Time waits for he who listens...

Having flopped away from his family in bits and bops, our hero, at age five, wandered alone on the beach.

He found a half living fish and its punctured eyeball.

He poured sand on top of it to calm it down.  It worked.

He rushed to the sea's edge and felt a good long moment of accomplishment as it ran away.

He was spared a dashed ego when he turned around to follow a rotten wind's trail and the calls of a pile of men.

Yes, he saw a pile of men.

This was something.

He walked in weaving loops toward them...quickly, but also hesitantly...as a child can do without looking anything other than appropriately composed.

These men did indeed invite fear and interest.

So, he went near.  And, stopped.

What are they about?, he wondered in one form of thought or another.

They play with me.  They tell me something.

It seems nice to be large like that.  But, that one looks dead.  This one like the eye popped fish.  Two pretend.  Adults pretend too.  I know that. 

What do they tell me?

They ask after me.  They tell me one thing and another.  They are nice and they are not nice.  I know that too.  I would like to cover them in sand.  Like the fish.  Because they don't know what to do with themselves either, and they look cold and in need of a blanket.  Half dead.

He, our hero, decides he doesn't want to be a man.  Not an eye punctured, cold pretending, blanket-or-dead man at least.  So he turns around, and begins to work out how he can become three again.  It's not his time.

The only way to make sense of it...

This is the way to change the shape of one's face.  To let oneself grow old.  Finally.  To calm the self, become something wiser...or perhaps simply something else. 

This is the way to break the iron force of habit:  A pain that won't leave you.  Like a tide that has forgotten to go out. 

Bo, Bob's boy.  This is Bob's boy, Bo.  Bob's Bo.  Bob's Dot and Bo.  Dot and Bo.  Bo and Dot.

Just think of the grasses, the shells, the once two-world creatures, the rock face that was an edge.  Soaked now to another consistency.  Left with new marks bored into their topical maps that will never go away.  New old marks.  It took a measure of extremes.

Some things happen so they never happen again.  

Urged towards a speaking he cannot produce...

Our hero is wrongly sized.  Small and wet in the mouth.  And, a she.

No, that's too much.

[Taking my legs out from beneath me.]

A small he, and wet with things he shouldn't have said.  His name changes, but for now it is "he." 

Our hero, he, managed to skip the stage of infancy...but, in doing so, he found himself living from ages 3 to 6 three times over.  The first time was eye opening; the second dull; and, during the third was when he became wet limbed.  At 15, this spread to his mouth. 

And, now, we meet him at the still relatively ripe age of 19.  He is understandably, but somehow still inexcusably, horny.  And, yes, he does have a way with girls and especially women.  What you dislike and worry over, he licks up and cannot finish with.  You should be thankful.  He is, we shall say, appreciative.  Sublimely appreciative.  In his own words, which he stole from Marguerite Duras (and, to complicate the issue, from her translator):  "I prefer your face as it is now.  Ravaged."  [Yes, be scared.  It will leave more for the rest of us.]

Anyway. 

At this point, his name conveniently changed to

The problem is that it's not very clear what exactly he did to become a/our hero.  Perhaps we can dig into his history a bit and see what we can find.

Here's something.  At the second time around of being five, the following sequence occurred:

[To be continued, let's assume.]

Things you find in the skin of another's neck, or else in the grass...

I'm fairly certain that the light of the setting sun on late summer's grass tells a story older and thicker than many told tragedies.  It's something like this: 

His face gives up its look.  Likely in the matter of a moment, it stepped down from the train of expectations, let go of their shared momentum, and abandoned itself to the present.  His face, he, softened.  And, he drank in the sadness of the day's almost end.  Completely.  For, this is the time of day when one typically pitches a tent against the coming darkness, pours out a drink or pulls on a sweater, conspires to laugh with friends, share a meal, or at least takes up an already begun book from the side table.  Not tonight.  His face became a defenseless landscape.  And, sorrow is there told...and held open.  It, he, is beautiful.  For the moment.  Tomorrow, the sun will be clear, and the call will come and he will in all likelihood accept.  

That is the second-hand tragedy, the sound and the fury, and the color of the leaves of grass at dusk.  I'm fairly certain of this.  

Memories to come...

I bought my first four "stolen moments" or "borrowed memories" for 10 cents a piece.  I found them tucked away in a forgotten drawer at a used bookstore in Toronto.  They were the smallest photographs I had ever seen; the colors were reminiscent of my childhood LiteBrite; and, they were taken before I was even born.  These photographs derailed my day--a short break from writing my dissertation turned into an afternoon of giddy fascination.  I wanted to know who took these photos.  Why had they straightened the room just so?  Was the person proud, miserable, excited, waiting for company, worried that the roast was taking too long?  How long had that shot taken to compose?  Had they washed down the patio just for the photo?  And, why did these photos end up for sale?  In my hands?  The next day, I found I needed more.  And, I now have more, many more.  Pictures of families cooking, sitting dogs, playing dogs, dogs in a bathtub, men in work clothes, men clinking glasses, houses in profile, cars in profile, stiff subjects, bored subjects, caught off guard and nervous subjects, subjects acting oddly with respect to other subjects, brides and old women and bullies and cads, national monuments, ceilings taken by mistake, unexplainable stories of giraffes in a tennis court, a man posed behind a pole, a woman holding an effigy of a dead child.  Why have these shots been taken?

I continue to collect other people's photographs, because the stories invite me to ask after them.  They are not quite as fixed in place as the photographs in my family album.  They breathe and sing, falter and warble.  I find these stories, these borrowed memories, in places where stories have been cast off--places for the used and no longer cared for--and I pick them up where they have left off.  Let's see what happens here...