To S. After Years Apart
Dusk. The horse no one calls begins to amble home from the fields. I open the door of time and breathe the cool, sweet autumn. Then I go again to find the old woman who lives just beyond the turn in the road. She has a potion that cures the ailments of love. Half our lives we’ve been sick with a passion that bent our bones the way a child bends a sapling in play, pulling its leaves to the ground. By now nothing can untangle the branches. But as I knew, the old woman is gone, her house long ago abandoned. Night will come soon and dark solitude. I’ll sit by the fire and watch the wood of fate burn. It takes years to turn to ash. Then our confused and inconsolable passion will twist itself around my heart like smoke drifting from a chimney.
Betty Adcock Tells Me There Are 1,086 Meanings Of The Word “Romantic”
at first this was hard to believe, but once she had reached number 29 i knew we were in for a major afternoon. as that meaning required, i took the hand of a seemingly sweet young woman on my left and skipped a full half mile through spring gardens, almost forgetting that Betty was still working on the list. rushing back, she’d come to number 100, and i felt the breath of tragedy sweep by me like a bus exhaust. i fell down on the busy sidewalk and was repeatedly trampled by hordes of unfeeling busy people who preferred to continue on their respective ways rather than consider the lost beauty hidden beneath the mask of my infirmities. at meaning 215 i ran up the stairs into my childhood house and embraced my mother, who was busy preparing the meatloaf and who smelled like onions and paprika, an aroma that has haunted me all my life whenever i touch a woman’s belly by the time i got outside again, since i had stopped to consume a plate of meatloaf and potatoes, Betty had already gotten up to meaning 784, which involved the enthusiastic, even desperate plunging naked into a country pond that contained somewhere in or on its muddy bottom a rare object — coin, jewel, or whatever — that had been tossed there by the incredibly beautiful — wow! — mysterious woman who was watching, idly, on the opposite shore and she too quite naked. i never found it, but wet, with muddy feet and a bit tired, i returned as Betty arrived at the final meaning, number 1,086: a spontaneous inner vibration that lifts one slowly but surely off the face of this complicated earth because of the perception of a resonance with all Nature, clouds included. bye Betty, I waved from the top of a local oak bye Betty. bye.
