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These grounds may be haunted by the echo of a woman from the future I am trying to go to, creeping into now. I step outside and I see a misty imagining spreading over the wide east corner of the barnyard like it was picnic tablecloth – our garden, a big garden, a witch’s garden. We grow goblin’s gourds in league with sunflowers, we dig mad tubers, juggle zucchinis, and train killer tomatoes. I told her my family used to make wine and now she has vines to grow the grapes of her own wrath at the rest of the world not invited to our refreshing sacraments. It is a veritable apothecary. She likes to pretend with me, I think. Or maybe it is one of those kinds of futures where it’s not pretend or one of those kinds where it’s all the same, philosophically. It is only a haze that dissipates when I try to step into it. But it wraps me up just as well in a cloak of truth that I am there while here now, standing on grass clippings and wild onions.
This woman must be somewhere by now, but I don’t know where. I don’t how many woman I will meet first or how close they will come to making me think they are this woman. I don’t know how we meet or meet again. But I needed her to carry on my in-jokes and visions before I gave them all up. I have needed her for a long time. Not to be a cornerstone of reality, not to complete my soul. I expected complication, not happiness. Go ahead, I say, let’s have the complication. Then it gets so complicated. What I’d said I needed was someone to talk to, but knew the universe could be so stupid as to make someone who liked to listen to me, then have her keep away. |
I admit any actual woman for me, as I have tried to otherwise imagine, is probably crazy. For all I know, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn, she it out there already stalking me now. She is out there in my own bushes, she is going through my trash. She has to, she says weighing my banana peels, she just had to know how creepy I was. So all I have to do is wait. Until one day she flips out like Harley Quinn and runs off with me. The full moon rises and she is running out the library, putting on a red wig, and jumping on a motorcycle to see me. She is stealing my whole schtick. She wants that job opening I always have for bodyguard/maid.
I could help this poor woman. (To my cave!)
I admit I do not know love well personally. Even in its basest pleasure and pain – I was sent only the painful part. My love is theoretical, waiting for her arrival. But it follows from observation. I didn’t know what else to expect, so I would try to keep no expectations. I could abandon common romantic conception. Now I’d just started to think of a woman as the ultimate accessory – like a jetpack. Or a trailer for my truck. And I will pull you wherever I had to go.
I could no more clearly imagine the woman, only hobbies. The same for myself. I suspected the trick to passion would be less in looking for a match, but just someone you could find endlessly fascinating. If we could only learn to benefit.
Yes, I would have a house in the country and a girlfriend with an apartment in the city. She would come down and pretend to be trailer trash with me. Then I would take my trash to the city. The world would be ours and no one’s in-between. It’d be like that until it was technically feasible and affordable (like in the luxury yacht range) to own our own private dirigible. It will probably be orange. Also, it would be good to have some other friends, so we don’t just have sex constantly.
Here I was living like a Trappist monk, dreaming of a moorish harem. Except I couldn’t be that simple. It’s not that it’s a cheap paradise. Most people just want to go to paradise and live there. But my barn was a bunker in a one-man culture war. I wanted an art student who could handle a shotgun. But I already said she was crazy, so maybe she’s aiming it at me. Because I could turn around northwest and the mists roll in with another future hiking on the plains, one I have seen possible longer than my garden – where I am just as lonely an old man walking along the horizon, cackling at my own flatulence. Honestly, I thought I’d be there by now. But for now… now I cackle at the sound of my 5.4L V8 opening up down the highway. Didn’t expect to be the type. But have to scold myself, “no farting in the truck.”
I couldn’t build a school for gifted youngsters, but I could run a day camp in the summer.
I couldn’t sing to save a soul, but I could make musical arrangements.
I couldn’t fix America, but I could cultivate my forty acres.
Well, I could go on.
| I once had a very common regret among young men: “And I’d never see her again!” All I wished for was a walk. Then somehow I got it. It should have told me everything I needed to know. She had dropped the class and I just stopped going, but I read the book. I knew the living can’t compare to the dead. But if you could resurrect them, you’d try. But now I can tell you, young man, it was a handshake deal with the monkey’s paw. Actually, if I’d known I could get my wish, I should’ve wished for more. I’d have wished for pizza.
So, luckily, maybe unwisely, no regrets for my part now. I know, not that other people wouldn’t regret my parts. But even I wrote myself into corners and tried to hammer at the walls. If I could do it all again, I’d do it the same – only faster. Unless there was a book with the lessons, then I’d just skip a lot. It all just takes too long going alone. But all the people are sick; everyone keeps asking me to stay and help, then act like they’re not happy to have me around. Every year I look up to count my blessings, but each time there were only fewer people, new bills, and more paranoia. So I am still fighting in the fields. To save more to carry myself farther, the farther I’d have to carry more alone. My body is killing me to be morally and economically unbankruptable. Then they tell me “love could cure what ails you” but deny me prescription, knowing you could be like rain to the desert. But piss if I held out a cup. |
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By agreement with the gods, I go like an armed cactus. Again, best I can do with the available ingredients. Until we have fresh sprouts.
