AN EVOCATION OF THINGS ELUSIVE
raymond tod smith
With fireworks flaming about our heads, I look over at her and she is an angel beneath bursting orange-tinted napalm, her child’s eyes reflecting like two brown, murky mirrors the cinnamon-sparkling sky, the myriad of stars doubled, perhaps tripled, with the metallic-smelling explosions of far-flung charges. And I want to take her hand and tell her the million things on my mind, but she already knows these things, their whole recurring theme. I would like to kiss her once more now upon her ripe, open mouth -- once more to taste her teeth with my tongue, to pull her both gently and urgently and feel her angelic breasts against my breathless chest, to feel her hot, holy breath upon my breathless face, upon my eyes wide open with wanting. But we are supposedly past such things. We have, she has, decided that we are better as friends, even though we have come very close to becoming lovers one again, which we have not been in many years. We were as split apart as the cascading charges above us for so long and I mourned her as if she had died and I mourn now for this love which must remain inside me, unrequited, my emotions left wide open, all of my cauterized wounds re-exposed. She has been the greatest gift in a life that otherwise seemed barren, the only thing that ever felt like home to me ... but home should never leave you.
If is New Years Eve but I fell neither new nor reborn. I fell very old and the springtime I felt when she slowly reentered my existence has quickly spiraled to winter, with the snow of terrible nights to come already settling within my skin. She stands beside me, miles away, with her brown eyes more spectacle to me than this or any lighted, holiday sky. But I am a damaged item to her unreceptive eyes. All of those years ago when I lost her love, I lost her badly, handled it badly, bungled everything with the incalculable sorrow of a dry and shattered heart upon me. I betrayed the memory of what we were, what we had almost and could have been, by invoking demons from inside me that I never before knew even existed. I cursed her awfully, screamed her name, eructing hollow anathema’s into her beautiful, crying face, destroying my conscience with intoxication. I was lost and alone, left without her, upon a world of constant aching and I have this rage to her like an unwrapped present, a gift of love soured by loss, by disaffection, masked in hatred and fear, which was my awful, on only, reaction.
The final blast above brings forth applause and I am lost inside its sound, unangered, perhaps having finally learned compassion, something resembling understanding, and love strong enough to let go. I fell the intangible, yet huge, despondency settling down, desperately wishing to kiss her now and, by invoking the old wives tale of a new years kiss, for the year to come, dreading already the nights I will spend imagining her lips pressed to my lips, to my life; the ghost dram of her body, undressed and warm, beside me.
As midnight shrieks across the unbalanced stage of my desirous desert, she leans and puts her resplendent lips to my cheek and lets her arms pull me a little closer, though only for a moment. And then the moment is gone, ends untouchabley and the new year begins, a year for rediscovering how it feels to lose what I have never truly possessed, if only because tears and blood and sobriety and new found strength cannot purchase what is too previous to even allow oneself to dream.
I consider the empty sound of fireworks ending and how I know its sudden quiet will always haunt me through every exact layer of my loving mind. Never again will I look into an erupting sky without feeling her mouth pull away and leave me.
Then, as if somehow repossessed by the amorous spirit we once shared, she pulls me toward her again, arms pure and strong as an unseen sun, and puts her mouth upon my mouth, her hands into my hands. I am easily replenished by the generous warmth of her warmth against me. She pulls an inch away and asks me, weary eyes almost seeming to trust me, to promise, to promise and mean it, to mean it more than anything.
I promise her with all of my all and clutch the truth of this promise between us as if it were a tangible object, a ring that fits precisely, linking the fingers of our souls. Beyond any touch or work or kiss, I know I will not wrong her, that I would die before ever wronging her, this astonishing and honest woman who hangs the solid phantom of hope within me like a new and grander moon, again. Never again, I whisper as my heart wells upon its highwire.
And she knows this.
The sky is more splendid now as we walk together again into the wonderful, frightening world, as if heading toward the home, the true home, within everyone that never leaves us, our fingers linked together like those unseen, and ringed, within us.
