Mostly in the Afternoon

Women Against Gun Violence

At the end of this post, instead of a poem, is a list of people injured and killed on Gun Appreciation Day. It will make you appreciate the times you use your hands to caress a shoulder, change a diaper, cook a meal, pat a dog, open a door. If you want the heft of a weapon in your hand, try forgiveness. It’s much harder to acquire, and very hard to hold onto, but when you wield it, the results are quite spectacular.

I’ve put in my application, but I only get occasional visits. But even instants of that experience make me deeply appreciative that my violent tendencies stay in my swampy psyche, where they belong.

Oh, how I used to treasure my imagination! Now it’s a survival tool—my outlandish fantasies distract me from the more boring repetitive emotions, bleed off pain—but I don’t like being me, and if I could get out of it in an acceptable way, I would.

Maybe you can’t imagine you could shoot your own child, or that your child could shoot his brother, her friend, herself. Maybe you don’t know your potential for rage, for what happens the day your beloved says, “I’m in love with someone else—but I still need you.” I bent my favorite carbon steel knife stabbing a book instead of my heart. Every time I use that knife, I remember. No amount of guns falling from the sky would make me kill someone, but myself? Who knows? Stabbing oneself in the heart is very difficult. Pulling a trigger, not so much.

It’s late to be learning the things I’m learning, all of which I’d read about repeatedly by the time I was 25. I devoured all the great spiritual texts and understood them intellectually, felt their emotional pull. I remember quite distinctly thinking something akin to St. Augustine’s, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” I thought the age I am now was the proper age for “goodness,” assuming that by now I would have had success, passion, exciting experiences, and so on. And I have, though not as I imagined them.

It used to be, for crimes of passion, you got a pass (if you were male). That once made me furiously indignant, but now I kind of get it (and probably would get it more if I were male). Jealous rage and brokenheartedness are unbearable feelings, and just because most people feel them at one time or another and bear them doesn’t change that. They are unbearable; we get through. They return in dreams and are still unbearable. It’s almost enough to make you believe in the Old Testament God. Who else but that asshole Yahweh would create such a set-up?

I keep stopping the writing—the larger piece of which my gun dialogues are a part—thinking: I need more time to heal. But I want to get it done. I would like nothing better than to abolish the past, erase it and fill those years with pictures of waves at dusk, pine trees in sunlight, the scampering of green monkeys across a road…but the past is real; we saw the monkeys; I have to meet and match it with something big and inclusive of joy and sorrow and stupidity and terror; 11 years of believing that if I lost or left this person, the pain would kill me—

And only slightly over the line of believing that it won’t kill me, though never certain it won’t in some roundabout way—I’m strengthened, maybe; weakened, no question.

But to get back to the positive—there is still and always good news—I haven’t shot anyone, nor will I. My swampy psyche polices its dangerous characters, manhandles them into stories that will eventually dazzle.

And when Charles plays his guitar on the street, people stop and thank him.

(I’m sure you’d rather read a poem than what I’ve copied below. Maybe you should go buy a poetry book.)

Gun Appreciation Day, as it played out

• A 14-year-old suburban Atlanta boy shot and killed his 15-year-old brother while playing with their mother’s handgun.
• A 26 year old was shot and killed while driving in San Francisco.
• A man was found dead from a gunshot wound in his home in Kansas City, Kansas.
• A woman in an El Paso County, Texas shooting range was hit in the knee by a bullet that ricocheted off a trash can.
• Two women were shot to death in a Dallas-area home.
• Two women were injured after someone opened fire at a crowded soccer field in Las Vegas.
• A 15-year-old girl was shot while sleeping in her bed when her Anchorage home was shot at.
• A 7-year-old boy in Tallahassee shot a 5 year old with a gun he found in a 22-year-old relative’s room.
• A Huntsville woman shot her boyfriend after the two had an argument.
• A 23-year-old man died after being accidentally shot in a Greshman, Oregon home.
• A Cleveland father has been charged in connection with the death of his 6-year-old daughter from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
• One man was shot in Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland, early Saturday morning.
• A man was found shot dead in a parking lot in Greenville County, South Carolina.
• Two people were shot and killed outside an inn in Hampton, Virginia.
• At least 10 people were shot in Chicago, at least two were fatal.
• A Colorado Springs man was driven to the hospital with a gunshot wound.
• A Jackson, Mississippi police officer was shot while responding to a disturbance call.
• One man was shot at a Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Jackson.
• Two men and one woman were shot at a home in Oakland.
• An 11-year-old boy was shot in an Oklahoma City apartment complex.
• Police in Richmond, Virginia are looking for three men who shot another man in his thirties.
• Police believe gang violence is to blame for the shooting death of one man in Santa Ana, California.
• An early morning shooting in Tuscaloosa injured two teenagers.