THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

  I remember my little boy soak tub when bubbles would ricochet off tiles with pop and circumstance. I remember the sleepy time choir of late August crickets whose notes would take flight  and soar in formation in honor of  the death of the day. I remember the sound of my dad laughing at Sid and Imogen like someone was tickling his feet transmitted from  faraway living room island to the shores of my crib which for a one brief second erased his blackboard  and made him forget  the chalk of everyone he had lost and still ached for  just like I did whenever mommy said good night  and would disappear into holy foyer light perhaps forever. Despite the fact that my job then was the pursuit of happiness I was always acutely aware even at two of the hidden companionship of sadness which lived in the secret places of grown-ups who, at the end of each day, from behind the grieving hush of closed bedroom doors, would slip out of their work costumes and life...

Snow is the accumulation of brushstrokes: Monet’s Magpie Hassam’s Late Afternoon New York Winter Renoir’s Skates in the Bois de Boulogne - framed by my windows which I can fly through on this island of passing days when summer feels as distant as the length of longing My  memories are a mad flurry of hexagonal plates and stellar dendrites that land like parachutes on a wintered battlefield  of insistent jasmine which has survived the casualties and blizzards of the heart. reminding me that weather is as brief  and lonely  as  the daydream that created it.

Ever since the days of perfectly fitted waistcoats silk top hats and the dangled kid glove when spring made its entrance as rowdy as a saloon, it became open season for desire. Inhibitions were lifted like a Crazy Horse skirt and for the pocket-empty artist, his swivel-eyed lust carried him by ragged foot   to the impossible distance of color-spattered fields, where armed with the seeds of paint, he tried to figure out the secret code of flowers which had spoken to him in the confidence of God since he was a child. With the genuflection of the Hog’s bristle brush and the consecration of the palette knife, the flowers were born out of creation--- becoming more human. with every stroke. Klimt’s sunflowers formed a soul Kusama made her blossoms quiver with the hallucinations of childhood and Van Gogh’s violet irises wept with madness from the asylum of Saint-Remy-de-Provence. And now after all these years the few that have survived be...

They were friends at that point, shoot the shit confidantes hoisting ale shots at McSorley’s as rain splattered the windows like Pollack paint  and sawdust added extra pulp  to their fiction. When she asked him  kind of casual, kind of not, why ghosts keep showing up in his poetry like the milky incandescence of long dead relatives, evaporated friends, and femme fatales who lowered the standards of his heart to that very moment he gave it a thought a seconds long inventory at best and answered: I don’t know, what do you think? She looked at him like she just solved a whodunnit and said I think it’s about hope… which stole his breath like a Times Square pickpocket and moved him to tears like  the first time he heard Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which guaranteed him safe passage right there in the saloon with its ususal crowd of diehards and tourists to enter his writing place where he conferred briefly with the spirits  who told him  to pack his mem...

After a life spent repairing his cowhide heart that has ruptured as often as a field of oil rigs in the Panhandle heat of an Amarillo summer, a gunslinger of some years, weathered to the amber of Old Overholt Rye, emerges from the final gasp of train steam. With a low-slung belt and spurs as rusted as him that jangle past the platform of twirling parasols that from space must surely look like daisies, he makes his way toward his long-promised reckoning— the high-noon showdown at La Misión de las Almas Perdidas— stopping twice: once to stroke a gentle horse, and once to catch his breath. And then he stands in the middle of the tree-lined crossroads, whose leaves, red as Malbec, cling to their branches like kinfolk in the Great Flood, praying, like him, to hold on one last time. But youth will outdraw him, and the wind will take the leaves. In the end, everything returns to dust, and the fragments left behind are all that light their trail to glory: ...

At first,  grief is the blinding that greets me when I reach toward the total eclipse of a late-August sun for the one I’ve lost. The years drift by— muzzy— half-empty bed abandoned chair, and left-behind shoes still waiting for one more invitation to whirl beneath the fairy lights and moonwash of the dance floor of eternal bandstands,  hopes, and dreams. Until grief— like my soul, and my refusal to forgive— softens into the long, low keening of a mother whale, her notes of longing bobbing along the salted complexion of the living sea— scatter-lit bottles of mercy and messages, each carrying the same heartfelt refrain: I miss you more.