UP : RODNEY'S

The stairs lead up. I stand in the light shining down through the sky light, looking up, for so long the man behind the desk behind me clears his throat. Can I help you? I don't turn around, and raise my camera, leaning further back, to frame the well, to adjust the light meter, to aim my focus so that it reaches all the way up, capturing details of the rails and stairs along the way. A bag of postcards hangs off my wrist. It's why I'm here. The postcards. Each one with a specific destination. Each one with a specific set of directions. A way to reach out to the world. A way for the world to reach back. One postcard is for you.

A quick click of the shutter and the photo is mine. I cap the lens, the image trapped inside for later. My footfall echoes down the last staircase. The door is heavy. The street outside is loud. Cars, people, busses pass each other before me, merging then pulling apart. Storefronts fill and empty. Everything is destination. We are destinations.

HAPPINESS

We wandered here from Harvard Square, where we had ice cream from J.P Licks and paused at the "question wheel." The man who curated the wheel was standing by, announcing to anyone who stopped to ask, that he answered all the questions, and there had been over 12,000 questions posted so far. There were questions about love and love lost, about death and about lost hope. Some questions were about dreams, how to achieve them when the path to them was overgrown. I took his photo. He was standing in front of the descending sun, the light seeping around his raised arms as he beckoned people to come nearer, to ask him anything they wanted. "You can ask me anything. What do you want to know?" his voice was full, deep. It filled our chests when he spoke. I set my camera down and wrote down a question. I didn't want an answer. Not really. Just asking was enough. It was the first cool day of fall. Cool enough for a hat and scarf. Cool enough to capture the breath of the man yelling out to anyone who would hear, his words clouding up and lifting slowly into the air above our heads. We walked away in silence. Hands jammed into our coat pockets, cameras slung around our necks, eyes watering in the wind. Store fronts reflected the street perfectly, as if we were inside looking out. Until the alleyway, and we stepped in.

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Opossum Day

The opossum is obviously dead.

We each poke the body with our toes. Ed picks up a nearby

stick and jabs at its head, pushing back the lips a bit to reveal its teeth.

The headlights of the Chevette shine directly on the body and cut us off just above the knees. Mosquitoes and moths skim across the grass, in and out of the light. It is warm, the first warm night of the year. We are all still wearing our track uniforms, tanks and shorts. Matt, whom we call D’oh, has his warm-up top tied around his waste. Lightning shuttles back and forth across the horizon, miles and miles away from where we stand.

We spent the better part of an afternoon convincing three local girls that not only was it National Opossum Day, but Belvedere was the Opossum Day capital of the U.S. and host to the biggest Opossum Day parade in the Midwest, an event second to only the New York parade, which followed, according to Ed, the last leg of the marathon route and ended with a complete lap around Central Park. What made his tale sound so real were his hand gestures, the way he drew a circle in the air before him to signify the loop around the park. Even we watched as his hand made the slow circumference. For a second, it seemed real. The girls looked at each other, then back down at the imaginary scene in the park.

“What are the odds?” Tom laughs, finally breaking the silence. He is the one who started the whole thing. It is his car, too.

It is dark in center field except for the lights. The practice diamond is between the parking lot and the track. We were cutting across in the car just because. No other reason. We didn’t see the opossum until it was too late.

“Yeah, Opossum Day,” Ed repeated to the three girls he had decided we needed to pick up before the track meet was over. “Today.” He looked, without flinching, into the eyes of each girl. “You never heard of it?” It was a line so bad it had to work.

Because We Were Assigned to Write Bad Fiction

We were trying to write something bad, to explore what makes bad fiction. The woman with hair like olive branches wrote to her grandfather, a kindly old man who whittled wood on his front porch. The letter she wrote was filled with the voice of the young girl she knew he imagined when he thought of her. She read it to us slowly, as if she had to articulate that this was clearly not the woman she was, that clearly the tone in her voice carried the weight of each unspoken word. And, to be honest, it worked. When she looked up from the small notebook she had written it down in, an obvious concern she had for her grandfather’s need that it be written by hand, the room was silent for just a little while longer. We each envisioned him opening that very letter, his whittling set aside, the knife blade sledding through the glued lip of the envelope flap, the starling he had been carving, waiting patiently in his lap. And in the silence, the obvious pain of her love rose into the air. What the letter didn’t say was this: that the olive tree loved a woman, that she never planned to marry, that he would never raise her children into the very lap his starling rested in just then as he read. And then each of us imagined the letter we would write, how it would keep from saying the same thing, too. The omission branding our love no matter where or whom we loved, no matter how well or how poorly we loved, no matter the season or the day, the earth rotating us away from that very moment rapidly, blindly, dislodging us wherever we sat for the rest of our lives, if we felt the slightest pull from it at all.

CAMERA SHY

Slowly, you rise from your armchair and slide
to the seat next to me on the couch, our knees

touching. I let you ease the yearbook from my
hands, surprised by your eagerness to hunt out

the face of The King. Until now, I never knew
you to care. To you, he was always a punk, a

delinquent and unworthy of your time.
The details you recall help us to narrow the search:

which hour English class; who his friends were;
who your friends were and why your paths never crossed.

We pause over the photo of the yearbook staff
long enough to find you standing in the last row,

smiling wide, your arms draped warmly over the shoulders
of your friends beside you. A photo you were certain

you had missed because you never showed your face
on picture day. On the very next page, we find

you again, posing with the speech team, again
standing in the back, again smiling wide. Because

I was always tall you say with pride as if this mattered
more to you than did being a part of the team.

It is no great surprise when, a few pages later,
we also find you as president of the drama club.

It does not surprise me, yet it is strange to see.
I have searched countless times through our family albums,

and have never found a picture with your arms around me
or your lips pressed against my cheek in a fatherly kiss.

I often wonder if you can still picture the day you left--I held
the door as you stormed out of the house, shoulders shrugged,

hands raised in defeat and bare as winter trees as if we
had robbed you of your leaves. Maybe this is what you

mean when you say that you are camera shy, that you wish
to remain unknown, unrecognized for the things you have done.

At last the search has come to an end. I am the one who
finds him in the Glee Club photo. We have searched the

entire book. This is the only place we find him. The King,
Elvis Presley, like you, is standing in the back row, smiling

a big southern smile, half a head taller than the others. You
can’t believe we have found him at all, that we have found

him on a page opposite you, both your heads just above the crowd,

your bodies hidden and completely out of view

JFK DREAMT OF SATOMI DOGWOOD

That is all it takes is one shot.
And all that crimson spills out,
staining each leafy green brocade.

Forensics can tell us the velocity
of a lacerating blow to the flesh
by the size, the shape of blood marks.

Trajectory is measured with strings, pulled like webs,
that span the distance, the angle the blood has traveled
to mark its place upon any wall or blade of grass in any field--even this one.

A bullet through the back of your head
will spray the blood, each droplet spreading out
into thin wires, into tiny telegraphs of how you died.

Maybe, you were running across an open field just then.
It does not matter. Your blood will say it all. It will cry out after you cannot
saying listen, listen, let me tell you what I know.