Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

So the nurse asked, can't we get the sunlight out of our eyes?  I need to be somewhere else. Like where I asked? I don't know she said. A big shade tree maybe. An awning over a picnic table in the backyard. So it's like a parallel world I asked? Not so much she said. I like the sunset but it's too hot to sit against. Yea I said but you work inside. Afterward don't you want to get outside and have a blast? Sure she said all that's great but I'm sweating and being hit by radiation. Can't we retreat? And I thought that's always been difficult to do. What I need is to have a sense that I've done something and then leave it at that. But to go backwards throws me. Where's that? It's not even memory lane - which is different -  because memory was a shape onto itself and comes to surface when you think about it. Once in remembrance there can be rightfully no turning back. Okay I said let's retreat. It's not like we're doing bikinis anyway. The nurse looked back at me. Whoa. Sometimes I feel default looking at a landscape. As though the whole account of life circled around - in pattern - in question - and in turn you felt stupid about it. But that's just the way it goes. It probably isn't that way really. Like where the footpath path cuts through the trees and comes to the water there was a small white shoe, a kid's shoe, and it was stuck on a piece of driftwood that was wedged between the rocks. Like it was there as something waiting to be found after it was lost. Waiting - but not really. It's we who invent the waiting. Not the shoe. But it really looked like it was waiting, to be found, or even lost all over again. Small white shoe on driftwood.. beauty as a kind of problem... far from perfect and far from harm. And in the nurse's eyes was the landscape reflected back at me. The fading sky with the long warming glare of the sunlight as a star gone in colors. The water with that light upon it almost like burning an oil on the waves. And the the trees in the park making those longed for awnings on a summer evening. What would a cardiologist say if this were a flipped over comic book universe? That I was having another heart attack, only now it was in reverse?  And what happens in this other universe was you get to evade the past and escape the future and stop the crazy wave action of time. You stand with the plants of the world and listen to the blood flow. But that seemed like asking for a cosmic credit. A good run but slippery. So we had a meal in retreat beneath a quiet old tree pruned many times over the years by faithful minimum wage parks and recreation department hands and whose branches were lopsided and not quite right to behold but were beautiful to watch and take in underneath. Fried chicken and cornbread from an old family recipe the nurse had in mind but was non-electronic to the extreme. If you wanted a copy to print out there was none to have. You had to drive north toward Canada and retrieve it from whomever was talking it then and giving it away like archival words passed around some long fire. The nurse said if you want this you need to go along. And so I did. The family looked at me like I was a creature somewhere detained between dreams. Alas I said and limped into the gathering. I met your cousin sometime after I died. Between hypodermic needles and ginger ale and the stormy effects of once being crushed. She's a tough ass. But she's also a blessing and as lovely as a small round stone that sits in the palm of your hand without clutching it. An aunt hit me with a fly swatter told me not to curse. I gave a younger brother a red painting. We had coffee and biscuits and drove off to dogs barking and chasing themselves and little kids imitating my monster walk across the gravel driveway. Back at the picnic we had local grown fennel and red onion slaw from the dreadlocks and banjo kids turning over dirt by the river into food and trying to make a decent business in the process. It was like farmer's market in the morning and then magic tricks in the evening. What it takes to have a meal. Maybe somewhere in a place we haven't yet discovered myth turns into a common object. Somewhere among the rest of us and our polarized selves we all just show up. And the pills were like tiny silhouettes to hide behind. Like having a rose tattoo on your shoulder that you only looked at in the mirror when you were twisted around. And yea I know, the brain chemistry should be there, like some two thousand year old asian vase that works in someone's home and doesn't line up on a museum wall. But I don't have that. I'm from a material culture. And so live within the great yelp of trade offs. What else to do but savor? Lovely August. Someone to have walk beside my own personal limp. Someone to unbuckle my braces. Oh to slump down on the grass and fall over the way a bad wind up toy might collapse when the spring goes loose.  The trouble always lies in what happens next. That's what gets to me I said to the nurse. What she asked? Well what are the days like? Here she said and handed me her cell phone. Call someone.