for dearest sara (on the occasion of her death)

The women are alone again tonight. I wonder where their husbands are off to. She lights a cigarette, someone complains. I sit in front of his door, and she looks at me, you had better stay out of trouble, she says. Yes I agree. Yes, I know. But I know nothing, I admit to her. She laughs, Why not find yourself a nice girl and settle down? Yes, but I don’t know. She smiles and asks the girls where their husbands are off to. They don’t know if they’re coming or going! But whatever it is, they’re gone, I say. We don’t talk like that, they say and they fold their hands on the table. She feels the pattern of the lace, the low relief, the familiar lines.

In prayer I hear her digging up the sand on the beach, in front of her house, in front of her view. Of the few things she owns, there is this view—soon to be in limbo and orphaned. This is the first time I've watched the sunrise in maybe 60 years, you know. I didn’t know that, and I’m interested in why. But there is no answer, of course—she’s looking away.

Now she is quiet and I strain myself to hear her. I turn on the bench, look through the floral print wallpaper and see her, leaning beside a window, open five or so inches, legs crossed, looking outside, over the seagulls. What is so interesting about those birds? Whatever answer they can give, whatever mystical advice will always be opaque. That’s right darling, she’ll say to me.

Yes, I answer. I do not knock on the door. I will not see her or hear her again. Outside, it is beautiful winter on the Oregon Coast. I hear a car passing, I hear Yiddish—nothing particular, nothing to speak of.

She has no idea what she means

My brother was the beast.
My brother is a mystic.
My brother is Hildegard.

A pastor preaching on power
cited a theologian who wrote,
True power is when something holds us, and we don't even know we're being held.

Ours is a city yet to be, she said, ours is a city already present.



I entered your history.
(Authoritative witness is most clearly revealed when all forms of authority are lost.)

And we swim underwater with our eyes open.

water-sky

The sky is dark for five o’clock. Heavy. We walk slowly, deliberately, savoring each step in each other’s company. On one flank little city lights peep out from behind thick clouds holding what will be what holds us back and what will keep us there. Our other flank is endless with sky, water, and a healthy greenness. We are walking towards the water.

The coolness pricks our skin and the breeze forecasts the wetness that is to come. It is just beyond comfortable but we ignore any sense we have: to turn back. We move forward.

We arrive and sit, our backs against the concrete wall that shields us from the stares of the city lights. We look forward into the water and wordlessly our gazes fade into the distant water-sky.

A drop falls. A second. The clouds relieve themselves. The wetness is cooler than the air and the hairs on our forearms and shoulders start to raise, the backs of our necks alert to the imposing weather. Now that we are there, that we’ve arrived, we can’t turn back. We’ve waited for this for too long. Wordlessly we endure the increased stress on our bodies to stay warm, we shiver and wrap our arms around ourselves, hugging our knees and struggling to keep our bodies from shaking. I look at you and see the rain running in-between your eyelashes, around your eyes and down the crease of your nose onto your lips. Suddenly we are completely waterlogged. Your face has now turned into a landscape of water currents, your hair matted snuggly to your head.

We get up and slosh away. I’m following you, you choose a railing up along the concrete armature of a building. You navigate to a sheltered cavity beneath the windows. We sit upon the rocks/ drainage system. Centipedes slither in and out of our refuge among us. We lean back against the concrete wall. We stare out into the downpour. It is arresting. You look at me squarely and say with weighty eyes, “I have to go,” but neither of us can move. You turn your back to me and slide your wet shirt off to put on a dry sweatshirt from your pack. I see your back muscles and look away, into the distance.

We try to wait it out but it just keeps coming. Drop upon drop, thick as static on the TV. We sit and stare out of our newly nested burrow, family of bugs and rocks and chill, and stare through the downpour to the water-sky. Above us the rain pellets drum off the glass, then glide down the panes in long sweeping channels. Water likes to stick together.

You say you have to go again and although I don’t believe you, you pull yourself up and grab your things. I follow you out from our shelter, unready for the next shockwaves of shivers and chattering.
We slosh back, picking up our heavy legs with our heavy pants, and this time our silence is also much heavier. Cold and wet, neither of want to leave, but you feel you must. The irresolution remains unspoken.

Camping - day 3

The water in the lake does not move much. When it does, I am surprised, anxious, irritable. Why have I come here? I ask myself, again and again. Is it so bad in the city? Is it so easy for us to access this nature, this landscape that is neither ours or its own, on its own? Things are complicated, I hear the voice say. Things do not make sense because they make sense. I can see the Chicago apartment, the stack of bills unpaid, debt.
We drink some whisky and swim just after noon. I feel less frustrated, and on my back in the water I think I could be like a sea mammal, a blue whale leaning on its side to expose one big eye to the sun. The voice goes away at some point, and I am left alone, only buoyant--just floating.

Memorial (day)

She pulled a drowning child from the pool today.

She watched his small
pale body
red hair
open eyes
floating peacefully with the water's movement
twisting and swaying
keeping what rhythm
only he knew
if he knew at all
as she struggled to understand what it was she was seeing
knowing
instinctively
the moment she saw him
his light-dappled body beneath the surface
this was not right
this was not right
this was not right
and so her eyes stayed with him
as her own children held her close
smiling in sunshine
until a few seconds
an eternity
later
she convinced herself this was not a game he was playing
holding his breath
counting to ten
or more
swimming past knees and ankles and shins
unsuspecting
changed into peculiar incandescent forms
by blue reflections
this was a child dying
perhaps already dead
and she reached
letting go of one child’s hand
holding another on her hip on the other side
and she pulled this child out of the water by his arm and raised him up
limp
strangely heavy
high above the water and moved with him like that to the pool's edge
as she called for help
with a voice
it seemed
they could not hear
again and again
over the noise of the other children and their parents
(where were his parents?)
laughing and playing
enjoying their first taste of summer

He did not die.

Negotiating Rapture

The piece kept showing up. Uninvited. Not unwanted, just uninvited.

The stark neon. The relentless flashing on and off. Red: You breathe, you live. Blue: You breathe, you die. Red: You want, you die. Blue: You want, you live.

So much death, so much life. Too much to absorb. Real and yet artificial. Red: You create, you live. Blue: You create, you die.

An isolated individual gazes at the neon from an exclusive, elitist hotel in Japan.

Two friends cry, side by side.

It’s all too much this unbearable lightness of being; This good news; this plurality and ambiguity; this calling to go where angels fear to tread…Only book titles can save me now.

Camping - day 4

Hungry and tired, we walk back to the campsite. We take a back way that we noticed only the day before. It is more overgrown, but also more direct to the lakeshore. I fall behind, letting my friend get ahead of me far enough for me to be alone. I sit by ferns and shallow shrubs. I dig my fingers into the soft topsoil. And when I look up, I see him. He is an Elk: like a perfect Aryan myth: cherry-blonde and broad shouldered, noble chest, erect neck. He breathes a cloud of condensation at me, and I am looking straight into his eyes. I have known this fear before: at sea, far away and looking across deserts, waiting for lightning, swarms of bees, my first plunge into the ocean.

Muscle Memory

Walking into the ballet studio on 33rd and Harvard felt like walking into my soul. I wanted to somehow convey to my family that as they stepped into these hallways, dressing rooms, and studios, they were walking through me. Passing through my skin and beholding who I am. I swallowed instead.

The studio always hosted an odd mix of smells. The excessive amounts of resin used for point shoe traction lent a certain dryness to the air but underneath, girding all smells was the damp, pervasive odor of decades of perspiration. I am countless different people when I walk through the door. A scared 5-year-old at Nutcracker rehearsal, who is overwhelmed by the limbs and kicks and afraid of disappointing the fierce lady with dark eyes; a shy 8-year-old who never speaks to anyone, ironically longing for friends and yet cherishing the one place I can be silent and no one finds me strange for my silence; a gawky 13-year-old who is weak, struggling, jealous, and fighting the natural instincts of my growing body; a confident high school student who begins to take risks in both dance and life; a college student, who finally feels the proud eyes of Ms. Larkin doting on me and my dancing. I still felt unworthy, but basked in the glow of her pride.
And now she sits in a chair in Roman’s office/her old office and she does not remember. She is alone, and so I am alone. She forgets me, she forgets herself.

Roman walks us through the studio showing us the changes that have been made. I fight the urge to run to my place at the barre where I stood for so many years. The place where I sat fairy princess-style, watching Ms. Larkin skip around the room, a delicate crystal prism dangling from her fingertips. As the rainbows of light flickered in our eyes, she invited us to imagine that we too could be prisms, magically transforming music into movement. And so we’d stand at our assigned places, bending, stretching, kicking, and waiting to turn into rainbows.

Roman gently escorts his mother on our tour, she barely notices the change of scenery.

Alzheimer’s is a cruel, cruel disease.

Before we leave, I pause to write a note to one of the other teachers, Ms. Hope. I notice the purple décor of the waiting area and know that she must have played a design role, considering purple is her favorite color. Ms. Larkin stands behind the receptionist’s counter and I want so badly to see the true Ms. Larkin—just once, if only for a fleeting moment. It feels as though I have been dismembered when I no longer see the best version of myself in her eyes. I am left with only my stories and perception-clouded memories.

I receive a miracle. From my limited work with Alzheimer’s patients in Hospice I know that many times the only way to connect is to delve deep into the past to our earliest memories. The oldest memories are often the most accessible. I begin to tell her of how I am teaching ballet and how I use her “5 Positions Song” to teach the basic five positions of the feet and arms. She still looks blank but I forge ahead. I begin to sing and move, “First position and second position…” By the time I get to third position her eyes connect with mine and she begins to sing and move in synch with me. As we come to the closing pas de burre her eyes twinkle and she smiles at me—the true Ms. Larkin smile that always said to me, “I am pleasantly surprised that you’ve made me proud of you.”

Then she was gone, lost in her own world again. But I had received my miracle. What had been lost had been re-membered. As we left the studio, there was a quiet sadness within me and yet a breathless thankfulness for the gift of muscle memory that can re-member us when our minds have failed us, for the sinews that can hold us in community long after our minds have severed all ties to reality. To live she must stay at the studio, surrounded by the movement that has taught her to live fully in the present moment, thankful for this breath, this step, this person beside her, this dance that is the breath of life made visible.

I learned that hot August day to trust my muscles and the memories that lie buried within them.

“Night is drawing nigh. How long the road is. But, for all the time the journey has taken, how you have needed every second of it.” Dag Hammarskjold

What's art but a secondhand emotion?

For AK:
Direction, or That to Which I Point May Be Exactly What I Want You to See.
Don’t You Trust Me?

Once upon a time, this is what she wrote:

Question: Is art elitist? Should it be? Is everyone an artist? Should they be?
Answer: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

I am an artist. And sometimes, some things can be, simultaneously, more than what they are and exactly what they are. A museum can be a swimming pool.

It is all about trust. Art can be real. Art must always be made with a nudge and a wink, especially sincere art. Art must be more real than the art world will let it be. Art must be more art than the real world will let it be. Art is on dangerous ground. And that’s good.

She laughs now when she reads these words.

A: Why don’t you say you love me?
B: Why do I have to?
A: If you loved me, you’d say it.
B: I love you.
A: You’re just saying that.

Would I lie to you, honey?

to Aunt Leonie

Aunt Leonie
Purebred invalid
Say your vespers
And drink your tonics
Nobody said you were sick in the head
How’s the asparagus?
Thick as your sick head
Please don’t get out of bed
We wouldn’t want to trouble you
Or worry your little head
How’s the Virgin?
Where’s the grocer?
What’s so charming about staying in bed?
Nobody wants to be in your head
More than me
And in your bed
More than Leonie

(jf)

Fear, the first time

It was a river that dried and filled with poison hours before he came up for air. A lifetime spent floating in the warm salty water of her belly.

A beginning, a very long time long ago

I do not yet know how to write what I must.

This sentence occurs to her as a plausible place to begin. In fact, the longer she considers the matter—and, of course, she does consider the matter for some length of time—this sentence seems to her to be the only place to begin. She who spends her days almost exclusively in the company of those without speech. She who is unable to complete one thought from beginning to end and for whom reflective activity has become a form of nostalgia. She to whom Derrida finally makes sense. And, as she considers the matter further, this sentence seems, at the very least, to be simply a place to begin. It is her place to begin. It is this sentence that will mark her beginning.

I do not yet know how to write what I must.

And, then:
There are fears I dare not speak nor write.

from Mali

Pleasure in the faces when little lone white girl greets-- in Bamanakan. Men on motorcycles hugging full-size, headless, skinned cows. Smog in this valley of Bamako. Regal and wise looking Muslims striding slowly with perfect posture and high heads. Confusion as the cops in full African army garb (fatigues and teal beret) ride past me, waiting for my schoolbus, white and bright on the corner. The market being set up.

-

A man beat his wife tonight. A woman hit a child with a stick; the other kids yelled "Tubab!" at me. A donkey had a sore above his eye and the rope halter dragged on it. The woman at my bus stop is gone, she doesn't sit and fry meat on the corner. She's sick. Amputated or malformed beggers. Rude gestures from a vender angry at me for encouraging my friend to bargain him down. A man beat his wife tonight. She screamed it out so that everyone would know. Her defense, her revenge, her weapon was our knowledge, her "refusal to be silenced," the moral condemnation, the prick of conscience, self-consciousness, embarrassment. We listened. We heard. We women, we did nothing.
(kj)

Camping - day 5

For the fifth day now, we’re camped a mile and a half from Lake Pile. There’s a little fox that’s been scouting the perimeter of the campsite—looking in and figuring out our alien humanness. Last night I think I heard him, whining east at the sad faced moon, pale yellow and surrounded by the evening fog like the fur collar of an Eskimo. There is his whine, his voice, his tiny feet stirring twigs, wind through his tail. There is this grey countryside, his dominion of dens and underground trails. There are the pups, their tiny mouths, the feathers of a brown bird—her blood and her feathers and the left over bones.

Coda

Pigeons swarm the intersection at Ashland and 3rd.
A woman sits on the floor next to a thimble of semen and overeats a pile of orange oranges.
The capacity of breath to trust and invest.
She rides through gray congestion fascinated by her changing mind.
Face red heart racing—she finds illiteracy across the park.
Territory—the human land animal who marks her turf.
She mapped the floor with rubber strips to figure out where she belongs.
White snow falls
some are colder.
She dissects
exacto
to find a sack of fetuses.
Drills, bits, blades pully. She prays for god
to use her.
Level router sander plane.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.
(dl)

Lost

“How is she doing?” A trembling voice on the other side of the telephone connection replied that she is not doing well. I felt a cold distance, not sure what to say next, because I already was aware of the situation.

After some silent seconds, I heard, “You want to say something to her?” The cold distance mutated, as I instantly imagined that the phone was put near her ear to hear my voice.

“Hello, Louise…I am sorry I can’t be there, but it’s going to be okay, I love you.” A muffled sound interrupted me, as another even more trembling voice took over and said that she just took her last breath.

I cried.
(jn)

An hour in my home/The things in my throat

Lately, I have been trying to take it easy. I sit on my couch and it is dirty. A jerk lived on my couch for a while and made the cushions very fucked up and burned by cigarettes. I sit on my couch and listen to slim slinky guitar jazz. Sometimes, I read a book called The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. It is very good. It is very funny and inventive. It is about a librarian who can never leave the library. Fortunately for him, he has a perfectly proportioned girlfriend.

I go to the kitchen and make a salad. It has greens, lots of greens. I am trying to eat good things. I keep getting sick, and I believe it is because my body is feeling down because I don’t feed it good things. My soul is also damaged because I don’t feed it good spiritual things. It needs a clean house and a god to pray to. I need always nice, never drunk, friends. So the salad has all sorts of leafy greens in it and cucumbers, too. Then onions, Gorgonzola cheese and walnuts. I make it in a big white bowl that I used to use for popcorn when I lived with my last roommate.

I go to the couch and shake a little bit. I think I might have fever. I can barely speak because my words just sound like squeaks once they get past my lips. No one can understand me because I sound so funny.

On the couch, the jazz is still slinking and the octopus lights are hanging above the armchair that I bought from a woman named Gillian. I think she almost killed me when I didn’t pay her for the chair right away. The lights and the chair together are a very pretty picture. I have taken many photographs of them together. I also find it soothing, especially when there is slinky jazz on.

I think about my friend who went home to have surgery. They performed surgery on her cervix. When I was on the phone with her I mistakably asked her how her clit was feeling. I was not coming on to her. They were extracting irregular cell growths. It was a good thing they took them out because they could have eventually become cancerous cells. I once had bones extracted from my feet because I was born with an extra one in each foot. So, I sort-of know how she feels.

I pull my sweater and t-shirt over my head, turning myself into a monster or zombie to any honest passerby. No one is passing by because I am alone in my living room. I am in my shirt and stare at my belly that is getting fatter because I have just been eating at the terrible Midwest pizza joints and at the good Mexican place down the road. Faith tells me I am fat, but she is just kidding. I wouldn’t mind looking like Will Oldham in his movie Old Joy. He is fat and bearded and very lovable, like a big fuzzy, folk-singin’ teddy bear. I wouldn’t mind being that someday. I feel warm and like a sock inside my shirts but I take my head out to try and eat my salad.

I have put too much dressing on my salad and it splashes all over my face and on my sweater. I don’t do anything about it. This is partly because I am preoccupied with something else. Something bigger. I eat as much as possible, trying to dredge up the good walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese from the bottom of the bowl. It is very difficult. I succeed in the end and eat the whole thing.

I am very nervous. I want my mother. I am sick and feel like a child.
(jc)

Compass

To know
true north
and to carry it, magnetic,
within
my self

The great towers and the industry that used to be

I am walking like a skeleton. My bones are banging against the bags that are my skin. I can walk however I want. I am alone, and there are big towers everywhere. Everything is gray, and the only thing that shows color is my blood. I am definitely somewhere, because I am with myself. But I could be anywhere. Therefore, I am nowhere.

But I am not nowhere in the sense that everything is lost and nothing means anything. I am nowhere in the sense that I am separated from the other humans. My actions are being watched, alone, by the great creator.

I am stumbling between building and building. Great big gray water towers. Little restaurants here and there. Underneath train tracks that are so loud. These tracks would not be tolerated in the downtown, in the uptown, in the hip parts of town. These are the remains of humans a long time ago. Factories and towers that people used to slave in.

These train tracks and water towers that are way high above me are only here in this nowhere part of town. There are no nasty people. There are no nice people. There are no rich people. There is just me, huge stone and metal, and the sky. This is the only place in the city where lost souls can wander and actually find something.

I can walk the way I want here. That is my freedom. I walk with my heart and let my bones throw themselves to the north, the south, the east, and the west. My body is my home to decorate the way I please. If I really walk with my heart, God will be pleased. Here, God and I are one, and everything is just fine.

My clothes are long and drag on the floor. My clothes bunch and bunch as I get shorter and closer to the ground. I am flannel, I am cotton. I disintegrate, God watches as I become dirt and nods his head in assurance that I am following my heart. Then he cackles with a giant smile like the Buddha as I appear beside him.

Then I have to leave and things come back into color. I am not the only red. I have to get on trains and buy groceries and lather myself in soap. I have to paint boxes and use vacuum cleaners and tip tap my fingers on aluminum machines that organize my thoughts and collect my data for me. Everything is too many colors, and God can’t see me through all of the bullshit.
(jc)

Child

I don’t know if there was a path that led up to this place. There must have been, but in this recollection it is entirely self-contained, and an entrance or exit would be contrary and entirely against the completeness this small space has associated with it. I’m not even certain if it is real, but there is a striking image of someplace I now associate with my neighborhood as a boy in Columbus, Ohio. The space comes back to me in three colors: a golden yellow that is the late sun diffused through yellow vines with yellow leaves, this light soft on the red brick that made up the path, and the wrought-iron that composed the table and chairs placed on the bricks at the end of the path. There must have been flecks of green here and there as well. The space was a small enclosure, perhaps a chamber in a garden. There was a small path wide enough for one person to walk down, a typical path, and at the end of the path was a small, round enclosure. The path wasn’t very long, as the entirety of the enclosure could be seen from wherever this recollection begins, but I do remember that there was a pause between start and finish, and I believe that this was a pause more of awe than of distance. The use of the word enclosure is due to the fourth and most striking detail that this entire space was covered completely by an arch of vines, roof, and walls; as though a tunnel like structure had been built of wire allowing vines to completely grow over the tunnel. The vines themselves, as already stated, had mostly yellow leaves with some green here and there, and I want to say they were of the same type found in my back yard of which I do not know the name. The lighting was old and quiet, late in the afternoon. The iron table was small and round, just large enough for the two chairs on either side of it. I must have been a young child, as the chairs seem to relate themselves from a higher angle than I am used to seeing now. There was no one in the chairs. I have no clue as to their purpose or owners. I do not remember how I came to be in this place or where this vision ends. This could be a dream that I’ve mistaken as a memory or perhaps a scene from a movie I’ve adopted as my own experience. Either way, it is distant in time and strong in feeling.
(ar)