Nothing and Everything

The wind shuffled a full deck of leaves, each of them blank.
Imagine what to do with carte blanche: how you’d furnish

your rooms, the many-leaved days, nights dusky as blackboards
chalked over with dreams— And I’m sure I’d love blanc-

mange, sweet rolls, strong coffee for brunch, the hours blank
as new linen, duty shoring up the banks— And how sweet

to be able to start, mess up, do it over again; fill in blanks
that were missed the first time around. Nothing left vacant,

no stone left unturned; no check voided, gone bad, or returned
for want of funds: the empty hull pleasing as its original shape.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Of two minds.

Of Two Minds

It was Sappho, wasn’t it, in one of her fragments who coined the expression. But who hasn’t felt divided like that? My bleak mood amused another part of me, as if it were a barrel cactus or the word murder written with spoons. I mixed a cocktail of tequila, carrot juice & ash. In the old westerns, the protagonists used to say things like, “Now it’s time for a dose of your own medicine!” Like certain plants, they were toxic to themselves.

I found a road-side tree into which someone had driven over a hundred nails. I stared at it for a while until I realized it must have been a place to post notices: estate sales, lost dogs, candidates for sheriff. In the old westerns, the sheriffs pinned steel stars to their chests, & the same Indian actors kept dying over & over. I looked up: it was a bigtooth aspen. A wind was shuffling the full deck of its leaves, which were pleasingly blank.

And ever

[and today I have written at least a poem a day, every day, for the last two years]

 

“Forever and forever, and forever.” ~ Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

When I was six, my biological mother took me to Mido Chinese restaurant in the plaza to meet the lover she was not supposed to have. We climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. The air was stale with the smell of sesame oil, fried onions, and five spice powder. You can have a dumpling with your soup, she whispered. Just don’t tell your mother that we came here, or whom we met. She was referring to her older sister, her only sister, who was raising me as her own, and putting her through high school. Both of them, therefore, were/are my mothers; and I was taught a special name for each of them.

I do not remember the face of the man we met there. I do not know for sure if this is the man she married, one grey morning months later in December. (Was it December?) Gigi, one of the next door neighbors’ daughters, served as flower girl with me. We wore stiff white satin dresses and tiny tulle veils; Gigi had stolen a tube of pink lipstick from her older sister’s dresser. She grasped my chin with her left hand and said, Pucker, then smack. I obeyed, making a fish face as she applied a waxy stripe of color to my lips. We stood in the vestibule, shivering, waiting for the cue to begin walking down the aisle, scattering dahlia and rose petals.

Is she going to faint? Gigi wanted to know. All brides faint at the altar, she said confidingly. That’s because the waistlines of their dresses are tightened, so they don’t show in case they already have a baby. She didn’t know, but I knew that couldn’t be true, because I was so far the only baby— and wasn’t I standing there, in a pair of shoes that pinched, clutching a wicker basket still full of petals husked from beheaded blooms?

No, not many knew. No one knew then, either, that one afternoon this man put his hands under my waistband and said, eyes glinting, I know another way to make you pee. And there they were, bending their heads under the veil and cord, passing a handful of coins from one to the other: making promises, drinking the wine without knowing quite yet we’d already fallen, head-first, all of us, into the rest of everything to come.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Celestial Body

It was a small moon, scarcely bigger than a thumb. It rose from its nest in the branches of a birch like an bird’s egg that had decided to skip hatching and go straight to flight. It wore a stripe of sunlight thin as the edge of a feather, but as the nights passed it drew more and more of this disguise down over itself until the whole thing blazed like a burglar’s torch. What a ludicrous sight! Poets everywhere ground their teeth at this violation of their beloved darkness, until they noticed how much darker the shadows had grown — and how the moonlight turned everything it touched to silver. A lover’s still face could pass for a statue, & it seemed suddenly conceivable that love itself might outlast the simple satisfaction of desire & take on the trappings of eternity. The small moon was now discovered to be enormous, but very far away. We would have to invent space flight to reach it. We’d have to leave bootprints on its smooth cheek that would last for a million years.

Exit Interview (excerpt)

What have you learned, I am asked; or, Who do you think you are?

I have learned that from the same window, the landscape is always the same, even when it is different. For example, today, heavy frost sheens the branches of trees. Yesterday, they were leafed in ochre and gold.

The seasons are punctuated by construction work, sewers flooding over, the high tide rising, squabbles with the local government over the correct placement and reading of water meters.

Every summer, when tall ships sail into the harbor unfurling flags from different countries, my heart feels that familiar tugging, reminding me of all the times it wants to climb the rigging, all the times it refuses to budge from its crow’s nest.

Patience is not necessarily a virtue learned only through traditional monastic disciplines; one school of teaching conducts its lessons through customer service branches on the telephone. It doesn’t matter for which product— just hit the prompt for “customer service” or “service hotline.”

There are only so many trips one can make to the mall or to the craft shops, hunting for sales, before the price tag evaporates with the steam of adrenaline. The shelf life of products grows shorter by the season.

Half a bag of apples, a few carrots, and a knob of ginger will make juice for around three people.

Who do I think I am? I ask myself the same question over a hundred times a day. Sometimes I think I hear an answer, and then I realize the sound of voices has drifted in through the window from somewhere up the street.

One thing seems a little more certain now than it was before: I do not chafe so much at silence anymore; but still, I know to crave the sweet touch of a hand, the memory of lips and eyes.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cargo Culture

I used to think that doors were failed windows. Now I see that windows are aborted doors.

*

Were the Melanesian cargo cults ever true religious movements, or were they just short-lived cons perpetrated on the unwary? No one seems to know for sure. Some may wonder if there’s any difference, but to me, it’s clear: the founder of a true religion must first successfully con him- or herself.

*

Whenever I encounter an uprooted tree and realize how farcical its feet were, I get a little vertigo.

*

Let’s spell it farcicle and try to imagine how, or whether, it would differ in taste from a popsicle’s sweet, colored ice.

*

A henge resembles an inside-out fortification: the ditch is on the inside of the wall. Henges must, therefore, have been like zoos for the always-dangerous ancestors.

*

I will be disappointed if Banksy turns out to be anyone other than a man with the head of a rat. A reporter who met him years ago said he was the grimiest person she’d ever seen.

*

It may well be that the majority of planets in the universe are small and orphaned: unattached to any star, just drifting through space. Hearing this, for the very first time in my life I feel a keen interest in space travel. Imagine standing on such a world — bleak, cold, lifeless, and utterly free.

*

Maybe a henge was a replica of the heavens, designed as a form of sympathetic magic to make sure the sun and moon didn’t wander off, and kept circling back each year with their cargo of stars.

In One and the Same Moment

“I am small in the rain.” ~ Eugene Gloria

We are all small in the rain;
we are even small in the sunlight,
though the shadows might grant the brief
illusion that we are taller or more brave

than we really are. And we can be small
at dusk, especially at dusk; smaller,
certainly, than in the early morning
when there is that sensation that we

are somehow taller, taking the first
sip of water or coffee, or sliding
into the car behind the wheel. Not only
are we small, returning in the morass

of traffic, or holding on to a strap
in the middle of the lurching bus
or train— also, we are flattened,
hollowed out, or pleated with

nervous anxiety; so that the howl
of the accelerating vehicle passes
like a blade across our bones,
and the drops of actual rain

pelting the windowpane border
on something that can be equal
parts tenderness and sorrow,
or simultaneous regret and

sweet nostalgia. Things live
like this in one and the same
moment, the large sometimes
in the small, the small more

rarely, but brilliantly, filling up
the inside of a room; the chest expanding
with the sudden intake of breath, the cupped
palm curled around a tiny, wavering flame.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

4 Etchings

They made the inch-long incision
at the center, where they stuck a set
of surgical wires like crosshairs,
one on each side of her right breast.
Because they insisted on clarity,
clarity, clarity, one procedure
led to another, and another.

*

We could not tell what he mumbled
into the ear lowered near his mouth:
the attending physician simply put
her clipboard away and bent her head
in silence. Later, his family and friends
were surprised to learn he had no will—
though he had drafted many as a lawyer.

*

In the recipe book, bata las claras
a punto de nieve
means to whisk
egg whites until they form soft peaks

useful when one is attempting to make
a merengue, or a pavlova, upon which
handfuls of fruit might be strewn.
To get it right takes some
practice, some experience.

*

There is a forecast of frost,
and later, pellets of icy rain.
I am thinking it may be a good
day to stay indoors, the shredder
humming at my side, turning drawers
full of documents into so much chaff.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.