On the backs of seahorses' eyes

by Cauble, Don

  her fingers stroking his head,

  and her voice, gentle

  as the rain outside melting the last snow,

  drifting him in her arms.

  In bed,

  he kissed her over and over in adoration,

  his kisses like butterfly wings on fire,

  and she, wet

  and longing for him to enter her,

  her whole body the material

  and soul of his own,

  each whisper on his lips

  rippling through the lines and breath

  of her mind

  into an ecstasy, a surrendering,

  into a cry.

  Exhausted, motion-

  less,

  hardly breathing,

  they lay in each other's arms.

  "It's still raining," she whispered.

  She pulled the covers up

  and they slept.

  Thoughts on a river

  As day turns to night,

  as our journey takes a bad

  turn,

  What went wrong?

  Who's to blame?

  we ask each other,

  as we both watch

  the sun

  slowly

  sink

  behind the giant redwood trees

  around us,

  & I listen to the river,

  flowing.

  What went wrong?

  The gathering storm

  It happened so quickly and woke you

  with a start,

  the wind rushing

  through the window

  you had opened to cool our bedroom

  and clear your head

  from the talk we had in the night,

  the wind slamming the door shut

  and whirling the curtains across the mirror

  you had danced in naked, as I watched:

  a woman in her early thirties,

  slender as a flame,

  beautiful as the earth,

  reclaiming the young girl she had lost

  so long ago

  to a thief, a liar,

  your mother's one-time lover.

  *****

  I calmed you back to sleep,

  stroking your head,

  but I lay awake for hours thinking of our home

  and listening to the wind howling.

  (It blew out lights and downed power lines,

  I heard the next day.)

  And when I slept, I slept only between dreams

  of catastrophic events

  and myself alone on a strange, alien planet.

  *****

  Waking for the last time,

  before the alarm,

  I wondered to myself if perhaps this house

  —our house—

  was the only house in the storm?

  Getting in touch with your psychic energy

  We got into a fight before we left the house to go to Mala's weekend retreat at the coast. Something about Naomi's driver's license. She had misplaced her driver's license. Naomi would come into the house, toss her car keys wherever. How many times had I helped her find her keys?!? Being a reasonable man, I suggested that she put them in one place every time. A simple solution.

  Not.

  What she did with HER keys, HER driver's license, HER lungs—was HER BUSINESS. Not mine. Okay?

  Okay.

  We had been to one of Mala's retreats before, in Eugene, where she had lived with her partner, Swami Aniruddha. Both Mala and Aniruddha were sannyasins who had recently returned from the Rajneesh Ashram in Poona, India. Like my friend Aditi, they always wore a shade of orange or burgundy—at least, they did before the Ranch closed and the rules changed; and, like Aditi, they each wore a mala on a burgundy cord with a small picture of Bhagwan, like in high school when you would wear your sweetheart's class ring on a chain around your neck.

  We first met Mala when she came up to Portland for a visit. Eden Maldek had urged us to go and get an "energy reading" from her. Eden had been really impressed with her psychic abilities. So was I, after the reading. It was Eden who encouraged us to go to her workshop in Eugene. I had never been to a confrontational style workshop before. I had no idea what to expect when, out of the blue, a woman started screaming. I had seen some weird shit before, and the next two days was just more weird shit. All this emotional stuff flying around the room. I immediately went into survival mode. Watch out. Stay calm. Find out what's going on. Even sitting in the center of the group, in the "hot seat," with Charlie yelling that I was "pussy whipped," I did nothing. I sat there, calm and reasonable. Thinking, I suppose, that's what I needed to do: stay calm and reasonable in the flurry of these jackals screaming for blood. Mala seemed resigned that I might never break free of my protective shell. I had no idea at the time what she meant.

  Later, Mala offered a free weekend introductory workshop to a series of psychic classes she planned to teach. "Getting In Touch With Your Psychic Energy," she called it. I decided to drive down to Eugene and take the introductory class. During that weekend, Mala taught us how to feel another person's aura. How to actually touch and feel with our hands the other person's aura. There's no "how," you just do it, I discovered. With your open hands outstretched, you walk slowly, carefully, up to the other person with this intention in mind until you begin to touch their energy field. You can trace the outer dimensions of this field, where it's most intense, where it drops off, where it stops. We do it quite naturally all the time, most of us, we just get distracted by our thoughts and the internal drama that's always going on in our minds. Because of the long drive to Eugene, however—a hundred miles each way—and this would be twice a week and sometimes on weekends—I decided not to take Mala's classes. Instead, Naomi would take the classes. At the time, Naomi had stopped doing her day care and she had both the time and the interest. Charlie, Eden's friend, also wanted to take the classes. So we agreed that I would take care of Scotty, Naomi's adopted child from a previous marriage, and she and Charlie would drive down together and share gas expenses. Naomi would have to do all the driving, though, because Charlie was blind.

  Meanwhile, Eden decided to go to India. He had inherited some money from his grandmother and wanted to visit the Rajneesh Ashram in Poona. So he quit his job, gave up his apartment, and made travel preparations. During this time I told him it was O.K. to use our address as a mail delivery. Things went fine until his passport got forwarded by mistake to his wife Molly, in West Virginia.

  When Eden first came out to Portland from West Virginia in the late 1960s (this was before I got married and went to Greece), he showed up with Molly, who had left her husband. Molly wanted to live at the coast. She and Eden moved to Lincoln City. Then Anna Sylvan and Brian McCarty drove down to visit Molly. Anna and Brian were lovers at the time. They were living together in Portland and somehow they had met Molly.

  Eden fell in love with Anna.

  Anna split with Brian, and Eden left Molly in Lincoln City where she lived alone by the ocean. Eden and Anna found a place together in Portland. Then Anna got pregnant with Monica. Monica was born and for years thereafter, Anna had an on-again, off-again, romantic relationship with Eden. Anna never got married.

  Molly seemed a bit scatter-brained. Spacey, I guess you'd call it. But everybody loved her. Not an unkind bone in her. A tall, thin, plain looking woman with a sweet face and dark, bodiless hair, and smallish breasts and long legs—she moved like a fish and she loved the ocean. "I don't want to grow old having never lived by the ocean," she once told us, when Melina and I were at the coast visiting her and Eden.

  Molly lived at the coast for a couple of years before moving back to West Virginia. While in Greece, in prison, I got a letter from her. She knew Greek. In fact, she taught high school Latin.

  Right around the time Naomi and I got married, Eden took a trip back to West Virginia. He and Molly took off to Texas and got married. I just shook my head when I heard this news. Molly had such a nonchalant attitude a
bout life, especially about money and material things and practical matters, that anyone could have predicted she would soon drive Eden out of his tight-fisted, saturnine mind. Did he think she had changed? Was he running scared, feeling the pressure of time? I had no idea. Looking back, I think he wanted redemption, but I didn't understand this at the time.

  Molly came back to Portland with Eden. This lasted about three months. Eden threw her out on the street. Over money matters, I think. She did this, she did that. For Christ sake, Eden, what did you expect? I thought to myself. How long have you known Molly? You knew she was this way. But I didn't say anything.

  Molly disappeared back to West Virginia.

  But she never got a divorce from Eden.

  And now she had Eden's passport. Or she did have it. She told Eden she had sold it. Eden got hopping mad. He was ready to report her to the FBI when his passport finally arrived in the mail.

  Meanwhile, he and Naomi decided to get to know each other. Eden didn't really know Naomi. He had never even said much to her. They decided to have coffee together, have lunch, drink a little wine, talk about Mala's psychic classes. Well, I had been around the block once with Eden Maldek. The minute I heard about Molly and the passport, I saw trouble ahead. Knowing Eden's history and knowing how vulnerable things felt between Naomi and me at the time, and how restless and inexperienced Naomi felt with men—I knew exactly what would happen. I really did. I watched the curtain go up and I watched it come down. The only thing that surprised me, the only thing I couldn't predict, was how much pain I would go through.

  §

  from Going into the darkness / Tales of past times

  (an unpublished novel)

  Dancing in the fire

  I wanted to follow you down

  that night, down passages

  of soft,

  forgotten skies,

  down romantic nights of youth,

  nights sparkling with fireflies;

  and long, long days of growing up

  in the South

  of pale yellow honeysuckles

  by the side of a red clay dirt road,

  of green apple trees

  in watermelon fields and ripe strawberries;

  and wild, black, bittersweet cherries

  I tasted each summer, just to see.

  I wanted to remember you absolutely.

  I wanted to dance you, that night,

  I wanted to be you;

  I wanted to hear the oceanic cry,

  the roar-hum that breaks my heart

  with each broken wave,

  dancing, dancing,

  in each joyous awakening

  of your body.

  I looked around the room for Sandy. We had danced together the night before, the first night of the Gearhart retreat, danced to Donna Summers' "On the Radio."

  "Would you mind, sir, coming down to earth and repeating that question?"

  "A dance?" I said. "Would you join me in a dance?"

  "Oh, God," she signed. "I thought you'd never ask."

  Sandy kept teasing me, saying outrageously coy lines in this Southern Belle accent that got my own Southern blood up and crowing like a rooster. We were just a boy and a girl, having fun.

  I enjoyed the flirtation with Sandy. But what I really wanted to do—I really wanted to dance with Naomi.

  It was the only time I felt close to her the whole weekend. "I love the way you love me," Donna sang and whispered and moaned. "Our love will last forever," and, as I danced with Naomi, I wanted to believe the words to the song. I wanted to believe, like the bravado actor John Wayne battling his last battle with cancer: I can whip this thing.

  Only Mala and Aniruddha out-danced us. You could actually see the electricity flashing from Mala as she danced. I had never seen such a dancer. Beautiful, willowy, graceful, Mala danced and I saw bursts of light energy around her. It was like watching a Fourth of July celebration inside a tent.

  The next morning, Sandy and I ran into each other in the kitchen.

  "Hey," she said, "you can stay out of my dreams! You were in my dreams last night."

  She's still teasing me, I thought.

  "Oh, I like being in people's dreams," I said, throwing the ball back to her.

  "We were doing something in the kitchen," she said.

  "What...?"

  She laughed at my hesitation.

  That morning, Mala asked Naomi to do some role-playing. Bryan McCarty played the role of me, as Naomi's husband. Mala had made a good choice for Naomi, for Bryan and I even looked a little like each other. We both had thin bodies, his perhaps more wiry muscular then mine, and we both had dark, full beards and similar straight noses and sensual mouths. We both had a quick smile and sense of humor and we both had protective walls around our feelings. Bryan loved the stars and planets in the sky and taught astronomy at a community college. He dodged his feelings by acting out in the external world. (Also, he sometimes acted with Portland's Storefront Theater.) When things got weird, Bryan simply went out the window. I dodged my deeper feelings by looking them straight in the eye and denying them.

  I watched carefully as Naomi acted out the anger and frustration she felt in our marriage. Bryan did good. He got angry back at her. She fed on that. It seemed so easy for Bryan. Why couldn't I do that? Naomi missed that in our marriage, I'm sure. She had grown up in a family where anger meant love. Anger meant attention. To me, anger meant my mother and father at the supper table, night after night, bickering at each other, year after year as I grew up in a little country town in Georgia. Anger meant my mother was weary with nerves frazzled, threatening to knock my head off if I didn't get out from under her feet. Anger meant she didn't want me around. A woman's anger meant the end of the world. So I had carefully avoided Naomi's anger and her long silences.

  Her silences could last for days, even weeks.

  I didn't know what to do or say. Gradually, I learned to walk around her walls. Just as I had learned to tiptoe around the house when my mother worked nights in the Douglasville cotton mill and needed to sleep during the day. With Naomi, I went on with my daily life, waiting for the ice to thaw, waiting for the warmness that I loved.

  I felt afraid that Naomi might leave. She felt the same about me. Afraid that I would leave her for another woman. I didn't understand her fear, for I had no desire to be with another woman. Yet I couldn't convince her, I seemed ready at any moment to betray our marriage.

  I couldn't be there for Naomi; not all of me.

  I didn't understand why.

  I felt the shame of not being enough for Naomi. In her role-playing with Bryan, she appeared so strong and beautiful, so much anger coming out. She looked like a princess. Others in the group noticed this too.

  To choose a partner for our next exercise, I looked for Sandy. Another man had already nabbed her. I suddenly felt confused. I had no idea who to pick. The only thing Mala had told us was to choose a partner of the opposite sex. I didn't want to pair up with Naomi for this exercise, or any of the exercises. It felt too sticky. Already we had exchanged harsh words the night before, when I wanted to sleep with her.

  Looking around, I saw the petite, dark-haired woman who had danced across the lawn during our lunch break. I had been sitting on the stairwell, feeling depressed and withdrawn. Glancing out a window, I had seen a beautiful woman skipping towards the meeting house. A sannyasin; she wore all burgundy-colored clothes. She had danced barefooted across the lawn, gathering her long burgundy skirt around her waist. She didn't have on any underwear, for all the world to see. I watched her until she reached the house and disappeared from sight. In that moment I envied her. "Envy no one"—"live by no man's code"—Bob Dylan had taught a whole generation this great lesson. Yet in that moment, I envied the woman's freedom. I envied the joy and careless abandonment she displayed as she danced across the grass.

  "You want to?" I asked her.

  "Sure," she said.

  We stood there, waiting for instructions. Mala told
everyone to hug their partners. The dark-haired woman and I hugged each other and then I didn't hear the rest of Mala's instructions. I felt this warm, feminine body embracing mine. I felt her heart beating close to mine, a woman who didn't even know me, and I couldn't stop from crying. I held onto her and cried and cried.

  Help me, Mala.

  Suddenly Mala was down on the floor, with someone else at my feet, someone at my head, and she worked on my chest with both hands.

  "Breathe, David! Breathe!"

  I lay on the floor a long time, crying. Mala kept working on my heart area with her hands, urging me to let the tears out, to let the pain and grief out.

  Later, I walked down to the ocean. I saw the dark-haired woman on the beach. She shyly walked by me. We didn't speak. I learned that her name was Merika.

  A few nights later, at home by the fire, Naomi opened a bottle of wine. Naomi didn't often drink, not even wine. I hadn't had a glass of wine in seven years, not since quitting both wine and weed while traveling in Greece. I poured myself a glass of wine.

  We loved our talks. The talking seemed to bring us together. We just didn't know how to talk about our marriage. My feelings of being in an emotional cage. Her feelings of anger and disappointment. Things we couldn't escape. That's what going to Australia was all about. Escape from a world coming apart at the seams. Only we thought it was the other world. The world outside us. We didn't see the intersection coming up.

  Naomi had researched everything. We got things ready. Everything except our souls. We even took a trip to San Francisco to see the Australian Consulate. Suddenly, the idea of immigrating to Australia sent her into a secret panic. Overnight, she changed her mind.

  If seemed so crazy, not being able to talk about our marriage. We could love each other, night after night like pages in a storybook that you never want to end, and yet you're dying to know how to turns out. I thought the want between us would make everything okay and that we didn't need a backup. I thought that no matter what happens, the spirit fire between us would never go out. But the soul swings back and forth, as I was about to learn. For that is the nature of the soul. All that which explodes leads us to the Source. All that implodes, leads us to the Source. Above everything else, above even my love for Naomi, I felt the timeless calling of my soul, calling me homeward. Naomi must have heard the same calling and decided to give us a push.