.. Wayne Noone
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Roger's Wedding Let me tell you about Roger's wedding, the little I can remember, when I was 21 and without a woman or wisdom and filled with the terror of being 21, when it felt like the scrape of gunmetal across my teeth, and I was asked by him to be his best man. There were no doves in the concrete shelter at Scott Park, Roger's 2nd marriage out of 4 that I know of and he the same age as me. He wore a blue tux which hung baggy on his thin frame and I can't even remember the girl's name, but I do recall him less than a year later sitting in a black Cadillac with a little white casket across his knees but all that was yet to come. Mark worn his new gray suit, and Mum told him not to forget to get her a piece of wedding cake, she knew I'd never bother but she could count on Mark, after all, she was the only real mother he'd had, and he loved her more purely than the one who used to climb into his bed at night, stroke his cock and whisper about Jesus, so, yeah, he'd get her some cake, and we'd get very drunk, I remember both he and I dancing with the mother of the bride, a gal in her 50s in a blue gown low-cut so Mark and I could see the great split between her breasts, boy, we thought she was great, and we thought, being 21, that she would fuck us but of course that never happened and I remember as we left we both had to piss so we stopped at a clump of bushes both of us fumbling around in the dark when Mark just disappeared and I figured he went back in after her but turned out he had passed out and fallen headlong into the bushes so I went home alone. Mum, waiting up, said where's Mark and I told her I had no idea, but an hour or so after I went to bed she was still looking out the window and called me saying here comes Mark and we watched him zigzag down the street clutching waxpapered pieces of wedding cake, a slick of white icing and pink flowers across his suit. Milkweed There is a place, a minor intersection of Kerr Road and Old Greentree Road and the new highway marked only by the braided cables of the roadside barriers and a blue Port Authority sign, an indifferent place ignored by the trucks passing along the highway, only populated by an occasional soul on a Tuesday morning, in light rain, waiting for a bus. I have made a study of this place, can tell specifics of its history, know the number of meters from Kerr Road to Ursula Drive, McArthur Drive, can draw you a map that would allow you to find it but there is little to say about it really, no one to remember. My sister Charlotte recalls stories about Indians. among the cinders and gravel you can find a shard of flint, an arrowhead, a tooth, a blessing It was part of the Samuel Nutbrown Farm in my father's day but the Nutbrowns are all gone or moved and across the highway there were Victory Gardens in the forties, I can show you chokeberries, raspberries, echoes of the hands that picked. Now just a roadside, cinders gravel and vegetation, debris, a plastic carton, butts of filtered cigarettes in their season. pick up one of these butts insert it in the quarter slot of a pay phone take up the receiver you will hear voices And the vegetation, ragweed, milkweed goldenrod, dandelion, and on the underside of a pale flat leaf is written in white: you do not see, ye fools and blind, that all things have started here that the confluence of these roads is mapped in the veins upon the back of your hand but recognition will offer your life no greater significance You must come with me then, to this spot. We will not read those leaves, merely wait in silence for the bus with a short fellow in a flannel cap jingling the change in his pocket. Seeing See a crow, other birds this morning and think of you. See fat white flowers blooming - have to ask you what they are. See you sitting on a park bench, in a black dress, looking beautiful, eating pineapple. Just want to let you know: I see. Main Page
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