Although it's been twenty-seven years, I believe it was every Thursday night that I experienced something akin the to eternal now. Moments so perfect, so right, they linger on still, every once in a while. Nights of methodical words, things said slow and right. We usually took the back road through the pecan orchards that trail northward along the Rio Grande. Sometimes it was just my brother and I; sometimes it was just George and I; usually, it was all three of us. In the winter, it would be dark. Outside the window, where the orchards closed in tight against the road, lines of bony-armed soldiers would file in from the black void towards the bright alien light, reaching upward towards a star-studded night in Pegan prayers to powers long forgotten. At least that's how it seemed leaving the lights of El Paso in the rear-view mirror, heading into those long orchards. Compared to many other places, I'm sure the light pollution was still quite substantial as the city didn't so much stop as dribble off.
In the summer, the sun would be at a great slant, intense liquid orange pouring through the perfectly straight rows of orchards in molten bars flung across the road, now and then igniting a white adobe facade of a house or store blindingly bright beside the roadside.
In the fall and spring, yellow-tinted methane gas from nearby industrial dairies would ooze through the orchards making the landscape resemble the fields of France during the Great War. I half-expected to come across a gutted cathedral, or a trench littered with twisted, partial corpses.
Yet, even on those cold fall and spring evenings when pollution hung low and heavy as the rusted husk of an old automobile, I loved that drive. There was enough of a rural feel to recall my rural roots. More importantly, on the other side, was a place I could hear the rhythms and sounds of others as well as refine my own voice. A mic is sacred space for one working with words. A piece never fully comes into being on the page. The print is just the score. A reading though, well that's picking up an instrument and translating scribble into something oh so fine.
It was a small bar in a very pedestrian place, a Holiday Inn if I remember right, visually soulless, very corporate--a place for weary travelers too tired to seek out any real night life. Yet, I loved that place. I still remember some of the readers, even the sounds of their voices, and how they played their instruments--where and how they paused, where and how they proceeded. Each voice different.
I even remember some of their names: Joe Somoza, Donna Snyder, Katie McLane.
Joe read poems slow and even, often with surprising, lightly humorous twists at the end. He would run his finger through his gray beard and peer out into the audience with intense eyes as he carefully moved forward one line at a time with long pauses in between each carefully crafted image.
Donna was working on a novel then. Working class. One could use the words "white trash" except that would be a complete lie. That bombed-out-muffler Ford Pinto and single-wide trailer reality was definitely there. The humor one must have to survive day after day, month after month, year after year, of getting nowhere was clearly there. But so was human dignity, royalty leaking out into the eternal night through an open screen door of a single-wide trailer along a curbless paved road among magnolia trees as big and blooming as small-town dreams before being dashed by year after year of time-clock reality.
Then there was Katy. Short poems. Funny as hell. Sometimes print didn't do them justice. But orally, bust-a-gut sweetness poured out about a life of pushing pharmaceuticals across the drugstore counter. The things we all think dealing with customers (or vise-versa) but never have the courage to say aloud.
In between there'd be rum and coke. The waitress, I don't remember her name, but I remember she always made sure I got both the cherry and the lime because that's how I liked it. I appreciated that.
Not everything was pure poetry. At least not the verbal type. There was a girl who liked to read in a loose summer dress and no shoes. George liked how she crossed here feet as she read, leaning on the podium for support. I wasn't sure about her words, but I had to agree her presentation was marvelous.
She came with a friend who was short, had short black hair and coal-black eyes intense as fire. I thought as a writer she had great potential, but I also knew I probably had no objectivity at all. She looked like she could be that young revolutionary spitfire I was looking for. If a woman didn't quite fit all my dreams, I would just rewrite her until she came close. It wasn't about discovering who they were; it was more about dreaming who I could be.
Maybe that's all right. Youth is blinded by forward thinking--scheming, dreaming, yearning for who we might become. In the process, there is a lot of pain, a lot of missing out on who and what we should really be seeking instead. But who would have it any other way?
Not I.
Once we come to a standstill, and our dreams fall off, leaving us naked and alone for real, we take a look around and decide what we really need instead.
Yet all that dreaming and all that scheming comes back like gentle wind in the eternal now.
Take me back.
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