Like a Gram Parsons Song

We lived out our brief life
together,
it seems,
fighting in parking lots
lit by sodium and fireflies
and passing trucks
bound for desert places
in different time zones
and maybe,
at some point,
home
in a black and white city
or by green sea.

And when you at last turned
your back to me,
I was still close enough to
feel the breeze and smell
your hair,
scented with flowers
that grew nowhere
near here.

Two completely unrelated things I realized today (or maybe just remembered)

1.

For Brian Wilson it will always
be 1964, and the thought of
that reassures me far more than
all the sayings of Jesus and
the Apostles combined and
compiled religiously (so to
speak) on audiobook and read
devotedly by Kirk Cameron.

2.

The quality of the afternoon
light in New Orleans's Garden
District on July 27th, 2005
will never again be duplicated.
I can't remember why we were
there, maybe high on too much
powdered sugar and deep-fried
beignets. Either way, we were
newly married, just arrived,
alive to the languid, tragic,
sexy green world we'd plunged
into like a swimming pool in a
Cheever story. We knew that
time did not truly exist but
were still aware that we had
yet to hit the cemetery where
Billy and Captain America
dropped acid in that movie. So,
instead of stopping and getting
out, I took the pictures
through the car window. Once
developed, the light would be a
shadow of itself and the
reflections on the glass would
look just like ghosts.

Partita in B Minor

10:19 pm - a window half-open
to the dark, suddenly cool as
the heat of day leaves the dry
air like a rush of sparks
funneling upward from a
campfire. High atop Black
Mesa, sixteen miles from here,
a desert-lean coyote walks,
hungry, wondering in its very
cells if there will be a
killing this night. A mountain
lion watches from a granite
boulder up in the foothills,
sees the lights of the city
come on knows it will live and
die and kill and nothing that
ever looks upon it will
survive. I find myself here,
on the edge of this desert
wilderness, near the middle of
this life, considering the
stories left to tell, the
stories yet to tell, the
stories I can never tell. You
are asleep, lost in the
narrative of dreams, the finer
poetry of night. And above the
hum of the evaporative cooler
is Bach, in each crystalline
note a life.

Driving to Jasper

There's no monsoon season here.
It's always monsoon season here.
Early summer on the coastal prairie,
late winter back home up north. Just
outside of Beaumont now, driving
into the deeper pines, the sundown
towns of black and white and
loblolly and barbecue. Church of the
Holy Ghost, signs that say
"butterbeans for sale" but no one's
there. "Seminole Wind" on the radio,
and I see thunderstorms breaking
over the Big Thicket miles away. Sky
like the heart of darkness. The oil
smell of the Gulf gone, now it's
cat-piss ammonia aroma from the
paper mills. Then it's no more and
it's all warm-pine-needles-on-a-
heated-forest-floor. So I breathe it
in because the windows are down and
I'm breaking every speed limit and
though it will rain here soon it
hasn't yet.

Currently Listening Thrall: Demonsweatlive By Danzig see related

Cuba Libre

It's hot out there, suddenly summer, suddenly
monsoon moisture slicks your hair back,
spread out against the pillow like an
antebellum fan for bayou afternoons. The air
is still; it waits. The glass of water on the
nightstand sweats moisture and secrets, there
being more wet at that moment than the air
can hold. I leave to turn on some music
(always a soundtrack) and the walls look
almost black with the still shadows tattooed
on them. We hear thunder, somewhere. Soon
rain will fall. Later, lost in the trackless
everglade of beat and conga, lost in you, I
realize that music is sex, dance the
surrogate for desire made manifest. But I
suspect you knew this all along, and I watch
the buttons give way and your white shirt
fall, your skin as brown and beautiful as the
mesa country after a month without rain.