Miranda Webster

I
There’s a place I use to go to in my mind.  It’s an old barbershop in a dusty Azerbaijan village near the Russian border. The floor is bare and the hair trimmings have been carefully swept in a small hole in between floor boards. The men around me all wear a uniform style of clothing.  As they sit on old wooden benches waiting to be shaved, they mumble and grumble about work, weather and women.  I look around me at the shop and at the men.  My eyes wander through their faces.  I suddenly touch my face and I realize I am the oldest man here.  My wrinkles are the deepest and if one reads between them carefully she will read the story of my life.  I sit on the edge of the bench near the door, hunching over slightly and resting my elbows on my knees.   

The door is always propped open using a large rock, “all the way from the Himalayas,” one man boasts from in the corner.  

“Hush, old cricket - you’re older than those mountains,” another man responds sitting in between two of the youngest men in the room.  The barber pauses while cutting hair for a second to chuckle at this remark.

In my mind, I travel through a spectrum of memories or perhaps past life regressions. These places always seem distant from anything I’ve ever known and yet strangely so familiar. 

II
I don’t go to those places much anymore.  My imagination has shrunken to a relatively small size, only reaching to the farthest edge of my bed post.  The mattress is filled with rice and my body from lying here so long has formed a depression in the bed.  The doctors take such pride in explaining to me my “condition,” as they call it, using extensive medical terms that a simple cotton farmer wouldn’t know.  I refuse to believe that my days are now numbered.  The doctors sigh deeply and I know what they are thinking immediately.  They think I’m a mad man – a lost man.  I regret to inform them, but I am merely wandering.  Not all who wander are lost and not all who are lost will wander. 

III
I relax the muscles in my face and close my eyes.  My thoughts leave me for a moment, maybe more, maybe forever.

An old woman, with salt and pepper hair pulled back from her face, appears.  She is singing to me, a song for a sleeping child.

“Wake up, Little Sparrow,” she sings in the essence of a half whisper.

I realize she’s cradling me in her arms and I am small, again.  So small.  And my hands that once were rough, lacerated and stained with soil from farming cotton for sixty years are now clean and smooth.  I am new.  I am infinity.

Midnight Vagabond
the beauty of returning to one’s origin:
after eighteen years of searching
a soul-less suburbia
under yellow haloed streetlights
for SATORI in the slightest form,
but always afraid of losing
            an entity,
            a particle,
            an unknown quantity,
of her autonomy. 

Kudzu
She pauses to entertain the mysteries of what lies beneath
the overgrown twists and tangles,  the Earthly shroud to the South’s secrets
of restless wanderlust, the footprints of Railroad Bill.

Burger & Fries
The wooden bench squeaked as we sat in front of the window
outside McDonald’s.

The Flowers
A day when Ms. Dalloway has to buy the flowers – herself,
the flowers resting on your doorstep.

Transcend
For every star in the sky,
there is a place I’d rather be.

A Place to Call Home
We find homes in the most unlikely places: in old plantation homes, nineteenth century jails, abandoned mental institutions, in the hearts of wandering boys, the blue glow of a snowy city thousands of miles away, cemeteries of a certain kind, in the eyes of strangers we’ll never see again and the familiar faces we cannot let ourselves forget, the flickering of streetlights and in the few seconds we are immersed among inescapable & absolute infinity.

Noah Webster
Bound by beauty and blood,
she couldn’t get the name “Noah Webster” off her lips.

Advice
the librarian looks up from the pile of books, shakes her head, takes the last sip of her drink until the ice hits her lip, looks at me and says, “Sometimes the people who laugh the loudest are also the ones who cry the hardest.”

Dinner at Eight
Somewhere an old man
affectionately named Clover Joe,
sells pleasantly spiced avocadoes and buffalo shrimp
on the side of an empty highway
looks down to his bright eyed grandson
and admits “I never wanted a purple heart, anyway.”

Anything But A Bivouac
A black box beatnik
with bright eyes
the color of the jade
Buddha hanging around his neck

How the words of Brautigan and Kerouac
would spill from his lips
flowing with an effortless enthusiasm
as he tucked his creamed coffee hair behind his ear

A Hugo House boho
with an antique pipe from Puffin Sam’s
smoking salvia
and spiraling away from this place he calls Maggie’s Farm,

I picture you
on the ferry bound for Bremerton
gazing up at the sky and the snow-sprinkled Olympic Mountains,
letting the Seattle mist kiss your cheeks.

Love
The streets were quiet. The sky was sprinkled with white stars. Dew drops sparkled in the grass. An orange tabby cat with a pink nose sat on the porch in front of a small white house. A light was on in the living room. An exhausted man sat under a glowing lamp in a red armchair reading a paperback novel. The rest of the house was dark. The man scratched his forehead and turned the page. The orange tabby cat stretched her legs, releasing a yawn. A tall figure wearing a long red coat appeared on the sidewalk. Crispy brown leaves crunched underneath her worn shoes. Her dark hair framed her cold face. The color of her lips and cheeks matched her red coat. When she came upon the façade of the small white house, she stopped and looked up at the light. The man looked up from his book and saw her. Her eyes met his. His eyes met her’s. How familiar it all seemed. How distant it all seemed. But the man shook his head and held the novel closer to his face. She dug her cold hands into her warm coat pockets and continued walking.

“He that is strucken blind cannot forget, the precious treasure of his eyesight lost” read the man.

“Shakespeare,” whispered the man, his eyes red and tired.

Collaboration with Jeremy Hawkins

I fed an elephant at the zoo
I ate an elephant at the zoo

I followed Lewis and Clark home
took off my shoes

Threw a brick at a window.
the window threw back

Distilled readiness to leave
through a shadowed doorframe

Patterns of loving
puzzles of hating

Cerulean windward eye
I never looked back

Summer blood runs
down sun lit creeks

On this long avenue
I was the only vagabond in sight