Whiskey makes you fun

she once said,

on the beach or in a bar.

We were drinking it.

Is it true?

Whiskey slides open safes

or blows apart dams.

Depends on the brand,

weather,

the magic of the mixing

of the drinkers.

We had magic.

Whiskey makes talk too,

forgotten talk in the mornings or months after.

In the past I believed,

the talk,

trusted it,

let the words uncork my intuitions.

I ran with them.

I believed her.

Whiskey won that race,

won it by miles.

Defeat sucked all the air from my heart,

but later,

weeks, months or years perhaps,

whiskey will have made you wise,

wise enough to drink differently with someone else again.

Mila’s fingers untied the knot of a braided purple cord.

She poured the contents of a black velvet pouch.

Tiny yellow pebbles tumbled across the kitchen table in her Istanbul apartment.

Light February snow fell beyond the window.

It barely defeated the soot from the city’s millions of coal-fired furnaces.

“I’m going to sell my gold so I can travel with you,” said Mila, my Turkish girlfriend.

“I’ve been saving these for a long time.”

I was leaving in two weeks after I quit my teaching job,

tour the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines for two weeks,

catch a ferry to Israel,

somehow make it back to Oregon,

start over yet again.

We never discussed her joining me

although I did unfold a map and described my proposed journey

after she read my future in the grounds of Turkish coffee,

a ritual still unsurpassed in my life as an exotic moment.

I’d never seen gold nuggets before.

They were rougher, more malformed than I ever imagined.

Dark folds, stained ridges.

They shined a dull sparkle.

I looked at her and touched the nuggets.

Palmed them.

I told her it would be freezing cold.

She stood up, came over.

I was still holding the gold.

“I want to go with you and show you Turkey” she said. “The real Turkey.”

Three days later, I helped her select a backpack.

Four weeks later, a frigid morning on the dock,

palm trees stood at frosty attention.

My ferry idled, ready to depart,

diesel smoke clouded everything,

like fog at Casablanca’s airport.

We said goodbye, kissed for a long time

while Muslim men and women glared.

I told her I loved her in Turkish.

She said she loved me in English.

If I had proposed, I would have seen the question float in the cold air

and her answer float back to me.

I think I might have swallowed it.

I went to the beach this morning,

like every other Oregon morning,

watched gulls drink from a stream,

the crippled dog lag behind,

the old dog lag farther behind.

The waves rolled in, bringing their bright clear spaces.

I left the beach and went to the club,

watched a woman from a Gram Parsons song,

slide to the mic, rise on tiptoes,

begin to sing.

Her low-slung brown cords slid even lower.

I heard her sing Neil Young

and this was not the day the music died

but lived.

I left the club and went to the beach,

wanting waves to annihilate my former not so helpless self,

wash away the acid and the damage done,

To have the ocean—and her—become the drug that makes you dream,

as Neil Young once sang.

I picked up the pace, picked up a stick.

The crippled dog caught up,

the old dog too.

I felt like writing her name in the fresh unmarked sand

with the stick, so I did,

on a morning finer than most.

Annette whispered

on her birthday,

on a sprung Murphy bed

in her apartment,

that my letters

(disguised as chronicles)

seduced her heart.

No one had ever written her letters.

Stamps from Mexico, France, Turkey,

crinkled, airmail envelopes the color of blue sky

helped out, too.

That night I gave her

a gift of a pewter hip flask inscribed:

For Your 19^th Nervous Breakdowns

It was the first and only time

thousands of love letters actually worked as intended.

(I still haven’t stopped writing them.)

Then love letters to Annette didn’t work,

and love emails never work.

Her mother asked me to assist with an intervention for untreated mental illness.

I did; the intervention didn’t take.

We disappeared on one another,

but I had more ability to stay visible.

I didn’t.

She’s homeless now,

schizophrenic,

shaved head,

toothless,

living on the streets of Las Vegas.

I have no way to mail her

a love letter

she surely deserves,

might even comprehend,

that I desperately want to write,

but would make no difference

in a lost life,

of unfulfilled promise,

ripped away by the cruel vagaries of evolution

that didn’t inflict the right people.

She drove to the wildlife refuge for a final assignation

before marrying a limp civil servant.

Marriage next weekend.

A lifetime of herbicides, somnolent sex,

subjugation of her inner satyr,

godless Easter Sunday casseroles in suburbia.

Fire in the burn barrel raged on the patio.

I threw rosemary in at midnight for witchcraft.

We drained a fifth of Rebel Yell while hazed in rosemary smoke.

She wore panties, bra and a sheepskin coat some kid left behind in my classroom.

I played our song, “Essence” by Lucinda Williams on guitar.

She jumped onto my lap, nearly crushing the guitar.

I kept on playing, she sang along to our favorite verse:

Baby, sweet baby, I wanna feel your breath
Even though you like to flirt with death
Baby, sweet baby, can’t get enough
Please come find me and help me get fucked up

She found a flashlight and began a strobe light striptease.

Bats appeared, dipped, dived around her.

She’d never seen bats before and was delighted.

I told her not to marry him.

I told her I could break them up.

She didn’t say not to try.

She said, “I’ve got to marry him so I can divorce him.”

She never did.

I never tried.