Dodging Bullets and Seashells
Have you ever felt a blue-steeled barrel press perfect
circles into a thin-skinned temple,
like a lover's bruising kiss, only colder?
It's like balancing on a wire fifty feet above the
heads of children and clowns.
My fingers achingly curve into grained wood,
index finger teased by thin metal.
Each time my thumb arches backwards, half-cocked,
and spins the barrel before slamming it into place,
it won't always sound an empty click,
won't always whisper air across my eyebrow and behind my ear,
like your lingering touch.
I want to create some great metaphor from all this,
somehow relate this to the way it is now:
Me wrapped in my grandmother's faded wedding quilt,
a woman's voice of raw honey and whiskey pouring liquid through the speakers,
warming me more than the heater at my feet.
I dreamt again last night: drummed by bullets into
weightlessness, feeling myself warm and wet then
drifting above my body; a dream within a dream.
I woke, prodded by the lingering memory of
an old-wives tale that if you die in your dreams,
then you die in your sleep.
Yet I am not afraid to die.
What scares me is him replacing me so soon after goodbye.
They spoon, as we did, her soft breasts and stomach
pressed against his back.
She wakes at 2am to trace his hairline with her tongue,
their bodies silhouetted in a pale back-light of street lamps and passing cars.
I remember how easily his skin marked,
so that for hours after sex
his back bore red-welted testimony of my nails...
but all of that, unimportant now.
It's just the fact of her, the replacement of me,
and how I too will replace him,
how we all replace each other,
as our lives rise and fall like oceanic tides,
like periodic and regular waves we crash on each others' shores.
Crashing in and drifting out, the simple pull of the
moon leaving sand-rippled ridges and shallow pools
to evaporate and harden on our shores,
each replaced person a jagged-edged shell
for the next to dodge.
(c) TLC, originally written Fall 1993
reworked March 7, 2008
