ma mere

we took the train from london, under the passage and the islands slid below us.  we took a taxi with two strangers who got out earlier.  we hauled our bags through the small town, breathless from the weight and the history.  we were given a skeleton key in the shadowy corners of a shadowy lane by our hunched and softly determined madame rousseau.  in the mornings she made us café au lait and hot croissants and i stumbled through my humbling french.  we rented bikes and we rode through the rolling vineyards, twisting vines, old stones, the sun was hot on our backs.  the miles stretched before us as the world opened its arms and the sweet air whispered to us of adventures and loneliness and things that bring a secret happiness only you can know.  we bought cheese and bread and sat by a fountain that tinkled and sang so that we smiled at each other with languid ease.  back in the shadows we showered, we dressed, entered the darkening air, swallowed the cool and some wine, a red joy, a burst of white laughter, we sat outside and ate buttery, creamy meat.  above, the stars mustered their strength as ours diminished.

we woke with the warmth, bodies as creaky as our mattresses, and boarded another train.  we sat, read, talked, mused, wound around mountains and sleeping giants, big bowls of trembling turquoise and tables of frothy, steaming green.  here, between the french alps, we were small beasts (small hearts, small hands) in a big, big wild.  we walked for hours, the sky arching its long back to warm itself in the heat of the day. we walked by the lake, our shoulders against a cliff of reaching stone from which hundreds of people jumped, minute after minute.  soaring souls, yawning eyes, their parachutes made rainbows in the blue above.  we walked by drooping poppies and dusty schools, benches and boats and bronzed breasts gleaming in the sultry summer.  a blink and a flutter, our clothes come off and we dash into the waves.  what freedom! what dreams! what we cannot have forever.  our blanket of light water, our memories; full we walk on...to paris, and who can speak of paris without a beleaguered and trite chattering of recycled words? so i will not try.

come take a walk in the pouring rain

this world that i live in is strange and dark red so that sometimes i cannot see.  here i am anyways, unraveled at the stairs, sleeping by a fountain, hold my hand please so that i do not walk away in my sleep.  she called me moonshine and she loved me in the shadows of a river.  she loved me so sweet and so soft and her skin was like honey and milk and she was a child of the sun, the clouds were her best friends.
she said we could flood the street with love or light or heat.., whatever.
she told me to lock the grown-ups out, cut a rug, kiss and scream, leave your legs, make it rain.  she told me the stars will rise again.

grins

today i had lentil soup.  i sat down at a table next to an open door.  i felt the cold air on my right cheek and i smiled and the action hurt my face and i remembered that i need to smile more often and i ate lentil soup.

around me there were three boys, three boys laughing in that bright British way.  crooked teeth, wrinkled eyes, they know how to smile. the soup burnt my tongue and they all had heaping plates of tavuk sis (grilled chicken) and the air was cold and so we all kept our jackets on and ate.  people kept walking by and staring; in kadikoy istanbul, we are the only people who speak english.

to say that this has been easy would be a lie. but to say that it is not a grand adventure would also be a lie. i open my bedroom door and step into a mystery. movement is unknown. down this alley there may be apple tea or there may be mittens; to the right there may be the sea or the straight or a mosque or a musician playing eerie twisting tunes, to the left shisha or corn or a rug or a man with bread on his head. but wherever a turn may take me, i must always remember to smile. a cracked lip, a shining eye, i must always smile.

oranges

Boy, I wonder where you wander (soft steps, heavy breath) when your icy eyes cloud.  To harrowing depths you descend, sinking for a minute, a fevered hour; shadows and phantoms, what woes reside in this world where you hide.  A stranger (masked, horrifying) incubates inside your skull and sometimes you talk to it, let it play with your muscles, tighten in your fingertips until you slip with shuddering vision and the lightest of heads.  It is all secrets and silence down there; it is not real life, but it is where you choose to live.

And how you push.  All I want is your soft skin and the adventure you once let me borrow.  How we used to play, painted faces, starving minds, we smiled so wide for our camera lenses, a filter and a post.  We walked around in starry circles, tickling the night skies, delighting the dewy grasses.  I wanted to know everything and you wanted to tell me; words fell from our cracked lips as quickly as kisses and we gathered them up and wrapped them in wire and saved them for our rainy days, even though there were none.

I kept telling myself to leap like a flame from my window; the earth and the ethers, your face in my head, my beats paired with yours and I could not, I could not leave you.  Perhaps you are just a rough and tumbled soul, a skinny sapient gambling life and death on a plastered, powdered table.  Or perhaps you are the meanness I hoped could not exist, foolish and selfish, you throw it all away for hours of ephemeral pleasure.  Drain it, drink it, if you can't smoke it, snort it; you work your whole life to keep up, you work everyday to keep your thoughts down.

Boy you were the toughest of loves; a darkness one moment, a tulip the next, rash, mercurial, you and I caught laughing and crying and scraping our knees on a see-saw.  And all I wanted was your soft skin, oiled and inked, and to roll around on your cowboy bed (how bohemian, how bold) with itchy noses and languid limbs, and to run through the soupy gloom, fingers interlaced, our insides all fire and all snow.  I wanted you for two short months.  And I suppose I got what I wanted.

vermillion

I was a pale girl with golden ringlets, a nose much too big for my young face; my parents called it Roman, and I called it Rhinoplasty (even youth could not hinder my blossoming cynicism).  I was an odd girl; I saw fairies in the flowers and flying fish in the river that swam past our forest-bond house.  My father wove us tales of talking rabbits and read us stories about long, lunar love.  My mother shoved our naked nates out the back door and told us, concisely, lovingly, not to come back in for three hours.  So we ran through the thickets, tanning our hides, stretching our doe-y limbs.  We jumped in the amber waters, reaching our arms for the sandy, dark depths.  We relished in our timbered, lively freedom, our tender years.

In our hidden palace the windows facing the backyard were sky-high, floor to ceiling stoic, staring portals that glowed during the day (a wonder, a spark) and frightened me in the dark.  I would lie facing them for fear of the unknown; in the still moments just before sleep they sometimes showed me sweet, worldly secrets and slipped me into glistening, fancied dreams.

In my eyes (a burst of butter, a mellow green) there is a beach and a clean horizon.  It is the morning somehow, new and fresh and smelling of opals and oceans.  The beach is Odiorne Point; it is small, a tidy corner of the New Hampshire coast, and if one looks out, they might see a miniature lighthouse on a pile of sepia rocks.  The waves here are colder and smooth and unusually clear.  The sand is powder and the air is a swollen skin, sheathing umbrellas and bones in its viscid, shining sinews.

Everything is light in this world; the waves wink and shine and the trees, branch of tinsel, leaf of gold, rise in a slow, glistering gambol.  A rosy vesper, a drop of sun, I am alone with the blankets and buckets of souls past.  A thought, as weighty as thunder, crawls up my neck: how did I get here?  The long grass whispers behind me, an answer and a push: it is mine, this is my world.

In the blushing luster I step forward.  I taste the salt that rides the atmosphere, I see a crest of water.  Rich foam slides towards my toes and I gather it with cupped hands and it disappears faster than I can remember.  My fingers stick in the aftermath and as I kneel, rubbing them in the sand, particles of mountains, through earthen histories piled lightly, I see a flick of red, a glimmer and a flare - in the corner of my left eye, perhaps a trick.  I draw it into focus and it blinds me.  I crawl towards it, hot knees and hot palms.  Tucked in a pocket of shore, before the flutter of my breath, lies a ruby as big as my heart and as small as alone.

I pick it up with a tightness in my throat and hold it with that tightness in my arms.  I stand and the wind lifts my hair around my face, and in my mouth saline strings meet saliva.  The strand in front of me heats with the movement of the planet, the tides, and undulates from the force of feet gone by; moving through the day I see spots of vermillion all around me on the shore, in the rises, between the divots, like cherries in vanilla ice cream, and I collect them.  My dress sags and smarts with the burden of this riddled treasure that is all my own and I stop at the rocks that barricade the sand from the impending water.  With a start and a smile I throw my jewels, my stolen secrets, precious gems, glowing memories into the steel waves.  A mist, and their mass and they are gone.

The sadness that I feel is like the edge of the afternoon, in the receding light when the shadows hold a long loneliness, a knowledge of something you can never have again; I understand now that this world of sultry chance and friscalating, pellucid ethers is nothing but a mirage, an ocular, nocturnal reverie.  The rays dismay me as I lift my lids, and I look at my father who is shaking me and he tells me, with a twist of his lips and the gleam of an eye, that there is no reason to think that what happens in the darkness, inside your body, between the hours, the atoms and your brain, is not real.  Who says?

Tumult

It is precisely the fighting.  Broken words and broken hearts, you hold someone you knew in you hands and they are dust; dark as resin, nonsense clings to some intangible and immutable truth.  It is the face of something twisted that hides under seething skin.  Red devil, red eyes, you work your tears through.  It is the question, the battle, the bags of hot malice that I drop on the remnants of a conscience, yours and mine, what we think is past tense.

And the present is hurt, a lock in your chest, weights on your waving arms, heaving and retreating, our glinting teeth are sharper now; I will eat your fondness for what was soft has hardened.  And it is impossible, venomous, vindictive... If only we would stop, stop and drag our dripping cassocks into the river, stop and wash in silence.  Please lets be silent.  Please let us stop.

Et Je me suis trompee.  I have made a mistake, let me take the seconds back and let me turn.  And this is what I told you.  That was my mouth, my muscles moving, my face flashing inches away.  This is the hurt that I have caused.  And this is the pain that shows, now in your elbows, now in your soul.

This is what we did together, this is what we made.  This is the hate, quick, lurid, that we built in our bodies?  our bastion, made of stone, made of coal, our touches, once yielding, are rigid.  What you wrapped around me was a fleeting untruth.  This is what we chose to do, and these are the consequences of our impetuous decisions.

But it is over, and what remains?  A void where a picture once hung... between the yellowed wallpaper, where the full pattern, colors still bold, shows, something good is gone; something that cannot be replaced or reconstructed... for nothing fits the woolly, amorphous outline of a complex and  affectionately singular, now damaged, bond.

tupelo

It was all new.  I gave myself to whim and looked down the steps, down the steepest hill, and held my pillow tight, crossed arms, crossed heart.  A haze of midges hangs in the air before the keen, westfalia-bound faces; night is nearing and they gather just over the golden silhouette of exhaust.  Through the flaxen fumes I meet resplendent, radiating Marisha (she has shadows in her eyes) and her lover (he has ice).  We are all in the bus, shining hair, mustard limb... the midges follow our palpitations.

Our arrival brings us neon bracelets and small cups.  We drink from these cups, drink amber liquid in the lilting, April light.  Amidst the cacophony we ripple, hunting cattails, a game of hide and seek.  A wan breeze, the clouds turn to ash, we race through the buttery, black air to our resting places.  A lull, one final hush; we make peace with our bodies.

The sun rises, our honeyed mother, and steams us from sleep.  Enter the day! Quickly ripened, we spin from the earth, our toes just skimming the dust; we are lost among grassy ribs, the curvature of a spine, some faint structure.  A tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, our enemies are our friends, we smile and wheel as petals fall from a tumultuous, bright sky.  This is the tupelo love and no one is left out.