Guest Writer - Gregory Hirsch

 

 

Cascade
by Gregory Hirsch

There was a first time for everything. The
first time we made love was on the beach.
She was brought there by a simple note.
Written while watching her host open mike
night. I had walked up to her, placed it in
her warm hand, sweaty from holding the mike,
and without words walked away.

I want to bathe
in the aroma of your flesh.
Want to ingest you,
make you more than just a memory,
but a very part of my molecular being.


Come with me tonight
silently,
so the blind children will not hear.
Come with me
in the shadows,
so the deaf children will not see.
Come with me
with no utterance of name
in secret
so the mind will not know.
Come with me
in rain
so the scent will not linger.
Come with me to the shadows
aside the world,
free.
Come with me, by night,
hold my hand,
and wander.
Come with me tonight
and remember nothing
but a dream.

When I awoke the next morning it was dream.
A string of hallucinations. From the first

touch of our hands, our lips, our bodies. Like
something not real. We had a memory, a
feeling for each other, and a secret. The
beach looked different but there was nothing
tangible. Nothing to convince me I had not dreamed the night before.

My name,
not paper
nor my image, film
my existence, memory
yours.
The place, my territory
full moon for a candle
the sand my bed
the sea my tears
and the wind, our
music, our souls.
In secret,
like illusion
mystery, a dream or fantasy
the only witness
you
and the wind to cover,
our marks in the sand.


The next night I sat waiting for her. The
earth made her usual noises. Buffeting wind,
water lapping against the dock posts, cars in
the distance. Insects crying out for a mate.
Occasional voices, and every set of footsteps,
hers, for a moment.
But, she did not come.



The fingers of wine
run late, and randomly
ending in drops, like nectar
on flesh
as they reach the small pool of wine
waiting in the bottom of the glass.
Like waiting for her.



Ask of me,
what you, cannot give.
Another glass of wine, relax, breath,
wait till you mean something
then walk away,
Another glass of wine, tingling, relaxing,
ask me to care,
ask me to need you
as a friend,
and then not be there,
Another glass, sleep
ask me to be there,
and make me stand alone,
alone,
you tell me it doesn’t matter,
but I’m standing alone
drinking lies
yours.



I called her house, her phone rang, each string
of tones perfectly spaced, drifting off in a
line, gaps of silence, a witness to distance
being created. There was no answer. I left
the house to look for her. But she had found
me. When I saw her note on my car I did not
understand, and thought is was too late to find
her.

The sound of deception
passes
easily through the night.
A single lie carries far.
And the truth, farther still
is hidden
in what we do not want to hear.



I found her on the dock, in the halo of a light
mounted to a pile, a couple feet above the
dock. The subtle light illuminated her from
the waist down, a gentle glow, really, that
made all that fell outside its sharp
demarcation even darker.

A small boat gently rubbed against the
dock, its motor purring smoothly, then
dropping a beat every so often. I could see
her duffle on it’s floor. “Hello” I said.
“Before I go, I wanted you to know
something”, she said, as I stood there,
motionless. No closer then twenty feet,
watching her undo the lines, flashlight in her
hand, her voice loud over the idling outboard.
“You don’t know me.”
“I suppose not.” I answered.
She stood up, took two steps and crouched
down to the other line. Not taking her eyes
off me. As if ready to leap should I move
towards her.
“I am sunglasses and a cloak, to you,
other people’s spoken lies. Friends. Only a
secret
whispered once, into the night,
a missed deception, perceived,
can ever be understood.”

I stood puzzled as the running lights of the
small craft raced out of the harbor. How far
could she go in such a small boat, I did not
know. But the entire next day it failed to
reappear.

On the second day she called me at work.
She was on a neighboring island.
“Hello.” I said to her in a calm, even tone.
“I’m sorry”, she said, “I got scared.”
“Scared?” I asked.
“I guess I just needed time to think.” She said.
“Okay.”
“Have you written?” she asked.
“Because of you, you mean?” I said more telling then asking.
“Yes.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Read it to me.”
“I can’t, I don’t have it on me.”
“Then from memory.”
“Ok, from memory.”

“You ask me to recite a poem
from memory.
Would you
believe I could do it,
if I refused to?
If I told you I could create one
while sitting her with you,
but would not write it,
would you still think I could?
If I told you I could cry,
without you seeing,
how would you know
I was not crying now.”


The next morning there was a note, letting
me know she had returned. It was written on
home made paper, tucked into my screen
door, where the morning dew could drip onto
it. Some of the ink had started to run. It was
thick, and the creases where it was folded
were heavy, swelling from the moisture.
Some of the fibers stuck to my fingers as I
unfolded it.

I can say I love you,
and curiosity can weave patterns with
innocence
because by the ocean there is only instinct,
and in the moonlight there are no lies.
And two souls could find companionship
drawn together by a common passion
and you could take my hand and tell me,
and I would understand, because the heart
is a scavenger, searching for love,
amongst the sand.

VI.


Like all things silently progressing, the
summer too comes to an end. And a group of
strangers brought together by an island, finds
themselves crying on the beach. Bathed in
moonlight, feeling the chill of late August’s
night air. Unable to offer solace in the lie of
meeting next year.
Though some of us would meet again, to
share similar tears, (in both senses of the
word, to have something torn from us and to
cry in the loss), others would never again be
seen. It is in that foreshadowing moonlight
that we mourned the death of summer.

Cannot words
speak
the truth of lies?
And mortality bring
innocence into our lives
as rain to cool
a summers day
like death that comes
to end a time of play.


II

I.

There is nothing more amazing than meeting
someone on a far off island, falling in love,
and then finding out you’re starting at the
same college in the fall. There is also an
equally amazing, yet devastating shock to
learn that that person is dying. It paints over
your entire life and then invades your dreams,
like a cancer creeping throughout its host,
from organ to organ, crowding out the last
functional cells, extinguishing balance,
ending its own life.

I remember as she first told me, the words
scorching the air between us as she spit them
out with anger. I was carried away by her
emotional pain, that like fire spreading, would
become physical.

The cancer
it burns through her body as fire,
least that’s how she says it feels!

The pain! The destruction!

She is dry grass in the wind!
To its lust,
it will strip the land
and starve in its own death.


II.

It was amazing how fast the cancer made its
presence known. Because at first she couldn’t
even believe it was there.

It is subtle,
the intensity of death.
At first it is this little thing,
that bothered you,
that you had “looked at”.
Suddenly it is a seed that fell from a tree
lurking,
in you, in their words,
but unfelt.
And it explodes,
into risks,
into statistics,
into treatments,
into words like “remission”, “metastases”
anxiety.
As rapidly as it is removed
there is another seed.
As rapidly as they talk of a cure
you’re putting your life in order
as the order of life becomes lost inside you.
When you only just learned to live
You’re learning to leave.

She was no longer in school, but would
visit often. Once we sat on a bench outside
the library, overlooking a large sloping field.
It is by a walkway but partly hidden by trees.
The bench was made of stone, with
someone’s name on it, in “memory of”, like a
tomb stone. Like a tomb stone it was solid
and cold. Though it was beneath us and not
the other way around.
She was talking, but I kept thinking, the
bench represented someone’s life. A
collection of memories. How many other
students sat on this bench, maybe after failing
a test, or sat listening to their partner breakup
with them. Or sat discovering someone new,
a first kiss, making memories, laughing and crying.
The bench certainly would be “in memory
of”. I would never pass by it again without
thinking of her, of us, sitting on it. Even
thirteen years later.
I was at my reunion. I was walking by it
with a group of friends and my family when it
took me by surprise. We simply rounded the
turn in the sidewalk and it was there. The
chill was so sudden, so palpable, it stopped
my laughter, my conversation, and broke my
stride.
It is where she accepted her disease, and
forced us to.

© Gregory Hirsch

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