by Cauble, Don
and the shadow of the tree.)
I want to sit quiet as a tear
on the cheek of Christ.
I want to drink this bitter cup;
I want to feel my aloneness,
without thoughts of bare bosoms
and the burning bushes of youth
and tomorrow; pleasure
and pain, we are constant worlds
entwined with nature's vines,
roots; flowers that fly away
in remote jungles; dinosaurs
that rule the world with profit
and greed and patriotism on their lips.
I want to sit, to know my aloneness,
to ask questions one must answer alone
to oneself, awakening
from the years of false pretenses;
the sham beliefs I have been taught,
the limitations I have chosen.
***
Desires come and go,
I do not detain them.
But I will sit here, quietly
listening to this passing world:
the noise of a car going by;
a dog barking angrily; a boy
playing on the sidewalk;
the rain dripping off the gutters;
the slow Oregon rain that falls
like a soft funeral train,
like the tenderness of a sweet friend
who died long ago.
I will sit here,
calm in this moment of solitude;
my individuality a bone for the dogs
that would devour us,
for those who would feast upon the earth
and perish of famine in their souls,
for those who would tear out my
heart (if they could),
in the name of brotherhood,
Mother, Father, God.
I will sit here, lofty
in my heart as the redwoods,
unobtrusive as a shrub or
an ancient, gnarled olive tree,
invisible as truth,
mysterious as life, unknown,
lyrical.
Going into the darkness
"To equate light with love is misdirected," Alora once told me. "For certainly there's as much love in darkness as there is in light." Going into the darkness, I didn't know what to expect. I had some vague, romantic notion, I suppose, that going into the shadowlands of my own being could be done with a light held fast in my hands. Or strapped to my head like a miner's lamp. I didn't really want to go into the darkness without a light. Without a guide. That felt too scary.
But how else y'gonna go, Rimbaud?
I imagined I had even found a spirit guide to hold my hand on this journey. Like Dante's Beatrice. The old man and the young girl… I remembered writing this poem when I was twenty-two years old. The old man and the young girl… the old man who represented wisdom and knowledge through experience; the young girl who represented promise and hope and immortality. Was China this young girl that my intuitive vision had seen so long ago? A woman who could travel out-of-body. A woman who had not understood her ability to travel this way and who had given up this childhood gift when she entered college and majored in psychology.
Between worlds
"David. Wake up."
I opened my eyes slowly, not wanting to let go of the dream.
But more than anything, I wanted to see her again.
"It's you," I whispered, a little stunned.
"Of course it's me."
"I mean, the girl in my dream."
"Well, I hope you had a sexy dream." She smiled mischievously. "I've got to go now," she said. "It's almost seven. My little girl will be waking soon."
"She's at your grandmother's, right?"
As I let go of the dream, I remembered the night before.
China… I'll call her .
That's not her given name but it suits her.
We met in a smoky piano bar. My friend, Melina Foster, and I had been to an art theater to see a black and white Spanish film called The Sargossa Manuscript, one of the most amazing films—along with El Topo—I had ever seen. On the way home, we stopped in at a restaurant bar near where we lived, sharing a house, along with another friend, Jan Nelson. Melina ordered a gin and tonic, her favorite drink, and I ordered a glass of house red. We sat quietly talking at a table near the bar and I noticed a woman at the bar the same time she noticed me. Actually, I looked her way because I overheard her talking and her voice brought back a flood of memories. Her voice reminded me of Christine Isbell, a woman I had known for two weeks (and loved) years before, while traveling in Greece. I had never picked up a woman in a bar. I had never even gone into a bar with that thought in mind. I don't really care for bars. Sure, in my university days in Eugene, I drifted into Max's almost every night. But that was different. I had never picked up a woman in a bar, but I knew I couldn't just walk out and not talk to this woman. I got up and went to the men's room, because to go to the restroom I had to walk by the bar. The woman and I glanced curiously at each other. Coming back from the men's room, our eyes touched again and I murmured to her, "I'll come back."
"Ready to go?" I asked Melina.
"Sure."
Melina didn't care much for bars either. Why we stopped, just a fluke, I guess.
Melina had noticed the connection between me and the woman at the bar. She didn't say anything though. I think Melina had given up long ago on understanding the romantic entanglements that I got myself into.
I dropped Melina off at our house, not far from the restaurant, and then drove back to the bar.
Would she still be there?
Would she remember me? Would she have a man?
I didn't know the rules of meeting a woman in a bar, if such etiquette did exist.
The woman didn't seem surprised when I showed up. She didn't seem indifferent, but she didn't seem that excited. I didn't know how to read her, or the situation. I only knew my feelings, and my feelings urged me in the direction of this woman.
I sat down beside her. I ordered a glass of wine.
We looked at each other.
"Can I buy you a drink?" I asked.
She told me what she wanted.
Some strange name I'd never heard of.
A young black man dressed in a tuxedo came out and sat at the piano and started to play. We got our drinks and moved over to the piano. And that's where we stayed until the place closed, chatting and joking with the piano man. A good-looking dude, too. He seemed to know her. What if they had an understanding? Am I being stupid? Do I go? Do I stay? Back and forth I went. What's she's doing here anyway? She's not really looking for company. But I can't just let her go; I might never see her again.
So I kept hanging in there, waiting for some signal.
We danced together near the piano.
The piano man seemed to be on my side. He wanted to get us together. Softly he sang a French song, "Ne Me Quitte Pas," a song that Nina Simone had made famous on her album I Put A Spell On You. Maybe he was just a romantic, the piano man. Maybe we were all romantics, caught in a smoky web of time, just a boy and a girl in an old-fashioned movie with the piano man playing Sam Cupid, playing romantic songs like "Stardust" and "How Deep Is The Ocean," drawing us together in the shadows.
Come two o'clock the bar closed.
What do I do now? I still didn't know.
She seemed as uncertain as me. "You have a way home?" I asked.
She nodded. "My car's out front."
"What do you want to do?" I asked.
She didn't answer at first. Then, more to herself than to me, she said, "Why not? Why not do something daring?"
I waited.
"I drove my mother's car. Follow me and I'll drop it off."
I walked China to her car and then followed her for about a mile to her mother's place. Damn, the speed she drove and all the turns she made, I thought I might lose her. Did she want to lose me? I wondered. Hell, maybe she shouldn't e
ven be driving.
China had a five year-old daughter. Her daughter was staying at her grandmother's for the weekend she told me. China lived in the same apartment complex as her mother.
China parked her mother's car and then we drove to my house. We tiptoed quietly up the stairs. China paused to admire a large oak-framed print I had hanging on my bedroom wall. It was a painting by Adolphe-William Baugureau of a beautiful, half-naked young woman fending off Cupid. The woman in the painting has both arms outstretched against Cupid's shoulder and Cupid, a naked, white-winged, boyish-looking cherub, has an arrow in one hand, poised above the woman's heart. The young woman has a smile on her lips, as if she's playing a delightful game with her small brother. I like Baugureau. I had picked up this print at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu when Melina and I drove down to Ojai in the spring to attend a series of J. Krishnamurti talks.
I was living on the second floor of our house. I had a bedroom, a bath, and a small room I used as a writing room. Melina lived downstairs in the main bedroom and had a bedroom she used as a studio. Jan Nelson lived in the basement. Jan had just finished her medical internship. She was a surgeon. Some nights—usually Melina and I never found out until the next day—Jan would be called to the hospital to do emergency surgery. She developed a strong dislike for motorcycles, after seeing what these accidents could do to a man's body. Jan and I often had long talks about life. Well, perhaps she didn't talk all that much, but she knew how to listen and she knew how to ask interesting questions. Once—actually, more than once—we were talking about sex and, this time, she said, "I could never surrender to another person." "Jan," I answered, "what has the other person to do with it?"
"Have you any music?" China asked. "I want to dance."
I put on Alan Stivell's Renaissance of the Celtic Harp.
"Oh, nice," she sighed, surprised and pleased by the music. I think she expected something not so spiritual. She asked me to light a candle.
What she did next took my breath away.
She stripped off her clothes and danced to the music.
I sat on the bed watching her. China seemed to be in a trance with the Celtic music. She could have been an ancient temple dancer, an incarnation of the beautiful nymph Psyche. I wanted to be here with this woman and only with this woman. China's dark blonde body, the whole meaning of this earth. Her dark blonde body, the wound I carried in my heart. Her dark blonde body, the last dance before the world came to an end. I hardly dared to breathe, hanging by a thread to a feeling of wonder and timelessness. Knowing that the universe had given me a precious gift, as if suddenly the veil between heaven and earth had shifted, and, like the flight of a wild bird going to nest, all I ever wanted danced sweet as a breeze to my door beside the deep woods.
I was a goner, I tell you.
"Dancing is the link between the passing moment and the eternal." I remembered these words from Louis Malle's film, Phantom India. Was this the dance of Shiva before me? China had seemed so out-of-place in a bar. She had seemed so mysterious, aloof, and desirable; yet she had done nothing bizarre or strange or glamorous to call attention to herself. She had been wearing a blouse and simple long skirt and shoes with flat heels. She had even seemed a little old-fashioned.
"I want to touch you," I whispered.
She came close to me and I kissed her belly.
I held her for a moment, resting my face on her warm flat belly. I felt her body shiver as my lips touched below her belly. Delicately, I tasted her with the tip of my tongue. She pulled away to lie down on the bed. She lay there for a long time as I hungrily kissed her sweet, wet, gorgeous flower. Finally, she reached for my hands and pulled my mouth to her mouth. She wrapped her legs around me and we danced another dance, as if the world had never ended.
The mystery of attraction continues
We were sitting in the sand on the banks of the Columbia River on the Washington side, idly watching sail boats go by and the seaplanes flying over the water, and people walking up and down the beach. The two of us kept darting like deep-water fish through the undercurrents of the party and our weekend together, and then I watched the sun begin to slide down towards the river in the far distance as I listened to her drift into regions of her memory, growing up in Arizona.
"My body memorized your hands, did you know that?"
I smiled, remembering.
We had left the party around midnight and went to her apartment. Her grandmother was keeping her little girl that night.
"I want you to stay," China said. "But I don't feel like making love."
We curled up together and slept late into Sunday morning.
She got out of bed and then came back with two cups of tea. She put on a tape. I recognized Chopin's Nocturnes. She had slipped on an old, faded blue robe when she got up to go into the kitchen. "One day, when I was living in Phoenix," she said, "after taking a bath, I was lying on my bed masturbating and I happened to look out the window. A man was at the window watching me."
I rubbed her shoulders through the robe.
"Hmmm...that feels good."
"I took lessons," I said, proudly. "From my friend, Merika. She's a masseuse. I talked her into getting a group together. We met once a week in her place for two months."
"Right here," she said, pointing to a spot near the base of her spine.
"Ah, yes," I said, knowingly. "Merika says that's a favorite spot for women to hold in energy."
She slipped out of her blue robe.
She allowed my hands to gently loosen the knot at the base of her spine, a splotch of skin turning scarlet. I worked my fingers up her back and into her blonde hair, massaging her skull and the back of her neck, and then down her shoulders and arms and fingers. I kneaded her butt, like kneading bread dough, slipping my hands deep to touch warmness inside her thighs, and then slowly pressed my fingers down the back of her long legs to her feet and toes.
She rolled over.
"You're good at what you do," she said, her eyes smiling at me.
She pulled my hands to her lips and kissed them.
"You have such large hands. They're beautiful. They're like—." She grinned down at my stiff maleness. She looked at my slip of a body and murmured, "Who would have thought?"
We looked into each other's eyes. We both grinned.
She reached down and invited me into her.
China grew up in Arizona with two sisters. All three of them went to college and majored in psychology. (China would have chosen forestry, but at the time—in the mid 1970s—this didn't seem like an option for her. A girl from the desert living in the forest? Her father certainly didn't want her to become a Forest Ranger.) After college, China met a guy in Phoenix who worked as a chef at a popular, highly-rated restaurant. They had a child together. She learned a lot about fancy cuisine and French wine, but when he started dealing coke, and people were coming into their home all hours of the night, she packed her suitcase and took her little girl and moved to Oregon to be near her mother and grandmother.
The gift of spirit traveling had returned to her, she told me. Her older sister called her a shaman and sent her the book Woman Who Run With Wolves. Her older sister was now teaching psychology at a university back East. China didn't know about shamans. She simply enjoyed her flying journeys—her journeys, as she called them, "on wings of wonder." Just the same, China wanted to know: "Am I crazy?"
We were having lunch at Café Du Berry.
Over a glass of French wine she said, "I'm a free spirit."
What did she mean by that?
Did she feel scared of losing herself? Of giving up the past? I certainly felt that fear within me. I felt ready at the drop of a hat to give myself away. To take off with her and her little girl to Arizona or anywhere she might want to go. Just like I had always done before with a woman. "You give until there's nothing left and then the woman walks away," a close friend had told me. I knew I had come into China's life at a difficult time. But I knew she liked how I could see into
her deep thoughts. She liked being respected and appreciated by a man, something she wasn't used to. She had let her guard down. So here I am, knocking on the door of a great darkness. Empty-handed, I stand at the threshold. I shuffle my feet in fear. I cannot touch this darkness with my hands; cannot grasp it with my mind. I want to embrace this dark beauty with my heart. Will She welcome me? Will She devour me and spit out my bones? As Kali has been known to do to Her devotees.
"Boy, we could never live together," I said, thinking about our differences. To begin with, she was twenty-seven and I was forty-two. I had been married and divorced twice. I wasn't good with kids. Hell, I wasn't even that good with dogs. Not that dogs didn't like me. They did. I just wasn't good with anything I couldn't reason with. Too impatient, I suppose. (All that taking care of....) China felt like an oasis for me, an island paradise, but not the mainland. I wanted stability in my life. I wanted to be with someone who felt as familiar to me as my own thoughts. In other words, I wanted to go home. I wanted to understand how, in the past, I could have loved so deeply and yet have two marriages dissolve into thin air without even knowing what the hell was going on. I wanted to untie the Gordian knot: "Who m I?"
"Why not?" she asked.
She waited for my answer, but I didn't say anything.
Perhaps I had only been fishing.
We sat in silence a few moments.
In fact, emotionally, she reminded me of Naomi.
Suddenly, I felt all this emotion inside me. I actually had to fight back tears. China kept looking curiously at me, her narrow green eyes gauging my face. She reminded me of a cat peering into a mirror. For God's sake, what was she thinking? I could never tell about China. She felt like a free spirit, yes. A free spirit hemmed in a slender body as hot and thirsty as the Arizona desert she came from, and like the desert, she waited for the sudden rain that would bring hidden flowers into bloom overnight.
I wanted to take her clothes off.
She reached over and touched my hand.
Finally, I couldn't hold the words back."I love you," I said.
"I know," she answered.
We went for a walk. She wanted to smoke a cigarette.