Rainy season. Dancing black birds inside dark leafed night.
Shuffling wings, rustling feathered bodies.
"Don't forget to bring the sewing kit back," she said.
Stitch a long highway, rolling thunder,
fast clouds, heavy cool tropical rain, cool refreshing music.
A single drop of water on a red hibiscus.
Metta.
;)
A young Japanese couple walked on the sandy path leading from the south end of the is-land.
He carried a heavy black back pack and white plastic bag. His face was light and happy. Filled with hope.
Filled with hope and expectations. He imagined they were lost on a deserted is-land, a paradise away from family, friends, work, pressure, stress, telecommunications, machines, sushi and caged animals.
His wife, a thin thing, wore a pink sun hat-bonnet, white shorts covering pale legs, a white blouse and low heeled brown open toed backed shoes. Her face was severe. She studied grounded sand with pinpoint black eyes. Her shoes were the problem in the sand - slippery, no grip and tiresome treading. It was a struggle to keep up with her happy husband. She was always behind.
She was always behind his long shadow.
She swallowed her displeasure, the apparently endless future sand path and trudged on in silence. Her Tao. Grains of sand in her hourglass.
He was a boy ant, seeing seas ceaselessly churning blue and white waves, distant flat deep blue waters, a rising volcanic mountain surrounded by clouds, feeling crisp air on his face, maintaining a steady pace.
They didn't see the cemetery to their right, the green grove, rune coral fragments, solitary green and white headstones with Arabic script or a dancing delicate spider's web reflecting 1,001 points of diamond light.
Then they disappeared.
(Translated by Wave)
Editor's note: this was organically published in June, 2005.
“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel.
I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.
“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”
I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed.
“Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.
“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports “heroes” have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”
I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”
“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!” They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.
“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”
I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation. “You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”
Metta.
He started this story on a Saturday morning. He was somewhere between dawn and noon.
He sat on a thick green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery. He'd found this place a couple of days earlier and liked it because it was quiet. The entire Air island was quiet. Maybe 1,000 residents.
It was one of three islands off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. It was called Gili Air. It was quiet.
The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one it was big and blue. Across the water was the island of Lombok. On this particular day Rinjani, the volcano at 3,500 meters was obscured by low grey and high white clouds.
He read "The Elephant Vanishes," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami.
One of the main reasons he liked sitting here was because it was next to a small cemetery.
Ten or twelve small plots, a few eroded headstones with scattered grey and coral borders in a grove of small trees. Weeds and small pieces of trash.
He always found cemetaries when he roamed around the planet. Peaceful places where he learned and observed customs, habits, histories. Air. Bursa, Turkey, Grazalema, Spain to remember three.
How the small Spanish village in the Sierras used crypts near the Catholic church. How they were decorated with plastic flowers. How empty crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels.
How the grazing white and grey sheep near the Catholic Cemetario filled rising green fields. There was a beautiful single palm tree in the courtyard. Behind iron gates lay silent white crypts decorated with real and plastic flowers, names, dates and old faded curling black and white photographs of the dead where a procession of men laid a 40-year old friend of theirs to rest last week.
They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity, blessed themselves and returned to the village for sherry and conversation full of memories speaking about the man who died alone with no wife or children and above the crypts were gray cliffs and peaks in heavily wooded forests and the sky was a watercolor in progress as white, grey, orange and blue colors hurtled on an east wind. Where families of Egyptian vultures expanded their wings on thermals.
After this vision he returned to Spanish crypts.
He manipulated his camera obscura tool in fast fading light making images of interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their pueblo connection. He imaged down cavities and shells of carefully constructed rectangular rows of empty passages.
They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Stories of desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence. Waiting for air to carry them to the listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in their collective breathing. Stories inside stories.
Metta.
She talked of "homesickness." All the letting go. How she was born on Air and lived in a small French town on the Belgium border for some time.
How her temporary work visa finally expired and she returned home. She wore French designer sunglasses and they fit her brown oval face to perfection. One day it was skin tight jeans. The next an orange and green flowing sarong. A fashion touch. She had the island ease, a long black thick mane, the divorced island hubby and the one boy-child over on Lombok going to school. Living with his "uncle," a tribal chieftain.
She worked part-time in a small cafe-bar near the beach, the white sunset sand, rolling blue apprehensions, French tongued memories. "I am so bored," she said.
"I want to build some bungalows. I own some land. I need to develop a source of income."
She chatted up the odd European. She mixed drinks. She spoke with her son using her cells, her DNA. She stared at the sea. It poured into her black eyes. It was everything she'd run away from. To find herself. To discover her island again and again and again when she ran in reverse through dreams and memories.
A yellow butterfly sailed through a garden. Darting high, low, in, out of fragrant red, yellow, white glorious blooms.
A diver spoke about money exchange systems after coming up for Air. How the value of economic currencies fluctuates. A butterfly and turtle have so much in common. One in air one in water. Both floating.
Metta.
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