Flash
Mike Dillon

Photo Credit: Vlad Podvorny/Flickr (CC-by)

I saw the rare bird of self-possession once. I saw it from where I stood in a banquet room bristling with billboard nametags and dentured smiles. Never mind my reason for being in that room: my reason was thin. What matters is I looked over the shoulder of the one talking at me to see her standing alone in a corner.

I watched her quietly watching that atonal crowd with the amused Mona Lisa smile of someone remembering a beloved childhood landscape. I suppose, at first, I took stock of her in the way careless people, at police headquarters, would describe someone gone missing: Tall. Early thirties. Green eyes, probably. Soft, green eyes. Dark hair, pony-tailed. Kind of pretty.

But then my real self would kick in, for her and for me: a book reader, I’d say. Or, a nineteenth-century romantic heroine. At which point I would be dismissed, no doubt, and told to take my irrelevancy elsewhere, but not before I declared she was the calm salient in a white-capped sea of inanity where everyone smiled in order not to drown. By this time a strong hand would have clamped my elbow directing me out the door but not before I would shout: one last thing!

Here’s how to pick her out in any crowd. I only need one minute to tell a little story about myself in the suburbs a year or so ago. Never mind my reason for being there: it was thin. What matters is I slipped into a scrap of woods where surveyor’s pink ribbons fluttered from the branches. I followed an overgrown path until it ended. I saw a place of sunlit moss beyond the brambles. I pushed my way in. I kneeled to three white trillium and muddy deer tracks. I felt a cool updraft from the earth and saw a black hole nearly covered by vines and rotted wood—an abandoned well exhaling earth’s cool breath.

As a robin caroled its sweet liquid carol overhead I found a white pebble and dropped it into the dark. And heard a splash sweet as the spot where ball meets bat for a stand-up triple—except I imagined a lovely trout down there as trout once thrived in the holy wells of Ireland.

That’s what I would tell the police, if she were missing, if they wanted to find her in a crowd. So much depends that they get my meaning: Think of the condemned woods, I’d say, and the well, the trout, and you will know her. All else is mere description.

I, for one, won’t forget her. She who never looked over to me or knows that I exist. Which is also to her credit.

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. He is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. Several of his haiku were included in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from W.W. Norton (2013). Departures, a book of poetry and prose about the forced removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor will be published by Unsolicited Press in April 2019. Email: miked7003[at]gmail.com