She storms in the kitchen finding bits of things to stop her mouth, wish it could stop the words spilling out. How could so many well-dressed people have their heads so firmly wedged up their
Freezing asses?
Fists should swing toward imaginary foes while the real ones all live among us, work at Walmart, never liked that effing little dog.
Everyday drawn to the water where the white birds fly so low they seem to touch the silk-spun current which wants a body to believe it is blue-constant even though we both know this is just a trick of light, just-reflect-the-sky-vigilance, the clouds, the trees, occasional sun hold still across the surface until the wind kicks up little waves, waves above the deep, deep color of something technically translucent if you were to cup it in your hands, if you could cup it in your hands, if hands could hold the sea.
In the dying light a boy nurtures wild cats, feeding them, watching them, pouring water out for them.
You and I just watch him. As usual your words anchor me, which feels a little unfair for you, seeing that I am the old one. I love your strong voice shared by all the women from your tribe, and just as when you were a little girl I want to call them to assembly, muster them for us, say, see these kids? The ones you have loved all these years? Be there for them, please,
No matter what.
They are out there somewhere still, three, sometimes four, figures and a dog who has long gone, gone past the snake on the path, gone past all the wounds of time, leaving snapshots of a good dog all the while the children howl full wind
They knew no shelter from the start
Miles of lonely nothing
No stones, bread crumbs, or birds to
Guide them back
Home.
She has been a cloud, a curved white wave, a story from a picture, the daughter who won’t answer back, reminder of all I have lost, world is full of daisies, I could find one now, on hands and feet in the night. They are common things, hands and feet in the dark, looking for lost flowers, people we always knew we needed. One million daisies, little flower faces, pushed to rough angles by this lion’s wind, breathing us into impossible life.
First the house is a messy
Then the wife
Gentle tyranny of ordinary things
Compared to cardinal ones, twos, threes
All that can be multiplied, added, subtracted
Divided between us.
I leave the shower curtain on the living room floor and the little boy who does and does not resemble us takes it up, exclaiming, the periodic table! with the remains of his little boy voice.
Later, after forgetting and days of heavy gravity, I lift the curtain and pierce each hole again, arms growing heavy-diagonally, the way trees grow.
Admire the way they have been ordered each in their brightly colored boxes. Iron, gold, carbon, oxygen, and the exotic ones we seem to have conjured to fill up the empty places.
He speaks to us in parables.
When I tell you I found the old mushroom-colored sweatshirt which saw us through thick and thin you will know I am talking about the way the Romans used to have it done, long pole, wad of cloth, vinegar soaked as we raise it to the real hero, his naked pain, the way he eschews ordinary safety for a stretched-to-the-limits agony
I take the brush, add the cleanser, wipe it all down with an uneasy litany
Drab for color
Old for young
Plain for beautiful
Forgotten for remembered
He says
Me for you
Death for life
Life, everlasting.
Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…
In the unassuming kitchen of God
Singing-
someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!
“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-
He talks beauty and parable
All tears wiped away.
Carrying Light 