But I am Naked Now

I’m naked.  Outside with the finicky sunshine, crickets, a plane rumbling somewhere near.  I like the free air and the heat on all of me.  The bees move as if they are being breathed - in and out, sliding along some invisible fabric.  

I am self conscious writing to you.  When you look at me, it goes deep.  An exquisite panic arises.  I build castle walls to keep you out and dig secret tunnels to sneak you in.  

You see me, not just the parts I show, not just the parts I consciously hide, but a whole of me that I cannot perceive.

A squirrel sits preening in a crook of the tupelo that leans over the pond.  Another scampers through mulch collecting acorns, its movements punctuated with any sound that might be cause for alarm.  I smell the work of a chainsaw - warm, astringent.  I try to relax into the familiarity of this world, but the pressure of you coursing through me, thickening my blood, is a new sensation.  I don’t know myself as I used to.

I feel compelled to ask if its reciprocal.  It’s a defense, an attempt to soothe myself with the idea that there is camaraderie in the internal quake.

The sun is sweet.  When it comes out, it lays on me.  I can see I am not the only thing feeling its heat.  But the squirrels and hummingbirds take shade, so it is just me and the rocks and the wood, fixed in radiance.  It feels good it because it comes from outside.

I want to travel with you like dragonflies, bent, twisted into each other, making knotted islands of our delicate bodies atop the murky water we know so well.

I want to write succinctly, matter-of-factly, less poetry, more substance.  I want clean and elegant simplicity.  But I am naked now and I can’t disguise these heavy prose - the exposure of a throbbing beauty, roots grasping stones, clinging to the Earth, screaming in anguish and delight at having been discovered.

Fishing and Flowers

She is sitting on a humid swing.  The air is full of cicadas and a smell of white flowers.  Her body rocks in the gentle seat.  Back and forth.  He is on his way home.  She hopes he is in a happy mood, but it's a shallow attempt at conjuring joy.  The truth is, it only affirms her expectation of his state of arrival.  Years it has been and always she finds herself trapped in the waiting.  Driving down 465 without air conditioning, imagining a lake and the fishing boat and the bass bigger than his arm, he pushes aside the tone of voice he knows is waiting for him.  Meek (when did it become so falsely demure?), concerned-sounding (when did she think this expressed love?), imploring (at what point did he stop talking to her?)

The weight of summer quiets everything.  All living beings within a ten mile radius, cease to emote, drop their patterns for this one moment each day.  It is a dense twilight, so big it cannot be measured in units of time.  Mostly it passes unnoticed, in fact the very nature of its existence is ephemeral, impossible - a snowflake in August.

On this particular day, high above them, a swooping gull split the snowflake with an eager angle of flight.  The gesture sent one half through the window of his car and the other piece down past the willow tree from which the swing hangs.  A tiny ice crystal landed on her nose, slid down the nape of his neck.  On this particular day, the invisible moment was mutually recognized.

The meat of their thoughts did not disappear, but all the residue - weeks, decades, generations of ways of thinking, washed through them.  He continued to drive, she, to swing.  Fishing was there, the heady scent of a garden, but nothing more.  Nothing else pressing against the moment, twisting it.

She gets up from the swing.  He pulls into the driveway.  They look like children.  She grabs a lemonade popsicle and runs to meet him.  He gets out of the car grinning.  She is tiny next to him.  He lifts her up under her armpits and licks the frozen treat in her hand.  “Fishing?” he asks her.  She wraps her legs around his waist like it’s a tree, kisses him on the forehead.  “Yes.”