The Secret Garden

I was studying abroad in Germany, in some small Dorf, a cluster of painfully reconstructed medieval buildings and cobblestones, beyond which the A9 sped past through the brilliant yellow potato fields. It was late spring, with the sun pushing on toward summer, but it hardly mattered, as the school was one great labyrinth of classrooms, student apartments, a gym and the cafeteria. There was no need to go outside - the whole world was contained in the institution. And besides, we were there to learn.

Each student had a tiny apartment, equipped with a small stovetop, minifridge, a couple of cabinets, a futon, and a low table. The doors had no locks, in order to foster a community of trust and honesty.

My boyfriend was there was well, and stayed in an apartment down the hall. I had never been to his room; he always visited me in mine. Our relationship was warm and muted, with an intense intimacy that left nothing hidden. Every mundane decision was part of the web, causing and effecting us to grow together, inward upon each other into the rapidly narrowing future.

When not with him, my attention was focused on Mark, another American studying at the institute. Slender and strong, with dark hair and bright secretive eyes, he began to consume my thoughts, my existence. I was in love, though I remained silent on that account, preferring to simply bask in the resonant glow of his eyes passing lightly across my face. But even more than the joy of his presence, I reveled in the fact that now, I had a secret, something of my very own that could not belong to any other. I nurtured it in my heart, letting it grow into a secret garden of dreams. Mark was the opening of a vast new world, unstable and shifting, the intensity and freedom of summer, with the constant threat of terrifying devastation. And, unlike the rest of us, he was not there to learn.

Mark had learned all he wanted to, in discovering who had killed his brother the year before. Pure justice was his goal, and the pursuit of rightful triumph his only one. He had followed the murderer here, a resigned, patient boy who looked to be barely 16. I never was to learn his name, but I will not forget his eyes - dark, tender, deep-set stones that peered into me and knew my thoughts, and my sins. Who knows if he felt any guilt, or if the desire to see into my own deceptive, faithless heart was driven by a need to know that evil was not only in himself. He was the only one who knew I loved Mark, and loved him indiscriminately and thoughtlessly, though I never spoke a word to him.

If he did, in fact, feel any guilt, he did not at all exhibit the fear that usually accompanies such a burden - fear of punishment, or the impossibility of salvation. Rather, he accepted that he was guilty, and that Mark would take his life as the required payment for the one he had taken. Their justice had been privately agreed upon - a simple, elegant, but unsanctioned execution. Mark had asked me to assist him, and I had agreed. What is summer, without love and adventure?

The execution took place in the afternoon free time after classes, in a small storage room at the back of the gymnasium. Several groups of boys were playing basketball as Mark led the convict across the courts to the realm of justice, while I followed a few steps behind. No one seemed to notice our solemn procession, though there was no real reason for them to notice three people passing through the well-populated gym. All was calm and orderly.

The room was mostly filled with sports equipment, and the crates of basketballs cast an orange glow. It was brightly lit, but without windows, and a single wide door opened into it from the gym. Towards the back of the room was a bare ping-pong table missing its net, across which Mark had laid a rope in preparation. After we entered the room, I went to close the door, as seemed appropriate, if only out of respect for the one who would soon be dead. Mark told me to leave it open - it would be less suspicious. But if this was justice, what should we be afraid of? Another secret was embryonic, and my world broadened still more, revealing a bottomless chasm.

Mark was helping his revenge onto the table, informing him quietly that he was to be strangled. I watched in awe at the calm, and the strange tenderness in both their eyes as they regarded each other. The boy lay back, flat on the table, and Mark affixed the rope around his neck, crossing it on the front of his throat so that it could be tightened from either side. He then bent deeply over the alleged murderer, gazing at him strangely with that intent fire usually reserved for love, and said, "Tell me when you are ready." This boy looked back sweetly with his dark eyes, and spoke: "Please, tell my family what I have done, and that I have willingly submitted to justice. And please, forgive me, and stay with me while I die." Mark replied, "I will stay, and I will comfort you. It won't take long, I promise."

I stood mutely, helplessly, to the side of the table, near the boy's head. He nodded to Mark, my beloved, the executioner, and he tightened the rope.

I had seen strangulations before, but this was vastly different from any of them. This was not the bulging veins and wild eyes and contorted mouth - the purple struggle yearning toward collapse. This was calm, peace, redemption. The dying boy made neither sound nor movement, except for the gentle blinking of his eyes as he gazed sorrowfully out of himself. Mark was still bent over him, murmuring to him that it was alright and the pain would soon end. The whispering and crooning continued, and I began to grow impatient. Occasionally, a basketball would bounce dangerously close to the open doorway. We could easily be caught, and there was no hiding the fact that someone was dying in here; I could feel it pounding in my own head.

I began to pace nervously, abstractedly, and every second of the boy's decreasing but clinging life doubled my agony, again and again and again. I stood momentarily by the open door. One of the basketball players dribbled up, and said, "What's going on?" I saw my ruin. "Nothing." Or we could kill him too - kill them all, and keep silence. He shrugged, and dribbled back toward the center of the court. It was so simple, lying. If this boy had been able to lie, maybe he wouldn't be lying choking on a ping pong table.

By this point, it had been a few minutes, and the pain and desperation of fast approaching death were setting in. His legs and hands twitched, and he tried to shake his head back and forth. Impossibly, low moans began to rise from his crushed throat. Mark's comforting refrain pressed on, as did his beautiful, tender hands. "It's almost over now, and then there will be no more pain."

This boy, he was accepting punishment for his sins, but not I. I would carry mine around in a little box for years to come, while all around me, others would willingly die so as to be rid of theirs. Nothing follows in death, not even guilt. But I had my first secret, finally, and I could never expose it! I had never had one before, and the feeling was strange, ecstatic and heavy. It consumed me with its own weight, and made me know: I was a liar, a whore, and a coward. For I could not face death, and preferred the burden of my own self-created horrors. I could not even face this death anymore, happening right outside my eyes. His immanent freedom terrified me, and I crouched to the floor beside the table, sobbing and choking on my guilt, my sorrow.

"It's over," Mark said, quietly. Wordlessly, we prepared to hide the body; we took the precautions of criminals despite our conviction of justice. He looked the same as in life, except his dark eyes were gently closed, and there was a slight raw mark on his neck. We wrapped him in a faded quilt, and carried him nonchalantly through the gym and the winding halls to my apartment. No one looked askance at us, though we passed many familiar faces along the way. We put him under my futon, and a bit of the blanket showed at one end. "No one looks in the obvious places," Mark said. "I'll be back to get him in the morning. And thanks." He left.

I was alone, with a second secret, a cooling body. I must keep this secret, keep it for Mark, and let it grow cold unnoticed while nearby my love for him burns on. And this dead boy, in him was my shame and my cowardice, my perverted justice, but he was also a promise, that Mark would return, and a sign, that he trusted me. A dead murderer, keeping my love alive and making my heart brim with devotion.

I was cooking when my boyfriend came over. Sure and familiar, he watched silently, steadily, as I poured soy sauce into the pan. "I thought you didn't have any left." I shrugged.

We sat on the futon to eat, with the body just inches below us. I was terrified he would notice the end of the blanket sticking out, the edges of my infidelity leading to the unraveling of and entire future, but simultaneously knew he never would. We had no secrets. We talked about class and studying, while I thought about tomorrow morning. What if Mark didn't come? Would I be left to bear the dead alone, to bury my secret? There was already so much guilt and horror, the vast instability of his presence, or absence, had opened up, and his precarious power over life. What would he do with mine?

But inside my heart, deep inside, beyond the place where my secrets had begun to grow and form, I knew they would remain secrets. No matter how they ripped at my imagination and destroyed my peace, I would never expel them, never allow they nausea to rise to vomit, never let them be suffocated. They would form the vibrancy of a vast and unknown future, while out here, the web continued its placid intricacy. He was saying goodnight, and I knew I would be hearing him saying goodnight for the rest of my life.

Resurrection Architectures

I.
By the river,
Trees are bent toward the city
Broken, torn by the wind, stripping away
Makes trembling naked
Shuddering, shrinking back from
Bright rushing cold.

Nature fearing her own cruelty
Reaches for strange, foreign shelters
Kept warm by her burning entrails.

Who will stand up?
Raise their eyes
To go with the trees
Letting the wind crush away warmth,
Tear away colors
of blood, of gold
now strewn and
left for rot:

Abandonment
Reaches not merely those with mouths.

The sun perches desperate,
Clings rakishly to the horizon.
Desolation extends its hand,

We are torn and buried
Half the world watches, jeering.

But soon, our hearing will fade
The image of your lips half-parted darken,
Your fingers draw through my hair
and fall away,
The blood-red leaves go swirling into ice.



II.
Pressed to you
is all my forgetting,
Fading into brilliance.
Gaping wounds staunched
Filled, bursting with fresh blood.

As evening goes down to the water
As light slinks from the windows
As summer's devastation shrinks before the frost,

Your eyelids are drifting closed
on a former life,
Lashes brush away tears long frozen
hovering across the years
fragile and persistent
A shroud of mist
that numbed fingers and lips
Now touched, goes fleeing disowned
Into a future once dreamt,
In all its wretched glory.

I have known darkness,
But not this darkness.
For this one shimmers,
and my heart races to know and understand

How tiny things have immense shadows
How a single rose petal enfolds my entire body
in sweet silk, and
Why the oceans recede
When you open my wounded hands.



III.
This room, stifling cube, is
Collapsing, bursting explosive

Arms outstretched in abject wonder,
My lungs inhale the long-absent breath.
Ash and cinder washed away,
I scrape the decay from my face
As brick and cement are
Cast into the sky,
Fall screaming into the sea.

Hair aflame, the sun scorches my skin
Newly exposed after years of
Burial and frozen mud.

I lift my eyes
And the future fills the empty fields
New buds burst where before leaves bled
The sap is rising in the forest, in me
And the coarse tundra catches
Soft and damp my feet
Running, flying through the bright dawn.

The ruins are cracking
The remainders, sinking in the salt
I look back, and all around
My heartbeat rushes,
Deafening
As my fingers learn to touch
and my throat, to sing.

Behold: the screaming red air
and know,
"All is made new."

The Final Vision, II

Surrender, howls the guard
Surrender! and the dog-men
horse-women go on working,
cutting up the flesh as they trample
Ice chews their fingers to the bone.
Wind runs down the trenches
Gnashing cruel wet teeth.

Beside, the machinery sucks and grinds
with starlight energy
the surrendered.
Seeing and un-knowing,
The defiant smash the remains of their obedient future.

That roaring crushed blackness comes for all,
yet the guard encourages and pleads:

Surrender! and do not be afraid,
See, how time glistens and spits,
what is to come.
Look at the woman you love! and know -
You will be one with her as you are torn through the air
Find union in separation, and in ripping
a prelude to the final rushed pressing together
for all the earth's remainder.

No one understands,
nor do they notice as the blood mixes and seeps
through worn out shoes.
Some have closed their eyes,
inhaling as the stench arises in funereal chant,
thick and hovering.

The guard is losing his voice.
Frenzied with exhaustion, he falls
and weeping, convulsing,
his body is borne into the pounding deafness.
The Living are silent, as the Dying
crack and burst.

The earth churns beneath him.

Dull and feeble,
the senses fade.

As August Fades

Into the sea: we glide
like dreams irresistable,
cold current tongues slice
the hot stomach, turning it up
to the bright surface.
Our eyes flicker open to the
sun's searing stare.

Silence surrounds.
Except breathing, roaring and
crashing in my ears.

The world's gentle rolling will carry us,
like this,
toward immense wreckage.
Bits of ships and bottles
Crunched and groaning
with salty wounds,
all heaped high and clumsy.

Within cool shade
the center rests,
That pulsating deranged mass of
bones, flesh, metal, lost cargo
Varying states of decay and
Conches - sighing, faintly wailing
Moments of all that ever was.

The sight is madness, and the sound:
entrapment.
Above, your shadow floats across the sun.

I cling to the rot as the shells
Sing the forgetting in images and tales,

Sing the air from my body,

Sing the pounding out of my throat,

Sing the darkness close around and,

Whisper grief to my remains.

The Infidel

The sharp high note of deceit
laced at the tip with doubt
soars into vacant blackness.
Bound, gagged, they listen, watch -
Understand desperation's writhing toward release.

Dampened dust settles as the war lies half-
defeated, half-victorious,
Unable to sleep: love remains!
wakeful,
across That ocean (blind, deaf, free)

Night hangs still close, pressing open my eyes
No blanket, love is far, and the bed careens about the room
trying to know and reject strange,
Terrible burdens we thought
dared to break up only to
find a sick stench -
impenetrable synthetic skin which in showing itself makes
No darkness.
Strong enough

The Final Vision

They were escorting him to his execution. His sentence: death by firing squad. As they led him along the narrow path overlooking the sea, I was with them, following at a distance of only a few paces. We were winding up a rocky, mountainous coastline somewhere in the tropics of the Pacific. The path was ill-kept, strewn with large, loose stones, though not terrifyingly narrow. A few hundred feet ahead, it curved upward and to the left, out of sight. To the right and ahead, the sea was rolling, treacherously below us, and growing placid toward the edges of vision. The man was asking about his wife, who had also been led around the side of this mountain, to be released. He wanted to know if she would be safe and cared for after his death. His two captors paused, and one spoke.

"We led her along this very path toward the town. She walked very slowly and gracefully, stepping sweetly over the rocks as if afraid to damage them. Then, by that bend just ahead, she stopped, and gazed lovingly out over the water. She was smiling, and the wind in her dress revealed the gentle curves of her body. I told her, "You are beautiful."

- The captive's eyes grew bright with memory. -

"She inhaled slightly, and as her breast rose, I pushed her as hard as I could."

As he finished saying this, he puts his hands on the man's shoulders and shoved.

At that moment, I was suddenly hundreds of feet away, watching from atop a cliff across the rushing strait.

The man emitted a loud "EEEYEH!!" as his body tipped downward and began its rapid descent. I was inside his mind, and saw his wife as she fell, and the words "You are beautiful" hung heavily in the salty air.

From across the water, he looked so small. His voice continued to echo, bouncing between the cliffs, long after his body had come to rest on the rocks below. The rough waves washed him clean.

A few minutes later, a man appeared with a shovel, to clear away the pieces. First the head, and then the limp body and limbs were fed into the water.

I stared across the straight, searching the path for the two executioners. I found them far to my left, heading back down the mountain in the direction from which we had come.

Tragedy

A baby squirrel sat trembling, crouched on the edge of the curb in the shade of an SUV. It flicked its tail and sniffed the air, the tiny nose quivering as it sensed the overpowering world. A gust of wind almost knocked into the street, and yet it held its ground. Fearless of my approach, he looked innocently into my camera.

What more should I have done to preserve him?

An hour passed, and he lay spread on the asphalt. Red and gray, and still so tiny. The black eyes were dull, but the wind brushed through the hair of his tail, as if trying to tell him:

Get up, get up. We will go back to the curb, and you will not be in the camera but in her hands, and she will cradle you and carry you to the nook in the tree where you were born, and life will stretch out the long day before you.

But the wind could not revive him, and the tiny faceless squirrel offered no reproach.