The Patron Saint of Fools

We set the cars like horses; faces nestled into bodies, nostrils spewing out the hot humid engine heat of an air-conditioned midwest summer night, intertwined.  The chirping of crickets and intermittent fuzz of far away radio chatter.  The languid air became thick with cologne that I knew he reapplied when I suggested our clandestine meeting.  The old habits we don't quit.  I remembered, I remembered, and I tried to shut it down but it kept.  Coming.  An evening with mom and dad at dinner and me dropping in and trying to keep it together, I had just found out but I couldn't tell them.  The way his voice sounded on the phone when I first told him.  Sunrises in the cemetery. Holding hands in the early morning when I felt so vulnerable.  Thanksgiving and cigarettes and her strength, carrying me.  Coded conversations where we pledged our undying allegiance.  The jokes, the declarations, the subtle glances, the devotion.  And that I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror one evening, and saying, you fool.  Whatever you are looking for, it is within you.  Stop.  Searching.

Standing prostrate in Nevada with a pack of Marlboro Lights, devastated.  And in the next moment a cell phone call from an acquaintance in panic and the quick transition into stoic elder, advice-giver.  The layers haven't gone away they've just become more complex.        

Old memories clattering in my head like skeletons, advancing on the front in a frenetic dying effort to escape.  To just, move, on.  But they never move on.  Retreating to the dark recesses of my soul, they perch on their haunches and wait, hollow, empty, with a fool's sense of injustice at their incarceration.  Plotting their next attempt at escape from the prison of my mind, my memories.  Why can't I let you go. 

He dismounted and moved toward me in that soupy late July night.  The sound of my leather when I mirrored him and the idling of engines.  And the crickets, and the distant lights, and the pregnant humming of daylight in the bible black predawn.  Gritty wet asphalt crunching underneath my toes.  The embrace.  I saw myself in the reflection of tinted windows and the girl looking back knew me before I knew me, the eyes so old and in some ways, bitter.  She looked disappointed, in a resigned, respectful way.  The heart wants what it wants, but the mind deceives the body into making a farce of it all.  The old know, the young desire.  This life.

And to whom do we listen.

The end is always poetry, so it is.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)