The Season of Beans

Line breaks, spacing and indentations are skewed.

The Season of Beans

I

The farmer drinks real milk,
thick and fresh from the cow’s udders
with that pudding skin on top
and flies wobbling around, tainted by the acrid,
addictive aroma of manure and sweat.
He only knows
the roundness of spotted melons in moonlight,
dark-stained mornings awoken
by the trumpet of a rooster, summers of cold creeks,
earth tilling, wild animal smells, hay bailing, jarred peaches,
the wisp of warm wind carrying dust,
a sun-browned woman’s yellow hair and thin dress.

II

I once knew this lady, this beautiful, lost lady wearing petals
for a dress & a smell like nothing I ever smelled before.

III

Rain
and then more rain. The woman leaning with the wild
flowers and wet wind over the farmer
and the blanket swelling into a lake, caught in a sun-drenched
morning by love, unable to be carried away.
Her father in the distance with amber
whiskey and slick rifle, lightning spear from clouds
and wind heavy enough to hide his rough voice, her name,
the crack of a gun, his body falling face-down
limp into a stream, a woman’s breath caught by her hands
when they find him.

IV

Here I am, once again
all alone on this hot & beautiful
summer Monday. I’m cooking in the sun
but a cloud just covered it & it feels
good. I wish the entire blue sky were filled
with sun-covering clouds right now. I talked
to Dawn this morning. I miss her. I miss walking
together, heads together, our voices together & then her voice
singing alone. I want her
to come down & visit me in August.
It’s so damn hot out here.
Even the ink is dripping.

V

Chicken eggs piled high in a brown
woven basket, collected by his girl covered
with wood dust and feathers. He hates them but eats them
for the morning with her and the molasses-thick coffee she pours.
Unplowed fields and the horses, sweaty in their stables,
will not wait for the farmer. He kisses his girl, touches the valleys
of her ear with the tips of his soil-stained fingers, and leaves.
She watches him whistle towards the barn, sun blanketing his back,
and fills the sink.
Her porcelain face and pretty yellow hair slips in completely.

VI

I was thinking how I wished that I’d saved this journal for another
time. This isn’t the summer I hoped for or the one
I thought it would be.

VII

She was only always a mirage,
an illusion built of beer and the ache
of loneliness that comes when night leaves
him nothing to do but watch fire crackle in hearths
of brown stone, the mud and ash of wood beneath
his heels, an imagined memory as pungent
as the burning smell of cherry and birch smoldering it smelled
like her hair,
he tells himself, she is not real,
over and over until he tastes the salt and wet soil in his palms.

VIII

I’ll say it again. A nice big cloud over the sun
& everything not going in the direction I desired. It smells
like rain.

IX

A ghost
floats beside him as alcohol slides into his throat
and he sits on a wide machine, moving slowly, chopping
heads off wheat stalks, the kernels like nuggets of fools
gold. Let water wash over it, watch colors
disappear and all the smells
slip away with it.

It would come back after a rain. She smelled like sunflowers
in her dress, her thin dress. I’ll follow her
thin dress. It was
real.

X
Soil in his hair, soil in nails, soil
in the splayed creases coming from the corners
of his eyes where he begins to grow old
without her,
the crevices where he collects liquid like rows
in a cabbage field or the dip between two graves.
He wants to wash himself clean
in the pond beyond the tall, flaking barn where he tosses
hay into cool evenings.
He’ll dive headfirst into a stone,
crashing through moonlight – her face
when he found her lying still – and rise lifeless.
But he hears her, sees her
eyes glowing in the daisies at night,
the grass like her dress around his knees, the dress
she wore when she first found him bent
over a milk bucket alone and knowing nothing
but the season of beans. It is August.

Restless Eye Movement

You won't notice the sudden flux of pain
when a burning, flame enshrouded foot is severed from the ankle
with one clean swing of a sharpened, singing blade.

Only the tone of your voice will change as you jolt backwards, gravel
digging into loose palm, sky rocketing away in red and head smacking
into a smooth stone, lights snapping out.

Waking will return your lost appendage, numb, naked and bound
under cotton sheets beneath the other, sadistic ankle.
It was just a dream but you can still feel it burning as you stumble
down a flight of stairs, crooked fingers clawing air, for a cold swallow of water.

Weddings and Then Happy Endings

Dean slides sideways and slaps his hands together, yellow button-up shirt matching my silk dress, smile and shoulders rising with Electric. He moves back, fists punching the air in slow motion, feet weaving in and out. Coming forward, he does a little spin. He's my one-time date at my cousin's wedding. I'm the skinny maid of honor with a crazy up-do and thick-rimmed, brown glasses. He moved the car so I wouldn't have to step in the mud, and then opened my door, explaining that he's still an old fashioned guy. I told him to stay that way. There's not many left.

The bride sits beside me watching with her cake, lace dress and regret. Her mother smoked a joint before the ceremony. We're not dancing to the electric slide again. Soar feet strapped with heels are difficult to maneuver. I'm champagne buzzed with an aching neck. The muscles tensed when I tried to prevent myself from blacking out while standing close to the altar, watching a tall man put a gold thing on my cousin's finger. After the ceremony a photographer snapped pictures and the rest of us headed to the fire house for the reception of salad and ziti and tradition. I was forced to walk in dramatically, arm linked with the burly best man's, all eyes watching and sappy music playing over the speakers. Later I collected money from strangers who danced with the bride. I was supposed to shuffle each person along, keep the long line moving, but I have a problem talking to strangers and an even bigger problem telling them what to do. Someone took over for me. The hell ended and dancing began. My cousin's new husband smashed cake on her face and she smashed some back. A sugar-coated foreshadowing of what was to come later.

Best time we ever had, Dean says two months later, face illuminated by fire light and the flicker of mosquitoes.

I'm draped in a lawn chair by my family's fire pit in the back yard, bare feet dangling over one side, loose hair flung over the other. We're cooking cheese weenies and I hadn't seen Dean since the wedding. Now we're rekindling memories while my parents sip beer. I smile, remembering the red helium balloon bouncing against my knee after the reception, the dancing, the bride's long face and her lace gown soiled at the edges. Two years later divorce will slip from her lips over burrito dinners, and I'm glad I have no need to utter that word.

Dean and I were dressed in yellow with no commitment or shiny bands tinting our fingers, no delicate designs sweeping over rented room floors, only singleness and blueberry soda by a fire pit later. My cousin picks her husband's empty beer cans and sweaty socks from the floor. In summers Dean and I embark on walks down long country roads, sunlight splashing our backs and the wide, yellow fields specked with cows, free hands swinging un-synchronized.

Contains Antioxidants

I remember when I pour the hot water over my hand around nine o’clock. Flesh puckers into chicken skin, and I have to sit in the sticky chair of an emergency clinic’s waiting room for the rest of the night. A nurse argues with an Amish family, breathlessly trying to convince them that the doctor’s machines and bagged liquid will save their daughter’s life. This is going to be a while, the receptionist tells me, peeking from behind her bifocals.

Now, nearly ten years later, I sit at the dining room table, pink sunlight spilling on the stained wood, waiting for the stainless-steel kettle’s whistle. Already steam is puffing from the spout’s small hole as the liquid grows hot, but I never pour water into a mug until it comes to a complete and messy boil.

My cat plods down the stairs, stretches, and winds her tortoise shell body against my leg. I reach down to touch her, and she nips at my hand. I call her a bitch and continue flipping through a collection of Scott Cairn’s poetry. I read about a dune and a moon’s blue light bleeding over red sand. No one the poet encounters believes that the hoofed mammals live in the desert, but Scott watches his moose howl to the moon with round, furry mouths. The cat swats at my leg, nose scrunched and ears pressed against her head. I kick her away, and the kettle whistles.

I push back my chair. Its legs sigh against the black and white checkered floor. Kit Kat, back arched and tiptoeing sideways across the linoleum, continues swatting at my ankles as I cross the kitchen. I can’t help but laugh at her ridiculous pose, puffed up to the girth of a rhinoceros in her mind, but about the size of a squishy bug in mine. I jump and land hard in front of her, dishes and cookie jars rattling on top of the refrigerator. She leaps, fur standing on end, and slides away into the basement.

Clouds cover the sinking sun as I pass the sink window. Looking past a wooden angel kneeling next to an olive dish and the brown leaves of a hydroponic plant, I watch snow clouds roll in thick from Lake Ontario. The snow-laden trees turn inky black as shadows creep over an already aging day, their prickly branches like twisted arthritic hands in the cold. I click a knob on the stove from HIGH to OFF and pour hot water over the tea bag. Even though I’m afraid of the burbling, fizzling, spitting water that sputters from the spout as I tip it over the cup, I keep my left arm tucked safely by my side. Clear liquid grows dark as the bag swells and drowns. Cupping my hands around the warm, yellow mug, I carry it to the table and resume my pondering.

Tea is supposed to cure cancer. I mean, it’s supposed to prevent cancer, but sometimes I wish it cured. The bitter drink is the blood of western tea leaves, thick with antioxidants and blessings from the monks. I drink it every day, sometimes three times a day, but never not at all. I wonder what would’ve happened if my stepmother drank it all her life instead of spending most of it parched and parked in front of the television with beer and pretzels. Last year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She’s fine now, recovering well as far as we know, but sometimes I still wish I could pour warm tea all over her body. I wish tea would flood the world and cover everything that I love, everything I don’t.

I tip my head close to the mug. Steam fogs the lenses of my glasses, and I inhale, chest rising until it won’t rise any more. The warm dampness fills my lungs. Already I can taste the bitterness of soaked leaves. When it cools and is safe to swallow, the liquid slides into my throat, past a malfunctioning thyroid gland, and down into my belly where it settles like hands over an aching wound. Kit Kat saunters into the room like nothing happened.

Stapled to the end of a white string trailing from the folded bag of coagulated leaves, a paper tag is printed with the evening’s inspirational quote. Unlike Salada tea, which makes a poor attempt at humor, Yogi’s messages are profound, and I stash them in a little white drawer beneath a mirror. I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful stacked on top of Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy. I save one Salada tag. It says that Real intelligence is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. I slurp down the last bit of tea and stare out the sliding glass door.

Dad’s going in for a colonoscopy. Doctors poke at my mother’s lumpy uterus and suck her blood into plastic cylinders. My stepmother’s still waiting to find out if the radiation treatment was successful or if there’s nothing else they can do. Snow floats down, thick flakes covering the brown lumps and footprints scattered throughout the yard, and a silver spoon clinks against glass. The tea’s inside me, swimming in my veins. Kit Kat curls around my legs, lets me touch her. Scott Cairn’s book lay silent on the table. And as I reach for the teabag’s paper tab, I notice that the snow is glowing blue, blazing like a light into darkness.

The Distancing Properties of Perpetual Noise

I sit curled beneath where he sits crumpled on the couch, his eyes locked into brightness coming from the sliding glass door beyond my shoulders, and my fingers tug at loose strings from his robe. My canvas bag overflows with books. The air's stuffy and full of dust and cold. It's mid-afternoon and I spent my entire day here, wishing I were someplace warm and sandy with bodies of water spanning endlessly. He wants to know if there's still a place for him in my crowded future. He wants to know why I've suddenly drifted away like soil carried from slopes of a river bank. He doesn't actually say that, but I'm trying to make poetry out of this moment, give it a piece of something that's good.

Earlier today I leaned against the sliding glass door like rain, looking over the city from his second story apartment on the hill. Sun splashed brick-red tops of buildings, budding trees, the point of a steeple rising above them all, but I watched a fat crow bob down the sidewalk with dark feathers. I wanted to see the bird spread its wings and step into the air, leave behind the hard concrete of the looming city, and take me with her. Ever since I was a little girl, I've always wanted to fly.

I wait for him to look at me, and when he does, it's as if he sees me from a great distance. He knows that I'm already gone, drifting north to my unfinished stories and final semesters, waiting patiently for the letter that will take me away, let me migrate south. You won't even let me follow you, he says, and I look down at my hands. I won't say anything to comfort him. It would be a lie.

Outside, children's voices break what he's placed between us, and I mention I heard the kids walking down his steps again last night. For months he's pulled on his boots and flung himself from the front door, leaned over the steep flight of stairs leading down to the main road, and yelled at the kids to find another away around. They never listen to him.

More than anything I need to walk. I need to leave. Essays are waiting for me. My sculptures of dreams still need to be chiseled, scraped, smoothed out and baked in an oven so I can finally paint them with colors. But he holds on to me, wonders why everything about us still feels new. It's been two years. Things should be better now. I listen for the sound of a crow, the flapping of her wings.

Later that night, after I've gone home, he calls me. I tore down those steps after you left, he says. I finally tore them fucking down. He tells me he's sorry and I say it too. We mend the broken fabric of what we have for now, but I'm still thinking of the crow leaving the city streets, the cold corner of this part of the world, and the earth that's held her for so many years.