Photos and Words - II

© 2023 Steve S. Saroff


It was somewhere on the path while I was traveling through fog that I began to look for you. All that I had then of value were my hopes. And my memories of lost hope. Those two kept me moving through the lands of mud and thieves, and past the mounds of broken trinkets and lies. Along the way I had to work in the way lonely people have always worked. Enough to keep going, but never enough to stay. Then, as the path confused itself into fading ends, I saw a clearing and a glow that had always been close and waiting for for me to slow down and notice that I was home. - Steve S. Saroff

Back in Missoula drifting snow had buried our history like those canvas Antarctic tents with the heroes frozen inside. In Dublin it was raining. I was carefully filling my last small notebook with my small words, as the rain kept washing the big meaning away. What was left on the pages were weather reports and the numbered lists of our failures, which as much as I tried and recounted, kept tallying back to the square root of minus one. In the pub where William Butler stared at his reflection behind the bottles, I decided then to become a meteorologist, but the barman, who was spying my writing, explained that my new profession would never change anything. Predicting the obvious while staying is never as good as simply walking away. - steve s. saroff

Listening to ‘A Case of You.’ I was a runaway hitchhiking across Canada. A ride heading West. Words and music coming over the AM radio, mixing with growing distance. "Hey,” the driver says to me, “She’s from my home town!” And suddenly I wasn't so alone. Seventeen. I slept next to a barb-wire fence that night, thunderheads 20 miles away on the prairie, but the air as silent as my nowhere middle of lost. Before dark, and before sleep, I had written down what I could remember of the lyrics from that song. Then I tried to write my first short story for someone who had died and whom I would never hear again. The best words have nothing to do with the crowd… "Love is touching souls Surely you touched mine Cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time..." - steve s. saroff

I think the sky knows more than us. The sky has the wisdom of patience, the quiet of healing, and the righteous rage of broken joy. If God is Time then the sky is God’s historian, and under the books of cloud our own pages become scattered like everything that the wind has ever touched. - Steve S. Saroff

Early mornings at restaurants, choosing an empty table with good light. There was no rush, the coffee was hot and the omelette you ordered was always better than the time before. It would have been so easy then, any of those mornings, to have looked at you and said, “There’s something I never told you.” You might have put down your fork and listened. Maybe just a few careful words, selected from my key chain of memories, which might have unlocked one of your rusted sorrows. I know we still tried, you and I, but there was always a waiter coming by at exactly the wrong moment, or the crowd pushing in, with urgent loudness letting us know that the day, with its trifles and waiting doors, was demanding us to get up and start going on our separating ways. - steve s. saroff

Where I used to live… An argument was always waiting. The sound of owls at night from the gentle backyard trees couldn’t make up for the noise of everything that was everyone else’s fault. Fiction was better than truth, so books became a destination. Next, after learning how to read maps — the ones with contour lines of hope that ran close together where the dreams were steep — I left. And where I lived then, those homeless years, was home. - Steve Saroff

Solitude is the cure for loneliness and love is the cure for solitude. But first there must be the wind and the rain and the rocks on the hills and the ruins. Then, maybe...

"I find moments without looking. Memories. Like books on a shelf, there is a scattered chronology, a disjointed stratum. Storms followed by windless gray. But then there are the peaks – a soft evening rain in a bright sunset sky with a rainbow arching over the darkening east. Then the rainbow doubles, the new colors reverse, and the center of the partial circle becomes connected with a perfect and invisible line from the sun behind my head. Do the thickness of the spines on the cluttered shelf matter? Do the physics of light explain the beauty of color? " - from Paper Targets

It was a long time ago, but I used to be homeless. And I drifted. Between labor, between towns, on my long path of lonely. What hurts sticks, and can crush or make you. I don’t think I was crushed, though I still remember everything. And I remember thinking it would be wonderful to live someplace with lots of books, and where I wouldn’t be alone. Sleeping next to wire fences by highway sides, waking in the rain, hungry, walking in the rain, hungry. Working in the fields of blowing poisonous dust; working on construction sites that steamed with asphalt and pounded with machines; working next to other drifters, who threatened and yelled, I would escape to wakeful dreams of a home. Like this, where I am now, where she is, with her books and our shared, peaceful time. - steve s. saroff

Why do criminals say that they were justified in doing what they did? The liars point and blame, the thieves hoard and say they were robbed. I walk in the hills and try to understand this. Give me honest rocks, rocks which are the history of time. Give me sudden weather that freezes and blows. Then, when I am home again, in the kitchen with the evening light and with the love that is not difficult, then I can slowly think of how to forgive and how to say goodbye to everything that will never be right. The first step of moving on is remembering to forget. - Steve Saroff

Another December and you still have not apologized. As these years happen, as we forget, as we live, and go into the fog of forever and further apart. I still check the mail box, wondering when the letter will come, that one you should have written a long time ago, even though those forever stamps you insisted on buying have probably expired. - Steve s. Saroff

My Missoula wreckage waits for me to walk by, leaning there against a sign post, one hand holding an empty to-go cup or a lost shoe, the other hand trembling with an undecided gesture, and aging at the speed of rust. With good lighting bad memories still glow, like the neon signs in those bars: drink enough and they become art, keep going back and the 60 hertz buzz becomes a heartbeat that gets confused with love. But on the streets no one is walking, and through the tinted windows of streamlined rides, the auras no longer matter. - steve s. saroff

I called, but you didn’t answer. I was on the road without direction or a sign. The map had blown away. Your phone just rang and rang. I was in one of those phone booths that are gone now. A drunk banged on the door. I told him I would be done soon. He banged harder. So I hung up and gave him my handful of change and your number written on the scarp of my heart that you had left me with. I wonder if you answered his call, the way you once answered mine.

Writing Sampler

Dear Reader, I truly hope some of the moods in my writing reach you. But, if you prefer to listen rather than read, many of these stories and writings are available on Spotify, iTunes, etc., as well as directly on the Montana Voice Podcast

And to readers who want more: the best way to encourage the publication of my next book is for my current books to receive more reviews. If you have read Paper Targets please consider leaving a review of it on Amazon. - Thank you!!!

Most of the stories and essays beneath have been puplished elsewhere, but sometimes I post new work and move out old work.

Fiction: Non-fiction: Photos with words: Available Books:

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