Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Nath Jones

looked—less.”
    “Yeah.”
    I bend over and put my forehead against the
cool glass tabletop. The tears come quickly. I pick up a handful of
the river pebbles and fend off the banged-up basement memories. The
rocks slip through my fingers.
    “What are you doing with those rocks?” He is
laughing and a little uncomfortable. I wish he weren’t so
uncomfortable. He has a lot of insecurities. He looks from side to
side to see if anyone is bothered. But I know and trust the people
at the other tables. They’re all right. They didn’t care when I did
what I had to do to block out the penetrating joy of a May blue
heaven.
    He puts his hand in the middle of my back. I
hate that. I like it on one side or the other but not the middle.
Why do people do exactly what you hate and exactly what you wish
they wouldn’t right when you need them to do the right, best thing?
Strange. A distancing thing, I suppose.
    Awareness. Come closer. Get closer. Or you
will drift—safe, calm, away, and done (who cares?)—into some lone
forever. Get closer. Do it now. Reach out. Don’t descend. Say it.
Say to your lover—the man who asked you a thousand times to be
truthful, to include your family in your life, to be proud of him,
of yourself—say, “I’m sorry. I’m just so fucked up.”
    He will never really forgive you. But he
says, “It’s okay. He was your dad.”
    There’s no other. There is a breeze and I
don’t want anything from anyone under this happy full blue sky. I
don’t want anyone to turn his love my way. So with one jolt of my
thigh I jerk his hand off. I interlace my fingers behind my head
like my dad used to do, lean all the way back in the chair, and
look up. The pecan leaves dance wildly for just a moment in some
small way, some impossible way. They are almost free but exist
attached, like all of us bound to this life for as long as
possible. They shake and tear at their foundation but never break
free. Until it is time. It isn’t time now. And when it is time they
won’t be ready and they will regret this violent shaking in the
wind trying to rid themselves of exactly who they are, in some
pecan-leaf way.

 
PORTRAIT OF A WHEEL SPOKE
BLUR

    An old woman made her yarn on useless beach house
days.
    Rhythm rain. Rhythm heartbeat. Rhythm breath and
blinking. Her foot worked the pedal. Rhythm rain, breath, and
wooden pressing rubber down. Inside on the porch during the rain
her hand held a strand between two old purple-veined fingers,
rolling, twisting, holding the newly-made thread out at a full
arm’s length, and on a spool spun dandelion-dyed woolen-stretched
rhythm and wooden pressing rubber down.
    But. That’s later. First the old lady picks
through the wool loosening the fibers, getting rid of any
debris.
    The waves and seasons and tides moved on.
Spring tide. Neap tide. The sun and moon came to her porch painted
gray. Under the privacy blinds sea treasure that little hands had
run offering and wondrous for generations covered low bookshelves
that somehow held up under the weight of so many lives lost. Among
them a horseshoe crab, a ten-inch whelk, and an elegant, black,
desiccated pouch of skates’ eggs. Sea glass rescued and reclaimed
sat amidst this happy desolation that ocean-edge collectors find so
soothing. No one walking on a beach—looking, searching,
hoping—thinks much of dead droves of sea creatures or of the
churning, sandy, blasting hell where sharp brokenness is pummeled
to nothing. No. Beachcombers seek only perfection.
    Children built her house. Such children had
gone off and come back parents and grandparents. And on the smooth
wooden painted floor this
great-aunt/grandmother/mother/sister/daughter/wife’s pedal hit in
quiet rhythm with wooden pressing rubber down, and rhythm afternoon
slant light, and blackberry-stained ghosts spinning down the beach
from Penny Rock and Briar Croft, with their headless chickens to
scald, and their dead footstep rhythm pressing memories down from
Mile