Take me away.
To the dewy haven you described in scents and textures, rather
than landmarks and catchphrase. Someplace surrounded with the rocks like bone
marrow jutting out from the land, bleeding foliage, bleeding striated earth, bleeding a
million insects intertwined.
My nerves will rumble with adventure on the car ride over. I’ll
be diluted with a nonspecific hope for our nonspecific destination. Because it doesn’t
matter if it’s precise. We will rock back and forth in our tumble of language,
laughter weaving in and out of the open, racing windows of the car. Your car
will feel bigger and then smaller depending on the talks—maybe we’ll poke fun
at some remnant memory between ourselves, maybe I’ll tell you about the vodka vomit
I spewed at age 19, maybe you will tell me about the quiet intimacies of
married life that I know nothing about. I don’t know what will get mined and
pecked and what will get split and shared. It doesn’t matter. There are always
syllables between us and though profuse they are never superficial.
The landscape will change, churn into a different season as
we climb north. And the trees will look like graduated clusters of broccoli trying
hard to masquerade like Indian corn. I’ll want to stick my hand into the
horizon and sweep their branches in my palm, letting all the rough edges chaff
the callouses on my hands. The catch of the calluses will make me feel satisfied,
will make me feel as if I have lived a life that is meaningful and profound. You’ll
catch the drift of that thought, even if I don’t say it; you’ll squeeze my hand
to say you understand.
We will get to the place that you promised to take me, a
place of seeped with silent woods and subtle sounds perpetually rising from the
dead forest floor. We’ll be stiff when we arrive. Our limbs will be saturated
with the burdens of our conversations, with the limitedness of words, with the
panged parameters of too much time in your tiny car. We’ll stretch and splay,
in our own unique devises and we’ll smile, quietly, knowingly.
My blood will rush again, remembering the nonspecific hope
of nonspecific novelty. We’ll walk, into the preserving, chilled scent of
earth, into the enclosures of life without tools, into dirt and water and ash. Into
trees that may have existed before the creation of human names. My blood will
rush again, so zealously it will feel purple inside my pulse, it will be purple
all wrapped up into my booming heart.
You’ll hold my hand and it will be much warmer than mine.
There is always an inferno in the palm of your hand, as if it is your enthusiasm
for life is always in your clutches. You’ll stroke the exposed skin of my neck
with your lips, feeling the low thud of my jugular. I will relish that prelude,
a gamete of a kiss. I’ll be smiling when my hand breaks away from your hands,
blood heightened to such speeds that the stillness of an autumn forest will
become the most animated setting I’ve seen. It will be a beauty that will
almost inspire me to turn back.
But I won’t because I asked you to take me away. I don’t know where we are going but
this is beautiful, all of it. None of
this has to be precise.
Maybe I will hear the trigger startling the silence of the forest. Maybe I will feel the fear stowed away in the trees when unnatural sounds disrupt their meditation. Maybe there is an eternity of insight between the entry and exit points of a bullet.
I will wish I could let you know but not as much as I want you
to take me away.
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