FOLIO REVISITED

A Thought for Today

Every day a new door opens. The old ones never close unless you want them to.

Continuing our look back at Rod's Folio Collection, today we feature the complete works contained in Folio # 7.

Comprised entirely of prose this Folio contains the ever popular "Goodbye". Regular readers of this column will already know that I need no prompting to post this particular work so today's choice won't come as a complete surprise.

I'll see you again tomorrow with the next installment of our regular Wednesday feature, "This One Does It For Me!".

                                - Ken, Johannesburg, November 14

The Planting of My Life

The planting of my new life now begins. And you will be the farmer tending me till harvest. I am not starting over and this is not one more beginning, part of a cycle of starts and stops that fill and until now have filled my life since birth.

My birth date, however many years ago, was never properly recorded. And so I've yet to have a birthday having come into the light only on the night I fell down in your arms this year. Rising up and falling back again. And so it is the morning of my life.

Would it surprise you to discover that I've been waiting here in this dark room hoping you might stumble in and gather me into your hands, pick me up and hold me as you would some flowering new mushroom.

Here I am, naked like a child man open to you always. Ready to be told if I am needed by you. By life. By anyone. I thought I was and always wished to be a simple man. I took great pride in being so. But I can be plain enough for you so that you need not lift layers or prop a ladder up against some wall I've built or that I'm building, that hides a mystery I never should have made.

Your time should not be occupied in sorting out compartments in my head stored up with silly, not so secret secrets. I do not mean that there should be no mysteries between us. Love is nurtured by the unknown and dies with discovery. But I want simplicity to be our password and our code for caring. Too much time is lost sorting out the real from what we pass off as reality.

To begin with, let nothing pass between us that has no element of truth. Yet if a little lie will help, let nothing be uprooted before it has a chance to grow. Confessions can come late in love and loving with no hint of hurt or harm.

This is the morning of my life with you and with myself. You drive me, you have been and will be the axis I spin on, the wheel I turn on, the tender of the wheel I turn upon. You. You. That is a better word than love for how I feel. You. It sits on my tongue. Sticks to the roof of my mouth. You. It won't swallow when I swallow you. You bloom on me, hang on me, live within me, beat at me from the inside like a second heart. No, a first. And while it is the morning of my life because you've made it, I have commended, commanded, willed my life to you.

I know not where we go from here. East to Pennsylvania - the other way to California, or even if we go as we together. I cannot imagine what it would it would be like to not be with you, to go apart. Hope takes over when such thoughts pass through my mind. I am saved by want. Held and helped by need. Such a need did not exist before you bounced and bounded into sight. Surely then you'll stay. There is no place for you to travel, but in and through the space I occupy as life. The new day doesn't come unless you carry it here within your arms or on your shoulder. Good Morning.

A Week To Go

Daisies and some half striped tulips have gone on living in the hotel bedroom for nearly half a week. I'll have new roses for you and lilacs trucked in from the country by the barrel load. Bring me cider, if you can, Chatsford honey, some magazines and books and the Pennsylvania chemistry your friend cooks up. I doubt we'll need it, but whatever's fair.

I cannot wait to cup your buttocks in my hands and move down through your legs to England's heaven. To try again what has been tried and done - to walk with you through sunlit London even in the absence of the sun. To lie a hundred different ways and drive with you ahead through all the Summer days.

I had intended to describe your mouth to you while I was looking at it, but another week of waiting is too long a time. Your mouth is velvet on the inside like the underside of violets, or the outside of your eyes. Wet it tastes like nothing half so much as your own mouth. Dry it hungers to be wet.

Your breath sometimes at night is like a mist, a thin gray fog that warms my neck when you move near. You seldom wake me though I drown in perspiration, yours and mine. Unknowingly your mouth takes me off to foreign places when my own rides against it. We are passengers on trains and sailing ships with no destination, in no hurry. Time and again one rides against the other, a tug of war of tongues so gentle that we might not be touching tongues at all.

Taking Leave For London

Goodbye's a word that should be used only to near friends or distant relatives, those who speed away at bus stops or at taxi curbs. Friends the army carries off and children heading out to seek their fortune in towns more fortuitous than those they leave. Goodbye's a word I will not say to you. Not on the deathbed or in the driveway. Not at the start of some day trip that separates us sunup till sundown or a year's sabbatical, if such could ever be.

Remember how reluctantly we said goodbye on telephones when talking half a continent apart ? Multiply that same reluctance tenfold, tenfold more.

Two weeks till you join me. That time away will not be easy, though three decades plus were piled up in finding you.

                                      - from Folio # 7, Fall 1975

GOODBYE

                                     - from Folio # 7, Fall 1975