Sunday, December 20, 2015
Minds
Even after the internet, Moke and Kippy sent
weekly letters.
Lulu and Racker kept them in Birkenstock
boxes in the cavernous attic.
They had inherited the monster of a house,
and crack many jokes about filling it up,
but no possibility there.
When winter came, they closed most of the
rooms off, but Racker said he enjoyed going
into one or another to think. Air like ice
evidentially conducive to such.
When the correspondents moved to Paris, they
missed a couple of beats. Kippy started writing
poems in French––she had taught it at Central
High—and Moke started painting again.
He did send his efforts via the net. Fetching
neighborhood scenes, crusty bistros and the like,
which inexplicably acquired jarring pop elements
after a couple of years.
Then, all shape and color, with not much fathomable.
Now, just color.
I like them, but don’t know why.
For some reason, it becomes necessary to visit a
mountain monastery celebrating its five-hundredth
anniversary.
Well, some reason: She thinking of writing their
Gregorian Chants into secular poetry.
Oh well, I couldn’t see the future in that, but that’s
just me!
At any rate, their bus went through a barricade
in a rain storm and plunged...! well, all died.
Lulu and Racker held a memorial in the huge house
and we’re reading from the letters by candlelight very
nearly horizontal in the wind. Two things strike me.
They had been interested in virtually everything.
And! They had a Romance! From Childhood till they
sensed each other’s breathing.
Until it stopped.
But we all knew theirs was an ideal out of reach. End of
our particular stories in that regard! Two exs studied me
as the flames resumed upwardly.
Anyway, the lovers wanted their ashes in “a beautiful,
natural place,” and her brother in Virginia volunteered his
beaver pond.
I sent him my video of the service here. That had been a
friends’ deal; the beaver pond a family one. Except for
Lulu and Racker. They’re invited. Hey! Every family’s
different.
They didn’t want to leave Brusque at the vet. An old
little Jack Russell gentleman, if still frenetic. So I came
over and took care of him in their three-day absence.
Lulu had moved the boxes of letters to a special alcove
under the eaves. I wandered up there during a blizzard.
Blessedly alone, Brusque afraid of the attic.
Sorry to disappoint, but the wind prevented my hearing
anything else, if the lovers intimated to one another.
They did in a dream the next week. He said “It’s cold!”
And she, “Never! with you.”
So? Was the Wind translated then, as Romantics would
have it?
I say just the wind. My twisted mind, the rest.
Labels: art, Death of Lovers, friends, ghosts, letters, painting, Paris, poetry, Romance
