Epitaph in Lasting Air

July 7, 2010

Nettling memories returned, as I bent forward to sniff the cactus flower blooming in our desiccated conservation.

Forgotten … reign of redolence: Expunged from the singing narrative of troubadour air … purged, since the advent of that shivered era when the potentate of provisional remembrance banished all memories of the mercies of rain.

Was it really all that long ago,

when we arrived in that lifeless land where wind-blown granules of your scorching, secret resentments flayed my skin to the bone? Then, you — empty obligation’s nimble seamstress — replaced my flesh’s memory with imprecations of woven thistle … hopes — dried to sloughed snakeskin … and this carapace persona I carry … Beneath: languishes: a convict dreaming of his prison constructed from his own bones.

It happens every time we go anywhere.

Remember that day on the beach in Nice … when we wandered through the detritus of fallen empires of epicurean evenings burnished down to polished beach glass.

Defiantly, opaque as beach glass, we held our smooth, green talisman up to the azure sky, believing this would protect us against the invective of shadowless noon. But, by afternoon, brooding shadows returned, pooling around us, as the sea darkened against our hubris.

Staggered … left bereft … by the storm we seeded: Our circular arguments were whirled into multi-dimensional helixes, connecting querulous dreams to infinite thunder. Even you could say nothing — Even you, High Priestess of the Python of Scorn — you — maker of the charms of eternal resentment — were struck speechless by the sight of the towering nimbus boiling with its casuistry-shattering syntax.

Then in Los Angeles: By the Venice canals, a mid-morning breeze had stippled our clothes with clinging ladybugs as we made promises to each other as empty as the narcissistic sky.

But by late afternoon, without warning, sans seeming causation, the narrative of reassurance ceased and Eternity’s scold returned.

The cold night air arrived like a ghost glazed in frozen rage … At day’s end in LA — that is not the chill of the wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean — it is the defeated exhalation of a million shallow desires repeatedly thwarted.

But I didn’t contact you to chronicle the banal details of our vainglorious wars waged against entropic rage, nor to recount the folly of our attempts to scale its eternal watchtowers manned by its conscripts of impersonal fury.

Instead, I have come to make amends to unseen things … senselessly annihilated during the din of that dim campaign:

To create an epitaph in lasting air: for friendships lost beneath oceanic contretemps, for dream animals addled into extinction by cataclysmic alarm clocks, for a million moments neglected in the pursuit of petty obsessions and for the folly of my relentless surrendering to tiny, moment-annihilating agendas, for flights of grandeur that were scuttled for the scrupulous acquisitions of piffle and waylaid by my enchantment with things obvious, safe and readily available.

This is my prayer of atonement to seeds not planted, to the Homeric Hymns ignored on every street corner, to the unknown universes bypassed by my carefully mapped, never wavering journeys through the tedious city of my habitual self-reference.

I offer this libation of fermented regret to all the raging ghosts haunting the stillborn air of lost potential.

Posted in Essays