Author Archives: Dr. Richard Country

A Strange Rain

Posted on November 17, 2012 | 2 Comments

My Saturdays are best spent falling in love with women in bookstores.
Sure, I wake up and I read and wonder at the amount I have slept from the night before; I work a little and I run; I come home waiting for that burst of energy. I worry that I’m dying. And then I suit up and head to the bookstore.
Once there, I wander the stacks, drink in the spines and the legs, and saunter up–books I will not purchase under my arm–and I smile. There she is: glasses frame and solid colored shirt, hair a hurricane in stasis, a slight smirk on her face. I try to make small talk, but generally I stutter and just mumble my need for coffee and no, thank you, I do not need room for cream. And then I sit down, opening the books, sipping at the rim of the cup.
Today, reading Bolano. I read a sentence and immediately made a small noise and pulled up my phone; I had to text this to someone. “It’s probably clear by now that literature has nothing to do with national prizes and everything to do with a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.” What a wonderful sentence. The use of the oxford comma is certainly energizing, but it’s the word semen that makes that sentence–and so many others. Of course, it brings up images, but also the majestic Neutral Milk Hotel lyric, “Semen stains the mountaintop.”
I peak over the book; she is brewing another pot of coffee and her face seems so perfectly framed by her glasses; I watch as she goes to pull two books off of the shelves and look at her ass. Large, but not huge; cupped in grey jeans, jeans made as if from the lost and ashen pages from another bible I will not believe.
I get up and receive a refill, leaving a tip in the jar as if this will show that not only am I well read, but also wealthy and caring!
Finally, I just sigh and make a book purchase. For what is more exciting than a new book, another addition to the shelf, words upon words that I will read and ingest and become before coming back to it in small moments later and later.
I smile at her one more time and walk into the waiting late autumn sunlight, wondering how the rest of my Saturday can possibly compare.

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imagination

Posted on November 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

I like to imagine–and I have imagined in both sunlight
and alone in darkness–you alone with your thoughts of
me; how the wind may be outside your window, how
the sweat is caught in your hair: I imagine you have turned
off the light and your eyes have closed and you remember
both my smile as well as the warmth of the flush of your
face as you smile at my approaching and you may even
question that flush as something real; it is.

I wonder at the spiderwebs of your fingers, the way they
travel up your leg–I have seen the outside of your leg but
not the inside and I wonder if the smoothness
continues to its inside: a shape of milk and marble–or how
your hands get caught in the tangle of your hair, or your
shoulder like glass pulling against the sheets, or the small dip of your
hip filling with all of the promises in the room only to
release them in your last, majestic cry.

Standing with you as we part ways, almost swaying
towards each other and away at once, standing and
waiting for what should be an embrace but never will
be, your smile breaking acute across your face, how it
turns up and almost bowls you over and holds tight onto
your cheeks and the sound of laughter delicate and caught
in your own uncertainty of your body’s reaction to me.

Kiss me in your mind and find me in your skin
with your fingers, and with your mind interrupt the trepidations
gathering in your mind as nothing more than an energetic
reminder of everything you already have.

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