Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Sky-Watching
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
You can almost see, under the cover of decades of vines, the tower, its brickwork inset with tiles decorated with a pattern of vines. The tower, whose stair treads sag with a creak under every footstep. The tower built precisely on the migration route so that, from the top, on certain late summer evenings as determined by consultation of multiple star charts, you can, if you lie flat on your back on the boards that are both musty and splintery (remember to bring a blanket to lie on, preferably a thick one) you can see the dragons flying overhead.
It’s always a moonless night when they pass by, so you see them mainly as vast silhouettes. You feel the muggy heat of the breeze that’s their wake, and see the occasional underbelly-embedded jewel streak by like a shooting star as it catches the light of a distant town.
After you watch a while, the dragons may seem to be almost close enough to touch, as if they’re skimming along under a sky as low as the ceiling back in your home.
No matter how tempted you are, do not stretch out your hand. Do not try to touch the dragons. The rushing friction of the gem-crusted underbelly will burn. The sky will tremble as if with heat lightning. The claws, when they catch you, will nearly crush the breath from you.
Worst, when you return, dropped back a year later, on the same roof (you’d better hope it’s been an easy winter and spring while you’re gone, or the tower might have crumbled to rubble), you won’t be able to find words to describe the wonders and terrors you’ve seen: the fiery fields that blaze on the moon’s dark half, the vast and silent cold of the migration ways, the draconian cave-citadels that drift among the furthest comets. No one will believe your stories, and no one will heed your warnings — if you do find words for them, they will do more to intrigue than to dissuade, and future summers will bring new crops of freshly-returned travelers. At least they’ll believe you then.
Why I Won’t Go Back to the Sea
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
I was hauling traps out of Boothbay Harbor when we met. Love at first sight! I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world — me and one of the ocean’s beautiful daughters. Her eyes were black and bright as a seal’s. Her hair was long, but as tangled as kelp, and sometimes, when we rocked in my little boat and watched the evening, she would let me help comb it.
The ocean has many daughters, each of them beautiful, each of them different, as different as one wave is from the next. And, as with waves, the difference isn’t one that reveals itself quickly to human eyes. So it was that I smiled at one of my beloved’s sisters, and another seashell-whispered sweet nothings in my ear. The sea soon turned to jealous tempest all the way from Kennebunk to Presque Isle.
When their father had had enough of this, he sent the ninth sister — a head taller than the others, brawny, magical, and cursed. She hoisted me on her shoulders and hauled me leagues and leagues inland. (“Abilene 278 mi.” reads the sign against which she left my boat leaning.)
But I’m far from alone here. Upon my arrival, the rest of the townsfolk came out of the houses they’ve built from their own beached craft. They stoked up an enormous fire and helped me to cook the catch I had in my hold. As I sat down with them to the largest lobster bake the county had ever seen, I saw my own heartbreak reflected in the faces of my new neighbors, mellowed by years for some, still achingly fresh for others. I knew right then that I’d found a home among the lovelorn bachelors of Surf and Turf, Texas.