Where did it fly -

your heron?

The one on the pond by the ice cream

shop - the franchise,

not either of the good ones -

with that pretty willow dressing the

froggy water like

a bridal veil, or

the shaggy locks and beard

of some Green Man,

all wizened and kind

and full up with your

stories and lessons.

We watched it fish

with far more deftness than either of us had,

our faces all sticky,

but it vanished - so,

I thought -

But I know

someone now

all wise and kind who

grows better greens

than a Forest Sprite,

loves froggy ponds

and stories and ice cream

from, wherever, but

preferably the good places

and certainly with rainbow sprinkles,

and she'd look fine

in a bridal veil,

if she'd acquiesce

to willow shade

over her eyes,

and she and I

roll around each other

getting

our faces all sticky.

So, I think,

Grandpa,

your heron landed

in my sheets.

   Henri d’Aramitz sat upon a simple wooden stool, running a silver comb through lengths of silvering hair. Inside the floral bronze rim of a mirror, a wry smirk curled his lips. An oaken stool. A silver comb. An ornate mirror polished to a shimmer that might make the moon blush. At heart he had always been a simple man with a flare for the dramatic, and though his face bore more creases now than scars, though his hair had long since faded, it pleased him that the core of him remained quite the same as the bold young swordsman his uncle called to Paris all those years ago to become a black musketeer of the Maison du Roi.

   Over his shoulder the blue tabard slashed with a gleaming Catholic cross hung from a tarnished brass hook on a stone wall worn smooth. As a man of irony, a Huguenot most known for time spent wearing of a Catholic cross tickled his humors. Then, Jeanne was such a papist he might as well have been one himself. The finer points of religion, for all the talk of his devotion to the Good Book, never held importance to him more than that of being the best man one could be.

   Across from the uniform, that window from which he and Jeanne spent a lifetime peering at moonlight. She would lean and gaze in wonder, broad smile parting her olivine visage. Smokey eyes so near to shut as her cheeks rose in joy.

   Henri would fold her up in his arms, kiss her neck, and joke and whisper romance into her ear as he nibbled. More often than he did not, he would lift his wife’s dress right there at the window and take her. How she moaned and gasped and shivered as his hands crept over her skin, and his fingers tickled her most tender parts.

   Henri could not be certain of Clement, their oldest, but Amant and Adeline had certainly been sired right there at that very window, Jeanne’s throat and the bones of her collar awash in moonlight, more elegant than any dress the Queen had ever worn.

   The little window let the golden morning pour over the tabard. Like Christ’s corona in all those paintings it wreathed the old uniform. Holes from musket balls and dagger cuts scarcely noticeable. Jeanne stitched them all years ago with the deftness only her slender digits could. Slender and delicate, yet touched with a hint of darkness and mischief, those fingers. They burned with the very soul of her. Light and dark. All his years gallivanting and dueling and fighting the King’s battles should have been spent kissing and caressing them, but he made up for that as often as he could.

   They settled upon his shoulders.

   “Come, love,” she cooed. “We have company.”

   He raised her hand to his mouth. “Must we?”

   Jeanne shook her head, “If you had not spent so much time preening and reminiscing, you would know they are already here, and so, yes, we must.”

   He caught her, for just the briefest moment, fretting in the mirror, tugging at her own hair. He loved that hair. Those locks, once rich and sleek, now grayed like his own. He had tugged it in passion and run his fingers through it soft as a cool summer breeze. The scent of it still drove his heart hammering at his breast. Fiercer than any rise the sound of cannon ever brought. Purer than the ring of his steel against the foe.

Henri led her to the window and stood behind her, folding his arms about her waist. Outside, the spring shone bright over the little blue rivers and craggy gray stone and budding green trees of Bearn. The children were at play in Jeanne’s garden.

   The earliest of her flowers, the buttercup anemone she grew with him in mind, yellow Stars-of-Bethlehem, white-rock roses, and most of all her lustrous ranunculi, bloomed with the tender care of decades. Watered, pruned, and loved after as he had spent loving after her. Against the bronze and lavender backdrop of sunrise he could think of no beauty so glorious as their children traipsing about the paths through Jeanne’s garden.

   Except, of course, Jeanne’s face. He spun her round and stroked it with the back of his hand. “Every gray, mon amour, is but a hair that gave its color to one of your flowers.”

Even now she blushed. She kissed him, then, more passionate than any young and vigorous lover could dream. They made their way down the winding stairs, hand in hand, to greet their visitors.

   No sooner had they called back the children and set a table of soft cheeses and fresh breads, not an instant later than they poured out the wine and set a few eggs on plates, three men clambered through their door. Dusty from the road, but the picture of chivalry, they tapped their riding boots clean and swept off their grandiose feathered hats.

   Henri caught Adeline staring at the youngest. A strapping young Gascon, much as D’Artagnan had been when they first met. Strong jaw, broad shoulders, boyish charm. Henri understood the draw, as did Jeanne, taking note of the same and looking to Henri with a silent smile that pled and laughed and soothed all at once.

   Clement and Amant helped the other two, older men, and experienced soldiers, draw off their coats and hang them by the creaky old door. The elder of them was Jeanne’s cousin, Louis. He twiddled his waxed moustache to assure its perfection and bowed humbly before taking his seat. If it were not for the constant demanding of tales of adventure, Henri would have liked Louis’s company.

   Henri became stark in his certainty that he would not enjoy the company of the last. A dark and swarthy sort, built like a square block of granite, with a fluffy beard and the ruggedness of a career killer. There were plenty of these such soldiers in the king’s musketeers. They were not all heroes, for certain, but Henri despised them then, and the tell-tale smell of them remained forever seared into his mind.

   That fetid reek of violence filled Henri’s nostrils as surely as the pleasantness of Jeanne’s hair, or her flowers, or the lovely little breakfast upon their table.

   “Jeanne!” a gleeful shout from Louis boomed through the hall. “Aramitz! I cannot believe how big the children have gotten!”

   “Bon matin, Monsieur, Madame!” the dashing young one added. Adeline swooned at his courtesy.

   “Strong lads, you have here,” grunted the killer. “King could use ’em.”

   “The king has made enough use of this family,” Henri snarled behind a polite façade.

   “So it’s true then,” the killer pressed. “He’s the Aramitz who served with Isaac de Porthau and Armand D’Athos? With the Comte d’Artagnan?”

   “De Troiville’s own nephew!” Louis was overjoyed to add.

   Jeanne sensed Henri’s unease and laid those fingers of sweetness and mischief on his hand. “He most certainly is.”

   “Good then,” the killer’s face lit like a jackal’s eyes in starlight. “An honor to meet you, Aramitz.”

   Reluctant, Henri shook the rough, meaty paw. He looked the brute up and down, weighting and measuring him. “I assure you,” the next words he drove like a poignard, “the only honor is mine.”

   “Ah, haha, yes, well,” Louis chuckled nervously. “Aramitz, why do you not tell my companion of Rocroi, when you broke the Spanish Tercios? Or of one of the intrigues? A duel perhaps?”

   “Oui,” the young man’s stare widened impossibly large. “Tell us, Monsieur!”

   “Mm,” the killer grunted, “yes, tell us.”

   Henri pushed his plate away, suddenly lacking appetite. “Children,” he called, “split that amongst yourselves. Evenly, now, as Christ would have with the Apostles.”

   “Oh tell them your bloody stories, Henri,” Jeanne snorted.

   “Ask Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras,” Henri scoffed. “He’s writing a book about D’Artagnan.”

   “Henri,” Louis’s gaze darted between Henri and the killer, and Jeanne, and the food, and his own fat belly, like a mouse surrounded by cats. “I understand we arrived unexpected, but is this any way to treat a guest?”

   “Why are you here, Louis?” said Henri, sternly, though he suspected he already knew.

   The killer answered, “The Turks have invaded Austria. The King may have no love for the Habsburgs, but in the name of the True God, he is marshalling an army under de Souchez. Captain D’Artagnan has issued a summons, and we thought perhaps you, with such reputation, or… your sons…” he cast a deliberate glance at Clement, “… would do your duty to God and Country.”

   The thud of the pistol’s butt upon the table took everyone completely off guard. Even the killer seemed alarmed that the flintlock sprang into Henri’s grip primed and loaded and cocked so swiftly. Henri leveled it squarely at the brute’s chest. From his peripherals he kept careful watch of Louis and the Gascon boy, but his aim never strayed from the killer.

    Henri glowered. “You tell the king, and D’Artagnan, when you see them, that they can see me for supper or sport or reminiscing any time they wish, but that the chivalry of their messengers is vastly deteriorated from when last I saw them. No man of this household will fight some fool’s battle in Austria, and if I see you on my property once more, Monsieur, you will soon discover my age has not slowed my hand.

    “Lad, Louis, Godspeed and bless you in your endeavors,” he continued, demeanor shifting to sunny earnestness. “You,” he refocused on the killer, “get out of my house before the arthritis pulls my trigger finger to a clench.”

First light a soft golden seam

On a hilly horizon

Fuzzy with barren black branches

Yawning open to a pastel flow

Intrepid and bold as blossoming flowers

Rosy pink and lilac and orange lily

There's a poem in it

Tickling my throat

Teasing itself to be spoken

And birthed into the world

From my tongue

Its taste is sweet

Salt

Smoke

Full and rich and nourishing

To be savored.

It tastes of you.

But I'm lost, so lost

In memories of our

Bodies entwined

Amorous stares catching in a mirror

And the joy and desire

And satisfaction

In those eyes

Of yours

And the whispers

And laughter

And groaning pleas

We've shared.

That I cannot bring that poem

Into being.

So I've written you this one instead.

Good morning, Darling.

A honking buzzer startles me to wakefulness, in the pitchdark of a moonless morning, and I wander, sleep-starved, and feed a pitchdark dog. Half feral and more a wolf. A screaming fanged omen I cradle at night and fight in the day, who scratches through closed doors because everything should be open and everything should be free. He’s right of course, and it could be any morning, but it isn’t. It’s this morning.

I amble with him from his clanking breakfast dish, catch sight of myself in the fogged glass of a sliding door with a broken handle that sticks as it slides on its track no matter how thick I spray on the silicon. I’ve fixed it twice now, but it fights me every time. I’ve grown stronger, from that door and other things, and I see myself shirtless in that glass, and I look it. Hard, scarred skin spattered with tattoos like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas.

The door can fight me, all it wants, but my arms are thicker than they used to be and I slide it now with ease. Doors should be open. The devildog is right.

Outside it’s too early for the faint pale blue of first light, dawn’s golden rose a distant faraway bloom, but the stars are winking. Winking like sparks of witchcraft from a wand. Like the ember of those fireworks that sizzle after the big crack-boom. Like the glint of sweet mischief and tender care in her eyes.

Her eyes like smokey switchblades. I see them in the stars. I see the stars in them. And the moon is ours, but this morning it’s in hibernation. A few more days, it’ll wax again, and she’ll come to me. The hellhound will dig holes through the doors I put him behind, because they should be open, but it’s my turn to be free. With my moon girl, switchblade eyes.

We’ll shake the earth again. Like the sea-god’s trident. That bed we rock and creak will break soon. We’ve already broken the couch. The kitchen counter was sturdier. The bathroom sink was sturdier. The floor was sturdier. The walls were sturdier. But in the bed I can stroke your hair with your head on my chest, all sweat and exhaustion and deepest satisfaction, the pair of us, lusty gods at last met our mate after years of mortals. And in the bed, as I run my hands over you and squeeze your smooth shoulders, I can tell you fairy stories and whisper poetry in your ear as I nibble it.

Our passion is thunder everywhere, but the bed is best for the after.

I light a cigarette. I lament how much less bourbon there is than a few hours ago. It’s too early, this routine. And I’m tired of everything but you.

So I’ll wait for this moon to pull her blankets back down from her face and peek me a silver smile.

And we’ll bay and howl like the hounds of Hades.

So what is it about today, if it's so same very same as every other day?  It's not the hangover.  It's not the carnival strongman inside my head trying his level best to push his way out of my temple, or pop my eye from its socket.  It isn't the violent buzz of the dying tube lights in the rotting building in which I work.  

Today I tell her who she is.  And she asks me who I am.  Asks as if she doesn't have a better handle on the contents of my soul than any other being on this drifting space-rock.  

Mia Regina della luce e dell'oscurita... says I, so I do, but I don't stop.

...gli occhi come fumo...

...unghie come pugnali...

...mia vita...

...mia macchina di miele...

...mi' amore.

Who the fuck are you? says she, a question she'd asked before in varying format, but she always knew, I believe, the answer.  

The other half of your soul, darling.

My wit, being what it is, even in spite of my head breaking apart, gets the better of me.  It's true, in my opinion, that if there were such thing as pair-bonded souls cast adrift in vain pursuit of reunification, that she is mine.  But that shouldn't have been the answer.

I'm the boy who saw all of you, and spent his life becoming the man to match you.  I saw the best parts of you as seeds, and saplings, and little buds now blossomed.  What a garden you have made of yourself.  That should've been the reply.

So later I find a way to say the second half of it at, least.  

And she writes me poetry in French.

Mais tes yeux...

J'en reve chaque nuit

Tres bleu

Comme le mer

And all the doors are open.  And I have never been this free.

And tomorrow, if the fates will it, we'll spend the night dying little deaths in each other's arms.

Not a monster, no,

A decent man, but flawed,

Like all of them before.

Not an idol or an icon,

Or a paragon in all things,

As a boy expected, believed.

Your words thrashed, harder,

Often, than your hands,

Or your distance.

You made for a shit husband,

And I fought you for it,

For how you talked to her.

You made for a shit father,

Petty and angry,

Often as you loved.

You made shit decisions,

And we grew up poor and wanting,

So the money you had but hoarded could be lost

In the banker’s game.

I wanted to cut out your guts,

And string them around your neck,

And pull until your face matched

The blue of your eyes, my eyes.

I tried to cut out mine,

With a knife I learned to use,

Doing the only thing you ever seemed proud of,

Fighting and winning.

But I watched the doctors

Pull out your guts,

And your face blue on its own.

And I watched your back break

Under the weight of your traumas

And your long hours and years

And the love you bore us

That you never knew how to show.

I know they beat you and broke you,

Your own parents,

And cast you aside.

You didn’t know how,

And you did your best,

And you did fine.

Your daughters are brave and strong

And smart like bee stings.

One saves lives, the other history.

Your wife is brave and strong

And always saw the good in you,

As I have come to see it,

And cares for your once mighty form

So feeble now.

And you have learned to show the love

You never knew how to give to me,

And how you smile and play

Like squirrels running round and round oaks

With your granddaughter,

I can see how you’ve softened,

And emerged from an opiate fog

The kind of grandfather

Who seems as though

He was the finest father, too.

And as for me,

I learned all my handiness from Uncles,

Big John, and Brian, and that green bastard Sam,

Not from you.

I learned all my love from others,

Too many to name,

Not from you.

I learned how to stand,

Through the necessity of neglect,

Not from you.

But I learned how to take a hit,

From you, Dad,

And that rage you gave me,

Burning like the coalbed of Hell,

Keeps me always rising,

Never on my knees for long.

Nothing in life will ever strike me harder,

And you have made me indomitable.

And I learned honor,

From you, Dad,

What to stand for, and why,

And how I have stood for it

Again, and again, and again,

Because I learned not to fear you,

The first time I hit you back,

And sprawled you into the bathtub,

Pouncing like a puma,

Before you rose back up

And strangled me,

And so I fear nothing.

And I learned how to be a better man,

Because I know what parts of you

I should be,

And burying my pain and hiding my bruises

Taught me how to bury

The parts of you

I will never be.

And I learned from you

The value of service,

To community,

The value of sacrifice,

For family,

And the value of courage,

Against all odds.

You’ve become such a good man

Now that you’re a weak one,

And I am proud of you

The way you should have been proud of me.

The resentment is gone, now,

You’re not the reason I drink,

I’m the only one to blame for that.

There is only love now,

You’re not the reason I drink,

I’m the only one to blame for that.

I take care of you now,

So you can get more years of that love

Than you had of your hate.

More years of tenderness

Than you had hardness.

I love you, Dad,

And I’m glad I never killed you.

You left me with two books of poetry,

But the printed words hold no effect

So moving as your hand

Scrawled over the inside covers

In looping green pen.

You beckon me to find you again

In another life,

“Some day

Some winter

Some year”

When some me

Won't have to creep in your shadows.

When some me

Will wake next to some you

And every morning laugh.

When some me

No longer revels in the love and passion

Of some you

And basks in her face aglow

Beneath his touch,

Her legs wrapped around his waist

As she sighs and gasps and shivers,

Only to watch her leave

The way this me must.

I hope he remembers

How you loathe the color red.

I hope he remembers

How to make your bones rattle with his touch.

I hope he remembers

To tell you he loves your mind and soul

As furiously as he loves your body.

I hope he remembers

The way you like your lower lip nibbled

And your hair pulled

And fingers in your mouth

And hands around your neck.

I hope he remembers

To drink in your smile.

I hope he remembers

How to hold you

And rub away your aches.

I hope he remembers

How to write for you

And sing for you

And romance you.

I hope he remembers

How to sit with you in the black times

And how to lift you from them

And how to tell when each approach is appropriate.

I hope he remembers

To cherish you.

I hope some me

Some day

Some winter

Some year

Deserves some distant you.

But if he is me,

And she is you,

He will find her,

And he will remember.

Lucky them.

The whole of me swells and rises,

Some great warm tide

Summoned from an altar

Of candles, and shattered clay,

And soapy, salt-caked stones,

From the sea,

From the god of the sea,

From the temple of the god of the sea.

Called to oneness,

Carnal prayer,

And the sighing little deaths,

You whisper under me,

Devotions and wonders.

Only the best of us lingers,

And you wrap me tight,

And tell me everything will be fine,

And we are Triton and Nereid,

And my father will not be dying

Under fluorescent tube lamps

In some cookie cut room,

With linoleum tiles,

Because we said our prayers,

Entwined and huffing our ecstasy,

And you quaked like the earth

At the trident's whim,

And you smiled your untamed soul,

It crashed over me like hurricane breakers,

And I was not a soldier

Who cannot find his way on familiar shores,

Watching his father's

Insides turn to outsides

In room 224

At the temple on the edge of the Styx.

I am Poseidon and you are Amphitrite,

And we are together something more

Than each of us apart.

We groaned, and dripped, and burned,

And you tell me everything will be fine,

And I believe you.

Venus clings to the

Waning Wolf-Moon,

Dressed in half its platinum mantle,

Yet gleaming as bright and sure

Beside the clear crisp

Stars of the dipper

That mark your skin,

Where my fingers danced

And my tongue skated,

As the night we made obscene prayers

And scandalous vows

At an altar of pot-sherds

And crumbled ivory stone,

Assumed the form and vigor

Of those discarded gods we praised,

Glossy sweat glinting

On shining bronze

And painted marble,

A gape-mouthed

Moaning-smile

Aflame on your face and mine,

As we followed

The map I made of your

Slickened legs,

And ascended,

Together,

To the apex of Olympus.

Wandering thick soup mist,

Ghost wisps gray and the sun

An imperceptible ball of flame,

That for all its brightness

Does little but keep the gray

From turning to wet obsidian.

I cannot see in this place,

Where hands graze slick

Lichen crusts on rough

Ridges of hickory bark,

And scramble over moss

Like sodden sweaters on gray stones,

Soft earth sucking at my bootheels,

A vacuum through which to trudge.

And poetry is like that, sometimes.

Words to rebrand the ugliness

And shine beauty over it,

Moonlight on a rough sea,

Silvered waves crashing

On warm white sands.

The screaming dark of our insides

So yearning to break out of our minds

And pour back out into our reality,

A fog of jet black disease,

To be lassoed,

And harnessed,

And trained to be something lovely.

There’s a Gaelic heart in my chest,

That sets my fists to rage,

And become a breaker of bones.

It pumps Sicilian blood,

That hones blades like oil and whetstone,

To make of me a carver of flesh.

Through the mind of a boy

Trapped deep in this man

Who fancied himself a knight,

Or a musketeer,

And seeks to throw his gauntlet,

And savage all those ugly blackguards

Who have callously stepped

On the flowers I have known and loved,

And left them crunched and toppled in the mists.

Sisters, lovers, friends,

My mother,

And me.

I too can be ugly.

Ambling through the fog

I’ve done my share of violence,

But I’ve never tramped over flowerbeds.

And I would tear out their livers

For each of you, daily,

An eagle of the gods,

My beak a guthook,

My talons spears,

Promethean fury and vengeance.

Pave the roads of Erebus

With their shattered parts.

But you, bright roses, have your own thorns,

And no need of my barbs,

Though they’re ever there for the asking.

So I will water your roots,

And tend your soil,

And tell you just how pretty you smell,

While I hold you.

All cloud breaks.

All darkness gives to light.

The unseen wilds turn

To birdsong and green forest.

I will hold you,

In the deep dark gloom,

And we will make the ugly things

Into pretty ones,

While we make pretty ones

All our own,

Until it is stark clear day.

And then?

I will hold you still.

The first word you taught me was “bullshit,”

And you roared with laughter

As I ran along repeating it to my parents.

My sisters, my cousins,

You gave us each the unique gift

Of vulgarity early as we could learn it.

I was smart because I’m Irish,

And you made sure I told my

Guinea father every chance you could.

You possessed such a sacred irreverence

About you, Grandma,

I think I might have been ten years old

When you first showed me

Silence of the Lambs

And began your customary offering

Of Pabst Blue Ribbon,

Which of course, was bullshit.

You drank wine.

Was I seventeen, then?

Has it been that long?

Longer still since we last played cards,

Gambling with candies, or peanuts, or pennies

On that tile-topped table

Where Grandpa told bad jokes

And you served too much supper,

And too much dessert,

And too much cheer, and love, and warmth?

We all swore you cheated,

Never losing a hand, as I recall,

But those accusations were bullshit,

Because you really were that good.

And you swore every curse

Grandpa wouldn’t.

“Shall I stick a broom up my ass,

And sweep while I go?” you’d say,

Giving your time at shelters for

Battered women, and the homeless,

And to your neighbors and friends

And your family.

Your time was everyone’s time,

And it’s bullshit there wasn’t more of it.

Your rasping, hardy laugh

Stood cornerstone to a sprawling family,

Matriarch to your clan,

As tough as you were generous,

As strong as you were tender.

I know you couldn’t bear the fear

Of losing your razor sharp wit,

Or your humor, or your mind,

Or yourself,

The way your sisters had,

Fading into a wandering fog.

You wanted to go on your terms,

And in a way you did,

I take after you like that,

But I still think it’s bullshit

That I can’t hug you anymore.

I learned to give a hell of a massage

Rubbing your shoulders for you,

And that’s proved to be

A pair of Aces up my sleeve

With women.

And I fall hard every time

One of them tells me

To clean my shit

The way you told Grandpa

“Clean your god damned desk, Joe!”

In the hopes she’ll be

A perfect storm of sass,

And strength, and fun,

And adventure,

And deep, deep caring,

The way you were for Grandpa.

I think there just might be one, but

It’s bullshit there aren’t more like you.

It was bullshit when that hospital

Took two weeks to realize

You’d had a heart attack.

And it was bullshit that your ambulance

Got hit by a drunk driver

On the way to the next.

And it’s bullshit that surgeon

Perforated your aorta.

And it’s bullshit that none of us

Could save you that day,

The way you had saved us

And so many others.

And it was bullshit that you died

On Friday the 13th

Because your taste in horror films

Was far, far classier.

You were a hell of a woman,

Joan,

For Joe McNally to marry a protestant.

You should’ve lived forever.

It’s bullshit that you didn’t.