Kabul, Afghanistan

“Your name is a bird in my hand, a piece of ice on the tongue, one single movement of the lips, a silver bell in the mouth.  Your name – how impossible, it is a kiss on the eyes on motionless eyelashes.  Chill and sweet.  Your name is a kiss of snow, a gulp of icy spring water, blue as a dove.”

-from “Poems For Blok” by Marina Tsvetaeva

There was the dream of walking the streets of the City of Angels once again in boots, also eating a steak dinner in a red leather booth with a fancy cocktail at Jack’s.  Then wandering over to lose his mind in the Viper Room, where he saw her father’s band play so long ago, not knowing at the time that she was there too.  She was on tour with the band instead of in school, keeping watch over him, a real live school of rock, even though she was only thirteen.  He imagined her in front of a cracked lighted mirror in the dressing room, tending to her curls and black eyeliner, pretending to be the rock star she would become years later to him and the world.    

But he was a long way from Los Angeles as he sat there on a picnic table reading the Paris Review, choking down a questionable dinner of chicken nuggets and soda pop.  Remembering the color then, when he thought the spring would never end.  But now he was consumed by the hard-boiled summer, staring at what was left of the leaves all around him, brittle, pale with dust, and the brown dust halo on the horizon, smudging away the mountains, having lost their snowy beacons. 

He worried about fading memories of her until she said, “memories fade into colors and melt into songs,” after which he remembered the sound of her voice as music like a moderate breeze through the pines near Battleship Rock.  Then he remembered her song, word for word, also the multivariate colors of spring, as vivid in his mind as the crimson sucking chest wound on a soldier who took his last breath a week ago, shot through the heart. 

There had been a close call or two, and for a time his spirit was weighted by something other than beauty, leaving him without the zealous hunger he usually had for the world.  A temporary spirit nausea teetering for a brief time on a full-blown puke.  So, he thought he’d get out of there for a while, perhaps the embassy in Kabul, where he’d take a dip in the cold water of the most secured swimming pool in the world.          

Getting up to leave he saw a dead bat on the smoldering sidewalk which made him think about birds not bats.  How the birds seemed to have vanished in the mid-summer heat and dust.  How he never saw dead birds back home but were everywhere there.  So, he said a little prayer for the birds to return to him in dreams.  Who else could he ask what to do?  Birds always know how to proceed.  Remembering how their combined sound was enough to keep him up all night after being jolted from a deep slumber.  God’s symphony must be in the form of a billion birds.    

It hadn’t rained for months, and he craved the scents of spring, especially the smell of new rain.  He once thought that was the best smell in the world until he sniffed his daughter’s head when she was three.  Wheat and honey.  Now older her head still smells wonderful although different.  Another particular smell he missed was a boyhood pasture full of cow manure.       

Birds vanished.  So strange to hear a just a single cicada scout in a locust tree, the blooms of which smelled as good as lilac in the spring, which is saying a lot.  But the fragrant dangling white locust blooms were long gone, leaving behind brittle brown bean seed pods hanging on for dear life.  Or would that be death?   Yes.  Life would be seeds falling to the bare ground.     

He began to hum a Tom Waits song which reminded him of something he read recently, that “There is also the melancholy thought that you could study and write poetry from dawn to dark and not come off with a quatrain equal to what Keats may have written on the back of an envelope on Hampstead Heath and then discarded as inferior.”  There’s no doubt he held the same sentiment about Tom Waits as the author held for Keats.    

U.S. Embassy

Kabul, Afghanistan