Joe was driving down the road, with no particular place to go when he spotted Rayfield, an old friend and workmate, walking on the side of the road. Joe pulled over. Rayfield paused for a moment trying to figure out what this white guy might want. He recognized Joe's car, then the driver, and got in the passenger side. Joe drove a bit, then pulled over. They caught up, relived past hijinks, shared this and that. Rayfield told Joe that he had taken a construction job after he had been fired from their mutual employer. It was grunt work, but the pay was better than that of a dishwasher. 

After talking for awhile, Rayfield became more quiet and pensive. Looking straight ahead he asked, "You remember the fight we had?"

Rayfield did remember. It was a sad memory. A memory of a fight, caused primarily from the inequality of their job positions.

"Well," said Rayfield, still staring straight out toward the road, "that wasn't nothing but a thang."

Marybeth came down the hallway of the trailer, cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other. She positioned herself in front of Jason and slid up and onto the washing machine. She leaned back and spread her legs slightly to accommodate the incidental new life growing in her lanky, restless body. After a sip of room temp Budweiser and a slow contemplative drag off a Marlboro, "I need to get out of here. I don't care where. Anywhere but here."

Marybeth turned from Jason and blushed at her confidence in someone she hardly knew. She glanced out the window at some imagined noise in the driveway, satisfied it was nothing, she turned her attention back to Jason. Forgetting her problems for a moment she used the flat of her foot to playfully impale him against the opposite wall. She giggled, then remembered her serious mood, "You have to promise to take me if you leave. Billy went over to his ex's house again yesterday. I know he is thinking about going back to her."

She brushed her hand absentmindedly over her belly. Awkward, both from the alcohol and new, unaccustomed bulk she leaned forward sternly, "You have to promise me. And mean it!" Softening, "Please." She took another shaky drag off the nearly-spent cigarette. Looking away, tears welled up in her tired eyes.

you looked so soft and pink
and vulnerable -
laying on the hospital bed,
swollen with life and
other people's future

and your hand
was warm and moist,
like the time you held mine
on the stick shift

and we drove all night
and you showed me the ditch
you hid in as a child
for almost two days

and the day
i promised
we would be together forever

and the morning
you put your hand on my shoulder
like we had been

and the night i told you
we would not

moonlit pools

the weighty ghost of someone i once cared for lies against me today

nearly motionless
and in tiny ripples in moonlit pools
and cheap white wine

mingled with the smell of chlorine
and regret
and distance

and corporate offices
and awkward reunions
and denial as closure

yvonne

I knew it would happen. It always did. I just had to be patient, passing the time in an informal game of bridge until she came. As soon as my bridge partner glanced above and behind my head, I knew she had come into the room. The other bridge players knew the game was over.

As she crept in from behind, I could smell Yvonne's jet-black Lakota hair, sweet and fresh from showering. As she leaned over the back of my chair, it cascaded in cool, wet strands over my shoulders. Her strong, broad shoulders encircled - I leaned back into a warm, reassuring wall of flesh. The silhouette of her face appeared from the side, toothbrush in mouth. Yvonne spent about half her time dry-brushing her teeth. The other half of her time was shared equally between touting the evils of 'the white man', or being passionate. I was the one she preferred, since love of any sort is preferable to thoughtless passion.

"But I am a white man, Yvonne," I would reply. After a pause, she would counter with some illogical denial of my whiteness, or some general deflection of rage towards some recent or historical injustice. Yvonne had one of the sharpest minds I had ever encountered. Talking with her, a safe distance from her points of rage, was nothing less than inspiring. It was obvious that her brilliant mind had pondered long and hard the logic of most subjects, dismissing the obvious and simple. At night, after her shower, we would sit in the silent flickering light of the dark TV room, floating lightly the surface of wave after wave of topics.

However brilliant Yvonne's words, I was often distracted by the harsh features of her face as they moved in the dancing light of late-night television. Yvonne had a face that was at once, both beautiful and ugly. Looking into her face, it was: as weathered and ancient as the rocky land that bore it; as angry and threadbare as the reservation that housed it; as young, fertile and spirited as a blossom opening to the sun for the very first time. It is one of the few things of long ago - a time when my spirit had been removed - that I will never forget. She was a sweet, dark oasis in a small, caged world - Yvonne's mandatory entrance into this mutual cage was sponsored by a deceased relative disturbing an otherwise normal night in a reservation drunk-tank.

This evening, like many others before, we headed for the abandoned TV room, already fused into a sweet-smelling, old-as-nature oneness. Yvonne deftly placed her toothbrush into it's well-worn slot in her jeans back pocket.

counting leaves

but then I would have never known Cole Porter,
or when in doubt, 'I' is preferable to 'me',
or that scotch can ease a troubled soul,
or that scotch would finally ease your troubled soul,
or that some twenty years later-
I can look into a mirror,
and count the leaves of grass.

~ from apologies

maybe it's the weather

it was on a day, just like today
twenty or so years ago
when I returned to my childhood home
(maybe it was the same feeling of Fall in the air)

when I met you
we talked
the crowd disappeared

when I abandoned everyone for your cement block cabin
laying for days listening to your long fingers play the piano
(maybe it was the same song playing on the radio)

when I left
and lived a life
and forgot your name

~ from 'apologies'

apologies

but she loved to dress in costumes
and play with water guns.
and she had a barbie nose
dusted with freckles.
and she had hands
and arms
and shoulders.
and when she sat
she would become weightless
and her feet would float over her head.
and she would cling to every word I spoke
to keep from dissolving into nothing.

-from apologies