He knows he is leaving only to come back only to leave once again only to wake-up once again, the overall thrill of the fall is all... Oct 20th 1996 (c)

"Did you watch the plane take off?” I ask her, a year and a half later.

 

                                                                         ***

 

The moment I find my seat on the plane I explode into a welt of tears. I have the window seat again. My view is facing opposite that of the airport.  I loll my head down  to my lower right. I am a sentimental blister. I am a scabbed over failure.  It seems like the only reason I trekked up to Appleton was simply to initiate the blood of my own wound.

  My entire face continues to burn. My chest feels as if it has been stunned, tears smilingly skid  in wild rivulets  forming twin-tassels of salt and moisture descend down the side of my face. Outside it is still the apical autumnal afternoon. Golden. I wonder if Megan is waiting inside, just waiting to watch the airplane take off. I can feel several of the passengers’ looking at me. Briefly I think about Kitty Pekowski back in East Peoria and wonder what she is doing this afternoon.

 The plane is stranded on the runway, huffing, make sounds reminiscent of a fresh battery vibrator.

I will not arrive home for another six hours.  Light seems to stretch and break into the side plexiglas of the window.  Somehow I realize that I have a napkin stowed in my side pocket probably filched from Peggy’s last night and I hold it up and blow. Tears  just seem to be kicking out of my face. The stewardess looks at me and inquires if I am alright and I nod. I look out the side window again. It feels as if we have been waiting on the tarmac for an inordinate amount of time.  I pad the sides of my cheeks.  Next to me an overweight middle-aged man wearing a purple caricatured hat and glasses sits down. He straddles the seat  as if using an outhouse stool for a medieval coronation ceremony. It seems to take him a minute to get comfortable.  Like everyone else on the plane  I can feel him looking in my direction and pretending not to look.  There is an empty row of seats behind me and an empty row of seats ahead. I wonder why he feels compelled to sit directly next to me.

He buckles up. His girth and purple hat is blocking the view of the opposite window where from I was trying to look out to see if I could espy Megan’s eyes looking back at me one last time.

 

I offer several snorts.  The fat man is wearing a fanny pack. He is looking at the safety-instructions brochure for Unites Airways as if he is perusing a dessert menu.

  I take several sniffs. For reasons I can’t even explain I feel compelled to talk to the overweight middle-aged man seated next to me blocking my view out the opposite window.  I have been seated on the plane for what feels like forty-five minutes.  I clear my throat. I push my sunglasses up into the center of my forehead. For some reason I feel compelled to convey to him that I am okay.

"Boy it really is a beautiful autumnal day." I say, before asking if he had a nice weekend in Appleton.

He tells me he is from Osh Kosh. I look at his hat again. It is the pear-shaped obese creature from McDonald's named Grimace.

I ask him what he is doing in Chicago. He tells me he works as a chef-consultant for McDonald's and is headed towards the McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, IL. Judging by his girth it looks like he has been spoon fed Mcnuggets ever since his mom wedged his fat-ass from the contours of his high-chair. He asks me if I realize that McDonald's is the largest purveyor of fast-food on this planet. He asks me if I realize that they serve almost 70 millions inhabitants a day. I'm pissed off as it is. I tell him no.

"Back home we call McDonald's  McMuck for propagating childhood obesity and paying their employees McShit in terms of wages. "

The portly man turns the opposite direction. The captain warbles static overhead.  In five minutes we are scheduled for takeoff.  I am still seated on the antipodal side facing the purple caricature on the portly man's hat.

I want to see Megan one last time through the Plexiglas only my view remains obstructed by a McFucking idiot.

I vow never to eat at McDonald's again.
 

  

                                                                          ***

 

“VAH—RHONA!!!” The barista with black skin and ruddy Buddha like cheeks says to me as I inquire what coffee is on tap. I nod my head and order a venti. I think about the letter my mother sent me, telling me that if my flight arrives early on Sunday there’s a chance I could grab the five o’clock charter back to P-town.  I can taste the salt of my moisture curl out from the sockets of my face. My sunglasses are still blocking any slice of wished for autumnal sunshine that might reflect a puddle of prism beneath the dirty upside down dirty rainbow of my eyes.

If I hurry I can make the bus, but for some reason I just want to be alone for a couple of hours and skirt through the almost papal-linoleum of the terminal and look at people, watching where they are going, watching the blinking pulse of departure and arrivals, wondering if people realize where they are going, wondering if people realize where they have been.


 

                                                    ***

 

                               
 

 

 

Hard tufts of exhaust smoke and luggage slapped over shoulder blades, a look of emptiness falling down from beneath his pupils, casting, downtrodden, oval penumbra’s under the lids of his eyes. He will amble on the bus, he will alight the Peoria Charter, his heart still cached in a red sports bag his own father used for tennis outings. His velvet suede Doc Martens purchased in Europe, the ones Kitty Pekowski inadvertently cracked an egg on last summer in an endeavor to create a shoelace soufflé, he is going back home to everything he has ever left. Everything which is seminally important to him which he seems not give a fuck about any more- he can sniff the salt, exited through his tear ducts, having evaporated, having descended in twin rivulets down the contours of his once gaunt countenance-his hair, slightly sprayed, but even less so. The can-a-day fetish he spritzed over a four year failed high school campaign has now all been exhumed, his hair has arched a proud upper-lip buoyancy on its own, and he no longer has to squint as much, although his eyes continue to burn. He continues to lumber down the airport corridor, salivating for Starbucks, frisking his pockets for the pack of Marlboro Lights they smoked together over the weekend. But all he comes up with is lint, a crumpled five spot, and a heart that feels that it is pocket change and ten pin heavy. His bag swung over his shoulder with no regard for the passengers floating on either side of him. He continues to jaunt, stops in the Mens to remove one of his contacts, he continues to jaunt. The smell of Nicotine in airports and Bus stops is one that will soon be all to familiar to him, on the precipice of his second decade on this solar pupil sparsely riddled with continental glaucoma hovering in the fabric of eternal galactic bed spread ; buoyed like Christmas ornaments. He continues to walk, thinking of the way her neck jilted back as they communed together with her family earlier that morning. Thinking of her, not wanting to bathe, not wanting to loose her ashed-apricot scent anchored inside of his bones. He knows he is leaving only to come back only to leave once again, only to wake-up once again, only to love once again and dream once again, knowing full well, even in his nineteen year old short-haircut, premature sideburns and unblemished skin that this time he will drive faster, dream harder, will hammer shut the lids of his eyes tight enough so that when, upon flapping them ajar, he will come into her face once again, see her eyes folded hushed like a dinner napkins, her lips inside of his lips, her tongue massaging the inside of his mouth, everything frozen, forever.

 

 

                                                       

                                                               
                                                                                       *

 

            His father picks him up at the bus station. He has been waiting. The October air hits hard and heavy into his lungs spawning little cauliflower patches of moisture exhaling in between each of his steps as he hoists his dream fraught duffel bag over his shoulder. He has returned home. His father is there to welcome him. The car is warm and the front cement steps of his house seem to push up against the soles of his Doc Martens. His mother will inquire. His sisters will inquire. His friend Kyle will, after firing up another cigarette, inquire if I had brought something back home with me from up North. Everyone will inquire. Everyone will wonder. Everyone will ask. He will sit all alone, his head pensive and heavy, his thoughts constipated, dripping out of his lobes. He writes, he writes poems. He writes about being close to someone and then having to leave them right away. He wonders at all moments of the day how she is doing. He wonders if she just so happens to be thinking about him. He wonders if she has gone to Minnesota to see her boyfriend. He is wondering all of this and he has no place left to wander. The parabolic curves of the hallway inside I.C.C., curving around, student’s hackeying bean-sac-volleying them between ankles and foot-he leaves. Walking, he leaves his class. Every Friday after that is a golden stem spooled from imperial sunsets. Golden. The color of the leaves. And he is walking, smoking cigarettes, wondering out loud where he is supposed to go from here. Wondering what sign life will point at him. Intrigued by the whole purpose, the whole reason.

Wondering simply, what is to come next.



                                                                                  ***

                                      

“Yes,” I say. My head still a piñata of tears waiting to be delicately released by the gentlest stab at the heart.

 "I had a great time. It was really good to see Meg again after all these months." I tell my mom when she inquires

            I wait until everyone has gone to bed. I wait. The contents of my duffel bag spread across my bed as if it has just been shot. I wait. Wondering if I left the package of Marlboro lights down in the basement of Beechwood court. Almost immediately she picks up and says hello.

 

“Hi,” I say. “I got home okay.” There is a long pause. I remember her standing next to me in line and then leaving. I remember the obese gentlemen in the Grimace cap staring at me as I inhale tears, cross my legs and try to have a professional conversation with him. I remember my reflection in the plexi-glass, warm tears sliding down my upper lip as the plane took off. I remember how the weather that weekend was perfect autumnal weather I had always imagined. I remember the how, from above, Appleton and Wisconsin looked like a giant golf course at a country club. I remember the minister requesting that we move the chairs and then we just standing in the room and holding them. I remember feeling released, coming to the conclusion that Megan didn’t love me, thinking that the overall thrill of the fall was all, remembered how loose my shoulders felt, like every emotion indicative of romantic yearning and autumnal sunsets had momentarily been released and I had been granted emotional amnesty before she appeared before me again. Her voice, asking me simply if I wanted to talk.

 

 I remember her telling me that she thought that during Before Sunrise, that she thought that I was going to kiss her. I remember the two of us trying on hats in Daytons, after I had excused myself to the restroom to sop up my own tears. I remember Peef and the church service and how I grabbed her hand at communion. I remembered all of that in the space separating feeling from actuality. The moment before she responded. The moment before her voice told me how she felt.

 

            “That’s good,” Is all she says.

 

            Another pause. Do I mention the plane ride? Do I mention anything else. Do I mention that I spent all afternoon clad in an veil of tears. Do I mention the guy in the grimace cap or that I feel like I have failed?

 Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that  I got home alright and everything.

I want Megan to say thanks for calling and letting her know that, only she refrains. I want Megan to say that she had a good weekend and to thank me for making the trek up there, only she refrains.

"Just promise you won't forget me." I say.

"I promise I won't forget you, David." Megan amends.

I can hear her shake her head and smile on the other end.
 

 

I hang up the phone in a subtle click and wait for the rest of my life to begin.

interregnum (iii.) Oct 2007 132 months after Appleton, the place he is going, the place he has aready been...

This is the way he feels right now, the month of October, 2007,  the place he is going, the place he has already been—this is how he feels as he Google maps the name of the avenue where she used to inhabit with her family eleven years ago this month, the house on Beechwood Ct., the place where he came back to after all these years—this is how he feels, using Google Earth and seeing the glass eye of the planet squint from the parallax of some billion dollar piece of equipment while finger pointing back into the atmosphere of the planet, and how via squinting, employing the plastic clitoris shape-wheel dashed in the center of a palm capped device called a mouse, watch as the digitalized orb of the planet I have called home scrolls into  view as if watching an eyelid peel back the mystery of night and blanket into the stunning blue that is morning—the blue of my planet reminiscent of the shades of blue pooled in her twin eyes as we sat on the couch in the downstairs basement and I held up the my poems in the fashion of sheet music, my lips skipping over dotted ripples of vowels and sunken consonants as if skipping a pebble across a lagoon at dusk. And here is Megan somehow next to me fifteen years later as I aerially scroll into the oblate geometry of the planet. Google Earth automatically plants a pennant above the vernal quilt that is Wisconsin, that is Appleton, the city from above a vivid topography of every shade of green imaginable even though it is October during Harvest, and how it resembles my first ever dream-vignette eleven years ago, chasing Megan across a thatched field of different patches of emerald—commodious fields where the earth stretches into an arable sea of propagating life—as I chase her through the labyrinth of a barn and somehow end up losing her again. All this now re-enters the tint of my vision, falling as if from high altitude, as if my plane lost control of its nervous system and nose dives into the green of the earth like a touch down. I see it all now, over head, the cardboard patterns of the airport, the Fox river trickling like a tear through the center of the suburban villa, and, employing the net atlas I find the house, the address, stenciled in colored blue-print planks to eschew privacy laws. I see the park where we walked past that Saturday morning to get breakfast. The dilapidated coffee shop across the street from the abandon card-board eyed Lutheran day care center where she shuffled my romantic predilections back into my face. I see the splash of grass where I caressed her that perfect autumnal afternoon, the place where I quoted rote Rumi and Whitman and Shakespeare, spilling out my heart via employing the medium of ink-blood of others, reminding her of the time of year thou mayest in me behold, imploring her not to the metaphysical marriage of true minds to admit impediments. Beseeching her to follow the wild dash of madness inside her breath as I barter out the mantras of Whitman, spilling out the stanzas of the body electric through syncopated poetic whole and half notes, thinking about how I quoted that same poem to Jana on the crags of the east bluff just over a year later, only two and a half months before Megan called me up over James Joyce and tea humbling inquiring, “Is David there?” thinking about all this, wondering if in an accelerated century science will have evolved to such an intergalactic purview where Google will be able to hoist a telescope using the plank scale a millennium or two away and how, squinting with this sort of divine apparatus lens, I can look back in time, witness again every molecule and laugh my head off in divine fits of light...

 

How Soon Hath Time the Subtle Thief of Youth....Oct 20th 1996 (b)

 

We arrive home from Church before her parents. It feels good not to be in Church clothes and to have gone to church wearing the same jeans I've been sporting all weekend. Megan is removing her shoes by slipping them off the back of her heal one at a time before holding them in a pinch as if they need to be exterminated in the back of her closet until Sunday next.

We have maybe less than two hours left to be with each other for all of eternity.

Megan tells me she has a question just for me. She walks ahead of me to the room where her big senior portrait is stationed above the mantle in almost frescoesque fashion. I refrain from making the comment I thought was witty about the being able to see her nipples through the winsome lavender drape of a dress she was wearing in the photograph. Instead she reaches behind the frame and pulls out several wallet-sized photos taken in the senior photo shoot.

She then asks me which one I want.

I point to the one that is on the wall. Megan tells me that that's the one I made fun of the day before.

“I know. But that's my favorite.” I then tell her that they are all my favorite. I tell her that if she took a sonogram of my heart she would find each of the four photos stowed respectively in each aortic chamber. Megan responds back with something that resembles a blush.

She then hands me the thumb sized picture. I kiss it in front of her. She tells me that she is going to go upstairs to change. I ask if I could go upstairs and wait outside her bedroom door when she changes. Megan tells me that its probably best if I wait down here while she changes just in case her parents come home they might think its like weird or something.

As she clambers up the carpeted steps upstairs and I kiss the photo again. I sit on the bottom step. For some reason I feel compelled to carol up the steps and tell her not to worry I rewound Before Sunrise. Megan echoes back a terse display of single-syllable gratitude. I try not to think about Megan reeling up the brown autumnal outfit she just wore to church. I try not to think about her being clad only in her bra and panties and frisking the interior contents of her dresser drawers looking for something to wear.

For reasons I can't comprehend I call her angel as I reach her floor, holding her picture out in front of me again like some sort of communion wafer that is waiting to be consecrated.

“What I love about this picture is that this is really the first picture I have of you.” I tell her, before explaining that I have the picture she sent me when she was three days old in her first letter and I have the extra passport picture she sent me where she wasn't smiling because she just got her wisdom teeth extracted. Megan responds by chirping out unintelligible vowels. Without looking back and as if on tip toes I scuttle up to her door and knock. Megan opens it like a three-inch slit wound. Her eye is visible.

“Hey,” I ask, “Could you put on that outfit you were wearing the last time I saw you in Chicago?"

Megan blinks as if she isn't sure just what I am talking about.

“You know, the denim bibs. The overalls. You looked cute in those.”

From behind the crevice in the door Megan says the word yes. Before this weekend the last time I saw Megan was seven months ago almost to the date. Since then I have traveled to Europe for my third time in as many years, I have held close Kitty Pekowski at the Scottish Rite Cathedral, I have become unfaithful, smoked cigarettes, worked menial spewing jobs, found a true brother in Patrick A. Mullowney. I have sat through multiple friend-induced Tarrentino films and have cocked my head back in laughter, reminiscing over London in TRAINSPOTTING. I have written poems and have ingested copious amounts of coffee into my veins; I have swiped my academic, ardent soles on the welcome matt at the local community college. I have fallen in love with everything about life. I have noticed how, the older I get, the more life and autumn spreads its legs and shoves me between her leafy pudendum, raking promises and bonfires on top of my scalp-offering me the promise of one more year here, one more year on this planet to write about everything that I will ever know; everything that I will ever feel thinking about telling all of this to Megan over the phone as we talked for hours last summer, telling her about how the world feels at the full-sated crepuscular feeling at dusk as the leaking slit of lavender light breaks through the bottom cracks of the sky. I will be smoking a cigar years later, there will be money in the bank. There will be a wife, and my own child who hovers around the caps of my knees, inquiring things. There will be stories I will tell my child about my own father, like my father would often tell me stories about his own father. I will tell her all of this, and still, in autumn, when the wind begins to vortex and rattle, I’ll stop and inhale and think, my mind composing a purana, a thank you to the sun, the unflinching orb, who always looks at me with her mouth full, her top down, and the light pouring through every pore I have to offer.

My ears register the door pressing close into a snap as I head down the stairs. Her parents arrive maybe thirty seconds later asking where there daughter is. I tell them she is upstairs, changing.

 There are footsteps. As I turn around I see her, behind me, wearing the bibs. Wearing the outfit I first said goodbye to her in. I see her smiling, looking apprehensive. Smiling none the less. An acorn smile buttons out  from between her lips. Her face has been the color of the afternoon all day, a golden tinged hue emanating forth, autumn dusk, her body, smiling, looking at my body.

                                                                     ***
I am leaving in forty-five minutes. For the first time all weekend I begin to take pictures.


“Let me have another photograph of the Master of the House,” David jest, once again, making sure the flash to my camera is on as I shoot, The same living room where David bartered Pico back to Megan, earlier in the day, while we were rather late for church.


I ask if I can snap a picture of Megan and her mom outside near the albino-looking birch tree.

 

“Now can you take one of us?” The mom nods her head like a buoy.

 

Scrutinizing the picture years later light seems to break around into spangles of autumnal light, light dripping around us in an almost wreath auerole-like fashion and, upon looking at the picture the only word I can think of that comes to mind is the word spate. I shake Megan's mom's hand by cupping both of my hands around her outstretched palm thanking her. Telling her what a pleasure it was indeed to meet her. I shake Mr. Snow's hand goodbye, again thanking him for his accommodations and his hospitality. Mr. Snow gives me a smile and tells me that I am welcome to come back and visit any time. I sling my red duffel bag over my shoulder as Megan proceeds to her vehicle, for some reason I open the drivers side door for her and she smiles back at me. The awkwardness that accompanied our every breath the day before seems to be almost completely effaced. Megan revs up the engine in a mechanical huff and I wave again at the creatures she has perennially identified as her progenitors, waving them goodbye from behind the bluish windshield in a swat like motion, Mr. and Misses Snow standing in front of their comfy suburban abode waving back at us as if in mirrored reflection his arm situated around his wife's shoulder blades like a domestic wing.

                                                                       ***

We each smoke one more cigarette en route to the airport, waiting until we are at least three blocks away to fire one up. The windows are respectively cracked midway as a courtesy to our incessant ashing. I tilt back, place one of my doc martens on the seat, as if we are still in Peggy's from last night. I smoke-slash-ash with my right hand. My left hand is lassoed around Megan's upper back/lower neck.

She doesn't seem to mind.

We talk about how fast the weekend transpired. Megan seems pensive and heavy. Part of me want to hold her close, wants to tell her that it doesn't matter if my feelings for her warrant some sort of nonreciprocal emotions inside her skull. Wants to tell her that even though this is not how I wanted things to be somehow they were perfect nonetheless.

Part of me just wants to reel her close to me in my arms and tell her to hush her eyes and to come close so I can simply hold her.

Megan seems apologetic. She keeps on stuttering and saying that she is sorry.

From the periphery of the windshield it shows a reflection of the two of us wearing sunglasses, my head is slightly tilted into the direction of Megan's body, Megan is again looking straight ahead a look of extreme concentration stretched into her face, the silhouette of the rearview mirror casting an almost plus-sign-like shadow, the shape of the crucifix we knelt down in front of and worshiped earlier that day.

On the radio that damn bubble gum Meredith Brainbridge song is still playing.

As I once again check out the denim contours of Megan's sung ass as she reaches over to snap the half-protruding emerald ticket that will allow us access into the airport parking lot part of me again feels like erupting. Part of me wonders if I will ever see Megan again.

As we get out of the car our doors thump to a close at exactly the same time, as if choreographed. We walk up to the airport check in I feel like holding her hand only I refrain.

 

 

I still open the door for her as we approach the building so that she will enter in first.

 

                                                                           ***

....And in Chicago three days before the first day of Spring almost exactly seven months prior a sixteen year old girl calls me on the phone and asks if she could speak to me. She simply says hi. She is three doors down and to the left. There is a curfew. We are not allowed to leave the sanctity of our hotel rooms after a certain time even though I will ask her if she wants to meet me in the hallway just so I can give her a hug goodnight.

She obliges meeting ne in the center of the hallway, wearing pajamas and her retainer. I kiss the top of her forehead.

We hug for a long time.

We don't let go.

                                                                              ***

She tells me that her family come to this airport a lot especially when her family goes on ski trips or goes to visit her grandma out in Idaho. Megan asks me again if I need to check my luggage. I tell her I am fine. That I only have one bag. She tells me still, I should have it registered and tagged just in case-you-never-know. I listen to her and obey.

 The plane is idling outside as if it is chuffing. As if it is purring in an almost post-coital fashion. As if the plane had just had sex with another plane and they are taking a respite on the cement mattress of the runway.                                         

Megan notes that the plane I am leaving on looks quite a bit smaller than the plane I rode up on.

 

           For some reason I feel like imploding. It wasn’t suppose to be like this. We were suppose to be making out with each other right now. We were suppose to be holding each other close. We were suppose to be making vows. Megan was suppose to be tugging me into her body imploring me not to leave.

 

Instead we just stand, waiting for the boarding call. For reasons inexplicable I thank her again for hospitality. I tell that that I had the proverbial time of my life. I tell her that seeing her is the highlight of my autumn.

 

She remains silent. I’ve spent less than half of the three hundred dollars I have brought with me. Part of me feels oblige to offer her three dollars so that she can pay for her parking voucher.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. She was supposed to be telling me to find a payphone and to call her as soon as I get to O’hare to tell her that I arrived safely. We were supposed to be making plans to meet over the pending holidays. Or perhaps find a weekend where we could meet in Chicago at the Museum.

Megan looks at me as if she wants me to say something to tell her how she feels. There is the static muffle warbling overhead informing us that the flight will be boarding in five minutes.

 

Megan is completely reticent.

Part of me thinks maybe I should tell Megan that I love her. Part of me thinks maybe I should apologize.

“It’ll only be 45 minute flight. Less than the average suburban commute, It feels like the length of a commercial. The fasten seatbelt sign blares on. It fizzles out. We fly over the emerald quilt of Wisconsin. The fasten seatbelt sign illuminates again. The skyline of Chicago which to me always looks like a dioramic of vertically arrayed ice cube trays sails into view. “

I stop. I think how the plane always circles overhead and then skids as it lands.

I wonder if I will ever see Megan again.

My black notebook is still in my red duffel bag. She seems to inch into me at almost vertical angles, as if intentionally bumping into me. I turn to her again. There is first call for the plane to board. Megan again moves subtly in my direction as playing a game of Marco Polo in the community swimming pool.

Megan seems to be biting her lips in a contemplative fashion. She looks at my direction. I hug her again. She seems not to be hugging back. She just seems to be standing there with her limbs

I set my bag down. Megan is giving me an insinuating look like I should get on the plane to verify that my window seat is not taken. I turn and face towards her as if we are plastic figurines stationed in a holiday nativity scene. Using my thumbs and fingers on both hands I manacle her wrist as if she is being convicted.

 

“Listen, I just want to say…”

Megan is looking up at me. All I can focus on is the chestnut-flavored hue of her forehead. Seven months ago we departed on a Sunday. It was snowing outside the Holiday Inn next to the same airport I will be arriving in to take me to the rest of my life in less than an hour’s time.She is wearing the same outfit she wore seven months ago the first time we kissed.

There is an overhead warble informing that the flight non-stop from Appleton to Chicago is boarding. My sunglasses are dangling on the front of my shirt. I reel her into my body.

I tell her I love her.

I call her baby.

 

I kiss her forehead.

 

I tell her goodbye.

 Megan responds by telling me to hurry up. She doesn’t want me to miss my flight.

I turn and walk towards the outdoor entrance to the plane. As I walk Megan is walking next to me. It is again almost like we are choreographed. It is almost like we are walking down the aisle at her church in Appleton in autumn come five years time after confirming vows of eternal love and commitment in front of the pumpkin visage pastor who left us hanging holding the chairs earlier in the morning. Although we are not holding hands her fingers keep clinking into mine as if they were pinecone-castanets.

 I look at her forehead while she is still moving. After a weekend of pure social awkwardness and blown tires and bad movies and coffee shops and poetry, after a weekend where I felt like I was looking for everything that I had ever wanted inside the pulse and splash of my anatomy over the sweet tea sunsets of last August, pummeling out poem after poem in my bedroom, scraping the tip of my pen into the exposed skeletal white of a fresh sheet.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out.

She is still walking next to me. It's like she doesn't want me to go.

I get to the door and hand my boarding pass outstretched like a relay baton. Out bodies are still next to each other almost the moment I step outside en route for the plane.

“Okay goodbye.” Megan says, very quickly. I look back as I walk towards the plane. Her back is already turned.

                                                            ***

          .

interregnum (ii.) August 1998, 22 months apres Appleton

I call. I keep pressing the tips of my fingers into the corresponding numerical shapes. I call. Using the phone card that Jana gave me to call her. Jana knew full well that I wouldn’t call. She knows that I need time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect over just what the fuck is going on with my heart. My heart, the heavy pendulous sac of arteries wound like a watch, thumping at the sight of Megan’s name. I call. The area code of Appleton is nine, two zero. And I keep hitting it. Keep dialing it, taking intermittent swigs from my beer, watching as the crimson fizz slowly creeps up the neck of the bottle. The phone continues to reverberate the monotonous drone. I am thinking of how last April and March we would spend the night together every night long distance, when Megan was still in Decorah. Now she is a camp counselor somewhere and I am in Chicago. Alone. Nursing my beer and tapping ashes from my Camel filters into ashtray, wishing that somehow she would saunter into her room right now. Wishing that she would leave the camp she’s at, anywhere in Minnesota, and arrive back home at Appleton right now. Wishing that she could somehow hear the phone hiss and whir, the sibilate chant; the Buddhist ‘OM’ reverberating with consistency, my eardrum earnestly glued into the receiver, offering a supplication. Hoping that she would pick up. Another ring. Another purr. Somewhere in East-central Wisconsin a phone chants out the time signature of my heart. Somewhere up north the Girl of the country stars is looking into a boys smile and not thinking about the man who is holding the phone in his hear, dialing the are code and the number, with each press of the button, he feels like he is unbuttoning her blouse. He feels like he is cradling her in his arms, He feels like he has a reason to come together, with her voice inside of his voice, a duet of arms and limbs, singing in the same key, at the same moment. Her voice shouting out his name, her voice explaining to him that he is the one she truly wants to spend her life with. Her voice reclining on the mattress, crying afterwards, sharing a cigarette with him, thanking him. Her voice conveying all of this in little technologically coated purrs; a slight warbled sentence composed in the scattered lexicon of the masses. He is waiting for her voice to brush through and say hello. Waiting to hear the click, the somnolent sigh, the nocturnal inquiry. The acknowledgment. The realization. He is waiting in his cousin’s kitchen in Lyons, Illinois.

Waiting to hear all of this.

 The phone groans like an insect in the mid-August swelter. Alone, naked with his thoughts unabashed of her (inside of her) determined to ride it through, focused on waiting for the sun to rise and her voice to vault over the horizon in a blaze of welcome, telling my heart that she just went away for the evening, she had to nourish other continents, I had to spin around in a circle and momentarily turn my back to her. But now she is here. In the incessant ring. Three in the morning and I can feel, can feel as I fish in the icebox for another one, can feel her movements pending, can feel her voice awakening, can feel her eyelids beginning to part, her body beginning to get moist and split down the center as the as the argot purr is suddenly truncated in mid-sentence, and a voice, half-asleep, masculine, picks up the phone, his eyelids heavy. Her father. The one I referred to as the master of the house. Offering a sincere hello. I hang up without saying a word. My phone card is swallowed in the trashcan and baptized with the offerings of the ashtray I’ve been stamping out my Camel filters in all night. Alone, all I can think about is her smile.

I don’t even call Jana once.

 

How soon Hath time the subtle thief of youth....OCT 20th 1996 (a)

The morning slices into me. I sleep with the residue of her lips on my heart, and she is upstairs, in her own bed clouded with stuffed animals and comforters, 20 feet above me, if it was two years later the audacious writer wouldn’t have spent the day being so maudlin, he would have kissed her the first night he was in town, he would have showered her with flowers the second he got off the plane, everything he would have said would have painted the mural of ecstasy on to her lips, he would have made vows and publically composed odes about her beauty—but he is unfledged and coy and she is upstairs, twenty feet above him, sleeping in sweatpants and a tee-shirt, wearing the retainer she always wears when she sleeps that makes it look like she has braces. She is sleeping their, her dog on the bottom of her bed, coddled into a warm mound of flesh, lingering above me like the most beautiful cloud.

There is the sound of muffled overhead thumping.  The morning sun sidles into the down stairs basement window in thick fibers and strands of light.

I arrive out of bed like a caricature in a children’s pop-up book clad only in my boxers. My hair is slightly unkempt.  From the opposite side of the ceiling it sounds as if someone is trying to move a piano over the linoleum of the kitchen floor in their socks.  The entirety of my anatomy is stiff and kicking like a toddler learning to swim for the woman who is twenty feet above me. The women whose residue is still on my lips.

 

Perhaps because she planted the petals of her lips on my lips last night I have slept better and am the last one up. Whereas the Snow family slept in on Saturday a hearty bustle seems alert and agog before 8am Sunday morning. Somewhere in the house the scent of coffee reaches that of my olfactory senses. I sit up in bed, my shirt off, the morning light leaking through the bottom eye-lid of the basement window in horizontal slants of fool’s gold. My bag is close to me, my notebook splayed open like something shot and wounded I pick up my pen and begin to chisel thoughts into stanzas.  There is the smell of cleansing—steam sifting from a recently brewed vat of beckoning caffeinated ambrosia.

 I can’t help but mentally pun that the Snow family is turning into an overhead blizzard-like flurry of upstairs activity.

                                   

I have stepped into one of the two pairs of jeans I brought with me. I am walking around with my shirt off. My hair is unkempt.

 

A voice carols down the stairs as if floating.

 

“David, do you want to take a shower or something?”

 

Downstairs there is a bathroom the size of a walk-in closet in a college dorm room with sink and a pisser and a mirror and bad flowery late 70’s wallpaper yet no shower. I still smell like smoke. I don’t think I’ve showered since Thurs night. A slight film is beginning to form like sandpaper frost across the angular contours of my visage.

 

I still smell like cigar smoke. I want to keep Megan’s odor from when I held her on the couch last night on my body as long as somehow is humanly possible.

 

I walk over to the stairs. Megan has traipsed down to the mid-level and she is conversing to me behind a plank in the wall, as if afraid she will walk in on me naked with my penis a pendulum of flesh slightly dangling bookmarked between the center of my saltine loins.

 

“I’m fine,” I tell her, the moonlight mist of her scent still wading over my limbs like a cloud. There is still more furniture-mover scurrying upstairs.  Splashing water on my face, I notice that if I still squint into the chrome vertical hung rectangle above the sink my eyes still look like they have spent the last twenty-four hours crying uncontrollably.

 

I leave the bathroom and walk to my makeshift bed, tucking in the covers, smoothing out the mattress, placing my gray shirt (thankful that I don’t have to get overly dressed up for church) around the doughy contours of my limbs, placing the contexts back into  my red duffel bag. A pair of rolled jeans.  Goiter-sox that are rolled into each other and look like they could be humping. I place in the black notebook where I have been scribbling my thoughts all weekend, chronicling every molecular facet of the sojourn. I place in my photo album aptly titled Youth. The last thing I place into the bag is the copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, as if it were some sort of tombstone for a veteran dead in war.  

 

Looking behind me I notice that the video tape of Before Sunrise is jutting its plastic tongue out at me through the hyphenated mouth of the VCR and that Megan will need it rewound before she returns it tot eh one video store in Appleton where her credit is still good. I try to rewind but every time it appears the cartridge has seemingly rewound it only gets as far as the beginning of the closing credits, the last scene of Celine looking out the window of a lapsing train, a violin decrescendoing into a weep in the background as a slight forbidden smile untucks itself from somewhere inside her lips. It is the same song I was listening to in my head three days ago as I prepared to leave on my sojourn and now, I keep listening to it, I keep listening to living life over and over again like a round.

After listening to the song for the third time I take the cartridge out, get down on both knees as if waiting to be blessed, and blow.

***

We are late for church.  Her parents have already left. Megan is dressed in a brown dress the color of the season, politely smoothed out and pleasantly hung near the caps of her knees.

 

“Pico? Pico?” She asks, scurrying around the living room. Pinecones and twigs leave her footsteps, her body is a carousel found in the autumnal woods, deep, constructing from the dregs of fur and pine. The carpet becomes a heavily trodden sallow ribbon, ferrying footsteps deep into he well of Fairytales and childhood funnel cakes.

 

“Pico?’ Megan’s voice slaps the living room ceiling fan with a mild echo. Without looking at me, she turns around and prances up the stairs, yelling out the dog’s name, leaving me all alone in the living room of the house. All alone with the bookcases and the fireplace; all alone with the grand piano and the apple orchard at dusk drained silence. All alone, momentarily, with my thoughts, her voice being bushing and pressed throughout her lungs in various floors of the abode. Near the cobbled entrance, where her parents gripped my palm just less than forty hours ago, there are retro-glossed sheen Olin Mills portraits of the Snow family household in various stages of their career. The one in the center, side of a window, shows her father still looking modest in a off-tan three piece suit, her mother, long velvet hair dripping off of her shoulders into a flowered blouse with water fountain puffed pads foaming between jointed shoulder and chin. A child, no more than perhaps four fingers, stands as the bridge between the progenitors. Clasped between the matriarchs arm, attired in a little outfit, is Megan. A smile blossoming into a ray of sunshine beaming forth from near her brow.

 

Megan has still not arrived from above the balcony of steps. I hear carpeted thuds, and the occasional door slam. I hear Megan almost cursing to herself, looking for the damn dog.

 

“Pico! Pico!” Megan yells, her voice itch against the carpet and the wallpaper. I stare at the ponderous drag of the grand piano, how it looks almost like some water buffalo grazing. From behind the day sofa, I see a brown sphere, coddling it’s limbs so that it resembles a globe. Without thinking I lift Pico up in the air, cradling him, holding him the way Megan’s mother is holding her in the portrait just inside the alcove.

 

There are more hurried carpeted steps. The lower hemisphere of Megan’s outfit is twirling around the final dash of stairs. Her body hushes when she looks at me, Pico cradled in my arms, very silently. With her mouth still buttoned she nears, holding out both hands. I feel her arms as we barter the warm creature between us. She looks down at Pico and then looks back into my eyes, a ruffled smile purling into her lips.

 

“Come on,” She says. “We need to get to Church. My parents are going to wonder where we are.”

 

 

                                                                        ***

 

Frost licks its icy tongue into the Earth early in mid-Wisconsin. I think of my father, late for his students, holding his milked coffee, placing the thermos above the car as he first picks the veneer of opaque frost from the windshield, tapping his limbs around the old Pontiac, as if a dentist scrapping plaque from the caves of an inner patrons mouth.

 

Megan is an old pro at this. I open the car door and step inside as she immediately slaps the metallic door shut in my face, surrounded my icy mirror that occludes my frosty vision with thick sheaths of ice. The car is started and within thirty seconds I will no longer be able to see my breath bubbled out before me as I speak. Megan twists the keys in the ignition and operates the defrost on the windshield. She shimmies around the car, dutifully scrapping off peels of frost, her scraper transitioning into a military barber’s electric sears, granting the glass a mandatory butch before Basics.

 

By the time she has circled the caravan she slaps the side door close. Ice still gelled on the windshield, flipping the wipers on, it quickly dissolves in two thick exclamatory marked swipes. The inside car is toasty, and her head rotates behind the seat as she pulls back and swooshes out a u, into the manor of Beeechwood court, where heaps of leaves remained piles and pyred at the corner, awaiting the snuffed arrival of the mechanical dinosaur to sniff them up.

 

“That was good,” I say, endeavor to communicate in terms of small talk. “I’ve never seen a windshield thawed like that before.” Megan just looks at me, slightly nods her head, and continues driving. I look at the cover to the BEST MIXED TAPE I HAVE EVER HEARD and try not to think about her boyfriend in Minnesota, try not to think about the mixed tapes I made for her. Think about the long winding letters sloppily composed in blue-ink that looked like spiked river hydraulics. Try not to think about any of this, as we drive, into Downtown Appleton. I am seated next to her, my hand pressed against the side of my face, trying not to hurt inside.

                                                                   ***

The church is located by the river, behind College avenue. It is masonry granite and has an autumnal flare to it. Megan tells me that there is only one service this weekend since the church is celebrating some sort of anniversary everyone is agog and moving furntiure to verify there is enough room after the service for the potluck dinner.

Upon entering the building we immediately saunter into the Pastor. The pastor is all rubicund-cheek pumpkin visage with a gourd-shaped nose and potbelly torso in his collar, towering over both of us, Megan sinking in the hot-air balloon of his shadow as he talks to her looking down out of necessity and girth, floating amidst the incumbent festivities. Megan quickly introduces me as her friend to which the beet-faced Reverend protrudes his hand in an all to post-benediction exit, bobbing his chin several times saying it is nice to meet me, his palm the size of a softball catchers mitt.

           

“Why don’t you guys help and move some more chairs.” He says, pointing to the community room off the ramp in the narthex where the après service celebration dinner will transpire.

 

            “Okay,” She says, sounding unsure, sounding that she doesn’t want to get a verbal lecture by the Reverend who confirmed her four years earlier.

 

    The church and adjoining community room have the same scent of every Lutheran church and adjoining community room I have ever been in. There is the heavy odor of disinfectant mixed with the percolating aged aroma of feeble Sunday school coffee.

 

            Megan and I each pick up a single chair and follow the rest of the teal-tie parishioners into the community room, where set are tables each with what appears to a plate of wafers and miniaturized plastic shot glasses full of wine as a center piece.

           

“They are going to do communion in here, after the service.” Megan says, with me first inquiring. The two of us are still holding our individual chair as members of the congregation tilt past us.

 

            “It looks like the room is already set for the dinner.” I say.

 

            “What should we do with the chairs?” She says, holding the chair by the back oak stem as if trying to pick up a sack of potatoes, reminiscent of the illegitimate ersatz child  they make you carry around the halls in highschool health classes.

 

            “I don’t know,” I say, looking back into Megan at the brown skirt she is wearing that seems to correlate perfectly with the autumnal light. Sun is screeching into the room from the east the way sunlight enters the church in spring on easter morning. There is something beautiful in the method in which Megan is holding the chair. Instead of sitting it down and resting she lets it slip just a little bit and then reels it up, near her chin as if trying to perform one final push up in the presidential fitness test fashion.

 

            I tell Megan we should set the chairs down and go sit into the sanctuary.

 

            “We just can’t leave the chairs here.” She says, sounding as if she is talking about  orphans in a third world country.

 

            “It sounds like church is starting though.”

 

            “Church won’t be starting for another fifteen minutes.” Megan then punctuates with a rejoinder stating that besides, the pastor told us too.

 

            I set my chair down but Megan is still holding hers up as if she is breast feeding a four year old. From years seeped in Lutheran liturgy mistakenly call the community room the narthex.

 

            “By the way, have I told you you look nice today.  I like that dress. It’s very  apropos for the season”

 

            Megan smiles before she tells me that I don’t have to tell her that every time I see her, David.

 

                                                            ***          

A friend of Megan is holding a flute and playing with the scattered group of amateur musicians. He has long yellow hair that looks like he dyed it with a stroke of sunlight and is lanky and the totem pole and there is something about him faintly reminiscent of Drosselmeyer from the Nutrcracker or the Horny old Uncle who has to register every three months for charges related to youth and sexual misconduct. Megan looks at me and tells me that she will be right back. I am sitting on the pew alone when I feel a subtle punch on the back of my shoulders and realize that it is Megan’s father.  He has a smile on his face. He inquires how I like Sunday morning here in good old Appleton Wisconsin.

 I tell him it is fine. I look at Megan and see that the tall fuck with the flute is saying something that makes her smile. She has her hand cupped over her lips as if trying to thwart germs. He hands her a piece of paper and folds up in slight of hand fashion an it completely disappears when she arrives back and sits next to me in the pew.

 

“Who was that?” I inquire.

 

“It’s a guy from my school. He also goes to my church. He’s a really cool guy. You would like him. A lot.”

 

From behind us resonates the a clamor and tintinnabulation of bells in autumn. We sit next to each other, facing the same direction we have faced the entire weekend when driving or watching slated images reel past us on a geometric tarp, there is the thunderous exhale of an organ while people dressed in what connotes Sunday garb all face the similar direction, alighting hymnals like podiums, squinting, singing off-key facing the direction of an oddly constructed plus sign, an askance X, a cross heralding hosannas to the only deity we have ever known.


                                                                              ***

Even though the Lutheran Church Megan attends is not Missouri Synod the flow of the service  basically adheres to the formula I have followed every Sunday morning of my life. There are hymns. There are readings where the audience is require to perform calisthenics, there is the welcome where everyone looks around as if befuddled and lost and says the words peace be with you while shaking hands in Native American treaty like fashion. Since this is a special service commemorating some sort of cornerstone anniversary for the church Megan’s Mom is the MC introducing several special Guests. A lady with blue hair from within the congregation reads a poem she wrote to commemorate the occasion which makes my, “In a world so jaded so inane/ to put its trust in Kurt Cobain.” Poem I wrote in high school look like it just won a National Book Award. The main guest is a writer named Tom Hegg, who wrote a best-selling thoroughly ilustrated Christmas book in the early 80’entitled A Cup of Christmas Tea. He teaches drama at a hoity-toity prep-school in Minnesota and just scribed another book about a Grateful-Dead looking Teddy Bear named PEEF who has either found Santa Christ or Jesus Claus or both.

 About a year ago my mom went on a Baptist binge and transferred churches. I still attend the church in Peoria, sitting next to my cancer-riddled grandma, not realizing that she will be planted underground in less than two years, not realizing, that my father, will be planted into the ground in less than six. Every Sunday morning I wear a tie and blazer and wreath my arm around the frail shoulders of my grandmother in the pew next to me.

 The church is the same direction as the church I attend in the South Side of Peoria.

 I want to lasso my arm around Megan’s petite shoulder only I don’t dare.

 When the congregational band plays (which the commemorative bulletin labels as a symphony) Megan looks directly at the freaky lad playing the flute.

 I anticipate an Amen.  

                                                                               ***

It is after church. Megan and I are seated in the room where two hours earlier we were inexplicably holding chairs to our knees only she excuses herself and says she will return back in a minute. I am seated near the front of the room since Megan’s mom is still em-ceeing. The tables are round and host eight. I sit down next to Megan. On my opposite side is Mister Snow. In the center of the table there is a variegated teddy Bear.

 

Mr. Snow seems to have completely warmed up to me.

 

“Look,” He says, he picks up the teddy bear in the center of the table. He presses his finger into the center of the stuffed creature as if pressing an elevator button. A high-pitched squeak emits. Everyone at the table laughs. Mr. Snow presses the center of the bear again. Another hiccuppy squeak. Mr Snow laughs again. Megan is nowhere in sight. I wonder if she is talking to her friend with the long blonde hair who was playing the flute. In the center of the table as if a Ouija board are eight wafers and eight small vials of wine, of which I can only presume Megan was talking about earlier when she stated that communion was going to happen after church today.

Megan slides down next to me and says sorry she had to pee.

                                     
Megan's mom continues to MC. She introduces Tom Hegg again who recites another rhyming verse to much applause. After performing Megan again looks at me and tells me that maybe I should try to meet him since I want to be a poet and all.

 

The pastor with the rubicund visage gets up from in front of the tables. He gives the whole talk about how it is time to commune. The heads at nearly all the table and look down in their laps as if they are intentionally trying to be pensive. The silver bowl with little chunks of bread is passed. For some reason at our table it is passed counter clockwise. Everyone grabs a frayed slice. The pastor who mandated that Megan and myself shuffle chairs holds his individual scrap of bread up into the direction of the ceiling and states that this the true body of Christ, Ninety-eight percent of the human beings in the room sport pensive expressions on their faces or are looking down into their laps. Everyone places the bread into their lips at the same time and chews. We perform the same exercise circulating the vial of wine counter-clockwise around the table. The pastor again holds his vial up and says that this is the actual transubstantiated blood of Christ. Years later it will be impossible for me to hold up a vial of that size and not say cheers but for now, I drink, in unison, and look down.  

After we partake from the body and blood I reach down beneath the helm of the table and give Megan's hand a little squeeze.