Charikar Afghanistan

“There can be no allowable concept of ethnic or genetic virtue, inevitably the major source of human butchery.”

            -Jim Harrison

Another purple morning.  Chamomile tea with honey and wild mint from the rose garden.  So fragrant it overwhelmed the scent of a dozen rosebushes blooming crimson.  Remembering recent nights.  The scent of tobacco and honeysuckle growing near the USO.  I could get used to this. 

Speaking of fragrance, I walked past a Bosnian soldier guarding our entry point.  She wore a familiar perfume.  Remembering, I just about fell over.  This is a place of scents that loiter, without competition, especially on a windless day.  As vivid as deep violet on a white palette, red mingling with true blue.  No mere evocation but a double barrel bouquet.  A lingering, chromatic sillage.   

The rain is gone.  My desert skin.  Lips, hands deprived of water.  Vague tummy rumblings for three months.  A sign over the sink says, “sanitized potable water,” whatever that means. 

I had a rather silly dream that I gave up everything to drive the country, buying and selling exquisite antiques from the trunk of my ’65 Thunderbird.  Selling to rich Hollywood women and even richer Washington politicians’ wives.  I became the stuff of legend among antiquities dealers.  They called me T-Bird.       

These days the birds have lessened their trance on my spirit, because there are so many species migrating through here in late spring.  During the winter and early spring the few species were great companions.  But now I’m confused and overwhelmed by the prodigious varieties, and there are no off the shelf bird identification books for Afghanistan.  Yesterday I read in a tossed-away National Geographic that some birds have magnetic navigational devices inside their eyes which help them determine direction from Earth’s magnetic field.  Some believe in the miraculous, but I don’t have to believe.  I know.     

“As in reality all wars both sides have lost and the damage follows until the end of our time.  It seems strange that it could have been done well.  Greed has always fouled our vast nest.”

            -Jim Harrison

"In a life properly lived, you’re a river.  You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the ‘beingness’ of life, as Rilke would have it.”

            -Jim Harrison from an interview in The Paris Review