in a gravel lot at a
jukebox joint the
oysters are crisp. and we
sip their flow
white wine and white wine and we
tip our cups
and crab leg snow. the
butter runs down our fingers. onto our tongues.
my bared foot is on your thigh and
your thumb strokes my sole. and
the hollow of your neck holds the perfume
of rosewood and vintage leather. clean laundry.
quarters are stocked and piled and
is this the song
on metal chairs pulled closer we vibrate. cecelia and
making love... and you purr. and i purr.
there is that purring.
later we will exit this
and slip back into our nights.
******
so, sometimes, if i'm really seeing, i taste and smell and feel and hear that the moments are nothing less than a song. and sometimes, i know that what that song is, is all of it. everything important is right there.
October 9, 2011
yes
you brought me to your hothouse
with walls of glass without a lid
and i grew up again
to opened.
aloud and savored bliss
you sun
shone citrus on me
yes pamplemousse yes
jaune citron. i yes.
shine on. i'm climbing this stem thorn by thorn.
with walls of glass without a lid
and i grew up again
to opened.
aloud and savored bliss
you sun
shone citrus on me
yes pamplemousse yes
jaune citron. i yes.
shine on. i'm climbing this stem thorn by thorn.
October 8, 2011
these are the daisies and defeat wrestling on my front lawn weedpatch
my angel baby,
when you were born it was with those long papery impossible to cut sharp dangerous infection carrying cornea scratching fingernails. i was supposed to use scissors or my teeth to trim them, according to baby books, but my teeth didn't work and i was afraid i would just tear into the quick and since i've never chewed my nails i really didn't get how that whole thing worked and i didn't know how to use scissors to trim nails either. despite the books i used the same nail trimmers that i use on my hands, because the little tiny ones in the drug store are so small that i couldn't control them well, and didn't want to slip, and hurt you. so in the end, the first time i cut your nails i also cut your finger and you screamed bloody murder and we both cried. i immediately began to breast feed you, and you settled in with hics and smuffled sobs, but i couldn't forgive myself, so i sat in the rocker he gave us, and called grandpa. i was 32 years old and called my dad and sobbed to him the story of my first official maternal bad deed. i wailed that i had betrayed your trust.
i was so young, angel baby.
grandpa did not laugh. to his credit. he just said it would not be the last time i would try my best and betray your trust. this caused me to stop crying, because it made me think. you are 11 now, and i'm still thinking about what grandpa said. is this my last contrary act toward grandpa, the process of proving him wrong, or is this thinking just my ongoing response to his statement, a way to live other than how he told me it just will be?
i say and try to show, all the time: i do not to lie to you. and i will always be with you, behind you, and for you. those are my promises-- and that i will always love you. those are all i have, all i will offer in the way of promises, and you can trust me with all of you.
-----
in a different city at least a half an hour away, and at the time of the earthquake, you were home alone with the others while your dad and i were at a therapist's having a non-healing and not-even-palliative session. i sat on that plaid couch and could feel my ribs being sawed separate, and everything soft inside me being bruised. ransacked. i heard the rumble first, and thought it was a semi truck driving by, but then i felt the vibration along with the roar, coming from below me. it felt like the earth was vomiting and i knew immediately that it was the natural outcome of my state--my vibe caused the earth to quiver. when the bookshelves started essing i saw it was not my rage. not unrelievedly, we realized it was an earthquake.
i had let my cell phone battery run out, and the land lines where i was didn't work now. i was glad you wouldn't know that i had let my battery run out--if the land lines were out at home there was no way for me to reach you even with a charged cell. i was already feeling the guilty mother thing, and didn't want you to see my shame. but, regardless of reason or fault, i couldn't reach you. i just hoped that the quaking hadn't reached home. i just hoped you were all still playing wii dance, and continued with the hopeless task at hand. sitting far apart, and unable to reach one another, in our family of 5, our natural disasters that day were all distinct. each of us had our own reality shift, and in some ways the only thing in common was the time and day. in other ways, the altering was universal.
at home you felt the shaking and all our paintings slid. books fell and glasses skittered. you were frightened. you were calm. you took the younger children and the puppy outside and to a neighbor's. they had you all in and gave you snacks that you are not allowed to eat, and hung out with you until i arrived home. telling me about it the next day, you told me how their attic was crammed full with christmas decorations, and i interrupted--you were in their attic?!! and you looked at me with eyes bored, annoyed, and filled with my idiocy, and said: of course! we don't have an attic so i had to go into theirs. i had to discover it, and when i asked they said i could. there was this string hanging down, and i just...
you are so young, my angel baby.
that was ago, and today i'm thinking of tomorrows, and how i am going to talk with you all about what is coming. i'll be the one telling you. i have conversations in my head and i try to anticipate how you will each be, since i've known you so long. you, angel baby, will be stoic, and logical. and afraid. but you never back down in the face of afraid, and so i will have to be vigilant in my attention to your need, as it slivers forth. cookie face will be sad that what he knows is changing, and my moon faced girl will cry, and will further develop her aversion to and mistrust of marriage. i try to key out exactly how i can give you each, during those moments, a feeling of still being secure, and what i can say to let you know--you must know--that you are secure still, i will always be here for you, behind you, and with you.
but i think of the earthquake day. i think of all that you and i discovered. about attics and promises and security and strength and
angel baby: i have tried so hard to prove him wrong on this one.
*****
october 8 is my dad's birthday, but he is long gone and so celebrating with him doesn't happen so much as celebrating him in my mind does. our relationship was quite tempestuous, with dramatic ups and downs, a lot of downs, and they seem to be on my mind a lot. anyway, but also especially since i have become a parent--a flawed, trying, failing and succeeding not super- not shitty- but rather medium mom. i seem to react to him differently now, and yet, i still seem to react to him in the same way, as well. now a mother, always a daughter.
when you were born it was with those long papery impossible to cut sharp dangerous infection carrying cornea scratching fingernails. i was supposed to use scissors or my teeth to trim them, according to baby books, but my teeth didn't work and i was afraid i would just tear into the quick and since i've never chewed my nails i really didn't get how that whole thing worked and i didn't know how to use scissors to trim nails either. despite the books i used the same nail trimmers that i use on my hands, because the little tiny ones in the drug store are so small that i couldn't control them well, and didn't want to slip, and hurt you. so in the end, the first time i cut your nails i also cut your finger and you screamed bloody murder and we both cried. i immediately began to breast feed you, and you settled in with hics and smuffled sobs, but i couldn't forgive myself, so i sat in the rocker he gave us, and called grandpa. i was 32 years old and called my dad and sobbed to him the story of my first official maternal bad deed. i wailed that i had betrayed your trust.
i was so young, angel baby.
grandpa did not laugh. to his credit. he just said it would not be the last time i would try my best and betray your trust. this caused me to stop crying, because it made me think. you are 11 now, and i'm still thinking about what grandpa said. is this my last contrary act toward grandpa, the process of proving him wrong, or is this thinking just my ongoing response to his statement, a way to live other than how he told me it just will be?
i say and try to show, all the time: i do not to lie to you. and i will always be with you, behind you, and for you. those are my promises-- and that i will always love you. those are all i have, all i will offer in the way of promises, and you can trust me with all of you.
-----
in a different city at least a half an hour away, and at the time of the earthquake, you were home alone with the others while your dad and i were at a therapist's having a non-healing and not-even-palliative session. i sat on that plaid couch and could feel my ribs being sawed separate, and everything soft inside me being bruised. ransacked. i heard the rumble first, and thought it was a semi truck driving by, but then i felt the vibration along with the roar, coming from below me. it felt like the earth was vomiting and i knew immediately that it was the natural outcome of my state--my vibe caused the earth to quiver. when the bookshelves started essing i saw it was not my rage. not unrelievedly, we realized it was an earthquake.
i had let my cell phone battery run out, and the land lines where i was didn't work now. i was glad you wouldn't know that i had let my battery run out--if the land lines were out at home there was no way for me to reach you even with a charged cell. i was already feeling the guilty mother thing, and didn't want you to see my shame. but, regardless of reason or fault, i couldn't reach you. i just hoped that the quaking hadn't reached home. i just hoped you were all still playing wii dance, and continued with the hopeless task at hand. sitting far apart, and unable to reach one another, in our family of 5, our natural disasters that day were all distinct. each of us had our own reality shift, and in some ways the only thing in common was the time and day. in other ways, the altering was universal.
at home you felt the shaking and all our paintings slid. books fell and glasses skittered. you were frightened. you were calm. you took the younger children and the puppy outside and to a neighbor's. they had you all in and gave you snacks that you are not allowed to eat, and hung out with you until i arrived home. telling me about it the next day, you told me how their attic was crammed full with christmas decorations, and i interrupted--you were in their attic?!! and you looked at me with eyes bored, annoyed, and filled with my idiocy, and said: of course! we don't have an attic so i had to go into theirs. i had to discover it, and when i asked they said i could. there was this string hanging down, and i just...
you are so young, my angel baby.
that was ago, and today i'm thinking of tomorrows, and how i am going to talk with you all about what is coming. i'll be the one telling you. i have conversations in my head and i try to anticipate how you will each be, since i've known you so long. you, angel baby, will be stoic, and logical. and afraid. but you never back down in the face of afraid, and so i will have to be vigilant in my attention to your need, as it slivers forth. cookie face will be sad that what he knows is changing, and my moon faced girl will cry, and will further develop her aversion to and mistrust of marriage. i try to key out exactly how i can give you each, during those moments, a feeling of still being secure, and what i can say to let you know--you must know--that you are secure still, i will always be here for you, behind you, and with you.
but i think of the earthquake day. i think of all that you and i discovered. about attics and promises and security and strength and
angel baby: i have tried so hard to prove him wrong on this one.
*****
october 8 is my dad's birthday, but he is long gone and so celebrating with him doesn't happen so much as celebrating him in my mind does. our relationship was quite tempestuous, with dramatic ups and downs, a lot of downs, and they seem to be on my mind a lot. anyway, but also especially since i have become a parent--a flawed, trying, failing and succeeding not super- not shitty- but rather medium mom. i seem to react to him differently now, and yet, i still seem to react to him in the same way, as well. now a mother, always a daughter.
October 4, 2011
an open letter to readers in the distant future.
2011
hello future reader:
maybe your life is centuries after the end of mine, and i wonder about you. right now, in 2011, parts of humanity see the human race (as we know it) as the product of evolution and luck--and there are many who deny that, and believe in creationism (look it up—it’s a big deal here, now). that is not why i'm writing, though i do find it moving: understanding we are just the lucky ones--the ones that survived.
there are many things you must wonder about us, absent any direct instruction and relying upon your own interpretation of those traces of us that you wind up finding. so i want to tell you one specific thing about us. but first: do you have love? it doesn’t seem particularly relevant, love, in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of the species—maybe by the time you are reading this, love will have been selected against altogether… . do you know romeo and juliet? (look it up—it’s a good one). basically, (spoiler alert) familial and romantic love can, tragically, lead to death—so you know, it could happen that over hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of years, love will have been selected against. by the time you are reading this, perhaps a biological weakness has died out, a behavior that jeopardizes survival of the species has become unviable and vanishes: and so your lovelessness is an adaptation resulting from selective pressure and competition. anyway, maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t occurred, but (perhaps hypothetically): do you know what it is like to lose love? i'm going to give you some direct instruction on that, because it is very important.
i am sure you must have found documentation of the kinds of love we feel now, in all of their variety. people are becoming more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of all kinds of loving, which is a step forward for us--at least in my opinion. and if you have love, you probably have love falling apart, but you may crumble in entirely different ways than we do now--and if you don't have love, then how can you know the crumble at all? let's explore the crumbling.
so this is a story of love falling apart in a very 2011-human way. it may or may not be fiction (do you know fiction?). it is written for historical documentation, and whether it is ultimately fiction or not is irrelevant—this is a good description of heartbreak in many--but not all--parts of the world these days.
assuming you do not have love, i’ll tell you: love starts out like a baby being born. (i don't know if you know what being born is, or how you reproduce, and if i start getting all side tracked with explaining all the back story of this it'll take me forever, so forgive me, please.) the moment the baby begins living outside the womb, the reality is that this freshly baked newborn is drawing closer to death. that is how love is--it's the birth of a new being that has a life and a lifetime of its own, and the joy and elation and exhaustion and overemotion of the two beings who produced this bundle of joy simply spill out at first, and then slowly settle down. between the two lovers there is still much happiness as their love-baby grows and matures, and there is little disruption in that happiness. and then one day, one of the two people in the original pair comes home from work and swipes his finger over the towel bar and announces that the other one missed a spot while cleaning. and there we see it: the aging of the love. the first tiny teeny little crazing has happened--very faint, very trivial, but there.
and, if the two are still together after that little event, there is more happiness and more crazing: between the lovers, the lacks are spotlighted: one is a poor role model for the children, one is falling down on “the job”, and the insults and the coldness grow and then one day, one finds the diary of the other and reads it, and the aging turns in to a physically disabling illness, and professional help is sought. and the treatment sessions occur and occur and occur but are, it seems, powerless against the dis-ease that has settled in the bones of that fragile body of love.
and then one october day, during a particularly bad marital counseling session, one bemoans a lack of respect and the other one yells that he is doing all the heavy lifting and she is not carrying her weight in their common daily life. and he is sick of her excuses. and he strides from their session early, slamming the door.
hello future reader:
maybe your life is centuries after the end of mine, and i wonder about you. right now, in 2011, parts of humanity see the human race (as we know it) as the product of evolution and luck--and there are many who deny that, and believe in creationism (look it up—it’s a big deal here, now). that is not why i'm writing, though i do find it moving: understanding we are just the lucky ones--the ones that survived.
there are many things you must wonder about us, absent any direct instruction and relying upon your own interpretation of those traces of us that you wind up finding. so i want to tell you one specific thing about us. but first: do you have love? it doesn’t seem particularly relevant, love, in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of the species—maybe by the time you are reading this, love will have been selected against altogether… . do you know romeo and juliet? (look it up—it’s a good one). basically, (spoiler alert) familial and romantic love can, tragically, lead to death—so you know, it could happen that over hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of years, love will have been selected against. by the time you are reading this, perhaps a biological weakness has died out, a behavior that jeopardizes survival of the species has become unviable and vanishes: and so your lovelessness is an adaptation resulting from selective pressure and competition. anyway, maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t occurred, but (perhaps hypothetically): do you know what it is like to lose love? i'm going to give you some direct instruction on that, because it is very important.
i am sure you must have found documentation of the kinds of love we feel now, in all of their variety. people are becoming more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of all kinds of loving, which is a step forward for us--at least in my opinion. and if you have love, you probably have love falling apart, but you may crumble in entirely different ways than we do now--and if you don't have love, then how can you know the crumble at all? let's explore the crumbling.
so this is a story of love falling apart in a very 2011-human way. it may or may not be fiction (do you know fiction?). it is written for historical documentation, and whether it is ultimately fiction or not is irrelevant—this is a good description of heartbreak in many--but not all--parts of the world these days.
assuming you do not have love, i’ll tell you: love starts out like a baby being born. (i don't know if you know what being born is, or how you reproduce, and if i start getting all side tracked with explaining all the back story of this it'll take me forever, so forgive me, please.) the moment the baby begins living outside the womb, the reality is that this freshly baked newborn is drawing closer to death. that is how love is--it's the birth of a new being that has a life and a lifetime of its own, and the joy and elation and exhaustion and overemotion of the two beings who produced this bundle of joy simply spill out at first, and then slowly settle down. between the two lovers there is still much happiness as their love-baby grows and matures, and there is little disruption in that happiness. and then one day, one of the two people in the original pair comes home from work and swipes his finger over the towel bar and announces that the other one missed a spot while cleaning. and there we see it: the aging of the love. the first tiny teeny little crazing has happened--very faint, very trivial, but there.
and, if the two are still together after that little event, there is more happiness and more crazing: between the lovers, the lacks are spotlighted: one is a poor role model for the children, one is falling down on “the job”, and the insults and the coldness grow and then one day, one finds the diary of the other and reads it, and the aging turns in to a physically disabling illness, and professional help is sought. and the treatment sessions occur and occur and occur but are, it seems, powerless against the dis-ease that has settled in the bones of that fragile body of love.
and then one october day, during a particularly bad marital counseling session, one bemoans a lack of respect and the other one yells that he is doing all the heavy lifting and she is not carrying her weight in their common daily life. and he is sick of her excuses. and he strides from their session early, slamming the door.
now, at this moment: their body of love slips into a coma.
(do you know coma? it is the state of being there, but not living. existing. and with a coma, eventually there will have to be a decision made: to pull the plug, or to keep hoping and waiting to get the body to come back to life.)
so the love is in a coma. and on this very day, after so many years of nurturing that body, trying to feed it and attend to it and keep it healthy, on this day she leaves the therapist's office in a state of shock, because she had done everything that she could and had given her best to make something strong, and after all this lifetime of that, she saw that body lying there anyway, and saw that she had never been enough. but she was yet not willing to pull the plug on that thing she had helped create. it was too soon. instead, on the drive home, she unbuckles her seat belt, presses the accelerator, and points the car straight at the concrete wall made by the freeway overpass above her. then she pulls herself back on track, after an image of her kids flits through her head.
it turns out she herself isn't hospitalized, though her doctor wants her to be. she insists: she can't be: there are kids to consider and other important things, and so with two medications (big for remediation of all sorts of things, in 2011), and in two months she drags herself through two major holidays, four birthdays and the requisite parties--that she plans and executes, two visits from out of town family (hers, then his), and fills the roles of santa and new years eve festivity planner.
and no one around her knows that she is a shell. everyone is happy and well fed and entertained and no one even notices her absence. (this is significant.) she slips away for naps a lot, and she doesn't laugh ever during this time, but she holds it all together superficially, and no one sees the difference (this is significant.) and then in the first days of january, after all of the important things have taken place, she collapses. eventually in february she gets to her knees again.
and this is when she admits: it will be this relationship, or it will be me. and she realizes: it isn't going to be me.
so the love is in a coma. and on this very day, after so many years of nurturing that body, trying to feed it and attend to it and keep it healthy, on this day she leaves the therapist's office in a state of shock, because she had done everything that she could and had given her best to make something strong, and after all this lifetime of that, she saw that body lying there anyway, and saw that she had never been enough. but she was yet not willing to pull the plug on that thing she had helped create. it was too soon. instead, on the drive home, she unbuckles her seat belt, presses the accelerator, and points the car straight at the concrete wall made by the freeway overpass above her. then she pulls herself back on track, after an image of her kids flits through her head.
it turns out she herself isn't hospitalized, though her doctor wants her to be. she insists: she can't be: there are kids to consider and other important things, and so with two medications (big for remediation of all sorts of things, in 2011), and in two months she drags herself through two major holidays, four birthdays and the requisite parties--that she plans and executes, two visits from out of town family (hers, then his), and fills the roles of santa and new years eve festivity planner.
and no one around her knows that she is a shell. everyone is happy and well fed and entertained and no one even notices her absence. (this is significant.) she slips away for naps a lot, and she doesn't laugh ever during this time, but she holds it all together superficially, and no one sees the difference (this is significant.) and then in the first days of january, after all of the important things have taken place, she collapses. eventually in february she gets to her knees again.
and this is when she admits: it will be this relationship, or it will be me. and she realizes: it isn't going to be me.
so, she has decided, and the plug is pulled. the love-child that had fallen to coma is now, and at what appears to be by her own hand, just a corpse. it doesn't make it easier for her that she made the call. in this case the line between life and death was a formality. it was an announcement.
so, can you see the lifespan of love? its growing up is a slow process, with fits and spurts of polish and ragged edges, just like the life of a person now is. and its end is as the death of a treasured person is, viewed today, as well: first denied and then wished and worked against, and then sudden. and irrevocable.
and so you see how it worked way way back in time, for your human ancestors. not always, of course, but in some cases it was definitely like this. although in this story the she pulled the plug, in some cases the he will have, and in some situations both parties just wander away from their love and it withers and neither care. today there are as many forms of betrayal and endings are there are loves and beginnings, it's true. some love-bodies last entire lifetimes, until the pair die a week apart, because the one left behind can't live on without his or her sweetie pie (not a food in this case, but rather a 21st century term of endearment). but i can vouch, personally promise you, that sometimes it was exactly like this.
what are they like for you, the stages of life for the bodies of love? at all similar? (i am really not at all sure that love hasn't been selected against.)
so, can you see the lifespan of love? its growing up is a slow process, with fits and spurts of polish and ragged edges, just like the life of a person now is. and its end is as the death of a treasured person is, viewed today, as well: first denied and then wished and worked against, and then sudden. and irrevocable.
and so you see how it worked way way back in time, for your human ancestors. not always, of course, but in some cases it was definitely like this. although in this story the she pulled the plug, in some cases the he will have, and in some situations both parties just wander away from their love and it withers and neither care. today there are as many forms of betrayal and endings are there are loves and beginnings, it's true. some love-bodies last entire lifetimes, until the pair die a week apart, because the one left behind can't live on without his or her sweetie pie (not a food in this case, but rather a 21st century term of endearment). but i can vouch, personally promise you, that sometimes it was exactly like this.
what are they like for you, the stages of life for the bodies of love? at all similar? (i am really not at all sure that love hasn't been selected against.)
but really, future reader, i am too sad to describe that, now. you'll have to find a different artifact.
October 3, 2011
sidewalk mary/or: the american dream
humbly, i am teaching my children that sidewalk mary is a person
with a whole life, a whole story, and the story is important,
and because she is sitting on the sidewalk every day in
sticky heat or dripping sky, car exhaust and
dust
doesn't mean she is insane. it means she is dusty.
hot. sticky.
that she has a moustache does not mean
she is insane. or unclean. or a man.
that she is surrounded
by teddy bears and is always
rocking one on her shoulder, patting and
rocking to rocking fro
rocking to rocking fro
means she is rocking her bear, and maybe she loves it. she was a child once
just like they are and they love their stuffed bears too, right?
who can't sleep without doggie? maybe she has no one else to love. we
talk. we explore.
and maybe we could take her
a root beer, on a hot day
or a cocoa, on a cold day
and take her a new teddy.
let her know we see her. that she is.
at first they think i am maybe making valid points but still
--cynics the bunch of them--
who but the insane wear a moustache when they are a woman,
or sit on the sidewalk every day?
but my children are learning compassion, and relativism.
that we all do not live the same way. they have come to think this
teddy and drink idea is a good one. they wonder where sidewalk mary is
when we drive by and the corner is unoccupied.
what about taking a few of the cookies grandma sent us? let's sit with her, they
say. tomorrow, i say. i'm happy they have good will. they are generous with
their love.
but i am afraid that when we sit by her, she will pull a knife on us.
this is the part i do not tell my children.
with a whole life, a whole story, and the story is important,
and because she is sitting on the sidewalk every day in
sticky heat or dripping sky, car exhaust and
dust
doesn't mean she is insane. it means she is dusty.
hot. sticky.
that she has a moustache does not mean
she is insane. or unclean. or a man.
that she is surrounded
by teddy bears and is always
rocking one on her shoulder, patting and
rocking to rocking fro
rocking to rocking fro
means she is rocking her bear, and maybe she loves it. she was a child once
just like they are and they love their stuffed bears too, right?
who can't sleep without doggie? maybe she has no one else to love. we
talk. we explore.
and maybe we could take her
a root beer, on a hot day
or a cocoa, on a cold day
and take her a new teddy.
let her know we see her. that she is.
at first they think i am maybe making valid points but still
--cynics the bunch of them--
who but the insane wear a moustache when they are a woman,
or sit on the sidewalk every day?
but my children are learning compassion, and relativism.
that we all do not live the same way. they have come to think this
teddy and drink idea is a good one. they wonder where sidewalk mary is
when we drive by and the corner is unoccupied.
what about taking a few of the cookies grandma sent us? let's sit with her, they
say. tomorrow, i say. i'm happy they have good will. they are generous with
their love.
but i am afraid that when we sit by her, she will pull a knife on us.
this is the part i do not tell my children.
October 2, 2011
finishing up
i have just finished a piece begun ago, dated september 24. check it out...is it ginsbergish? what was the essence of the beat movement anyway? --to stick to rules and patterns? i think not. so fuck it.
this one is me-ish.
what a learning process.
this one is me-ish.
what a learning process.
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