Nighttime on the deck …

notebook excerpt July 21, 2002 –

Nighttime on the deck …

Disembodied children’s voices call from beneath a darkening hull of trees.

“Hurry!” They giggle and urge, “No, under it! Go UNDER!”

I want to follow weightless, aloft, a voice among the leaves. But whom would I beckon? What words? Which way?

To be bodiless. That is the allure. But voice, the shape of words, an unchecked tone, finding this and the speaking of it has always been a search of mine. A yearning. And still, inches from my grasp, an eternity.

I would whisper through the cool gray of a sunless dawning. At dusk I’d peal the names of children, keen and fibrous as a song. I’d gather them amid the tender echo of their names, my open arms wide as branches, and call them home to the scent of roasted almonds, to apples boiling on the stove.

The air seeps to darkness now. My page aglow in the blue-gray air. A smiley-faced moon, a melon rind, the hulking shapes of backlit trees eerily still. My hair falls across my bare thigh, cool and soft and damp. I am baby-oiled and sweet and clean and I clutch my sides in impenetrable fear.

TV noise wafting faint as voices in a hotel corridor, drifting past. A plane rumbles and whines overhead, air conditioner units hum, lightning bugs tap my legs. At the moment of death they blare brightly and linger – 20 seconds more, 30? They will fade, inescapably, their last mark waning slowly, without them. On my windshield they flare and protractedly extinguish and I wonder at my own moment –

will I burst with light and linger?