Unlike Shakespeare claimed of himself, he was born under a rhyming planet. He tied the words off in knots, like a cherry stem under his tongue, lolling out from teeth to palate and back again, like an arrow shot through branches reaching sky, like the words cellar door. Cellar door.
What if there were only a handful of places left in the whole world where you could look up, and see the stars, and not just a lightly salted bread of night, but a whole beach of stars, enough to be buried in, enough to build castles in the sky.
The circumstances of my birth were anything but exceptional. It was early morning, just a slip of light sneaking around the shadows, making the blinds glow. It was 1982, so I’ll let you imagine the clothes people were wearing. The rain was a quiet sprinkling overhead. They named me Ben.
The days were lived out in fear, eggshells walked on, voices in whisper, eyes fast to the ground. When the lights moved with morning, they would pretend to walk in the sun and carry their kids to the car and dance to the old tunes, like before the darkness came.
He had blue eyes, like his grandfather, so they named him Henry. He wouldn’t be here long, but they couldn’t have known. When the rains fell, and they were wet with grief and tired with tears, he made them happy again just in the remembering of him. Like his grandfather.
We are always having the dreams. Sometimes they are black and white and still. Sometimes they are Technicolor and sad. Sometimes they are places we have not yet been and will not go. Sometimes we do not remember their most important parts. Sometimes we do not remember them at all.
The water was glass, the sand was cocoa, and the trees were paper-mâché, leaves flapping whimsically in a breeze of breath. There was a man and a woman there too, arms akimbo, a fire of toothpicks and candy corn raging between them, looking awfully happy for a little girl’s diorama.
He watched the grass bend in the wind. She watched the mountains stand against the sun. He watched the water run through the fields. She watched the children dance on the stones. He watched her play the piano. She watched him love her again. He watched her love him again.
Summer, you healed me. Your warmth coaxed me from winter and your breeze dried my tears. Your grass stopped my fall and your dog days licked clean my wounds. And the sun, that glorious globe of glowing, that heavy ornament of heaven, that blinding blot of gold, rose rosy again.
He saw her like you see ghosts, though she was still alive. Here she was in his room, on his bed, in her wedding dress. Here she was in his folks’ sun-filled living room, asleep on the couch. Here she was waiting under a tree at their favorite secret park.
He tried to sleep; it was certainly dark enough. Every now and then, between moments that could have been minutes or years, he heard muffled voices and strained to listen. For a long while they cried, but now they came and laughed too, laughed and left flowers he couldn’t see.
I see you by day, like God’s faded thumbprint on a cobalt canvas, like a half-closed eye afraid to look, like a holy teardrop dropping. I see you by night, like a giant-sized snowflake, like a silver dollar on black paper, like the top of a stone in dark water.
He added a variable of fear, divided the days of sadness, squared the promises and fractioned the false pretenses against factors both imaginary and transcendental, now combining the axioms, splitting the constructions, hoping against hope that the proof of his love for her was in this madness of terrible numbers.
He ordered liquid precipitation with a touch of virga, the better to see the sanguine sunset by, and a pH of 6, the better to stand under with mouth open in thirsty wonder, and an abundance of petrichor, the better to smell in sweet longing as it deliquesced into dusk.
