Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver,
I've read your swan song:
full of joy,
joy, joy
in every thing.

I read too late last night
and woke to another sore throat.
I fed the cats and drank coffee.

I sit writing at a window,
two day's snow in the window box
reaching to the second bar
of the child proofed windows
and the tree in the courtyard,
its dessicated pods
tenacious to spite the wind.

The half finished building
across the way obstructs the view:
one year and six months
I'd watched the trucks of 125th. Street
Postal Station back in and out,
the workers on their union breaks.
I am a free lance.

That was the dream,
wasn't it?
Not far off.
I'd imagined more squalor.
More despair.
Cheaper rent,
more downtown?
A smaller place,
certainly.
Beer.
I imagined us together,
skinny and desperate,
ageless in my teenage fantasy,
her my only connection to an adult future,
lost and found,
what some call fate.

That was the dream.
And now this:
a free lance.
Imagine:
the romance of it all,
the poetry, the food,
all of it.

"In five years,
he'll be twenty seven,"
my ex-girlfriend's
Grandmother had said.

In two months,
I'll be twenty seven.
This may be a quarter life crisis--
a social phenomenon
for the new millennium,
years to go,
before my swan song.
I read late into the night
and wake,
with sore throat,
to feed the cats,
and try to write,
and to find that joy,
in this life,
in this place.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Boxing Day

The new decade
upon us,
shades of slate
in our victories
and our losses.

We dream of escape;
there is none.

I hear house sounds
in your absence.
Snowplows,
like thunder,
through the whiteness
that penetrates deeper
still.

The shadow moves with us,
our forever thread,
woven once more,
and still dreaming
we become entwined.

I wake to new life,
your breath upon me.

The house
breathes
in your absence.

It carries me.
Wind, rushing past,
my body alive.
Test pattern static,
keeping the time.

The house breathes,
whispering in your absence,
the clanging pipes,
the hiss of the radiator,
the cold streets,
my hand upon the window pane.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Total Eclipse (Solstice 2010)

We were compelled by the facts
of the night:
first total lunar eclipse
in four hundred years,
last in over a hundred,
to occur on this day--
the winter solstice,
the full moon and the earth
tilted as far as possible
from the sun.

This night,
I promised
I would stay up
in observance
for the first time,
having watched a documentary
on Nova about Stonehenge,
having written about my connection
to the indigenous of the Carribean,
wanting to feel connected again
through the path of moon through sky,
north and south and west again,
slight penumbral darkening.

I leaned my head
against the glass,
the cold from outside,
as earth's shadow edged
incrementally
between sun and moon,
determined at the moment
of total eclipse to stand
between the sun behind me
and the moon in front
drawing whatever power
my ancestors had
over this event,
this perfect alignment,
assuming the rightness of the moment,
the direction given,
the path ahead.

In mid morning,
the sky dark,
the moon reddened,
finally,
I watched it pass
behind cloud cover,
head pressed against glass
looking further out,
the moon nearly lost
to the west,
dull red, gauzy moon,
and made my way
bed ways
hope in the
fading moon,
red behind the clouds
until dawn.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Blank Generation

This is a brief experiment in multi-media poetry. A thought I had regarding the future of publishing as E-readers and "apps" take over the market...

A generation past,
blank by choice,
unlike our current blankness,
one of circumstance.

How many before?
The wasteland gave way
to the roaring twenties,
a Great Depression,
and finally a world war,
at the end of which appeared
the beats.

A pause between wars,
where the American Dream
was not shared by all,
not by those that saw past it.

It was the hippies who took over,
during the next war,
and it was all on television.
They could promise that the revolution
but it was too late for that:
the Civil Rights Act 
had been signed,
the war ended troop by troop
and that generation wasted away
or else got rich in the end

until the boom went bust.
a bang indeed:
the whimper in the response--
ours to clean up,
ours to grow old with,
ours to fret away,
anxious, sleepless nights,
wondering at tomorrow.

Memories I May Have Had (Sister: One)

First Draft

Memories I May Have Had

Sister (One)

She sent me a text
to ask me why
I only have a brother
when I write.

As if
there were some
intention behind that.
Even though
the time period involved
would make her three
or four. Five at the outside,
and the only memories I have
of her at that age are spotty at best.

In pictures she has bangs
(a variation of the haircut
we boys had,
the bowl but longer on the side,
framing her smiling face
like a cartoon of a smiling
little girl with an inverted parabola
for hair).

She sent me a text
to ask me why
I only have a brother
when I write.

But my memories of her
are so entwined with
his that when I write of him
I'm implicitly writing of her:
coming home from the hospital
and my displacement from my bedroom,
a thirteen year diaspora
wherein I shared a room with the same boy
who had stormed into the room that had been mine
before it was hers
and stomped my lincoln log house,
razed it, clear cut logs scattered across the ground.

And then she was there,
pink from the hospital,
in a basket in the living room,
and we wondered where she'd come from,
and how,
and watched her grow
until one day she was in college
and we were in our late twenties

and she texted me
to ask why
when I write
I only have a brother

the same brother
who was my partner
in crime, when she cried
and cried
half the day
and we reached into the medicine cabinet,
looking for something to stop the crying,
mother was doing who knows what
and finding the Ambesol that we somehow knew
was for soothing the pain of her teething jaws,
reached over the side of the crib and rubbed it
over her bleeding gums and went back to our room.
but the crying didn't stop so reaching over her crib
again we rubbed it into her torn flesh
and again, squeezing the tube until
mother found us
and put a stop to our well intentioned overdose.

this poem is for the sister
that texted me,
wondering why
when I write
I only have a brother.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Memories I may have had (easter snow day)

In Deposit, in January, when the lake had frozen over and the snow drifts were at our shoulders, and the fog on our breath crystallized, icicles in miniature forming in our nostrils, we would go for one last sled ride down the steep slope of the beach, our blue discs spinning towards the water, and sometimes we'd make it twenty, thirty feet on to the icy lake. Then home for hot chocolate. We would vacuum and make the beds, turn off the water at the main line and run the faucets dry. Cross our fingers that the pipes wouldn't burst and head back to the city for the winter.

We were back for easter break more often than not, after the last of the snow had melted and coils of ferns began to unravel under the pines.

Until one year, we went to bed in the spring time, and awoke to a blanket of white, packed quickly and set out in separate cars, Mom and the kids, Dad with the dog and the antique furniture he'd picked up in Walton.

They had bought walkie talkies from Radio Shack, this before their expansion into the cellphone and digital camera and tablet computer market--this, in fact, before cell phones and digital cameras. Before tablet computers.

Dad, driving quickly, was soon out of range--"Michael, can you hear me, over." Nothing. Snow and ice. The Crunching road beneath our tires. "Michael, come in Michael, over." And nothing. Static.

Once, we nearly swerved off the road, wide eyed as the car was suddenly aimed at the guard rail, the granite, icy river below, and mother's sangfroid as she steered with the skid, gained control, pointing us back, slowly, inexorably towards the meeting place. I imagine her fear now, three children, and no control.

It took three hours to drive an hour and we spent the night in a hotel, watching through the window as snow piled against the wall, reached the window, stopping three inches up, an aura of frost above it, and spots of fogged breath, circles of wonder, like the universe itself, "ha - ha - ha," breathing out, and watching our big bang shrink back to a singularity above the snowed in window.

In the morning, snow hung from pine boughs, six inches high, falling now and then in dull thuds around us. The roads were cleared by then, on the highways anyway, and we made our way south, back to the city, a day late for our return to school, where the daffodils and crocuses were still germinating, bursting from the softened earth.


Saturday, December 11, 2010

Memories I may have had (what's left behind)

Here's a revision of the story from earlier today; I realized I was trying to tell two stories. I think this works a little better.


The house across the way mirrored ours in nearly every respect, forgetting the minor details. It was undersized, like ours. Yellow, to our blue. Stood on the corner, across from us. We climbed on the couch and stood watch most nights, no one going in, and no one coming out.

On the other corner, other children did the same: watching us; we came on weekends--in the fall and winter--thanksgiving, twice. Nearly always for the Christmas tree lighting, never in January or February, when icicles grew from the eves, and fell shattering in the drive way. In the spring, we'd come back, resume our post on the couch. And in the summer we were a regular fixture in the neighborhood, riding our bikes, exploring the empty trailer at the dead end of our block, taking turns at the diving board of the local pool. There was life in the blue house, for a time.

My brother and I had decided the yellow house across from ours was empty, finally, after years of faithful watching. Sometimes we would cross the street, walk the perimeter, with long jeans, ever mindful of ticks hiding in the overgrown grass. I never got closer than that until one day my girlfriend was visiting and we decided to poke around, discovered the back door unlocked and walked in, just like that. The house was empty, but abandoned--the floors sagged under the weight of forgotten ephemera--comic books, combs, the shattered glass carafe of a coffee maker, its black, L-shaped electronic frame nearby. Upstairs, overturned mattresses and emptied closets--sheets and sheets. Twenty minutes we spent, indulging our secret intrusion into a forgotten life. And then we too left.

Later, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, we visited an entire town that had been abandoned--it was collapsing into itself, the town--a fire raged underneath, from coal that stretched for thousands of acres, sinkholes forming, swallowing townsfolk, steam rising out of cracks in the earth. And when the town was bought out, the moving vans weren't big enough for everything--hard choices were made and what didn't make the cut was thrown into a stretch of grassy road that used to lead somewhere.

We lie awake at night sometimes, a generation born of baby-boomers, talking and not talking, but always the same fear--our dubious inheritance, homes full of years of acquired souvenirs--books and videos, sculpture, painting, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, half re-finished chairs, basements overflowing. And when they're gone, us left to sift and sift, make the hard choices, the wheat from the chaff, and leave the rest behind.

One

This is from a cross-genre series I'm working on, tentatively titled, "Memories I may have had."
It's a first draft and needs to be cut by about 200 words if I'm to submit it to any micro-fiction sites.


The house across the way mirrored ours in nearly every respect, forgetting the minor details. It was undersized, like ours. Yellow, to our blue. Stood on the corner, across from us. We climbed on the couch and stood watch most nights, no one going in, and no one coming out.

On the other corner, other children did the same: watching us; we came on weekends--in the fall and winter--thanksgiving, twice. Nearly always for the Christmas tree lighting, never in January or February, when icicles grew from the eves, and fell shattering in the drive way. But we were back in the spring, easter break more often than not--remember the year it snowed?

We went to bed in the spring time, and awoke to a blanket of white, packed quickly and set out in separate cars, Mom and the kids, Dad with the dog and the antique furniture he'd picked up in Walton.
They had bought walkie talkies from Radio Shack, this before their expansion into the cellphone and digital camera and tablet computer market--this before, in fact, cell phones and digital cameras. Before tablet computers.

Dad, driving quickly, was soon out of range--"Michael, can you hear me, over." Nothing. Snow and ice. The Crunching road beneath our tires. "Michael, come in Michael, over." And nothing. Static.

Once, we nearly swerved off the road, wide eyed as the car was suddenly aimed at the guard rail, the granite, icy river below, and mother's sangfroid as she steered with the skid, gained control, pointing us back, slowly, inexorably towards the meeting place. I imagine her fear now, three children, and no control.

It took three hours to drive an hour and we spent the night in a hotel, watching through the window as snow piled against the wall, reached the window, stopping three inches up, an aura of frost above it, and spots of fogged breath, circles of wonder, like the universe itself, "ha - ha - ha," breathing out, and watching our big bang shrink back to a singularity above the snowed in window.

In the morning, snow hung from pine boughs, six inches high, falling now and then in dull thuds around us. The roads were cleared by then, on the highways anyway, and we made our way south, back to the city, a day late for our return to school, where the daffodils and crocuses were still germinating, and no one believed that we missed our first day back because we were snowed in.

**********

My brother and I had decided the yellow house across from ours was empty, finally, after years of faithful watching. Sometimes we would cross the street, walk the perimeter, with long jeans, ever mindful of ticks hiding in the overgrown grass. I never got closer than that until one day my girlfriend was visiting and we decided to poke around, discovered the back door unlocked and walked in, just like that. The house was empty, but abandoned--the floors sagged under the weight of forgotten ephemera--comic books, combs, the shattered glass carafe of a coffee maker, its black, L-shaped electronic frame nearby. Upstairs, overturned mattresses and emptied closets--sheets and sheets. Twenty minutes we spent, indulging our secret intrusion into a forgotten life. And then we too left.

Later, in Centralia Pennsylvania, we visited an entire town that had been abandoned--it was collapsing into itself, the town, a fire raged underneath, from coal that stretched for thousands of acres, sinkholes forming, swallowing townsfolk. And when the town was bought out, the moving vans weren't big enough for everything--hard choices were made and what didn't make the cut was thrown into a stretch of grassy road that used to lead somewhere.
*******

We lie awake at night sometimes, a generation borne of baby-boomers, talking and not talking, but always the same fear--our dubious inheritance, homes full of years of acquired souvenirs--books and videos, sculpture, painting, chairs, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, half re-finished chairs, basements overflowing. And when they're gone, us left to sift and sift, make the hard choices, the wheat from the chaff, and leave the rest behind.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Submission to M.P.

below are two poems I submitted to a small press in Port Townsend, WA, where I lived for 2.5 years. "Someday" contains a minor revision:


Someday

What does it mean,
to you, she asks?

This reading into
you always do?

I'd been obsessed
with eternal return;
the idea came to me--
overwhelmed,
I stared into the uncanny,
swirling void,
before I knew there were words,
before I knew
I was not alone
there.

What does it mean?
Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,
but mind games,
and perhaps a little comfort
before I go to bed at night,
like warm milk and Valerian root,
or the prayers I would say as a boy
to that bearded thing--
and the ritual that went with it,
to fight off imagined hordes
of crawling insects
swelling up from the basement,
racing towards my bedroom:
to swallow me up and drag me
back with them, the rustling crunch
beneath me.

Just a little bit
before we sleep.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;
I need this sacred geometry:
imagined circles
upon circles,
looping ever forward:
an expanding universe,
collapsing into itself
to expand again,
and so it goes.

I jump in memory time,
in backward loops
like Billy Pilgrim
only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,
no future mes to see.
Only this life,
stretching backwards behind me,
a string from my birth,
I gather up from time to time,
and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,
the chance to live again,
this self same life,
but better
bit by bit,
a little better.

I want to make a contribution
to the canon,
and someday will,
given my midnight
thought experiments;
but for now,
I don't have the vision for poems,
or the toughness for prose.

And problems arise,
as they are wont--
if I improve,
wouldn't everyone else,
with more to give
and more to see?
The mystics and visionaries,
the prophets and poets
and painters and saints?

But someday,
when Plath and Sexton haven't killed themselves,
when Kurt and Ernest don't put guns in their mouths,
when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,
when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man
in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities
to anyone who would listen (but no one does),
maybe then I'll find the poem inside,
give voice to it,
set it free.

Columbus

Tabonuco,
bought at the Bear Mountain Pow-wow
from the single Taino booth,
first thing I smelled,
that sweet wafting resin,
carried on the wind,
drawing me in.

Tabonuco
burnt in clay pots
as tribute to a past
I can't remember.

In the rain,
in Harriman,
I read about Columbus
and his account
of my people
as gregarious
as joyful
as generous.

So generous, in fact,
that his demands for tribute unmet,
he cut off their hands,
left them to bleed out
on the jungle floor.

We disdain Columbus
for what he did
to the North American Continent,
this half truth shared in classrooms,
forgetting
it wasn't the red man
but the brown
that Columbus first broke,
that joyful people
with insufficient offerings
and no longer hands
for giving.

I share those bloodlines:
my parents met, dated, married
in the Bronx,
like Sharks and Jets.

Tabonuco,
burnt in clay pots,
in tribute 
and mourning,
for a past I can’t remember.

Raised eating pasta
and red sauce,
sfogiatelle and crown roast
at Christ's Mass,
my white skin,
and the arias
that would float through our home
so many evenings.

Forgetting
an incompatible legacy,
that burns inside.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Living

Obviously, this is not my poem. But it's fucking good. So there.

Living

By Denise Levertov

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

Submission to Autumn Sky Poetry

The following poems have been submitted to a neat online journal, "Autumn Sky Poetry"; They contain minor revisions for those interested.


Your English Background

You, the land.
Razed and plowed,
deep furrows running through
where forest once stood.

And now, again,
second growth,
in scattered poles,
bracken, peat and bog,
high winds of highlands.

You bear the heft
of Sarsen,
dragged across the windy plain,
land shaped like blue stone,
bit by bit
until

having chipped away,
the edges no longer sharp
but shorn by patient hands,
you give witness,
watchman like,
ghastly Cerberus,
Avon, Lethe or Styx,
no matter:

You,
this foreign land.

Shaped by man,
reclaimed at last,
sprung
from your forever womb.


The Gift

I am everything
inside this box,

felt lined,
blood red.

Lacquered mahogany,
fancifully etched

by some careful hand
with images of swirling demons

beneath
a veil of mist.

You have the key,
but you dare not open the box.

You the disease,
You the cure.

Pandora,
I am what's inside.

But you can not look;
only cherish this box:

intricately carved,
polished, finished to a high gloss

that blood red hinting
at depths and depths.

You have the key;
you have the box.

I am inside--
patience.

You, the disease.
You, the cure.

Hope
is what's left behind.

Sylvia

Sylvia Plath,
I went in for Ariel,
but the copy in stock was hardcover, glossy,
and there next to it were your collected works,
1956-1963,
poems you’d written right up until that final cold February,
just days before my birthday,
that you stuck your head in the oven.

You were thirty. 
You had two children.
Your husband left you for another woman
because you couldn't fix yourself
and when she couldn't fix herself 
he didn't leave
but she went out
in a similar manner.

I try to calculate how may poems you wrote
between twenty six and thirty one
and how many I've written up to now,
and how they’d stack up.

I wonder at the backhanded compliments I’ve received over the years:
from Devon, “Chris could cook circles around you,
but he’s unreliable. I need someone I can count on.”

Ted Hughes said Sylvia never scrapped a poem once written.
She approached her writing with an artisan dedication--
if she couldn't make a table, she’d settle for a chair,
an ottoman, an end table. Sylvia Plath?

What does that leave me?
Poems like whittled spoons for stirring beans over camp fires?
Bent brass door handles fitted over the steel drum body of a bullet smoker?
Glued together mugs full of pencils and wooden beads,
an old triumph badge and bent safety pins?

I might as well stick my head in an oven at that rate.
Just to see, of course--they’re all electric anyway.
It’s my vanity that keeps me from the full go--
is there any dignified way?
Chicken legs at obscene angles, half in half out the oven door?
The crushing splay of rushing pavement and the gawking crowds?
The liquid evacuation following the kicked out chair?
The choking blue, the foaming mouth, the aspiration of vomit?

No, no, 
I won’t be convinced--
just stick to silly love poems,
free form literalism 
and call it a hobby.

Nevermind.
A drop in the ocean
with no room for more.

Sundries

The orchid on the table is dying;
shriveled leaves curling back into itself.

Someone could have changed the water,
but there were other things to attend to:

the dishes in the sink, for instance.
The hairball in the middle of the bedroom.

Visiting friends in the country,
and wondering at the lack of clutter in their homes:

"They have more space," I said.
and I meant it then, but now wonder.

We could have that space, if we wanted it.
but there is a pushing against,

and the space between
can not be filled.

Things are crowded out,
little things--

the pile of clothes at the foot of our bed,
the flower, curled and dry on the table.

Longing to be filled,
we push towards each other,

only to be repelled
by the space between.

The orchid on the table is dying.
who will take care of it this time?

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Bus (Part Four)

Most recent section at the bottom; includes new edits to the previous three sections.


There was a school bus in the woods. If you wanted to go there, you had to cross the wooden bridge at the end of the dead end street, over the canal that ran into the Delaware, and then stay to your left, walk up the ridge, which is what we called it. It ran between the land on the left that belonged to the high school, mostly, and on the right, a couple of houses and then a farm.

When you reached the curve in the ridge where the houses turned into the farm and the field that belonged to the school turned into just woods that belonged to someone (the farm, maybe, or the state), there was a break in the grass and brush, and if you turned into it, to the left, you walked down a path, and across the creek, which was usually dry enough to walk through, mostly. If it wasn't, there were stones to step carefully across, except for one summer when it was nearly waist high, and we went swimming in it. We called it our swimming hole except that it was just a tiny little space where the water was deeper and wider than usual, and probably full of run off from the farm. But we didn't think about that then.

Once you were across the brook, it was only a couple hundred feet to where the forest started, and the trail was as wide going into the forest as it was leaving the ridge, this fifteen foot swatch carved into the side of the mountain, gently sloping up, with electrical wires strung from posts in the middle, and space on either side for walking.

It wasn't far; you walked fifty, maybe a hundred feet up the gentle slope that in the Catskills passes for a mountain, and looking through the trees to the right, the birches and white pines, the hemlocks--a clearing, surrounded perfectly by trees, you see the bus.

I remember the first time, I was with my parents on the hike. We saw the yellow streak of the bus in the clearing, the forest light full of motes and mites and pollen and whatever else streaming down through the trees, and with the sort of surreal combination of uncanny and quiet it might have been mistaken for fairy dust once upon a time. We broke the ring of trees and walked toward it, stepping over stumps and leaf rot, stepped around a fire pit, surrounded by large flat rocks that had been dragged there for sitting, over crushed bottles of whatever cheap beer was in vogue at the time, Bush probably, and at the far end, down the slope of the mountain, perpendicular to the ascending line it sat there.

There were no windows, anymore. Not by the time we got there, and no telling how long it had sat like that. The front of the bus was untouched, the yellow hood down, the engine presumably safe inside, rusted maybe, but otherwise undisturbed. The back doors, however had been torn out, wrenched away in fits of drunken reverie, party after party until finally they broke free, and were thrown down the mountain side, tumbling and crashing through the brush, coming to rest against a fallen trees.

No seats, either, except for the driver's. The rest had been taken out, one by one. Two of them stayed in the circle, and the rest were carried back down the trail, over the ridge and found new homes in basements where the foam filled cracked plastic absorbed the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and pot smoke year after year. I knew this because later I saw one, in my friend Ryan's basement. We were the same age, but he had an older brother Chris in the army and a Captain or something, 36. Chris had been part of the first group at the bus--probably led the rescue efforts, kept the best seat for himself, and when we were teenagers we would sit in that basement and add to the layers of beer and smoke every weekend and some weeknights.

That first time with my parents I was eight, maybe nine. My brother was seven. The dog was with us and my parents let her up into the back of the bus, sniffing around. I remember thinking she would find a body in there, near the driver's seat, or a body part, or something. I don't know how long we stayed, but it was creepy and even though I didn't say anything, my parents must have guessed because quickly they whistled for the dog to come back and she did, with nothing in her mouth, no severed hand or foot, and they put her back on the leash and we walked up the mountain, took one of the trails around, and came out near the high school and walked back home to Elm street.

In the bed room we shared, there were two twin beds on opposite sides of the room, with two tables for lamps and two windows, and between the two windows, a dresser, and above the dresser a five point buck that had come with the house. We'd lived there since we were four, when my father decided he needed to get out of the city and how we ended up in Deposit, NY has always been a mystery to me, but he got offered a job as the head of the English Department at the high school and he took it and there we were. We were surrounded by hunters and fishers and truck drivers, but my father didn't do any of that except sometimes we would drive to the lake and on the way we would pick up a tub of night-crawlers from the bait and tackle shop and cast our little hook the squirmy brown things and cast off into the brown water and come home with a cooler full of sun fish that we'd gut and fry with butter.

My brother and I were terrified of that deer head. Maybe if we'd grown up there, really, or maybe if Dad knew the first thing about hunting or shooting a gun it would have been different, but every night we went to bed terrified that it would come down off that wall and take it's revenge for getting put up there in the first place, and it wouldn't matter that we hadn't put it there because it was a deer and it would just go for the easiest people it could find, which would be me and my brother, sleeping below him.

We made a pact never to leave the room with out backs to the deer, and it was always best if we could leave together. So we would wrap ourselves in blankets to look like high priests, and back out through the doorway together, nodding our heads and bowing at the waist, and with our hands held prostrate in front of us, we would say, "ahso, ahso, ahso," three times, and that would placate the Buck for the day and let us sleep in peace one more night.

After the bus, we started to associate the deer with the bus and it was even worse, and we kept going on hikes with Mom and Dad and the dog, but we wouldn't go anywhere near that bus. I think we figured that somehow the deer had been hit by the bus and gotten it stuck there somehow and the driver left the bus and took the deer and stuck its head up on the wall like some sort of voodoo protection that it would never happen again. So we kept backing out of the room, bowing and muttering, until we were probably a little too old to do it, until a year or two after we should have known better, but before we were ever old enough to get invited to one of the yellow bus parties.

*******

It was the summer before high school. Mid-July. I had my first kiss with a girl who was spending the summer in one of the nicer houses up on the hill. I would see her walking through town sometimes, alone, and then I was sitting on the bleachers of the football and she came walking across from the other side, from the high school and past that, the houses on the hill. She was wearing cut off jean shorts and a tank top and she had dark hair with a red streak died into her bangs which were pushed back behind her ears, and she was walking straight towards me. I was smoking a cigarette on the bleachers and thinking about the school year ahead and what it would be like to go to school with my father and whether or not he would be my teacher freshman year, or later, and how much shit I would have to take for it.

I looked away, pretended like I didn't see her coming, and then I would look back up and she was walking towards me still. Her hands were in her pockets and she was looking straight at me. I was wearing tight black jeans and converse and a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and I had a bracelet on my left hand that was really the top part of tube socks, with black stripes that I had cut off three inches of. My hair was short and messy and I hadn't washed it in a while and when I saw she was looking at me still I didn't look away. She was almost all the way across the field and she kept walking and when she was only twenty or thirty feet away from the bleachers I said, "Hey," and she said, "hey," and then she climbed up onto the bleachers and sat down next to me. I took a drag of my cigarette, and before I had taken the cigarette away from my lips, she took it from me and took a drag. She blew out the smoke towards me but she didn't give the cigarette back.

"I've seen you before," I said. "Around." She looked at me and took another drag of the cigarette and said, "I know. You're always staring." I didn't know what to say so I took my cigarette back and looked down. "It's ok," she said, "I don't mind." I still didn't know what to say, so I asked her name, and she said it was Chris, and I said that was funny because my name was Charles and then she said, "It's not funny cause it's a boy's name?" I asked her why I would care if it was or it wasn't, and anyway isn't it short for Christine, and she said it was. "Where are you from," I asked her, and she said, "New York." I laughed. "What's so funny," she asked me, and I said, "No it's just that . . . well, me too. Sort of. I moved here when I was really young. It's just whenever people say New York, it's like they forget that they're already in New York, and they never say, 'New York City,' just "New York," like it's the only place in the world." She looked at me funny. She had a sort of half smile, and she took my cigarette back and she said, "Well, isn't it?" And then I said, "yeah, I guess," and then she kissed me and it was wet and I could feel her chapped lips and her lip ring and then her tongue finding its way into my mouth and I could taste the smoke on her mouth different from the smoke on my mouth and we leaned into each other for what seemed like forever and then she pulled away and stood up and walked to the bottom of the bleachers. When she got to the bottom she turned and smiled up at me and said, "Seeya."

******

The next time I saw her was at a party at Ryan's house. Ryan was my only real friend in town; we hung out most of the time. We had some stuff in common, I mean we listened to the same music and neither of us were really into video games, but it was mostly because his father was an artist and my father was an English teacher. His father was a potter. He had a little studio behind their house which was just around the corner from our house. The house was big and red, with a front porch that was wood but built on a foundation of river stones, all different sizes fit together to create this swirling effect.

Ryan was played pee-wee football, and was going to try out for the high school J.V. team, which was cool, but I didn't know what it meant as far as our friendship, because I wasn't going out for any teams. Maybe track, but probably not. I didn't go for any of the team sports.; I didn't like much of anything that I was forced to do with other people.

I'd seen "Breaking Away," and that summer my father and I took our bikes out for a ride. He had an old ten speed orange Raleigh from the seventies, and I had a BMX bike that Ryan and I liked to jump off a ramp that his father built for us sometimes. I had also read a book about bicycle racing and I guess I thought maybe it was something I could be good at.

So we went out for a ride. First, down by the river, to where the railroad tracks and the highway passed over it, and to the end where the farmhouse stood, guarding the rows and rows of corn behind it. Then back, and we weren't tired so we kept going. We rode all the way to Walton, over the highway and the state routes. We stopped once and shared an energy bar and the one bottle of water we'd brought with us. That was when we decided that we had gone far enough that we might as well keep going, because to turn back would be the same distance anyway and there's no point going backwards when you can just move forward.

So we rode to Walton, up and down the rolling hills, past the reservoir, and on the hills I would have to stand up and do the biker's dance that I'd read about, swaying from side to side, standing on my pedals, pushing myself harder and harder to keep up because my bike had no gears. And when we got to Walton, we went straight to the diner because we were starving and I ordered a Lumberjack's special and ate the whole thing in about three minutes, and when it was time to pay, my father realized he hadn't brought his wallet with him, so he went outside to call my mother from the pay phone, and she came to get us. I guess Dad had asked her to drive down the river to the farm house first, to see how far our whole trip had been, and when she got there she yelled at us for being so stupid, for biking 35 miles with no wallet and hardly any water, but I could tell that secretly she was a little proud, of me and Dad both.

But in September, Ryan would try out for the J.V. football team, and make it. He would hang out with the kids on the football team, at practice and they'd have parties on the weekend, and maybe we'd still see each other sometimes, do homework together on weeknights, jump our bikes off the little wooden ramp, but it wouldn't be the same. I wouldn't go out for a team, because it's not like the Deposit Middle-Senior High School had an bicycle racing team, or a rock climbing team, or a hiking team. I would just be Mr. Rastelli's son, from New York City.

In September things would change, but it was July, and Ryan was having a party and he was my best friend. When I got there, I went straight to the basement and there she was, sitting on the torn out bus seat. She was wearing a little plaid skirt and little black fishnet leggings that went up to the middle of her thigh, but the way she was sitting I could see about three inches of skin between where her fishnets ended in a band of solid black and her skirt started and I thought it was just about the most incredible thing I had ever seen. I grabbed a beer from the mini fridge under the stair case and said hi to Ryan. She hadn't seen me yet. I leaned in to him and whispered, "What's she doing here?" Ryan smiled at me like he had a big secret and said, "Dude, I told her we were having a party. I thought you'd be into her. You know she fucking asked about you? I mean I know you've been checking her out all fucking summer, but you could get some tonight." I took a sip of my beer. Then I took another sip, a bigger one. "Well, thanks, man," I said.

And then I grabbed another beer from the fridge and went outside, behind the pottery shed. I leaned back against the wall and slid to the floor, and chugged the first beer and then I opened the second one and I drank most of that, too. I lit a cigarette and smoked slowly, blowing the smoke up into the summer sky, watching the stars and finishing my beer. I stood up slowly, walked back to the house, down to the basement, grabbed another beer and sat down next to Chris. She was still on the bench, alone, staring around at the little clusters of people drinking in dark corners of the basement, that half smile drawing the left corner of her lips slightly up, wrinkling her eyes just a little bit, this devilish, aloof grin. I was starting to get a little drunk. I put my hand on her thigh, where the black elastic met her bare leg. "Hey," I said. "Nice to see you." She looked sideways, smiled and said, "you too. Nice shirt." I was wearing the same Smashing Pumpkins shirt I'd been wearing at the football field the day we met. "Get you a beer," I asked? "No," she said, "I'm good." I took another sip of mine and looked down at the ground. I was really pretty buzzed and bummed that I was dumb enough to wear the same fucking shirt I'd worn the first time we kissed, even though I had no clue she'd be there at the party. Then I realized my hand was still on her leg, and I could feel her skin and it was warm and my hand started to sweat as I realized how close I was to her, and I went to pull my hand away but she grabbed it, and put it back where it was and kissed me hard on the lips.

********

Chris was kissing me for a while before she pulled away, our breath short, my hand on the back of her her head, our lips held close together--as if we were afraid to be pulled apart, as if we would never again close that gap. Ryan told me once that sometimes when dogs were screwing they got stuck together, that when it was over they would hop around together, the male on two feet, the female trying to pull away, unable. We weren't stuck, not quite, but I didn't want to be any further from her, not yet.

When we had calmed down a bit, we were both smiling, laughing, relaxed back into the yielding foam of the bus seat. We laughed together, I let my fingers trace the skin above her fishnets, marveling at the goose pimples forming as my fingers passed, circled, passed again. The twist of her lips, the red in her hair, the ring in her lip, splitting her mouth symmetrically except for the half smile; I was captivated, rooted in place.

"You know it's funny," I said, leaning into her, "I've always been a little freaked out by this seat. But here we are, making out on it." She laughed. "Freaked out? Haha, why?" I laughed a little bit, and told her the story of the bus in the woods.
When I was finished, Chris jumped up, turned to face me still sitting down and grabbed my hands. "Hey," she said, a wicked spark in her eyes. "Let's get out of here. Let's check out the bus." I looked back at her. There was nothing I could say. Nothing I could do. I was in her orbit. I would be for as long as she'd let me. And I'd follow her anywhere. It wasn't quite dark out; it was mid July, and the party hadn't gotten too crazy yet (not that it would--we were fourteen, not yet in high school; it was 12 of us in a basement and it would be over by eleven). It was eight thirty. The sun was falling, spreading across the cobalt sky, a line of ocher slashed above the hills.

We ran across the street to my parents house, giggling, sneaking in the back door, in through the tool shed. I turned back to her, my finger to my lips, closed the door slowly behind her. It was dark. We took our time, and I held her hand in the dark as I let my eyes adjust to the room. Shadows started to emerge, slowly fading in to focus, and when I could make out the work bench, I pulled her along behind me, to the far right corner. Grabbed the two flashlights, and a bottle of seltzer from the K-mart in Binghamton that we kept under the green bench.

We turned around, opened the door and ran down through the gate of the lawn, down past the yellow house on the left, the mayor's house (perfectly manicured hydrangeas; immaculate white 1950s thunderbird), the length of the football field, 200 yards to the bleachers where we'd kissed, past the tool shed at the ten yard line, past the goalpost, back-lit and casting its shadow towards the school on the hill, by the nearly full moon. Over the bridge, and bearing left to follow the grass, the red sun fading into night time, the rising moon taking its place above us, and down, past the stream, turning right at the farm, the red sky falling around us. We turned down the path towards the mountain, still running full strength, our breathing fast, regular--the energy of youth and lust--of her gravity, her magnetism, unlike anything I'd ever known. We jumped the stream, made it almost all the way over, our feet just catching the last couple of inches of muddy water, splashing up around us, flecks of mud catching my jeans, and her bare skin through her stockings, our shoes, running still, and reaching the tree line, we turned on our flash lights and entered the wood, past the white pine and birch, past hemlock and larch, up, past stumbling electrical post after stumbling post. Tripping once, catching each other, she rolled over me, her skirt touching the rocky grass, over my legs, bent down, kissed me once, quickly and jumping up, dragged me behind her. I let the weight of my hand pull her back, and fell to my knees, gasping, desperate with laughter. "Stop, stop, stop, " I told her, "you don't even know where we're going! Look," I said. I pointed, up, behind her--"two o'clock," I said. "It's right there."