduated from college and traveling the globe in a quest to shed my prosaic Midwestern life.  His break out novel in the West “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was my manual in opening up these new possibilities.  I read it on park benches and train stations in Eastern Europe for maximum effect.  His writing was chock-full of history, politics, philosophy, art, and music that drew me like a moth to a flame.

He was a writer and intellectual from the Czech side of Czechoslovakia and had lived through the Communist takeover of his country before relocating to France to pursue his passion without government interference.  The melancholy of such an experience pervaded his novels and was like pure oxygen to me.  The sadness of top-down attempts to suppress the insuppressible, of struggling to be human in an inhumane system, of being exiled from your home and alienated from your culture.  In his stories I could feel so much longing and in that longing I could find hope for something better or at least different.

In retrospect, reading his novels were likely my first impetus to be a writer although those dreams had to be put on hold indefinitely when I began medical school which swallowed me up body and soul.  During that time I met my future wife who was an English major at Butler University.  As it turned out her academic advisor specialized in Kundera and I was able to talk to him about my experience with reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  I told him how the first time I read it I was sympathetic with the main character (Tomas) and liked him a lot but on the second reading a few years later I abhorred him.  He understood why that could very well be the case and I wished we could have talked more but we were not at his office hours for me!

His other great book in my estimation is “Immortality”.  Maybe he is now experiencing a bit of that not only in literary terms but also in spiritual terms, one can hope.  I am thankful for his attempts to reach out and connect with people like me who are hungry for love, for understanding, and what might account for sympathy in the unbearable lightness of being.

***

All Those Years Ago

 

How strange 

that the paintings 

of a young Adolf Hitler 

were of churches:

-The Minorite Church of Vienna

-St. Charles Church 

-St. Stephen’s Cathedral

-A southern Bavarian church

The only one I’ve seen

in person is St. Stephen, but

I may very well have passed 

the others without knowing it.

A friend and I wandered 

the streets of Vienna for a day 

where I looked for literary landmarks 

while he looked for pastries.

It’s disconcerting to think that

this young artist with such 

talent in good measure 

could become so inhuman.

In my experience art has had 

a profoundly humanizing effect

that I could not have done 

without in these middle years.

“My Struggle” apparently has had

a very different meaning for me 

than it did for that angry man

all those years ago.

***

Find This Place

 

There are lights across the water that are merciless in their inaccessibility, as far as a midnight sky winking with stars of near-infinite distance.

I do not know what brought me to this black beach but I stand in sand with wavelets lapping at my feet staring longingly at that distant shore.

It is something I fear I deserve but my memory cannot conjure the source of offense that necessitates such a cruel and unusual punishment.

Time is spent skipping rocks across the surface of the water.  “Find that place!” is the energy I expend with the full torque of my longish limbs.

An attempt to swim across would be disastrous yet I fantasize about such a thing, binding a raft with ropes of regret and a salvaged sail.

And I imagine I hear a voice across the water, “Find this place.  I am waiting for you.  Do not give up.  I will allay your fears and fulfill a dream.”

***

Man at a Parade

We’ve lived in the Columbus metro area going on 15 years now, first in Worthington and now in Upper Arlington.  Between these two communities we have transitioned from a focus on a Memorial Day parade to a 4^th of July parade in the respective communities.  

One thing that has not changed is the presence of this man of indeterminate ethnic origin and age.  He wanders the length of the parade with glasses perched on his head and a fixed smile, determined to have his picture taken by everyone he meets on the street.

The first time he approached me several years ago I had no idea what he wanted.  He does not talk, but instead points at your phone and then at himself.  After taking his photo he wants to see it and then moves on to find someone else to take his picture.

Today he got one from me again after I hadn’t seen him for at least a few years due to the pandemic.  After me he walked up to a group of teenaged girls who were somewhat amused if not bemused by his approach, but like everyone else they figured it out.

I wonder where he lives.  I wonder what his story is.  I wonder how he gets from community to community, parade to parade.  I wonder why he is so focussed on having his picture taken by complete strangers.  I wonder if I’ll ever see him again and his eccentric smile. 

***

Last Thoughts on The Martian Chronicles

On this cloudy and slightly damp Sunday afternoon I have just finished reading The Martian Chronicles.  In my mind’s eye I see my own reflection in that Martian canal as the novel comes to a close and a thought comes full blossom with roots running into the ground to stabilize it.

It has been discussed ad nauseam, this peculiar phenomenon of Ray Bradbury imagining a Mars that is scientifically absurd with its “thin” but breathable atmosphere, canals full of blue water, exotic vegetation… and yet we WANT to believe it against all that we know to be true.

The discussion then flows to the author’s assertion that it is not Science Fiction as such but Fantasy.  The circle refuses to be squared.  There are astronauts, there are rocket ships, and there are “aliens”.  It’s like saying it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but isn’t a darn duck.

The thought that comes to mind today is that this is a story set in an alternate or parallel universe where Mars is closer to Earth.  As a result it is more conducive to the conditions Ray describes to include being able to spot Earth easily in the Martian sky and having similar climates.

And the frequent rocket ship trips made by individual families makes so much more sense if it takes weeks instead of several months to reach Mars.  Just this little adjustment in my mind makes the stories so much more satisfying to me and hard hitting as “reality” replaces fantasy. 

***