Portraits of girls that I know
She is the kind of girl that unknowingly inspires songs. She is one of those personalities that will be solidified and made infinite through art, through the adoring glances of thousands of lovers. She has messy hair, a messy life. I step over mountains of clothing, discarded objects. She is living life too quickly to notice the run-off. She was duty bound to this sort of living the minute she was born. Sweet Caroline! Her name is evocative of green Southern landscapes the way she is evocative of hurried escapes made in dilapidated Pintos. We are taking off across the country, hands out windows, palms open to the cool air that comes in off the plantations at night. I can hear bits and pieces of the music coming off of the radio, but she says, “really it is just the lazy jag of some lonely satellite.” I believe the things she tells me. We are cruising good, now, trying to make a break from the deserts and the crowds. We are sleepy now, tired from looking for our own faces in Pamela de Barres novels. Somewhere between Gun Barrel City and the Mason-Dixon line, I turned to her and saw nothing but her hair and the sun, which I told her was very important, like something I read in a novel I can’t quite remember. She always laughs indulgently at midnight madness because she understands the way that water springs from underground; she understands the way the subterranean can create a pressure that one is unable to deal with. She understands these things because they are part of her genetic code. They were hardwired into her through generations of dreamers. Truth is in her DNA like light, like water. If anyone on Earth can remember Genesis 1:1, it would be her, because her hair and the sun hold important information like this. And sometimes, when I am in the backseat and the afternoon is bearing down too hot and I have had too much sangria, I start to believe that her hair has become the sun. That her hair has always been the sun and this is what Genesis 1:1 said, what they were trying to convey. She’s always driving to somewhere else, to some next world’s Genesis 1:1, because she wears boots with fringe, and what else are fringed boots going to do? If I could tell her something to keep her from knitting a worried brow during these endless pilgrimages, it would be what good ol’ Val said: “when God made the world He did not abandon it to sit in contemplation-- somewhere in limbo. God made the world and he entered into it: that is the meaning of creation.” And all the congregation said, Sweet Caroline, Amen! -D, 2008
There was a night when we were speeding through dark lanes, and our headlights illuminated the thrashing body of a dying cat. We were shaken, and there were questions. She asked, “There’s nothing we can do, right?” And I told her she was.
I loved her more in that moment than ever before because at that time we shared a heart, and it pumped the poor blood of that unnamed animal.
In the nighttime, when she is illuminated by the lights of passing cars and liquor stores, I am sure that she is June Miller because she is crazy but comforting like a mother. When I was young, I was in love with my mother’s hands. They were cool and clean, the skin so tender that it was transparent, and I could see straight through her flesh to the pumping green veins below.
I have never looked at her fingers, but I know already that they are iridescent like my mother’s. She is the kind of girl that never has clammy hands. -D, 2008
There was a night when we were speeding through dark lanes, and our headlights illuminated the thrashing body of a dying cat. We were shaken, and there were questions. She asked, “There’s nothing we can do, right?” And I told her she was.
I loved her more in that moment than ever before because at that time we shared a heart, and it pumped the poor blood of that unnamed animal.
In the nighttime, when she is illuminated by the lights of passing cars and liquor stores, I am sure that she is June Miller because she is crazy but comforting like a mother. When I was young, I was in love with my mother’s hands. They were cool and clean, the skin so tender that it was transparent, and I could see straight through her flesh to the pumping green veins below.
I have never looked at her fingers, but I know already that they are iridescent like my mother’s. She is the kind of girl that never has clammy hands. -D, 2008