Hurricane Love
when it became time to go
you are a ride on a train
Patrick Melrose Reflects
“Because of the women and how the men struggle to hear inside them”—Jack Gilbert, “Gift Horses”
Sandy lashed the coast as I idled in Ohio. TV anchormen hung like human barometers in angry Atlantic swells. Wharf water poured down subway station steps onto third rails which, let’s face it, I knew something about. And there was my mother to think about, without power or heat and huddled in bed with the covers drawn tight around her, but also Kate, whose raspy voice, once a siren, sounded more plaintive than seductive, amped by eight luxury speakers in my speeding BMW, asking me why, what was I thinking, insisting that this too was a mistake. Pari was on the phone next with news that Route 9 was closed and how she’d been driving around for two hours trying to get a prescription filled and by the way, there is no gasoline, anywhere, is beyond, her Jersey voice more guttural than usual, and by now I was crunching through hurricane snow and sudden ice at a Sunoco station in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, which was amusing in a way, and fielding another call from Kate, tottering on a tirade, when I got to thinking about Janette, safely bedded in Toronto, and kind of missing her if you want to know the truth and oh shit, there is a tree in the right lane of Interstate 95 so I swerve into the middle lane and look into my rear view mirror in time to see Sandy toss the tree onto an overpass. And Governor Christie is screaming at morons on the radio and Chris Matthews is leaning forward on MSNBC about how this plays in Peoria for Romney when Kate interrupts with another bulletin about us, how there is no us, and who am I to argue? And Pari is begging can I get Eliot’s prescription filled somewhere, and where in the hell am I anyway? And right here is when I realize my Navigation System has taken me to the surface roads of North Philly and no light in this city is working and the wind has bent storefront signs and not even a bar is open for a midnight gamble and I am now going south to get north in a ninety mile an hour gale and the ramp to the interstate is closed and look who drove up the off ramp to go backwards into a superstorm. The storm inside me will subside in time, and will return. No one knows all about us, though some know plenty. Who could have predicted I’d meet a woman in time for my February birthday who’d remind me of that night, a Jersey girl (of course!) with the temperament of a Russian spy, who by herself would blow out all my candles, her blonde hair loose against a fur hood, her long body pressed to mine for what seemed a fortnight. She’d stand glaring in the faint starlight of a hotel room in Soho insisting she hadn’t given me her room number. It’s a big job, inside, she’d later say. Well, yes. We’d made plans to meet at the Museo de la Tortura in Siena, toasting Dante and stopping for drinks some long summer evening. Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto, che mugghia come fa mar per tempest, se da contrary venti e combattuto. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, the arrangement she sent stands in its vase on my bedroom dresser, the flowers keeping me awake all night with the sound of their petals, falling.
lamps are lit
where are you?
the last time
i saw you
the tent came un-pegged
soon we were sliding
out to sea
a shelf of iceberg surfaced
from the inky waves
i sped to the other side
of the boat
where it began to rain
you went back to your
box of paints
now I occupy my share
of days
light leaches upward and rolls
into dark clouds
i adjust my eyes
stitching the wilderness together
and wait for the
night train
the door is shutting & of course i
know how to say
i love you
but the stain
why does it spread to
all the beautiful parts?
and look
here comes queen mab
with her dream elixir
to make me believe
you had become the
complete vision
of all that I had missed
dreams are like that
making your apartment door as
white as snow
the beloved past decays
i am a keeper of drawings
and silent sonatas
now others will have to
believe for me
there are always more worlds
to travel
but when it became time to go
neither of us would leave
before the other
you are a ride on a train
passing grain fields
corner houses blur
the sad gray river; light shifts
to the west and there is something
now the same thing, repeating, repeating
while beneath the floor steel wheels churn
a man says goodbye to his wife
in the dirt yard where sheets flap on
a knotted cord of rope
past the vacant stations we speed
not now never, to stop
like any ordinary heart, pumping
only muscle, tissue & blood
this unknown movement
you passing through me
Snowflakes like white gloves cover the cold earth. It is December again. My house—my ex wife’s house—is lit for the season, a candle for each room, seventeen in all. Or eighteen, the math of things is always in question. Fuzzy as these snowflakes, which continue to fall while I write inside this Moleskin with the wrong pen. We were married for twenty-five years, twenty-six if you count the year on the couch. Which I don’t, usually. I stand outside my house—well, her house, now. I’m trying to hold this broken umbrella and keep writing, bear with me. To think of the things one has done for intimacy is embarrassing, earth flying over your shoulder. There are good women who wanted to give the care one never had. They must be tortured into letting you down in order to show that they cannot really be trusted. And then there are the bad women who save you time. It helps to alternate between these two broad categories. Ha ha. What’s that movie that ends with a stucco house in a big square with a central garden and a woman in the window three stories above, beautiful, available, and mentally ill? Hoping and moping, moping and hoping. Who was it who said that romance was where love is most under threat, not where it is likely to achieve its highest expression? Well, OK, that was me. To be able to sit in the same room with oneself requires real effort. Not to mention holding this damn umbrella. Someone has thrown a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup on the white lawn. The cup has filled with snow. None of this faintly falling, falling faintly shit, this is a Nor’easter. Still, the cup stands by the iron gate like a soldier at his post, or a husband at his job. Ha. That’s Kierkegaard in the ethical stage. A stage I apparently skipped. I was a child here for a long time. But it’s embarrassing to be so deluded one runs from the delusion like an out of control lecture. The days scud past like tumbleweed in a tornado. Someone said how sad that everything must change, and yet what a relief, too. Otherwise we’d have only looking forward to look forward to. The tree that stood on this lawn is no longer here, as if to prove it occupied a different slot in the history of objects. I lack a lectern for this. Still, each event becomes a forbidden meaning of thunder and curdled white milk and invoices continue to be forwarded to the wrong department. Birds settle in small coves in the eaves of the house. In the morning they’ll be screaming for food.
Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review) and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. Author of four books in philosophy, Percesepe’s fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, The Millions, Brevity, PANK, Metazen, Short Story America, The Brooklyner, and other places. Percesepe is the author of Itch, a short story collection, and a collection of poetry, falling. His new collection of short stories, Why I Did the Grocery Girl, is forthcoming from Aqueous Books. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
