Pretty in Eyebrows

So in retrospect it could have been in any of those countless of deep summer days, spent in the tall park grasses, looking at the crazy people between sessions of engrossment into depthless pages of Foucault, Diderot, or even Vonnegut. I could have recalled any of them with vague and pointless detail, but instead I chose this one to dwell upon and further drive into the conscious bastions of thought. It was this piercing summer day in the park that held on like a regret shaped icicle.

This was the park with the pitted pavement, where I learned to ride my training wheeled bicycle. It was this crab grass knotted knoll where I sat with big sis and tried to read; to the tune of red fish, blue fish. It was the sandy paths and littered tree bottoms that my mother and I first walked when her dear husband passed away; and my father fragmented into a mantelpiece ornament, scattered photographs of faux human poses, and the toothbrush that took damn near a year to find its forgetful way out of our bathroom cup.

It was the same set of three swings. They sat next to the gate, mere feet from the lazy afternoon street, slick thick rubber seats, shined for little asses, and chains laminated to protect little fingers from biting rust. I sat here too when my legs were short enough to swing, when I would flail my little feet hard enough to get some momentum to see over the fence and into the world it protected me from.

But today, here on some warm rock in a city park, I feel like the glowing capitalist Buddha. Full lotus with soft drink names wrestling on my tongue, their citrus twists eloquated by a Proustian like nirvana. How can I come to enlightenment when my proudest memories are cut from associations like park swings and popular children’s literature of the era? Has the great Theodore Giselle hijacked my family recollections with his wacky doodles and witty pronouncements, leaving me with only catchy phrases and sitcom tunes to show for growing up?

I need to stop and somehow grope for something real, an anchor to my identity. I’ll write a bit about modern romance (there is none), and I might sketch out an adventurous story about how a man chases a wounded metaphor all over a dirty little city trying to save her from herself and in turn drawing the precocious entity into his own being.

This is like drinking… I need a subject…

Panning left I catch wind of a middle aged dog walker, rubber mitten on to catch a stray pitch that seems all too inevitable as the mutt throttles at its haunches nearest to the rhododendron side of the shrubbery. I could write a book about dog crapping, little bits of scat-poetry or fun euphemisms for puppy dumps. I could sell it to this woman for sure; maybe add the cost to her subscription to Dog Fancy or some other irrelevant niche advertising haven.

Turn to the cute girls in the water, in their new bathing suits and dryer sheet reeking towels laid out on the sand with their wet butt prints holding them down. They giggle and gossip, rub on some sun lotion, arch their legs gracefully when reclining and make kissy faces when the lip gloss is applied unevenly. I could write a book about their friendship and how it transpires five, twenty five, eighty years down the road. They would buy it, but it might just be too late for me to make enough of a cut to get my kidneys dialysized.

Everyone is just such an actor here. Maybe even me, sitting on the hill and scrutinizing everything below me, playing the role of a disheveled depressive writer who puts on a brave front like he knows what the hell is going on in the world. It a façade of control that the performer tries to exude as he stays the stage in the event of major catastrophe, or in this case a tragedy of perspective. Everyone here just an eyeshot away from being figured out and analyzed down to their very particular and predictable parts. Everyone just players in the grand scheme of… wait…

There she was; her hair, like some fluid cacti, aggressed by the hot breeze of some arid-temperate sandstorm. It held for a moment and was back to brown strands across neck, to the brim of a nape. It reacted like an inverted mug of coco, wild with non-dairy creamer, highlights of softer brown in unstirred drape.

From my hill, she was made of a top of a head, a right arm unsheathed to the elbow, fingers cradling the latest paperback thriller, or a witty coming of age novel, of the autobiography of Jesus.

No! It’s Dharma Bums instead, yet rightfully from this distance I can barely tell if she is merely smelling the Kerouac or reading the frayed edges of the flowers surrounding her. I’m imagining fragmented sonnets under the magnifying glass, chapter-ettes scribbled out in .5 pt Times New Roman font; it would shimmy down crocus cilia and wrap its way up the woody stems of tulips. Rosy red stamen, erect to casual sunshine; Camus printed lengthwise, in sonnet like explosions of flower sex glands and glorious French surrealisms.

Turning over each petal, each plump frond; sucking in the prose like nectar from her palms. It was split columns of Ellis spread out in a five mile line, replete with simplified punctuation, wrapped like a gooey decal around the trunk of the old Dogwood, spiraling literature to the warm heavens.

Her eyes flitted over my dog walker, my bathing girls, and even a stooped man that I had somehow missed, tucked in the lilied gazebo with Walt Whitman at his hip. His eyes were sharp and green, and even with his hands tucked between gnarled knees, his humble look did little to disguise that at any moment he could toss out a quip and wrestle you down with his great expanse of poetical notion.

That is when the rain starts, and in cuing that weather was a brooding haze of summer sky. It was rife with blown dogwood blossoms, sand gritted grins; born of a thundering humidity tipped to its side to begin seeping its mixture of ripe dewy rain.

The Dandelions tiptoed as their faces were pattered with that drenching summer stuff. Leaflets hopping like tight drawn leather drums to the falling drops whose pace now quickened to a meaty downpour.

All my people scattered with papers over their heads and purses and laptops under their arms; rain biting their tidy faces and manicured moments and picnics. It challenged their love of the outdoors, forcing them again into flight and alienation in slick mobile homes and furniture cramped saltbox houses.

We are finally alone; me on a damn hill in a stunted city park, cataloging a girl with her shoulders drawn, warming from the rain and keeping her dog-eared tome from the pressing weather.

Is she realistically this beautiful? Is it a crude variation of psychosoma that draws her character to me, like some transposed mirage of what I need in my life?

Can she sit in the cold pissing rain with a wet book under her thigh and wipe snot from her eyes and be so beautiful?

Rain blots entire words from my notebook, but I’m so taken, I want more than just breathy contemplations on my yellow paper. I want to watch as she ties those little brown shoes in the morning, or when she takes them of and curls her toes with a big yawn.

It’s an anticipation that broods for me, like a quiet room filled wall to wall with trepidation, something needing to vocalize out of midair to keep the world moving and to keep the walls from dissipating out of non belief.

-

Then, seeing her just weeks later, outside of a coffee shop window, walking contemplative steps; over a berm, across a sidewalk and out of my life. It was me knowing all too well that I have shared more with her than anyone in my life, in just that simple glimpse that seemed to say good bye/ do I know you.

How would it have been if I had instead taken that wet wooden seat next to her, the one that sat barren in the park. I could have told her this stuff, given her my notebook, something, extolled my passionate speech about the shallowness of humanity and how I knew by the way she watched the flowers that she felt the same way, and that when I saw her I knew that she needed to be in that moment of my life to make me real and awake.

Would she have cuddled with me in that sonorous rain storm, sitting next to one another with our papers in one pile, her “On the Road” in a wet stack with my “Slaughterhouse Five”?

I couldn’t tell her then if we would travel Europe on motorbikes, living in abandoned castles, or holding hands in ivy trussed villas. Whether we would just meet again and again in the little knoll in the park and read poetry to one another, backs to the dogwood, and me getting up enough courage to ask her if it was cancer that took her eyebrows away from her.

I would say, that either way, it’s nice not having something distracting me from your eyes.