What kind of animal are you?
Still forming. Not a hair left untouched.
Are you capable of subtle distinctions?
The past has presence. I have presence. We don't have to occupy further.
It lets the wind pass through you? Lets the earth?
Yes, but when it's my turn to explain, I listen. I try not to be thick, not to entertain. I try not to discourage fragrances. I'm not alone.
Perhaps we live in bodies that do not understand civilization?
As something else we achieve success. As someone different we define our future landscape. As ourselves, birth continues.
What luck. We don't have to go to the twentieth century today.
Yes, a gift from the bushes. Independent gardens for independent desires. They visit us with history. We don't have to exaggerate.
But when it leaves, you are still here. Come sit awhile. Come rest.
It feels very peaceful. We have never been a greater crime.
Some stories arise from the ashes of tormented idealism, having burned too long in an aging brain. Some stories fall from a surprise belch like a piece of undigested spinach. And some stories discuss their progress with the passing clouds. This story is a witness to its own unfolding, as if each moment could not be told until it spilled out onto the alteration of the page, with no more sense of direction than our lives have.
For this is the story that says things are not the way they should be and this is the story of the writer who is not the same man with the pen in his hand or the keyboard at his fingertips, who has limited his experience by interpreting what it means. Has this writer really ever said what he meant? What he meant was never good enough, was never really the experience, but sometimes he loses himself in the writing and he says something better.
And this is the story of the artist, who lives beyond the writer, the noblest of failures. Because art is inadequate. Because in art, too much precision kills. How terrible it is to be so right. How dead.
And this is the story of the writer's lover, the one more in love with the creation than the creator, the one hauling the umbilical cord over her shoulder like a rope, the one who does not know she does this. Sometimes imagination is enough, thinks the writer, and she is not really there.
And yet the writer's heroes seem so innocent. The guys with the wrenches and the answers. The guys with leather shoelaces and a history of marching. The guys with muscle in their hearts and meat on their bones.
The lover remains cheerful. She arrives from nowhere just when she's been forgotten. She looks in the hero's eyes. He isn't there anymore. She's saying to herself, "He's just meat."
So she nudges the river into a different place this time.
The hero was on his way to an unbelievable victory when he noticed the smudges on the side of the truck. They seemed familiar.
Like all fairytales, this one was secretly painful. The writer left it with the truth and the truth hurt.
It made the writer very happy to have failed in this way.
That was the day the ocean came to visit. It was very specific, but I still couldn't figure out what it wanted.
I wanted to send it to Reader's Digest. I wanted the approval of insects. The ones with large mandibles and substantial wings.
I live in a house on Elm Street. I don't know how the ocean got the address.
The culprit might have said something like, "Invest in the future," because she's like that. Like there's only one.
I wrote it down. The Podunk Review thinks I might have something someday. It's all very exciting. Perhaps I should take a nice bath and show it to my mother.
Receiving little validation from my family, I decided to visit the indulgent river. It was very very cool. It gave me chills just brushing up against it.
The instructor inside was offering free mistakes for signing up for the course. The distance between the surface and the deeper implications was on vacation or I might have overachieved. I never did figure out what the course was about, but then I never did take the course.
I left some ice trucks in honor of the quickly approaching season, but I think they melted. Or a train sculpture came into confluence with their destiny and altered them inextricably.
Meanwhile the ocean was talking to me and I wasn't listening. I might have been a visitor, but the ocean was too insistent. I might have understood if I hadn't been so afraid. I could swim but I preferred to walk and I knew how quickly tired arms and legs can wrap themselves around something way too large and not at all good for the other parts of the body.
I just couldn't decide how large this thing was.
If I were writing this in the future, I could say, "I was right. It was larger." I could say that if I had survived. It would be entirely ironical.
But I'm not and the ocean's waiting.
If it's the sea that's gotten in me, the trouble's the same, but some say the irony's greater. I don't understand why.
I wouldn't care about the difference if I didn't have some hopes of publishing my failures. You see, it's a story and not a life, which doesn't have to end the same way.
