"American Saga" by David Pring-Mill

American Saga

David Pring-Mill

Atop golden, parceled earth,

the sun came in with a bright mist,

with the electric vibration of dawn,

with shadows reaching out like long fingers;

Starting at the remaining cultures

and extending over the nudity of a partial harvest.

It lit everything with equality,

Until the soft blush of a virgin sunset

made the hills seem modest.

There were workers sorting through bushels of lettuce.

There were cattle walking near the fence without

Any inclination of panic or doom, with in fact all

postures of idle satisfaction, of slow complacency,

Assigning indifference to all things, including their very existence,

The twisted span of this existence.

The man walked over

his homeland, remembering

the girls of his American youth.

He envisioned them all

with heavy impressions:

There was the blonde.

She wore a one-shoulder top with a ribbed knit,

Solar hair falling over her bare and small shoulder.

There was profoundness to her feelings, and

Although she would never admit it,

she needed all the feelings of her heart

to be reciprocated with exactitude.

She needed every shared thought to be

identical in his mind, as if

This uniformity was necessary

not only for their love

but to make her content

within herself.

There was the brunette.

Her tunic, draped loosely,

had a black slit and button closure,

offering a thin line of disclosed skin.

Her skin there was soft and in its palest shade,

There where her spine dipped as she stood

maintaining a straight posture,

conveying fundamental uncertainty

and an attempt to hide it.

There was the redhead.

Her excess of heart was apparent,

her dance was contagious,

and her, he really remembered —

The buoyancy, the lifting,

the subtle sadness that flaked from her

in little pieces of her actions,

The goofy laugh that revealed her completeness.

Her hair, orange like a jar of marmalade

on the windowsill in morning light.

Her spirit, determined

like California poppies with cup-shaped blooms

marking dry, tilted earth with the insistence

of vivid wonder.

Her composed smile, such a careful thing;

Her eyes bright, her lips pursed

only slightly in a compromised pose.

And those eyes, so big and green,

how they looked at him and also seemed open

to the world.

She played in those moments,

contained by her pink sweater with eyelash yarns;

The tree’s shadow keeping them apart

from light brushing over the valley.

And they would explore each other in sand

by an aqua-blue hourglass body.

They watched the sparrows fly

like bullets out of bramble,

startled by the moans

of two young lives at their peak of being.

They laughed at the frantic flight of birds,

while falling in the arms and breasts of one another.

He wished then

That there could be a flicker of her in all things,

And all the colors so richly poured onto every patch of earth.

Looking back, he thought:

“Isn’t youthful love so big and dramatic?

Isn’t it the most innocent lover who, ironically, declares,

“You are the world, and for you I’ll give the world;

Yourself, to you?’”

He would return from the Middle East

with salt and pepper hair, seasoned too soon.

He approached her house along a weed-choked path.

When they met again, they held hands

and he recalled her light and delicate size

and she studied leather skin, his scars.

And they did this for a while, intently,

like bees fussing over the minuteness of their task,

Until she told him:

“Come home, forever.

There is never a sacred act of violence.

Love is sacred. Art? Yes.

And anything associated with creation:

beautiful and continual creation!

God was not the answer to ‘how do things die?’

But to ‘why do we live, and for what?’”

A heavy sigh preceded his reply:

“What’s the flame?

The same flame that illuminates the idea

reveals the heart and its attractions.

It is a flame that some can barely contain

while others laboriously try

to re-ignite it, till they decide

They are creatures of the cold

As owls and raccoons are born nocturnal,

never regretting their lack of daylight,

As birds belong to sky

never thinking to complain

about tempers of the wind.

And so these people put a name

on the coolness they know well:

Contentment,

It is called.

What lights the unknown spark?

It’s unanswerable

but there is divinity in fire.

Because bodies can grow,

But souls? They burn.

And they burn wild.

This is why I fought and why I now explore,

That’s why I left the fields and left you here,

Alone.”

And she commented then that she

had not been alone.

She also said that she’d changed,

But it seemed to him that she had

more words than meaning,

more opinions than wisdom,

A searching and disruptive self,

which made sense to him:

To search is to overturn all things.

When he last saw her,

she splayed out on the sand

and whispered,

“Now it’s my goal

To make my breath like the waves

lapping against the coast,

To completely fall

within this world, because

to keep any distance from it

creates tension, and that

I can’t bear any longer.”

He said, “When we were young

that was all

I tried to do.

But I abandoned that goal,

Somewhere in aging.”

She insisted this was all that anyone

could ever fully achieve, but he

persisted in his attempts for power,

even when rebuffed,

even in bleak times.

He would explain it as follows:

“Hope is the suspension of an unwanted reality

And so the mind welcomes the better tomorrow

before the horizon allows it;

As if this globalized crescent might succumb

to the dictations of fiery imagination wires!

Yes, hope is the deliberate blitzing of ruin

with seeds that fall from airplanes and bloom in ash.

Hope is security locked inside the chaos.

Hope is the justification of the heart for recovery.

A reason to fight again, to hit walls and love a million times.

The hope in you, the unity in you, the fervent motivation,

It would not exist were it not mirrored elsewhere

in the outside world,

Even if only in a distant future…

Do you see now why I must fight?

Why I must wander? Why my life

is always conquest, not contentment?”

And there would come a time when he

could no longer see what he proclaimed then,

When he would do anything

To feel her gentle breath

against his neck.

Poet’s Notes:  There are critical junctures in our lives in which sacred values compete for prioritization. Perhaps the stakes are never higher than they are in love. There are profound and expansive ripple effects to the decisions we make in our relationships.

“American Saga” aims to offer up a quintessentially small town mythology. It is both a poem and a short story. It is about the love we pursue and the love we discard. The narrative pits chaos and hope against contentment. This poem prompts the reader to think deeply about the logic that underlies all choices and the impacts that can never be predicted or understood.