Leaves

by d. heidel

“Do you remember the math to calculate the projectile?”

Words made no sense.  Make sense, make sense.  “Take a breath, man.  You’re ok,” I tell him.

“Do you remember the math?  To calculate its flight?  There’s a squared number in there.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I say.  Of course I remember.  We are humans.  We are sentient beings.  We are logos in the flesh.  We are Plato’s ideals in a form that feels pain.

The projectile had come down on us.  Both of us were knocked off our feet.  But he’d also taken a ruler-sized chunk of steel to the torso.  And now, everything below his belly button was gone.

Belly button.  What a strange word.  A word made for children.  Belly.  And button.  It’s the little button that holds your belly together, Johnnyboy!  And now it’s come undone.  Not a sight for children: pinks and browns and red (plenty of red) as if a thick-yarned meat sweater had unraveled.

(You formed my inmost being, you knit me in my mother’s womb.  My bones were not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, fashioned in the depths of the earth…  Those words came to me, fluttered up into the back of my brain.  For in the beginning was the word and, at the end also will be the word.)

Wonderfully was he made.  Blonde hair, dusty.  Southern California boy.  Smiling and easy.  Thinking of him now, I only love him.  There is no doubt, no “if-only-he’d-done-this-or-said-that.”  Only love.

And there and then, he was un-made.

“The math of projectiles,” he was saying.  He.  He.  He without a name.  For he was on his way back to the depths of the earth.  And soil has no name.  Has only parts that crunch like sand, taste like salt, smell like sulfur or decayed skunkweed.  He was nearly earth again.  Very nearly.  And yet, “The math of projectiles,” he was saying.

“Yes, yes,” I said.

“It has a squared number.  Do you know why?”

I shook my head.  I knew, but I wanted him to tell me.

“So that you can drop that square down, multiply by two, and find the velocity.”

“And acceleration?” I asked.  I asked it to keep him going.  To move forward with his creation.  But what is creation?  Creation.  All of it.  Or just his.

To build up, to construct anew.  To make flesh from clay.  To remember that it is to dust that we return.

No, don’t tell me.  Let us not move from this moment when I am holding your head in my lap.  You are a young man, older than you once were and younger than you’ll be (Paul Simon says that’s not unusual).  But no, at some point, you will not be younger than you’ll be.  At some point, you’ll be as old as you will ever be.  And at that moment, you will be on the cusp of unbeing.  You will, at that precise moment, be at your last.  And, if there is no next moment, are you still extant?  Existance is creative.  If there is no next moment, there is no more creation in that one precise moment.  So, then, if you cease at that one precise moment, then what about the moment before that?  Surely there could be no creation in that preceding moment?  And, if no creation in that moment, then what of the one before that; and the one before that, and that, and that…?

He had to think.  He was thinking about acceleration.  About the third term in the equation.  About its units: meters per square second.  About what that means: the change in meters per second with every passing second.  And then he was thinking about meters.  About how we: American boys, living and dying for Old Glory, were using a term rooted in the Europe which we fought to liberate only half a century ago.  We’d walked 15 klicks today alone.  That’s somewhere around nine or ten miles.  I don’t know.

We were versed in kilometers for marches and meters for range distances. 

Do you understand?  Can it all be applied? 

He’s dying.

I’m dying.

Into my creator, I commend your spirit.

And, many years hence, I remember all of this.

He smiled. 

There’s a Whitman poem about the poet himself as he tends to wounds.  And then, in the dark of a cathedral-turned-hospital, he finds a boy shot in the gut.  And they smile.  One at the other.  There is quiet there, in the moments before death.  Water is offered.  But the thirst is deeper than what this earthly water can quench.  And then, and then, the eyes are wide.  And empty.

No, there is no poem like that.  I cannot find it amidst the rubble of these bookshelves as I search for words that will help me understand my love for you.

Here, there is no creation. Here, there is only memory.