rappelling Dihedral Wall

Graphite shavings
Slip across
Paper-thin edges.
Creating a moment,
A cloud, lost to us.
Chalk dust gives the lie
To my invisibility.
Outlined, announced,
Retracted, broached.
Just a shadow,
At least here,
On this wall.
I cling. To you.

Pulpit Rock: solo ascent

Brooks Brothers at Fifteen

Mom was in the house crying as usual. When he had gotten home he had checked on her. Told her he was home. She just continued her quiet sobbing. How could anyone have that many tears? He always thought that her eyes must hurt so badly from that much weeping. Grabbing a couple of tapes from his room, he retrieved a bong from the bushes outside the back of the house, and walked toward the quarter acre that constituted the “far back”. Dad was waiting for him, sitting under the Avocado trees. A circle of chairs in the dirt surrounded an old milk crate covered with a batiked cloth. Sitting down, he took a lid of weed from his shirt pocket. His father hadn’t aged. He was dressed in a dark grey Brooks Brothers suit, a dark blue paisley tie, and a light blue dress shirt. His hair was silvering, shining, and long in comparison with the conservatism of his clothes. Still forty-eight years old. The same age as that last day he had seen him three years ago. He was starting to get used to the fact that his father would come and sit with him under the tree. Dad rarely spoke. He just seemed to watch.

“How can she cry so much? I mean, her eyes are always so red, so raw. You know I don’t cry as much as I used to. I don’t have time I guess. You know? What should I do for her? I mean, you know? I mean…” his voice trailed off as he stared at his father who was leaning back in a chair.

He tried again, “Let me ask you something…why did all this have to happen? I mean, where’s God anyway? You know you made me kind of believe in that stuff. God and stuff. Then, I guess you made me not believe in God. I don’t know. But you’re here and you shouldn’t be, and I think you’re real. But I know you can’t be. And isn’t that like God? I mean, that he’s real even though he can’t be? Not that you’re God. I know that, I guess.”

He took the bowl off the stem of the bong and blew through the hole. After inspecting the bowl, he filled it with some of the pot from the bag. The late afternoon summer sun, leaking through the avocado trees, cast long shadows in the heat. Pulling a tape deck from inside of another covered milk crate, he slipped a tape in. Pushing the play button, the silence from his father was drowned out. It was replaced with The Stones singing “Gimme Shelter.” Lighting a match he stared at his dad for a second and then pulled a bong load. While holding in the hit he saw his dad look away from him. “yeah we’re goin’ ta fade away…”

Blowing out the smoke he continued, “See, it’s like this, um, mom hears things and I see things. I mean, I’ve heard you as well, but seeing grandpa the other day too? Wow that was creepy. You know? I mean, why would he come here? He was always disappointed in me after you were gone. I mean, I got kicked out of the Boy Scouts for refusing to pray! You know! So why did he come here? He just sat out by the swimming pool and stared into space. Did you know that he came here?”

Mick and Keith kept right on playing. “whoa…children…it’s just a shot away…it’s just a shot away, yea, yea, yea…” He ignored the fact that his father never liked The Stones -- or rock for that matter. His dad was staring at his hands now. His hair falling from his part across his forehead. Setting the bong down, he picked up a dry avocado leaf. Crushing it, he smelled a spicy scent.

“Okay so…you won’t tell me about why this is all happening to me. You know, I used to cry all the time, just like her, like mom. Now I need to show her that there is another place…I mean, like, a totally different place. Where she doesn’t need to hurt so much. Why don’t you go and talk to her? I mean, she hears voices anyway…so what difference would it make if it was you? That would be so much better than whatever it is she hears now, like, you know what I mean? Dad? I can’t make her see her way out of wherever she is now. She’s trapped wherever she is...I can tell you that.”

He stretched in his chair and looked at the sky up in between the canopy of leaves. When he looked back, his father was staring intently at him. His father’s hand dropped a crushed avocado leaf onto the fine dirt. The smell made him sad.

“Are you real? Are you God? Or am I like her? You know, sick or whatever. I can’t have friends over anymore dad. If they saw mom they wouldn’t understand that she’s just really sad about you dying, you know? So it’s just you and me…and I guess grandpa now. Man, that was weird. Why did he come here? Tell me.”

“You’ve got the silver…you’ve got the gold…” The sun hit him directly in the eyes washing out the world. “Yeah, I’ve got the silver. Hear that dad? What should I do for her? Give me at least that, will you? Just say, ‘Son, blah blah blah.’ Okay? But you know, like you were still here and could actually tell me. Come on, please talk to me.”

His father shifted in the chair and pushed his hair back. Blue eyes seemed to look right through him. Then his father reached out and placed another dried leaf on his lap.

“Crush that for me,” his father said. “I can’t smell it anymore. But I can smell it when you smell it. Do that for me son.” His father stared at him and waited.

“Wait…when I smell something you smell it too? So do you get stoned when I get stoned? That would be totally weird, I mean, getting stoned with my dad. No, that’s too weird.” He picked up the leaf from his lap and twirled it over and over.

Raising his face back to his father, he said, “Okay…no problem. But we’ll have to make a trade. I’ll crush up the leaf if you’ll tell me what to do for mom. Okay? I mean, that’s fair isn’t it? Like, you know, I would smell the leaf for you anyway. Even if you said no about telling me what to do for mom. Cause, it’s not like you’re real or anything. Unless you are. God.” He started quietly laughing, “God…get it? Man. Couldn’t you just let her see you? I mean, maybe then she would stop hearing all those things, and stop crying all the time, and…”

Then he started to shake. And the tears came. They came so violently that he couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t hear anything either, except for his whimpering and sobbing. His nose began to run and he doubled over placing his head in his own lap. Periodic convulsions of sadness wracked his body. Then he heard the leaf crush in his balled up fist. And the pungent odor of avocado spiced the air. On the back of his neck he felt a hand gently caress him.

“It’ll be okay. Your mom does see me. Just not the way you do. You’ll be okay. Cry now, it’s okay,” he heard his father whisper to him.

But it wasn’t okay was it? Never, ever, again. Soon he saw all his dead relatives hanging around the yard. All of them seemingly intent on some sort of meditation on whatever was before them. Grandma stared at the stable. Grandpa continued his fascination with the pool. Two of his dead cousins showed up and just sat under the basketball hoop. None of them said anything. In the meantime, his mother descended ever further into her delusional reality. So, one day, he went into the house and gathered up as much glue as he could find. In all he found four bottles. Then he took a long hot shower. Afterwards, he went back to the avocado trees and sat down and waited.

When his father appeared he smoked some pot and crushed a bunch of leaves. Then he took off all of his clothes and folded them neatly. Hanging from the tree was a thick rope, which acted as a climbing rope. Taking hold of the rope, he pulled himself up into the tree. He had brought a brown paper grocery bag with him, held in his teeth, up into the tree. The bag was full of the crushed avocado leaves, the bottles of glue, and the tape deck. First he smeared glue over his skin, working in small areas at a time. This process began with the upper left quarter of his body. After the glue was in place he pressed the crushed leaves onto his body. He continued until he was covered in glued on crushed leaves. He could smell the mix of avocado spice and white glue.

“How’s that smell dad?” he whispered to his father, who now sat on a branch across from him. “I kept my part of the bargain you know. I never quit. I never died. But you couldn’t tell me what to do for her could you? I gave you all these leaves…that’s what you asked for...wasn’t it? Then all these people show up and they’re just zombies. So now I’ve got a gift for you.”

He put a tape into the tape deck that he had wedged into an elbow of the branch. Pushing play he heard, “I’m your toy…I’m your old boy, and I don’t want no one but you to love me…” Pulling up the climbing rope, he fashioned a noose about midway down its length. The dried glue made his skin feel constricted. No, he felt held, like in some giant hand. It felt like the imaginary hand of his dad. Or God. He smiled. Slipping the noose over his head, he knocked some of the leaves off his cheek. He watched as they twisted their way to the ground below. Then he tightened the noose around his neck and crouched on the thick branch. Suddenly all his dead relatives crowded around under the tree. They left an opening directly below him. An invitation, he thought. Gram Parsons continued in the background, “ No I wouldn’t lie…You know I’m not that kind of guy.” The late afternoon sun hit him in the eye and he heard something far away. As he slipped off the branch he heard his mother calling for him. It was a mistake, he thought. But he knew he would at least be able to get her to see him. Like dad said she saw him. And he would ask her to crush up avocado leaves for him. And she would feel better then. The sun disappeared. He saw all his relatives gather leaves up and crush them. Then he called out to his mother, “I’ll be right there mom!”

abandoning Dawn Wall

Air closes around me, glovelike
it separates, the rock, in practiced foot smears.
Sweat, now, bleeds oil onto body and hands,
beneath, the head locked tangent,
of easterly weather gatherings.

Your ghost waited below for me,
turning dusty circles behind a tree.
Unseen, above, bleakly held moments,
gripping, through memories cramped,
when I could not continue forward.

This fulfills and shatters, granitelike
my fantasies, the dirt, in the still closeness.
Mildew, later, infiltrates damp bath towels,
hanging, in white tiled uniformity,
under the last pitch seen at dawn.

free-climbing Sentinal Rock

I cut myself with a rusty knife,
yesterday, and waited, for hours,
until, the fine line turned, away
from brightness, from red, deepening
to the color of the blade, itself.

A small slash of withered courage,
yesterday, remembered, for hours,
until, the blossom burned, away
from kerosene, from fire, seeping
into the salt of my skin, itself.

Ephraim

Ephraim

Ice cubes for brains. Rattling around, clinking, and ultimately melting away in the face of the fire. I walk into the room freezing. Frozen. Cold-hearted. Dead. People stand around at the party. It is ten o’clock and quietly dark out. Inside, here, it is bright. Small conflagrations, burning footprints, smoking eyes and ears, but mostly flame-throwing conversations. Balls of fire spewing forth and sticking to this person’s shoulder or that person’s cheek. I try to be cool. The ice becomes water. Becomes gas. Leaks from my body, making me an airhead. My footprints are small puddles. A difference so obvious to me, yet clearly unacknowledged by others. What is wrong with me? I have no ambition, no drive. Just self-destructive recurrent patterns of embarrassing helplessness. No! The cancer won’t come back. Can’t come back. Don’t say this to me. My mind stops. All I hear is, “No, no, no, no…” washing out all of your words, your predictions, your admonishments for me to prepare to be alone eventually. No! Everyone is on fire. Fire! I am a block of ice, alternately melting, and then freezing again. Fissures and crevasses make it easy for your words to seep in and break me apart. Leaving me cubed and cracked, shaved and shattered. Can’t come back…can it? Frozen in time. Unable to move, to make, to be anything ever again. I don’t believe I ever was anything to begin with. I was born unsettled. I matured unstable. I am aging unsatisfactorily. They are on fire. I enter the party.

The bow. Ephraim, the bow of the twelve tribes. I am Ephraim. I am the bow. Never the arrow. Merely a stationary fulcrum. Launching other things and people. An ice sculpture of a bow. My parents were Ephraim. My mom said I was Ephraim too. So I am. People mill about. I prepare to launch cold from my bow to staunch the bleeding fire that they spread about the room. Maybe I should let them burn. No! It won’t come back! They are made of asbestos. They don’t need to be cooled, preserved, or slowed. I melt with a word, a touch, or a look. Why did I come here? I don’t leave my house anymore. I’ll be dead soon anyway…so why leave? If it comes back, and you die, then I die. It is that simple. I am waiting for the all-clear signal. I remain huddled under my desk doing exactly what I was shown. When an air raid, or atomic bomb attack happens, duck and cover children. I am under attack. I have been under my desk for so long that it has grown into my back. I walk hunched over supporting my flesh school desk. Forever waiting for the bright flash that will signify my evaporation. Under foot lay all the pretty pieces of my dreams. They trail away behind me indecipherable, to me or anyone else. Madly swaying against a wall, a drunken girl is laughing. She drinks as if the fire threatens her too. When she opens her mouth, first to pour more beer down her gullet, then to speak, I recognize her. She teeters on the edge. The lukewarm eddies create temperate zones vying for stability, swirling around her waist. Fire and freezer burn. I don’t recognize her after all. She is not of the tribe of Benjamin. She is not an arrow. She just toys with letting the fire lapse into a smoldering drunken smile. I am the bow.

My host turns with a smile and welcomes me. He doesn’t see that I have melted due to his invitation. My home is a deep freeze that I keep carefully controlled. Now, here, I have no control. Introductions made, names immediately forgotten, I trundle off to place the beer I have with me into an ice-chest outside. The yard rambles unexpectedly off around bushy dark corners. Above the chest a church key hangs from a wire attached to a hammock frame in the semi-darkness. I think of hanging myself. This brittle frozen neck cracking in two after bearing my middle-aged weight. My head rolls off down one of the garden paths that wind away from me as I open a beer. Between my ears I feel the congealing slush of my returning self.

Outside, here, in the shadows cast by the backyard porch light, I regain my specific gravity. No, I don’t want to talk. I just want to watch and listen from a safe distance. No, don’t get too close to me. No. It can’t come back. I wish my ears would melt off. “Oh yeah, sure, u-hm, fine, we’re fine, she’s fine.” A fine line. She’s a fine line. A line that I tether to my iceberg brain, towing her to safety in the freezer of my heart. I want us to be like a pair of Mammoths stuck in permafrost. Holding hands. Forever. Until we become food for some starving expedition that digs us up in a few thousand years. Cancer. She’s a fine line. Health or death. In between happiness and illness. Tattoo a harbor on my forehead and place her ship there so I can keep it safe. I am the bow. She is the archer. She is from an unknown tribe. Not one of the twelve. Not of my people. Not even of her own people. Her people just blindly coupled one day and she took the opportunity to start her creation. I’m still waiting for them to be reduced to ashes. To leave her alone with me. She has no tribe. She is unique. She is her own creation. A runaway adopted off the street. Self-created with rogue indifference to cells exuberantly multiplying in her body. She told me she is prepared for this creation, her self, to leave. No, no, not me. Don’t leave me. I am already so cold here. “Oh yeah, good to see you again.” I open another beer and smile at nothing and no one in particular.

Why did I come here? She left our house to go to the desert for the weekend. I am alone. Parties always emphasize exactly how alone I can be. Small talk has never come easily to me. But I have learned to make it seem so. Every word that I utter only exists because it has to follow the other words that somehow escape my mouth. Those words have no significance beyond their fear of losing each other. My tongue is a gatekeeper who sometimes sleeps with the gate key fully exposed. I say things I don’t mean. I say things in response to others out of etiquette as much as engagement. “No, she’s out of town.” And I am out of things to say. It happens that quickly. Plastic Fireball Man, fearful of aging, wants to tell me about playing music out of fakebooks. I don’t want to talk about playing music with this guy. He gives me the creeps. I’m not sure why. “No…I don’t play anymore.” My frozen head rolls out from behind a bush and winks at me. Doesn’t this man see that I am dead? That I am slushy and leaking? What is he looking at? I have no head. I almost point to the path down which my braincase has rolled. If you want to talk to someone, something, talk to my head Plastic Fireball Man. The drunken girl breaks something on the back porch. “No, we’ve never met. I’ve never been here before,” I say after she insists she knows me. She flips her Peggy Lee hair out of her eyes. I haven’t seen someone this wasted in years. My head rolls back to me and I place it on my neck. It dangles a little to the side. I need to get home, back to the deep freeze. “New Mexico?” Another girl says she is from New Mexico. She points to her less than sober companion and says they are both from New Mexico. Then she adds,“So is Mr. X in the living room.”

Mr. X. The Mr. X. I walk into the living room and reintroduce myself to Mr. X. He is a friend of a friend, and an unexpected event in flesh. Why did he come? Cars, dragsters, top fuel, men with tools, men with diminutive women who love men with tools, diminutive men who love women with tools. That’s why. This party is filled with gearheads. I am not one of them. I love tools, respect cars, but drag racing isn’t my thing. Just not part of the California I grew up in. I know others say that it is integral to Southern Cal culture, but most of them grew up somewhere else. As a matter of fact, the majority of gearheads I know are all from some other state. They moved here and found the link to the stock cars, dragsters, or matchbox toys of their youth, in the drag strips of Southern California. But I am from here. Just because I am frozen and inarticulate doesn’t mean that I don’t have bragging rights to my area. I know what I know. In my neighborhood, drag racing and car culture were for hicks and hardasses. Surfing, hiking, and horses were what I knew. Cars. Loud, smelly, and lowbrow. Mr. X, an artist who, like everyone else here, defies my overly judgmental assessment of car racing fans, is relaxed and nice. My recognition of this worthless prejudice against combustion shames me. I talk about our mutual friend, and other things, for a few minutes. Then he joins a discussion on the history of drag racing celebrities. The participants melt before my eyes. The kitchen floor is awash with greasy flames dancing about. The drunken girl, still smoldering away, is guided out of the house by her friend. I left too; leaving sodden trails careening around my friend’s house and yard. “Hey, thanks for having me. Bye.”

My feet slip along the brick pathway across the lawn. Ice patches appear in my wake. A bow is worthless without an archer’s hands to guide it's action. To give meaning to it’s potential. A concerted dance of finesse. A love affair of sinews. I may be Ephraim, but her tribe is new. Her ways reassemble known bits and pieces into a new territory. For me, she is the jewel of all archers. It is cold out as I make my way to my car. For this I am grateful. No fires to worry about. No melting. No heads cracking off. But, no one waits at home. Parties aren’t for me. I don’t have an interesting enough personality to go to them. I just freeze up. No, no, no, no, no. You won’t leave me alone here. Alone on this planet after all these years. I won’t let you go. Sure, go to the desert to thaw out. You deserve to warm a little every now and then. But my cold arms will keep you fresh. Keep the fire from exploding out of those strange cells you say you still carry around inside you. No. Never say that to me. Never say that I am going to eventually be alone after the cancer comes back and takes you away. Never say that I must prepare myself for such a thing. Never say we are separate, that we won’t go together. Never, I can’t take it, hear it, or feel it. I won’t let you leave without me. Without your hands, eyes, and steady nerves, my ice bow would only melt away. Or more likely, shatter. You are my true tribe. You are of the tribe of the Jewel. You are the only party I am comfortable at.