The Fourth: Fruit or Flowers (Ideas or Symbols)

The Ides of March are back on their walk so silent they wrap me up at night
have their way with my brain
and shake my hand as they pack up their things again
just like last time.
But not like last time.
Boom-Boom-Boom, all in three’s – dates follow themselves
as if to a Sadie Hawkins dance where retards wear mismatched clothes
and I’m not woken up from under the bleachers
when it’s my turn to become a retard.
John M is 43. They would have been married 49 years.
Then a reprieve. Then the double fantasy days, just before Spring.
Each year different.

First: Shock- disastrous, unheard of, sad to say the most abandoned, free sex you had
was around the nights your father died.
In his house, he told me that shooting star was my father.
There was not a drop of guilt on me about what we did after he said that.
Seems like decades ago. The fermented, last remnants of my late
childhood.

The first year after– came the first celebration. New home, new family of people,
I cooked everything I could muster from our family, youth and heritage.
He said my hair smelled like flowers and cooked meat, and how that comforted him
and reminded him of Pittsburgh, of home and his mother.
The things I did while that woman slept in the other room.

The second year after- that was the hardest.
Not quite past that first shock and awe, but far enough away that we were gone from our house.
Where he lived, built, dreamed and died (and where I saw and felt him on those nights after,
when I was there, second floor bedroom which I had badly painted for him,
looking over from bed across the bathroom and stairway of wood, and hallway
to the other bedroom. He was right there with us still)
And waking up at 3am nightly like the plague was on its way from down deep inside me
growing up root into my brain and setting up shop like quicksand.
I was not myself, and yet didn’t know how I had been before. That thing I lost –
it was ok that it was gone, but did something good leave too, or was something deeper
sprouting there, and I could see it yet. Blindfold barefoot sleepwalk through the back-
garden under the moon, little green stems curling around my ankles and toes.
Arms tied tight,
no end in sight of this, as I jumped across self created minefields.
So far away it all was.
A need to run away brought me back to the girl on the west coast who met him, stayed in that house,
loved him, and stood up drinking wine with us til the late hours……
She would always make him smile, and loved his Johnny Cash red and black
cowboy plaid shirt he wore far too often,
(I cried the day I went to the top of my bookshelf to smell it but it didn’t smell like him anymore.
It just smelled like an old, un-worn shirt).
As he regaled her about love, and friends, and being yourself no matter what others said,
and I ran to her to quell my pangs of year 2.
Champagne and wine in her back bedroom near the pool,
bandaged me and saw me through again.

Then year 3 – I had become myself again, not the one that had been a child. More food,
more love, more experience in the only home I ever felt I had in this godforsaken city.
I had wished he could have seen it. And still wish with every new face I recognize,
that he was around for a late night wine-soaked talking fest.

Change, and recumbent, drowning in soil
and fucked by the moon. New is now old, and joints and brain waves squeak.
Upon this comes year 4. Stealthily marching like good, starving men who have won the war,
and are on their way back home to us, their women.
What must it have been like in ancient times to fight for years, and decades some-
then, win or surrender, if alive and breathing still,
perhaps months or more to walk home, after the fact. Probably a pacifist by the time
you reached your door; no more energy for war stories, as you’ve told to each other
and yourself every step of the way back.

This is where we are, today.
The war, the trauma and blood, the brutal meanings, and shocking sites,
the drums of passion, and that which brought us up,
the rhetoric of all that we believed in, which lifted us high and took us to this place,
-him carrying me all day on his shoulders at the thanksgiving parade when I was five,
even though he was nearly 50 and it hurt his back so-
All of that colourful silk of homeland flag waving back to me,
reminds me
when it comes back again, in the quiet of 3am, awoke from dreams,
I might welcome it into my arms and a whisper.
The sort that tells secrets, that we’ve known to ourselves all along.

M. Lucia