monaboyd_month | Before the beginning, after the end

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Rating: Nothing explicit.

Before the beginning, after the end
One of the best memories is of being covered in the sand of Baja California, drunk on Mexican beer and salty from surfing on one of Billy’s rare days off.

What a life that had been, he’d said years later: at sail in O’Brien’s oceans, chasing Bonaparte’s men and fighting with Jack Aubrey for England, for Home. He’d never felt so much a part of Britain, of British history, as he had in that sailor’s uniform, by turns freezing at the bottom of the seas or roasting in the Doldrums.

Dom agrees: that’d been one of his favorite times in his life with Billy: before Bills settled down with Ali, before Dom was seduced by Hawai'i.

Before they stopped being Billy'n'Dom, and after they became each other's worlds.

Dom learned from Billy what it means, to work your whole life toward something even though it seems unattainable. He learned how to pace himself, how to not give in to despair grown from disappointed vanity, how to discriminate the merely agreeable circumstance from the truly supportive one. He grew into his charities, became the kind of man one would believe deeply understood the importance of trees, not because it makes sense to grow trees, but because each breath of air fueled his life with its oxygen, and each breath he exhaled contained, burnt by his body into its carbon dioxide, his mad enjoyment of being alive in a life with Billy in it.

Billy learned from Dom to accept that good things do happen to good people. That loving someone with all his heart wasn't dangerous but essential: yes, they would leave him eventually, through the movement of life, or the coming of death. But he can't lose them if he's loved them with all his heart. They're engraved there like the grooves in his bones that his ligaments slide through: all the movement of his memories is there in those grooves, all the breaths in and out filled with the scent of his beloveds there, just like the memory of their skin, how they filled his arms. Billy learned to risk all and mean it, so that when baby Jack comes Billy's got everything in his heart there ready for him.

That summer, that summer of filming and surfing and being burnt brown (Dom) or pink (Billy) on the sand and the waves- that summer confirmed everything they knew about each other, had known from the start.

They'd always be in love with each other. They'd probably never, unless in their ancient dotage, be able to be completely out about it. Billy would always want children. So would Dom. They'd be there, absolutely, uncles for each other's kids. Billy would always sing to Dom even if Dom were nowhere around, and Dom would always have Billy in the viewfinder, even if he wasn't in the lens.

And every so often there'd be a poem, or a day, or a bird that'd remind each one of the other, and the world would be good and grand and beautiful as a day on a beach in Mexico.

~~~~~~

The Origin
by Jane Mead

of what happened is not in language—
of this much I am certain.
Six degrees south, six east—

and you have it: the bird
with the blue feathers, the brown bird—
same white breasts, same scaly

ankles. The waves between us—
house light and transform motion
into the harboring of sounds in language.—

Where there is newsprint
the fact of desire is turned from again—
and again. Just the sense

that what remains might well be held up—
later, as an ending.
Twice I have walked through this life—

once for nothing, once
for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool—
glassy-winged sharp-shooter

on the failing vines. Count me—
among the animals, their small
committed calls.—

Count me among
the living. My greatest desire—
to exist in a physical world.

Poem from The Usable Field to be published May 2008.

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Before the beginning, after the end

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