omg

oh for this embrace
my listening heart dilates
god breaks me open

oh in love's caught breath
my speaking heart cursing "you"
god leaves me broken





 
 

 

Summer

I saw my father in the summertime only, between age 6 and age 12.  Those Grand Rapids summers felt like a separate timeline, as if the airplane were really a time machine.  My big sister and I would get put into the time machine just after school ended, and two hours later we would find ourselves in a different family with a different mother and little sisters who speak Latvian, in a hot, rudely racist city instead of the politely racist, lily-white boondocks of our schooldays in rural Maine.  I'd pick up right where I left off, as if I'd never left these alternate best friends nine months before: sweet, clever Beverly across Sutton SW with her geeky, curly-haired big brother and her kind, boozy single mom in the stereotypical house dress, and nasty talking Janet on my side of the street with her buzz-cut hooligan brothers and her terrifying (dare I say menacing) evangelical parents.

It was always steamy and sizzling back then, unlike now.  Are summers milder?  Or is it just that back then we cooled ourselves in front of fans, most of us, while talking into the spinning blades in that way that fragments sound, just to amuse ourselves and pass the time.  Janet's family did have a huge air conditioning unit in their living room, the only one in the neighborhood.  But their blinds were always drawn, and neighbor children were rarely allowed to enter the house.  I remember enduring a dim, chilly bible-reading in that cool, dark room one time, the price of admission.  It felt like a funeral parlor, like you could almost see a coffin, and I never went back.  Usually we all met outside, on porches and in the street, where summer is meant to be lived, and I still prefer a living demon humidity to a dead god chill because of my memory of that room.  I still don't like AC. 

Also during those Michigan summers, my sister and I attended the local pool for Red Cross swimming lessons and free pool time after.  Either the water was kept icy, or I was just very susceptible to cold.  Ever the free-range child, I rarely remembered to bring a towel or a change of clothes to the pool.  I would get blue-lips shivering with cold, being what even my friends called a "shrimp," and leave the pool from time to time craving warmth and finding no towel.  So I'd crawl to the nearest dry patch of concrete, immediately plaster my face and body against it, splayed out, cheek and chest and wrist warming to the radiant substance beneath me.  I loved that sensation no end.  I'd close my eyes, soak up the heat, and breathe in that distinct smell of chlorinated water, summer skin and baking concrete.

The poolside warming ritual came back to me in a rush the other day when I smelled that smell.  And I missed her yet again, that girl I was when summers were alternate yet endless.
   
 



 

It's all written down in the book

The caretaker is a warm, nurturing guy who safeguards my interior spaces while I'm gone and warns me away from certain dark subterranean areas when I'm exploring.  Or he might direct me to a certain locker or shelf to retrieve something I need for my travels.  There is always the understanding that he'll water my plants and care for my orphans (a pet or a child) if I'm gone a while, or even if I never return, which is always possible.  He appeared weekly in my dreams last year, less often these days.

The shopkeeper is a very helpful business woman who keeps accurate records of things: she knows the provenance of every item in her shop, and what its value is.  She is young, brunette, buxom and bright, at ease in her role, and literally in charge of gifts.  Her shop is always a gift shop filled with ornate novelties and tiny treasures.  She has helpers, but also many customers.  If things go wrong I can go to her for help, but I'll have to wait my turn like everybody else.
 
I do a lot of sorting in my dreams.  In this morning's dream I'm absent-mindedly sorting unredeemed, highly valuable gift certificates someone gave me for safe-keeping into a carousel of unpurchased gift certificates at the gift shop.  I'm distraught when I realize my fault, and unable to retrieve most of the certificates from the carousel, as other customers have picked them out.  They're gone.  Mother says disappointedly, "How could you not know this was a priority?"  Husband gives the familiar eyeroll of contemptuous judgment about my lack of focus on what's most important.  Father is silently oh so sad I squandered these precious gifts.  

But my shopkeeper, God bless her.  She recognizes my distress and appears by my side.  "These certificates are just pieces of paper" she says warmly.  "They can't be redeemed by anyone but the intended recipient.  If they're lost, just come up to the counter.  It's all written down in the book."  

I burst into tears of grief and relief.  My shopkeeper, she patiently smiles like Glinda telling Dorothy that she's always had the power to return to Kansas.  

Good dream.

 

 





 

Iron

it's industrial
it's in the blood
my deficiency shows

iron woman's the iron maiden
to my eye
my open eye

(yes, like Margaret's fish hook)

it's the stuff of ships and shackles
of pregnancies fortified
red meat, dark greens
stew pots and frying pans

she's tough as nails
hobnails and thumbnails
she's driven, like nine-inch nails into teak
she's driving with muscular thumbs

she's all thumbs and nails really
(I like to think)

my deficiency shows

I'll sleep.
when I'm done.
spitting nails.
 


 

 



 

 




 
 

WYSIWYG

I'm never expecting the crone I see in the selfie mode of my phone camera.  The sagging flesh, the wrinkles, the pouches, the stray eyebrow hairs, the blotches, the frizzy wild hair.  The mirror in my deliberately under-lit bathroom usually compromises while I gaze.  Make me 32.  No, but I'll make you 42, how's that.  

I don't work that hard, mind you.  I'm not applying makeup.

I did the thing where you try different angles with the phone to see if I could see something other than the dreaded crone.

I found a much younger version of myself by putting the camera over my head and aiming down, thereby reducing the visibility of my under-eye pouches while including a view that encompassed my tank top and jeans stretched out in an alluring, 32-year-old manner. 

Then I decided to linger on the ugliest views of my face too, while changing filters.  I spent maybe ten minutes doing this, ending with the crone, in chrome.  

I am what I am.  

Childlike, girlish, nubile, womanly, matronly, wizened, wise.  

Hideous, ugly, unremarkable, cute, beautiful.  



 

Free

Today I'm going to skip through puddles like way back when. 

With this hip, I won't straddle-climb door jambs barefooted to the top. But I'll remember when I was all skinny legs and buck teeth 
making that climb.  
I was every bit that girl, until I wasn't.

Today I'm going to sing about simple gifts, 
puff the magic dragon and the cat came back.  
Her songs.
  
I'll hold this aching close, as ever, but not in the song I sing.
Anyway not today.

I might even make a wish about the woman I'll be, long from now.
After the braces come off.

Now that woman can sing.