Lou Barlow's Smile

A toxic salve,
so easy to fall into.
Saves me from myself
by consuming everything.
He is the joy of childhood crushes,
the part of awkward, shyness, curiosity
that never grows tired.
The euphoria of the first kiss,
even better, the longing stare.
What I would give to see
Lou Barlow's smile
in that moment again.

Painter

In the apartment above the little clothing shop that had fallen by the wayside of time, an old woman with glasses circled amidst her many projects. Her rooms were large, yet they were cramped and almost manic in nostalgia. The place was filled with every kind of concept paper. Ideas sketched in crumpled notebooks and relics of past triumphs she could no longer discern in anything but the very best of lighting.

Lizzie Fritzinger, always aloof yet plagued by chronic pain of all sorts, did not consider herself a conventional woman. Among all the people in her town, she felt close to almost no one. There was just her childhood friend, Meyer Wilke—a practical joker and one so attuned to the measures of Lizzie’s own personality that they’d had the rarest of the rare: a lifelong best friendship.

Now, as she scuttled about amongst her many things, she could not stop herself from hoping that Meyer would come. She removed her glasses and fingered them nervously with a soaked paper towel. Then she left them on the table.

Night fell just outside the window. Slowly, ever so slowly, it crept inside. She switched on the television- an insincere effort to quell her loneliness. With Larry King in the background, Lizzie stepped before an empty canvas and started mixing colors.

Red, blue, green, yellow, orange… a squirt here, a dab there, and soon she dipped her brushes into the thick, oozing fluids. “Now we will see what the night brings.”

Her paintbrush hung off her fingertips. To anyone watching, it would have looked as though it moved independent of her; colors dripped onto the space and coalesced in a mass of lines and figures before she knew what had happened. For Lizzie, shadow had always played a large role in her paintings…

After a few minutes, lost within herself, she stepped back from the easel and focused her eyes on a huddled mass of color in the lower right corner of the canvas. Her hand reached for an exceptionally thin brush, which she then dabbed in blacks and charcoal grays. Wrist flicked several times, making contact with the surface of the space. In her mind’s eye, it was all so clear.

The figure, a hound, had escaped from his owner. Running across an open field, the dog headed toward a clustering of ducks, for he looked intent on creating a disturbance. It was not the beast, however, that so interested Lizzie. It was not the beast she pictured in her mind’s eye at all. Rather, it was the grass and the air in the wake of the animal’s charge toward ephemeral instinct—and away from his owner.

The solemn painter yearned- this was a fact- to capture what is unseen, the openness that exists, sliding in and out like a fluid between things.

A short distance from the animal- at the center clearing, beside a fountain- Lizzie painted the figures of a man and a woman chasing after it. The man was intent in his pursuit- the woman, somewhat half-hearted, barely kept up.

She imagined she had painted this very scene a hundred times before- only to have it end badly at every recurrence. She thought that the man and woman in her painting had failed to grasp its meaning. That they’d not heard her warnings in every brush stroke.

“These ghosts, these half-ingested thoughts are our regrets, warning us to turn back around,” she whispered, staring at the canvas, annoyed she could still see each of her many determinations so clearly.

Awhile later, after Lizzie had collapsed in a chair, Meyer came to the door. With her friend at her side, Lizzie ventured out of the little apartment and away from the pictures that served as her companions in the absence of pulsating flesh and blood.

As her eyes adjusted to the lamplights that dotted the sidewalk along which they trod, Lizzie began to speak of many things, avoiding talk of her paintings or the myriad ideas swirling about in her mind’s eye.

Meyer- well accustomed to such lyric rants- kept a steady stride and peered into store windows as they passed. “What is it you are trying to paint?”

Stopping, she looked down at the sidewalk- the gray, cemented earth laden with cracks, fractures from decades of elemental pressure. The painter’s eyes grew wide. Removing her glasses again, she knelt to pull some weeds from one such crack in the sidewalk. The light melted off the street lamps and the huddled old woman stared as though one looking into the face of a lover. The awed eyes, the concentrated expression of this mostly blind painter might have made her appear to others as though a protégé at the foot of her Muse.


“Between people, Meyer…” Lizzie began, than she stopped and sighed. Standing, she put her glasses back on. “Intent charges out in front of me toward my focus. Vibrations, layers of intentions, all that is never said but always felt- that’s what I try to paint.”

Lizzie's Doodles

Girlfriend

The salesman had taken to the young girl despite his better judgment. She was endearingly compliant and yearned for his attention. As for the salesman, he liked to look at her because when he did, she stared back with the eyes of a reverent angel. It was late summer when she came to the store, came to tell him she was pregnant.

The salesman peppered her with questions and voiced his anger more passionately than he’d intended. And though she did not cry, the young girl’s intense eyes bobbled and welled up with loathing. It was in that moment he first registered a fear that he had disappointed her. He was shocked it saddened him so.

That night, after the girl had long since left the store, the salesman closed out his cash drawer in silence. Walking to the back exit, he sat for a moment on a stack of old packing cartons. Cradling his face in his hands, he considered the baby.

Seemed years since he met the girl on a warm Wednesday. They had talked of sports for more than an hour. Her lover at that time was a basketball fanatic, for that reason she knew almost all there was to know about Michigan State’s Flintstones and point guards, and the pro leagues of tomorrow. “Short equals speed,” she’d said again and again.

The salesman remembered how she laughed. Her throat began in an unexpected chortle and ended in a series of hops- all the while, her body remained perfectly still. And as they stood beside the sparkling fountain in the center of the park, her dog’s leash slipped out of her hand. The mutt was off like a shot, headed for a cluster of ducks on the bank of the creek about a hundred feet away.

“No!” the girl called out.

Together, she and the salesman darted across the clearing through the blackening sunlight. Somehow, they managed to pull the dog from its precarious position atop a smattering of wet stones.

"Those ducks are too fast for you,” the salesman chastised the dog, even as the young girl scooped him up in her arms. He petted the poor mutt and laughed at its dissatisfied expression.

In the storeroom now, all he can think is how I wish that day had never happened. Simply, if he had walked an opposite way through the park, if the dog had only taken off sooner, if he’d had the sense to not chase after it…

“I don’t want to tell your wife,” the young girl had said to him earlier that day. “This doesn’t have to be a problem. I just wanted you to know.”

He asked if she cried when she found out about the baby.

Touching him, the girl traced figure eights on his arm as she had done so many times before. “I did… I did. But then I started to think this might be the push I’ve been waiting for.” A delicate smile. “No one will ever know,” she continued. “I’ve thought about it, and I’m quite sure it’s the right thing to do.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You’ve already done it.”

On his carton at the back of the store, the tears came. If he'd only
known when he met her, he might have foregone the talk, the laugh, the dog. If he'd only chased the phantom air in the opposite direction of her.

Images of her broken body flashed in front of him now, comforting him. The salesman tried to block out the many sensations he’d drowned in at her hand. He held himself and yearned the day- that it might quickly come- when he would forget her.

June 18, 1999

“Ha, it’s done,” she said.

The paintbrush a glinting cobweb,
or her wrist, dangling in the air
as if to waiting for the daybreak rousing of its next
fever. A split second. “It’s done?” she asked,
surveying the fulsome scape
of the canvas.

“The picture of safety,”
the artist decided one morning, told me in piercing and impatient tones
at the core of the broad crest
of her living room/studio. Seeds of paint spray everywhere.

Just then, a bright blob of quaking crimson
made its way down the slant of her bottled filigree tray;
there, propped on an uneven end table,
poised precariously on the air
against nothing- defiant, as it were.

The iced cobalt of her eye
became vapor when she painted, and her face
a study of fissures
the very wrinkles, the slits that sought to undermine
Time’s whispered insecurity- those static, castrate conditions.

Imagine, so slight a woman
making a canvas yield to her like that.

I’d swayed there.
Watched the swelling preludes.
Now in front of her,
further, the picture evolved.

What, exactly, does security look like?
Is it her lock boxes
balanced atop iconography…
is it a blonde, closely shorn head,
the smell of leather,
default crosses or well-rehearsed prayers…
is it stifling familiarity?

A wily old gal, silver mop and
malformed spinal cord- she’s the shape of a question mark.
Lizzie liked to talk Tuesday afternoons:
God, how unsafe the world is,
how one had everything- and nothing-
to do with the other.