The Lake

        Turtles on a log in the sun.  The rooted path covered in slippery trampled pine needles.  When he came out of the woods onto the tarmac lake trail he noticed a baby’s pacifier lying on the side of the path. Debating to pick it up or leave it, he moved on, leaving it in case the owner’s mother returned to this spot.

The bend in the trail lipped around a small ravine that sloped down to the lake’s edge.  Stopping to appreciate the sun kaleidascope-ing through the trees, he noticed something odd down by the water.  He took a few steps off the tarmac towards the lake.  It was a baby carriage. He looked around as he started down the slope, sliding on the lifeless bodies of last year’s foliage.

It’s like I didn’t know what I was looking at and by the time my brain comprehended what my eyes took in, I stumbled backwards, turned and fell into the mud at the edge of the water.  I turned to look back up the slope of the ravine, my head sweaty and swimming.  An old Asian couple out for a morning walk had stopped and where looking down.  A kid with a fishing pole appeared on the opposite bank of this narrow stretch of lake and called over to see if I was okay.  I yelled to him to call the cops and then vomited.

To the Winds His Son

I wade into the surf up to my chest, the occasional wave slapping and spraying my face.  I pour the ashes over my head letting them slide down my back and face, off my shoulders, onto my arms, into the water; some carried away on the breeze.  The empty bronze urn splashing into the sea.  My son.  I reach into the mound in my hair, grab two handfuls and angrily smear them into my face; tears and sea turning it into a paste, spilling into my mouth, wanting to absorb every last bit of Conor into my body.  My son...my son...

Summit

At the intersection of two roads in the woods I spent the day making love with a woman. As I got on my motorcycle to leave she came out and told me to go straight through the intersection, stay to the right, then continue straight, merge and just keep going.  I drove the road as she said and time seemed to pass like in a movie and I wrote on a board what the road was like with words and drawings.  There was a very straight stretch of the road where the narrative seemed to indicate something important happened to my family in the 1930s.

The road became dirt; narrow with slight hills and shrubs on each side.  It was the only stretch not paved and seemed to mean something and instead of a pencil mark  on the board to indicate the road, I could see the road as if I were on it.  The road rose steeply, higher than any I’d known, and the slope became paved with something other than asphalt.  The summit was very, very high where a lone house sat; a house that had been there forever.  The road plummeted down just as steeply as it had risen.  Nothing was to be seen around in any direction, just the sun which appeared at the same height as the summit.

At the core, he had a conservative nature, but his desires were constantly at odds with it. This is why he could sit and stare for ours without a clue as to what to do with himself. He didn’t believe in anything, he knew he had to, he knew everyone needed a god but he couldn’t seem to find his. Not art. Not religion. Not money, ambition, power (as a matter of fact, he distrusted power in any form). For a while he believed in love, yet here he was, twice divorced. Perhaps Love was a demi-god, without enough power to hold him. And despite the sheer enjoyment of exploring every inch of a woman’s body, he knew sex wasn’t it. He was beginning to think that perhaps Failure or Loss were the stronger gods. He was forty-eight. Not old, not young. But he had, what, maybe fifteen more really good years before some organ began to give him trouble. Even now, as he stares at the screen, he has no idea where to take this paragraph. It will become like so many others, another promising start, like a road whose pavement just ends in the middle of a field--no where to go, not even room enough to turn around.