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Spaces
Dawn.
Venetian blinds project jail house movies onto the floor. I woke up tasting
disappointment. Again I had dreamed of that place I once was.
It was a house, an amalgam of a few places I had lived? A house broken up
into uneven apartments. Sad fates, dead dreams. Lines waver. Even with clouded
images there was a sense of urgency in getting back there.
I had been there before.
I may have been fooling myself, my only residency having been in dreams.
I must make sure, either way. Think back. Devour. You are gone but now must
conquer, my phoenix of memory. Think back, obsessions listed, to appear as a
chant burning down the page.
Me, her, a theme viewed from several perspectives over the space of many
stories. A theme emerging from different characters and their motives. The
truth? Only the repetition of questionable facts which make the pattern, the
theme.
I close my eyes. Should I go to her place? That last time...
Her place. The last time, the trip was made longer by the fact that she
would only stop to eat or fuck in towns named after saints.
Her place. There is the bent tree. Still hidden in the field of Anisette,
the scent of fire. The place she killed her dreams. I am there too. Sometimes by
accident, sometimes fate. I needn’t come. I am doubling up, the two of me
wandering in opposite directions through the field.
The scent of fire. In her hair, in her past. Regrets. Someone had been
lying. I shouldn't worry, it is in the pattern.
Something tattered is caught in the branches of the tree. Gaunt, like a
desire unfufilled. The wind. Something black and tattered. It waves good bye.
c2004 Tantra Bensko
Hippo Funeral
It has been raining for five days. The sky remains dark, but all the leaves of the trees have become strangely luminescent. A Degas painting set outside
the city with its theaters which he loved.
Except for when they are very young, no other animal preys upon the hippo. After their first year they gain about one hundred pounds a year. Each herd has one leader. They live about thirty years. The only thing
prematurely disrupting their life cycle being privation due to drought or a young challenger being killed by the king.
Females never fight, except to protect their young from other animals. Sometimes a king becomes too old and is killed by the challenger. The next morning the entire herd will start licking him in a display of
affection, and to try to wake him. When this does not work they will each, one by one nip him. When he still does not wake all the males will open their mouths
as a sign of respect, and cry.
Five days of rain, the type that comes straight down in little broken lines. Below, in the lagoon, trash and little bits of branch float by. The current gives it all a bobbing motion.
Happy little animals waltzing out to sea or on
their way to a funeral.
copyright 2005 Wayne H.W Wolfson
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