The Writer
I wish I knew where it all came from. I don’t, I’m just grateful that occasionally I have beautiful visions.
There was no sign of illness on the horizon, no sign of financial difficulties, in fact, as the writer wrote, he lived a life somewhere between enchantment and comfort. No, it was nothing to do with his future, his flight toward an infinite invisible splendor, or the madness of kept secrets, stories never told, love denials, or the wintry passages through boredom.
No, it was the harmonic intervals followed by long summers of discoveries, all forming in his mind, that had always kept him wondering.
The killing was easy. It held no fascination for the writer. However, a day before the thought of death, the ceasing of his breathing, the loss of his smile, life did not appear as charming or comfortable to all who came close.
Today, he will not appear again. The light of his day will be extinguished, taking from the world his affections, reasoning, sometimes the marvelous and unforeseen beauty of his writing passion. It would be merciful, if at the point of love, he ceased the agony of living without achievement.
Tomorrow, he must reinvent his life, have people believe that a dead man lives on, hidden from view, from their affections, their criticisms, have them regret not seeing his brilliance.
Yet the writer walks among them without smiling.
Killing was kind and reasonable, if only to make certain it was love and not the writing that killed him. Had he lived on he would have splintered the grace with which he was anointed and to which he had grown accustomed.
You won’t remember the writer, not fleetingly, as one recalls a dream days later, or an image flashed before you.
He cannot be loved.
The writer will reinvent himself each new day, live with his selfish affection, without a woman’s fury, purified of all wrongdoings, released of desires, living in a world that is his salvation. Gone the egoism of adolescence, the studious optimism, all taken over by his dying ideas buried within the hourglass of nocturnal melodies.
The writer remains a secret. Known and loved by all, one taken from us, mistily distant but recognizable, riding on the shores of his broken dreams, passing planted fields and stretches of woodland, laughing at theatrical women thinking they could compare themselves to the writer’s lost beauty.
There were nights when all should have wished to hail him, this deader than dead man, gone off to discover the secrets of wintry nights, visitations, to once again hear only the simplicity of his breathing, its strength in exhaling creativity, and the feelings of exhaustion.
Yes, I knew him, a would-be Don Quixote. How easily he rode the pages, had them turning like a windmill, churning the air, or made to turn more slowly.
So much is passed off, praised, and handed down as love and loving that reality at best must be unreal. I could not hear the voice, even on the telephone, without a sense than we were doing more than talking.
Yes, the writer’s breath was heavy on me as if his head had found that hollow in my chest and knew it was the eternal nesting place. When we were together our kisses came so often, as if one pair of lips could not canvas the other quite enough. Kisses, the writer said, interrupted whatever else our mouths were doing, speaking, tasting one another’s hills and cavities, sighing, and breathing. I had been kissed so often.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever know how much of us was memory and how much of the writer I made up.
I cannot tell you more than I did during my first interrogation. I did it on a beautiful morning, in a city full of brilliant people. We first met in Paris; he was wearing a white cotton shirt with brown slacks, a hat with a colorful band, and a silk scarf.
Yes, I remember exactly. It was in a restaurant. The following day we spent the morning walking in the suburbs, and in the afternoon sided up with the Seine, leaning close to one another. The next week he explained that he was leaving. A door slammed. A child was waving. I was being abandoned, passed over, and swallowed up in practicalities. Reasons, he said.
What reasons take a poet out of Paris?
Our encounter was as perfect a sorrow as one could imagine. It was, as one left, the faultless moment to end it.
I put the pistol to the writer’s temple as he slept.
In the end, I became more detached than a beggar, wanting his life back, our lives together, down every open road in any weather. He promised me that. I loved his brilliant moments of madness; and would go through them all again and again; falling into a heavy sleep on the steps of his creativity
He will rise again, new, unidentified, rejecting the wind that calls him to June’s side, and falling into San Francisco, North Beach, then moving deliberately and slowly between past loves, down along the Pacific Coast having written down beautiful lies about a love and for which he is not ashamed.
He is a writer, and you might not know him or recognize its face.
The writer was exhausted…giving up on ten thousand words. Moons had waxed and waned, trains arrived and departed, lives teetered on the brink, suitcases packed and unpacked, bells had rung in far off steeples, journeys were begun, finished, and yet being traveled under soft burning September skies, dogs are barking over the hill, letters are written, sealed, posted, talking of love, or fear, or fun……..and all these things might have happened but went by unnoticed because of writing. All the time the writer keeps thinking to himself: ‘What if a train arrives and he’s not there to see who gets off.’ And, because he’s a writer, he is there, and no-one gets off. Loves come into his life, glows, flickers, and maybe he never noticed because of writing.
Love, like a train, blows its whistle and moves off.
There are tears in the back of his eyes as he fights the trepidation of having to fill the blank paper in front of him.
Only sleep would save him from frustration and angst and folding his arms on the desk he lay his head down.
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