Bernard Bucholis
|
The Summer House I don't know where the money goes, she said with worry; gave a little laugh. Shook dull blonde curls she didn't know were showing black at the roots. She couldn't smell the twenty year old scotch or tell-tale mixture of French perfume fixed with a fishy trace of sand dune from Cape Hatteras; wouldn't get close enough. That was left to the children, patted and kissed at light's out, after obligatory Angel of God My Guardian Dear by a father whose mind was still out there, groping a shopgirl he'd earlier slid across our Studebaker seats betraying all of us, but we didn't have a Miltown to keep it fuzzy, or want to do anything but shuffle into the gameroom to watch another evening episode of Studio One, but there was the sun. The merciless, summer sun that sees everything, sun for growing tall in a home away from home that never was but a place to send those pretty lighthouse picture postcards from. Sometimes, There Are Lights behind the eyes, deep in the sockets, wrapped around the retinal nerve, small specks of light I used to imagine at the bottom of the door in the space where shoes appeared. Stopped, but never came in; four and terrified that I was the only one left of all the bleeding, howling house, but sometimes even now, I see such similar lights. If You Were With Me If you were with me, I think there'd be a reason to put the kettle on, make the bed, stir the soap to foam and shave a face so tired of looking in the same, old mirror; whose thoughts of razors do not first go on to splitting life from vein, or memory from days when you were close enough, I felt the heat and held one solid piece, and all of it brave. Main Page
|
