THE YEAR OF LIGHT

It was a year of light.  The green light of promise and hope, clear blue eyes shining, the eternal flame of spirit, the arced spark of electricity, words growing and glowing on a screen.  The blaze of a mind awake with discovery.  This piercing  winter light reveals everything--including those things that might rather be not seen.

A year of illumination.

It began with my mother.
 

My mother should have died eight years ago.  Recently retired from a fierce commitment to excel as a foreign-woman doctor, she had not yet found which star to follow next.  Out on a bicycle ride with my father, she became unsteady, unbalanced.  I'm sure, as was his constant, he was yelling at her for her ineptitudes.  "What are you doing?  What's wrong with you?  You're an idiot."  "I don't know what's wrong" she said and fell and hit her head.  Hit by a stroke.  After all the years of my father's abuse and aggression, she finally broke.

As she began recovering in the hospital, she was hit again and disappeared into a coma.  Ever vigilant, the hospital put her on life support.  I wish they hadn't.  She would not have wanted it.

I rented a car and drove nonstop 24 hours to Chicago to say goodbye.  There was no hope for her other than "vegetable state."  Her hand wandered constantly to the mask that was covering her mouth & forcing her to breathe.  "I don't want this" she was showing us.  We had the  breathing apparatus removed.  She took up her own breath, sighing deeply.

My father had a dream that night where she came to him pale & naked and desiring his passion.  In his dream as in life, he denied her.  The dream had completely terrorized him. My unyielding father  broke down weeping before me.  He wept that she had begged for more affection from him but he always rejected her.  He wept that she would always do things for him--fold his pajamas just so, hand-weed the grass so thoroughly and he would never acknowledge her kind efforts.  He was jealous because of her achievements.  She was the better wage earner.

She spent her life pleading to and pleasing a locked door.

Asshole.

He swore now that he would do anything to make it up to her.

It was her birthday .   I left her hospital room momentarily.  Returning, I heard my father singing "Daudz baltu dieninu" (Happy birthday) to her, his voice breaking with tears.  As I walked in I saw that my mother's eyes were open.  She smiled at me--a sweet, crooked smile because the right side of her face was paralyzed.  That smile tore my heart apart.  She was returning for the promise of love fulfilled.

Her eyes open, her hand resumed a wandering, this time raising halfheartedly up in a "now what?" gesture.  Her dark eyes so sad.  When her eyes closed again, seemingly forever, we lost hope completely and agreed to allow her to starve to death.  There is no other way to help the undead die

She lived.  She left the hospital in a wheelchair, my father her sole caretaker.  He could not tolerate anyone else's assistance, driving therapists and caretakers away with his poisonous belligerence.  Except for the one who ensnared his heart with flirtatious promises in order to get to the money jangling in his pocket.  She is my age.  She has become the good daughter/sex object.  (There was always a sense of something twisted in my father.  Growing up, I instinctively hid my sexuality from him, bundling up my robe high so he wouldn't see my skin, the budding breasts.)  My mother wailed & stared at her immobile hand, trying to will her young self from it.

My father took my mother to Latvia last month, left her with Maruta, and returned to America to have reconstructive hip surgery.

I don't know how to feel.  Sad of course.  Sick.  Angry.  My mother is unreachable (she cannot read or talk on the phone) in the home of the woman that would take her husband away.  She plays checkers with the harlot's son.

She should be playing with my son.  My sister's daughter.

I think of writing a letter to her, but I don't know what to write.  So instead I  write a letter that I will never send.

Mila mamma,

There you are, inconceivably far.  I cannot communicate with you other than what I still sense of you.  I sense sadness.  The plodding of the days.  The incredible burden of the minutes, the hours.  You wait for the end.  In your life of trials you have conquered them all.  This is your greatest trial of all:  waiting for elusive death.

It sickens me that you are left with Maruta.  It infuriates me that daddy could not have at the very least told me what he was doing.

Far away, in a stranger's home you wait.  That is all that is left to do.  Wait the minutes, hours, days, decades until your hand does not rise again.  I desperately wish death for you.  Death & peace.  To lose the burden of hopelessness.

I wish the hospital had not intervened.  I wish I could share something of my life and you could see your remarkable grandson.  He misses you deeply.

Still, I don't know what or how I feel.  An unbelievable reality.  Life's funny that way, isn't it?  Especially in our family.

Family.  My mother.  You gave me life and raised me as best you could under the poisonous breath of my father whom you loved and still love more than your pride.  It is the promise of love fulfilled that keeps you here.  O

I speak to you in dreams where you come to me.  I do not know if I want to see you because daddy has allowed you to become fat & ugly.  The dumpy old woman that you desperately fought off with self-medications of massive hormones and whatever else the medical journals promised as fonts of youth.  Your breasts are huge & hang to your waist.  Father has long abandoned containing them in a bra.  Your hair is shabby grey & plainly cut, not the black curls that you would choose.  Your face is swollen and plain.  No lipstick, no dark brows.  A plain, fat, old woman in a wheelchair.  I don't want to see this.

I want to hold on to the beautiful, proud woman which you hold inside.  The woman you seek in your immobile right hand--willing it to revive and thus resurrect her.  To keep her immortal for you.  This is what I can do for you, mamma.

I have not forgotten you.  I just don't know what else to do.

Women are the ocean.  The rising of the salt water of our bodies in concert with the moon.  Menses.  It is something we are ashamed of.  The stain of it.

 I have stained countless beds.  Countless pairs of underwear & jeans.  I have a heavy flow.  Sometimes it seems that I will lose most of my blood through the copious flow.  It has been crippling almost.  Like the time my son & I were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I was running to the bathroom every 10 minutes trying to stem the unbelievable flow as I tried to allow my son some kind of exploration of the museum.  How can you explain the burden to an 11 year old?  Tolerant but angry that I was ruining his day.  I stained my shorts & pulled my gratefully long T-shirt far down hoping to cover the dark spot spreading between my legs.  Embarrassed.  Humiliated.

Waking up in the morning  to find--oh no not again--the sheets are blood red.  Dousing it all quickly with cold water to keep the stain from setting.

I remember taking apart one of my sister's menstrual pads when I was young.  I found it in a plain box in her closet.  I carefully unwrapped each layer like a present to find the smooth blue plastic sheet in the center like a toffee.  I was so immune to the excitement of new experience because my sister had always been there first.  When I first bled, I called my friend:  I've started my period.  Oh.  There it is.  Little did I recognize the beginning of a long burden.  An enduring handicap.

I remember too asking my doctor mother to explain what happened during menstruation because then, we were not taught such things in school.  We were left to stumble through our bodies cryptic changes as best as we could and tried to be casual about it.  My mother scribbled a diagram with her ball point pen:  the uterus--the fallopian tubes, describing the journey of that small, pale egg traversing  the distance to the awaiting rich, lush bed of the uterus lining; the passing of the infertile egg.  I think she was somewhat embarrassed, but pleased that she could address it impersonally and clinically with her professional skills.  We were not a very personal family.   She warned me not to use tampons.  She did not describe the emotional flux, the physical discomfort.

The passing of the blood is a signature of failure.

I become a ripening fruit as my menses approach.  My breasts swollen to bursting, heavy & sore.  My uterus an aching pear.  Waiting for the dam to burst.  I have made love often during  my  menses.  It is messy, but honest.  Earthy.

The blood is a beautiful thing.  A liquid wave of undulating red.  Were our culture otherwise, it would be a thing of pride, not shame.  We would sign our names in our blood.

Each month I bleed yet remain unwounded.  I am supernatural.

I wake late.  Looking out the window I am surprised to see the ground wet, drops dripping from the roof.  It rained during the night without my knowing.  Moist, warm, lush.  Spring is much too early this year--the redbuds blooming last week, now the mountain laurels.  I welcome the warmth.  I fear a late freeze to turn these fragile green buds to a crisp brown.

The doves have been calling for mates.  A patient, persistent lot "who cooks for you?"  They gather in great coveys at the feeders, suddenly flushing with a loud clapping of wings at the rustle of the wind perhaps, or the black-devil cat or often the hawks which have taken urban residence.  "Here, to me, here to me."  Bold, red cardinal faithfully offers his subtle brown mate tasty bits of sunflower seed.  Time to nest.  My sweetheart.

There are flies buzzing at the windows.  I have no idea of where they come from.  They seem to be hatching in batches.  What could be the home for their writhing larvae?  What moist spot in this dusty old house?  At night they swarm at the electric lights.  One by one they drown or are eaten by the cats & dog.  Some are fortunate & escape out the door.  I let them out whenever possible.  I have come to the point where the only things I can willingly kill are mosquitoes and roaches.  And certain prolific non-native weeds.  False mallow mostly.  And burrs.

Each spring there are new mystery plants that rise up and challenge me to identify them.  This year there is a round leaf with scalloped edges herb as well as a variegated--almost striped--dandelion-like plant.  From these mystery plants have developed the redbud, mountain laurel, bois d'arc, pomegranates, cedar elms, forget-me-nots, asters, chile pequins, red cedar, peach trees, others I am still not sure of.  It is a passive benevolence that has borne many pleasures.  By leaving nature alone for the most part & only offering a guiding hand, my yard has developed into what to me is a daily miracle & offering delightful surprises.  Mushrooms spring up when it is moist, long red smelly phalluses, wavy orange ones.  Butterflies, insects, wriggling lizards.  A prolific bevy of creatures & life.  How unfortunate that we humans and our hubris still manage to outdo this fertile genesis.

It will be good when there are fewer of us. To quietly diminish like flies, pests that we can be.   Or when we finally acknowledge that we must live in concert with our environment.  If not, our arrogance will erase all that we rely on.

Spring.  Healing from the winter's sterile sweep.  Hopeful spring.

Cycles in circles.  Infinite.  Elastic.  Intimate.

What a fortunate existence.

Eyes open.

I was sick this last week.  Unable to be vertical for more than minutes at a time.  The mind was lucid enough, but the body was weak.  Ordinarily being a very strong woman, this was hard to stomach.  Literally.  It makes me feel old, this being sick.  Mostly in the eyes.  I can feel dry, puffy sacs drooping down from my eye cavities.  I am having a hard time accepting my age as well.  Yesterday, I wore the tight, red "Cooper's Real Ale" t-shirt that I wore frequently on stage some 20 years ago when I was deliciously seductive as I rattled the tambourines.  Looking at myself now in the mirror with my drooping eyes, I see a creased, older woman trying to be what she is no longer.  I haven't yet learned how to dress my age.  I can't afford it.

Being sick so rarely, I fear elder age when it may become a daily battle to feel somewhat healthy.  Even now I disregard the stiffness in my legs in the mornings.  It can be cripplingly painful some days.  I say "it will pass with time" and fortunately for now it does.

I don't want to live in a non-functioning body.  Then again a few minor repairs might make it fit to go for decades more.  Like the capillary hemangiona on Z's neck.  An alien beast that protruded from his skin like a gruesome egg preparing to hatch.  One skilled slice from Dr. Grant's graceful hand, the sizzle of cauterization (burning flesh with smoke), three stitches and the threatening specter was conquered.  Nothing to it.  After months of procrastination and hesitation.

Sick like the tom-cat that I drove away from the yard yesterday.  His rheumy, yellow eyes bespoke of some inner disease that could not be cured.  That could spread & multiply to my healthy felines.  He seemed dumb with his disease:  despite my display of threats & aggression he still meowed hopefully at me.  Feral felines.  They are a disease unto themselves.  Thanks to the human hand that abandoned the creature that comes of a stock entirely integrated to coexist with our species.  Domesticated.  Feral domestics.  Perhaps as we run out of resources, humans will also run feral.  Some already do.  Or nearly so.

Sick.  Out of kilter.  My body still isn't settled, but I can force it into functioning as if all were well.  We still have these salvias to plant, these seeds to scatter.  Even the most lopsided plant can send out its hopeful flower.  So let there issue forth from this creased, softer body something that resembles a bloom.  O let there come a bright  butterfly to dip into its nectar.

The phone rang.  Jumping from bed, I looked at the clock.  7 am.  I groaned "not again" thinking it was my son with another morning emergency, imagining "my bike is broken can you come get me?"  Instead, picking up the phone I hear "Hello, Ingrid?  This is someone from your past.  Someone you housed and fed. "  There were people laughing in the background.  "This is Sharon."  O my.  We were roommates 25 years ago.  We parted on bad terms.  "I'm at the Embassy Suites.  I haven't  checked in yet."  If I was awake, I might have picked up on the implied message.  Instead I told her she was quite close to my house, walking distance even ("I'll be there in a half hour.") but I needed my sleep.  It was my day off.  Call me back in a couple of hours.  I figured she could check in and go to her meetings or whatever it was she was doing in Austin.

I hurried through the morning, painfully ashamed of my poverty, my shabby home, washing dishes, making some order of my son's messes.  Sharon called again late in the morning.  She was now near the interstate on a street with a similar name to mine.  Her map of Austin did not show my street.  I understood that she had no plans and nothing to do and wanted to get together as soon as possible.  She said she was "traveling."  I imagined her in an old car, cell phone & map in hand, wandering the country.  I gave her directions to my house.

I took the dog for a walk, leaving a note on the door, half expecting to see her drive by in her car.  She still hadn't arrived when I returned.  Finally, the phone rang.  She was now within blocks of my home, and still couldn't find my street.  There was a woman with her, walking, who was going to show her the way.  They both sounded confused.  I explained the very simple directions and waited.

She was on foot.  At my door.  Black-felt, round-brimmed hat, black cowl over her head, sunglasses, dark, heavy winter clothes.  She was quite hot & I gave her water "with ice?"  Yes.  She removed her hat & cowl.  "I haven't washed my hair in 24 hours."  The dog sniffed at her crotch--she pushed him away.  So what exactly are you doing?  What brings you here?  How are you traveling?  "However I can.  By truck.  I was at Mardi Gras.  Can you imagine?"  She was hitchhiking .  I told her that could be very dangerous.  Suddenly I could see her in some very unpleasant situations.  I could imagine she had been taken advantage of sexually or at least harassed often.  "I'm taking a break from my roommates.  You could call it a mid-life crisis, I suppose."  She had only the clothes on her back and a handbag.  “I'm traveling very light.”

I tried to understand what she had been doing in her life.  She had been married and divorced.  She had been volunteering at the Field Museum's Native American collection since 1987.  Volunteering?  But there's no income?  I could not determine what she was living on.  Perhaps alimony?  She would not say.  I told her how  I was always straddling 0 financially, how little money I had.  I'm getting a little tired of it, you know?  Perhaps once I paid off my debts things would get a little easier.

"Are you a soda drinker?" No, not really.  "Iced tea?"  No-o.  "What do you drink?"  Um, juice, though I don't have any right now, coffee...  "Coffee would be fine."  "Do you have a sheet I can put over me so I can take off these hot clothes?"  A sheet?  I have a robe you can wear.  I brought her the robe.  She went into the bathroom to change and I started the coffee.

She turned on the shower taps.  You could have asked. This was no ordinary shower.  It was endless.  The water kept running and running.  Water costs money you know.  I was getting angry.  What am I to do?  Sit here and wait for you?  I went outside to saw the dead branches from the chinaberry tree.  One branch was very hard to cut. I took an axe to it.  Hacking and sawing, hacking and sawing.  Finally it snapped.  She was still in the shower.  I was angry.  I heard the wild cries of geese.  Looking up, I held my hand up before me to block the sun.  The geese were clustered in a confused group; not the usual determined "V" pointing north.  I went inside to read and wait.

Finally, Sharon finished.  She padded around with her round, bare feet and puffy ankles, in my robe.  I remembered this image from when we were roommates.  It was not an image that evoked good feelings.  I read my book or at least pretended to.  I tried to make sense of how I felt:   used and uncomfortable.  I understood now her initial words to me:  I was someone who had housed and fed her.  I had no money to feed her,  She would want to spend the night.  I did not want this.  Was this selfish?  Was this ungiving?  She had been a friend after all.  I have a son to care for.  You come unbidden.  You take without asking.  I do not owe you anything. "Sharon, I'm not sure what to do.  You seem to be in need and I can't help you."

 I sat and read as she puttered around.  As if she lived here.  Holding her bundle of clothes, she said "washer?"  Reluctantly, I drawled out a suspended "ye-ess."

"Do you still smoke?"  No I quit a long time ago.  (No, no free cigarettes from me.)  She went outside to smoke "with my blue cup" of coffee I gave her.  It was black.  I had no sugar or cream.  Uncommon luxuries.

What would I do were I in her place?  Not this.  I would ask.  I would use little.  She had used generous amounts of whatever was in the bathroom:  soaps, shampoos, my son's wash cloth.  She left the soap bar soggy in the shower.  These common things come to me so dearly, so carefully rationed.  This soap is a luxury sparingly used.  There were large amounts of black hair in the drain along with one of my new razors.  I was angry.  Was I being petty?  She did not ask.

She kept asking about my “husband.”  "So how did you meet your husband?  Were you both students?"  No, through music.  We were both musicians.  I  really don't think of him as my husband.  It was such a long time ago.  He really doesn't mean much in my life now.  It seemed like her marriage was the only event of significance in her life.

She busied herself in the other room on the blood and cat stained futon that was waiting for bulky trash pickup day.  I  imagined that she wanted to sleep there.     She clipped her nails with my son's manicure set.  She painted them with my nail polish.  I put her clothes in the dryer and went back to reading.

As she wandered about looking at my son's art work I finally said "Sharon, I'm sorry to be so blunt, but when your clothes are dry, I need to ask you to leave."  OK.  As if she was expecting it.    She sat on the couch putting on her make up.  Again I was reminded of those 25 years past.  I brought out her clothes in a basket.  "Are they dry already?"  Not soon enough.  She dressed, cowl and all.  Her clothes were very nice.  She had some sort of official-looking identification tag dangling around her neck.  I told her "I wish circumstances were different."  Yes, I know.

My son arrived just as she was getting up to leave.  "This is Sharon.  We went to high school together."  She stretched out her hand to him in a limp, elegant gesture.  He was busy with the dog who was jumping all over him.  She kept her hand extended until he finally shook it.  I gave her directions downtown.  She walked away.

Perhaps she was running from something, a crime, an institution, a bad partner.  What else would explain traveling with only the clothes on her back?  It suggests a sudden departure, an escape.

"Man she was weird" my son said.  Yes.  I was hit with a recognition of how much I had changed from that time.  How willing to be used I had been.  How little skill I had had in judging.  I knew little about good friendships.  How had we become friends?  She was in need.  She had a bad home life:  alcoholic parents I think.  Possible sexual abuse.  Mother-hen-I offered to share my apartment to give her escape.  Tiny apartment: we slept in the same room.  When her boyfriend came to visit, they went into the closet to have sex.

My son asked me:  "Did she say 'thank you'?"  I realized:  no she had not.  It was  not so much in the taking as in the lack of please and thank you.

Gene Ramey had a bad-boy glimmer in his eyes, a lopsided smirk in his smile.  He liked making trouble and got in trouble often.  He had flunked a couple of grades--probably should have been in eighth grade, not fifth.  He was tall & thin with long, dark hair flopping into his eyes.  Older.  None of the baby-fat softness of boys my age.

I was madly in love with Gene.  It must have been the scent of danger on him.  Plus that grin and the flash of blue eyes as he looked away with the promise of something I didn't know about yet.

I knew he lived in one of the apartment buildings on Foster Avenue and would longingly seek for a glimpse of him as I passed by riding the bus to my violin lesson.  I would dress to please him--wearing mini mini jumpers and black tights.

One day, during recess, he beckoned me behind the fieldhouse where we weren't supposed to go.  "Got something to show you."  I eagerly followed.  He pulled out something from inside his jacket.  It was a calendar.  He opened it & showed me.  Black & white photographs of glossy,  nude women posing for the camera, for the men who would fawn over them.  Pouty, round.  I had never seen anything like them and was eager to see them all.  We both leaned our heads together holding the calendar as Gene turned the pages.  Suddenly, he pulled the images away.  I protested "wait!" as he tore the photographs into small, shiny bits that fluttered away over the blacktop with the breeze.

Behind the fieldhouse

   "Got something to show you"
     From the slit mouth
       On the pizza-face
         Delinquent

   Round-cheeked
     Pixie hair
       (One side behind the ear)
   Ten year old
   Is in love
     And strains to see

   Black-&-white glossies
     On cheap calendar paper
       a hole punched through the top for hanging in garage back-rooms.

   Flesh
     Dangling, contorted
       Smooth & naked
         Seated among studio floral arrangements

   January in ivory whiteness
     White pears
       "I'd like to grow white pears."
   February flaunts her grey rippled surfaces
     Streak of sunlight on gloss
       Bars the view.
   "More -- please more
       Want to see so I can be"

   Suddenly gone from view
     In the experienced hands
   Ripping the smoothness
     To shreds of disgust

   Small squares of
     Confetti-nudes
   Flutter & limp
     on the
   Hobbled school pavement

   Displaying their bits & pieces
     of sallow flesh
   In a wind parade
     (1974)

Cool spring.  The young squirrels have found this to be delightful weather and have been cavorting since the crack of dawn--thundering over the roof and squealing in the trees.  Since dawn too, my dog has been racing back & forth in his room, toenails clicking, and exploding in sharp, single barks.  He can't help it.  He's part Terrier, driven by instinct to hunt & devour furry, squeaking things.  His hot-breath excitement knows no boundary, no stern reprimand.  I am not a morning person.  I am not in a good mood.

Somewhere before this though, I dreamt.  As always, it was a dream of many things but  most prominent was the presence of my paternal grandmother.  Vecamate.  Old mother.

She and my grandfather were the first of the family to come to America.  They came from war-violated Latvia to Blanchardville, Wisconsin through a Lutheran outreach program.  Helena Lauva.  Helen Lion.  They worked hard at Ben Watrud's farm.  My grandfather was crushed by a tractor that flipped over when he was driving up a hill.   Helena went to live with her son, my father, in a Chicago apartment.

My mother didn't like her very much.  She was somewhat contemptuous of her simple farm-nature.  Helena was argumentative, strong-willed, somewhat compulsive.  My father argued with her endlessly and derisively.  His maw spewing.   She found housing elsewhere and floated from place to place over the years.

We would visit her in her last low-rent apartment between Broadway & the lake.  She insisted on cooking us meals of bloody, twisting blutwurst and other awful, greasy things. There were slimy smears on the drinking glasses and roaches in the tiny closet kitchen.  All the while, my father yelling, my mother laughing openly at her.  I did love her rolls, though.  They had an extra buttery dip in the center filled with caraway seeds.   Sometimes I was allowed to sip a shot of Jaegermeister.  Or caraway liquor.

My grandmother had little in her life but for the priests at her church.  She spoke of them lovingly and perhaps even longingly, thumbing her well-worn bible.  When my father brought her a television, she watched it constantly.  She believed the people on the television could hear her and would hold conversations with them though she had only a rudimentary command of English.  She said hard candy was good for her stomach.  She was quite fat.  She smelled of cheap perfume and Coty Spun Powder.  Her lips were red when she went to church.

I visited her once at the nursing home.  A grey, cold place.  Uneven, linoleum floor rippling past the shiny silver of the chair legs, walkers and wheelchairs.  She was not happy there.

When she got cancer, she thought  it was a creature eating her up from the inside.  "Vezis."   Crab, lobster, crayfish.

She died in 1980.  I was too young & self-involved to be sad.  But I have thought of her since then.

In the dream she was still & peaceful.  Entering the garden, she sat down at a table.  I sat across from her.  There was a blossoming bush of delicate cherry-like blossoms crowding her chair and pressing against her.  "Cik labi smarzo!"  How good it smells!  Yes.  I hadn't noticed.  I felt comforted by her quiet presence.  I was glad to have had a chance to visit with her again & find her accepted, at peace and at home.

At last.

Images.  Of your mouth close to my ear, warm breath drawing in my scent--my hair brushing your cheek--  My head thrown back--your lips pressed to the point of my chin--of your lips pressed to my throat--

You enter the room as I knew you would.  I try to be casual.  As we pretend to go about our business there is an electrical vibration that continues to escalate.  A silent buzz in the hidden parts of the brain that builds to a roaring cacophony.  It is difficult maintaining lucidity, but human etiquette demands that we do.  The animal in us, though, would have long since been snuffling and growling and rutting.

I hardly know you.

I look at your hands.  I like them better than last time.  I talk somewhat logically but am forgetting things.  I pretend to keep busy as do you.  Are you looking at me?  I hardly know it, but my body does.  Our forward, human brains can make no sense of it, but the beast at the base of the skull knows exactly what to do.  What a conflict.

I submit to the beast and put away my busy things.  I finally recognize & acknowledge what the primal brain has been buzzing about.  I open my body to you.  "I could spend all day here."  I make sure you know my name.

It is time for you to go.  You must hurry or will be late.  I think of offering you my hand but instead turn to keep both hands busy again.  As you rush through the door, confused, you reach out and rub my back in a friendly gesture.

In the silence remaining in your wake, we continue to vibrate.

Until next time.

Budlong Elementary was eight blocks from my home in Chicago.  I would walk to school and back down Foster Avenue every day in all kinds of weather experiencing all kinds of things for 9 years. The year I made a olive-green blanket poncho in Girl Guides and used it as my only coat, I also had a pair of sneakers that had a hole in both big toes.  I wore the sneakers without socks.  I wore them walking through 16 blocks of ice and snow.

I was still quite young but beginning to bud.  Following the fashions of the day, I was fond of short, short jumpers.  As I walked along the fence of Chapin Hall, the foster home, a man came running up, squatted down behind me and reached his hand up my leg to touch my underwear then ran very quickly away again.   I laughed.  I'm not quite sure why.  Perhaps because it seemed like such a pointless action.  Even then.

Viola lived at Chapin Hall.  She had big bug eyes and stringy blonde hair.  We would often meet at the corner of Foster & California where cheery men would sell bags of peanuts or red poppies for their causes.  Later as an adult I bought an upright piano that was in abysmal condition from Chapin Hall.  It had gum stuck to the underside of the keyboard.  I lived in  an apartment in Evanston on the top floor and enjoyed witnessing the delivery men struggle up the three floors.  I repaid my sister's paramour for the repair & tuning of it.  I left the piano behind when I moved.

One day, walking along Albany Park I looked towards the curb of the street and saw a carcass with flies.  Perversely curious, I went closer.  It was an orange cat that had been hit by a car.  Its red, red intestines had spilled out of its split gut and stank repulsively.  I was horrified.  It was my first encounter with death.  I have never forgotten it.

David Margolis was a neighbor two houses down.  He lived in one of few apartment buildings on Troy Street.  My mother wouldn't let me play with him.  She thought he was beneath us.  But we would walk home from school together.  We would stop at the bridge over the north branch of the Chicago River and lean over the cement wall.  There were large goldfish living in the river.  We figured they had been flushed down toilets.  They were approaching the size of carp.  We would spit into the river, leaning as far as we dared over the wall.  The goldfish would eat our spit.

Carp.  That I remember too, in the lake.  Floating, dead at the side of the walkway, Belmont Harbor perhaps.  And watching the boats emerge from under the bridge.  With my father when I thought he was a good father.  When we would roll down the hill at Foster Beach--or sled down in the winter.  When he would swing us giddily screaming through the air when he came home from work.  The first twinge that he was not a good father came when we would ride our bicycles to the lake.  He would ride first and I often struggled to keep up.  He never looked back.  Even the time the light turned red & I was left to wait while he steadily pedaled ahead.  I thought I would be lost.  He never looked back.

For a little while there were two brothers who lived in the apartments who would terrorize me on the walk home from Budlong.  They would wait in ambush in the park.  I would try to take the long way around but they always found me.  They would be hidden behind some bush and came rushing out at me as I ran to escape.  It was not so much what they did to me as the intent that I remember.  What had I done to them?  Why did they target only me?

Almost home, I  would walk behind the gas station.  Despite the sea of cement there would be plants to look at.  Flowers growing between the cracks.  Turning on to Albany.  Once a woman told me "Happy New Year!" on my birthday in September.  I understood later it was Yom Kippur.

The alleys then and the quiet of the empty lot behind our house.  The white wooden fence next to the river where I later dumped my sister's empty wine bottles.  Descending the steps to the back door in the basement.  Musty, wet smell.  A place for isopods.  Once I had forgotten my key.  I stood in the stairwell crying.

We walk down the hill to the park, side by side.  In the park, you stretch your arm around me, I--mine around your waist.  Our strides differ and we walk in an uneven rhythm--I am used to energetically crunching the gravel when I go running.  I slow my pace--trying to match my stride to yours.  And gradually we walk in an even, smooth grace.

It is a coming into knowing.  A knowing that is deeper than human language.  Pace to pace.  Spirit to spirit.  Body to body.  A little faltering at first.  A little uncertainty.  When you grasp me to you, I stumble  but as our bodies know each other, I am held firm, strong & sure.  Trusting all that I have already known.

No longer You & I.

We are.

We will never forget these three days.  The thunder & rain now confirm it.

I miss you

Already

Oh yes

oh

Very young-I  holds images of summer days at a lake in Wisconsin.  Lake Geneva perhaps or Wandawege (we called it Vandavega).  There were leaches in the water...we would run screaming from the lake tugging at this limp, large worm that would not release its clutch on the warm blood pulsing in our legs.  My mother & sister are there.  Other friends of the family and their sons & daughters.  Latvians.  My best friend Renate Dundurs.

I went fishing with a boy, or rather I watched him fish because he was the only one with a rod.  We stood on the weedy bank--the shorewaters waving with grasses.  There were frogs swimming through the tangled blades.  One had somehow lost hold of its intestines:  as it swam, its entrails trailed behind--strings of grey & black & white dragging along with each kick.  The boy caught a fish, a small fish.  Unable to remove the hook, he smashed the fish's head with a rock until the hook came out.  I didn't fish with him anymore.

There was a piano inside.  We little girls who had already begun piano lessons would pound out the eternal "Heart & Soul,"  "Chopsticks" and the black key knuckle dance.  An older girl, American (she must have been a hired helper for the facilities), blonde, wistful like an actress in the movies,  played & sang "Moon River."  She must have been in love.  We stood around her sighing for what our hearts could only imagine and hope for when we too would be moved by the moon.  For when we too would know of the rare thing that has no name nor words to express it.  I wonder if among those little girls I am the only one who has ever known it.

None of us are complete

I work with a large window stretched before me.  I busily type and prod and delete and edit the records that inadequately summarize and catalogue books--books of passion, wisdom, their authors blindly devoted & driven by their purpose.  For a time, I could see the far side of glorious sunsets through the open expanse before me--billowing clouds reflecting the brilliant pastels then the smoldering oranges and reds of the sun that I could not see.  Sometimes too the violet crown which hugs the horizon at dusk.  Or the gathering mountains of anvil clouds of a monumental thunderstorm.  The view, the sky has kept me from tedium.

Recently,  the tree outside has grown large and filters my view.  Funny:  for all my knowledge of trees, I have no idea what this tree is.  Perhaps a member of the olive family.  Now I watch the flashes of birds in the branches.  It attracts many kinds--travelers.  Yellow warblers, shy migrating sparrows, jays and their antics, sweet finches, busy wrens.  I listen to the music of their calls and try to remember for next year when they travel through again.

Because of the tree, I must seek the sunset elsewhere.  In the summer, the library closes early on Saturdays and I quietly step through the darkened building, climbing the stairs to the second floor.  The rows of books muffle sound.  They emit deep memories, heavy in the air.  I enter the aisle facing west between the bookshelves.  It is afire with a deep, glowing red of the setting sun's rays.  I walk in this fire, nearing the west windows...feeling myself glow and absorbing the energy.  The air system causes the building to  vibrate & hum.  I pull up the window's blind and curl into the carrel there.  I open my body to  the huge red orb of fire and quietly, quietly am immeasurably moved by its slow embering, melting into the horizon.  I remain still there for a long time afterwards in the humming/thrumming of the building.

Some things, most things are easy to talk about for me.  But I have not been able to speak to anyone about what I witnessed on Memorial Day and have held on to it all week to begin the slow unraveling.  After all, when asked "how are you?" you can't answer "I witnessed a drowning yesterday."

A hot , lazy day.  Z & I wend our way out to Buescher State Park.  The "lost pines" are there--acres of pines isolated from their natural environs to the east.  I leave Z on the steep, sandy bank of the lake to fish.  I go hiking with Archer.  Archer is excited--he always is when we travel by car.  No matter where we end up:  a parking lot, a fast food joint--he thinks its the most exciting place he has ever been to in his doggy life.  Archer also longs for unity in our pack of dogs so he is straining against the leash to turn back and recover Z.  The pavement is hot.  Out of the corner of my eye I see two scissortail flycatchers fighting, their long elegant tails at awkward angles.  One has a pinkish belly.

I pull Archer onto the sandy trail, the silent, cool pines all around.  Oh I love the silence of pines and the birds I do not know that sing within them.  Archer is panting heavily.  When we reach a fallen log to sit on I give him water but he is too excited to drink much.  The trail opens to a straight stretch of a pipeline clearing.  It is bursting with wildflowers:  coreopsis, Mexican hat, galliardia, eryngo, greenthread, and tall grasses.  It is hot, the sun hot, sweating.  I aim for the top of the hill where the path turns into the shady pines again.  Archer pulls at the leash, whining.  "No"  I tell him.  "You can't go get your boy."  Suddenly, he drops to the earth in a cool, shaded spot.  He is cooling his body.  I stupidly realize that he is overheated.  That I need to stop.   I sit down on the sand next to him, give him water, pour water on his hot little head and wait.  There will be no further exploring today.

As he pants heavily, I look around.  At the fields of flowers, the sky, the clouds, the empty, sandy path stretching above & below us.  A movement of red catches my eye.  A grasshopper, walking slowly.  Its inner back thigh is a brilliant salmon red that only flashes occasionally.  It approaches another grasshopper, they engage in a mute, mechanical discussion then turn away.  All is still except for the hot panting.

We rise to return.  Back down the hill, back through the pines...I long to press my nose to their bark and smell butterscotch but these pines are not like the Ponderosas to the north west.  These pines have a dull, dry bark that yields little when embraced.  Back along the pavement, the scissortails are gone.  Back to Z.  Archer feels fulfilled and I urge him to swim.

Z fishing.  "I almost caught one."  Happy, patient.  The sun, hot.  There is a man fishing on the other side of the lake.  He is up to his neck in the water, stretched back, a dark cap on his head.  "What a fine way to fish" I think.  He casts the line, reels it back in, casts the line, brings it back in.  His friend on the shore says:  "Time for a cigarette break, huh?"  The man in the water does not respond.  He is lost in his own Nirvana.

I lie back on the bench and watch the clouds in the blue sky.  There is a circle of haze around the sun.  The clouds billow and gather and then draw apart.  The air is heavy with moisture but there will be no rain today.  I am at peace and lost in thought.

My mind wakens with a slow awareness that I have been repeatedly hearing "Ricky!  Are you OK?" every few minutes.  I look out to the lake.  The lake is still.  There is no one in the lake.  The man in the water is gone.  Then, suddenly, a burbling rising of the dark hat, a face.  "Ricky!  Are you OK?"  The man has not raised his head far enough out of the water to hear or respond.  He slips back under.  I realize that he must have weighed himself down somehow to be able to fish in the water.  Rocks in his pockets perhaps.  Heavy boots perhaps.  His friend begins to panic.  The water remains still, still.  The friend borrows a half-inflated boat to paddle out into the lake.  He must not know how to swim.  He reaches the spot where his friend last appeared.  He is silent...then a few  minutes later he quietly begins moaning "No....No..." his voice heavy with anguish.  Valiant men arrive who launch into the water.  EMS.  The park police.  They organize.  They develop a systematic method for finding the man.  "The water is only about two feet deeper than my head, so if we form a line and move together we should find him."   "Hold on to the rope."

The man has been underwater for a long time now.  How long is it before there is no hope of returning?  Of sparking the heart to its relentless rhythm again?  My mind's eye sees him moving with the motion of the water.  He has breathed water.  He is with the fishes now.  A part of another watery world.

"Pull the rope!"  "Pull the rope!"  They have found him.  He streaks through the water to the shore, a swift, silvery  bass reeled in.  The EMS place him on the stretcher.  They hover around but there is little activity.  Then they cover him.  The friend stumbles and weeps, hands reaching toward his face in anguish.

I have witnessed a drowning.

A duck in the lake quacks noisily.  As if to say "how many of our kind have you slaughtered without missing a heart beat?  You are the same...you are the same."

Love.

I have had the word "love" pointed at me like a mark of possession, a weapon, a threat, a challenge . . . an accusation.  As a force to bind me.  As a reminder of my duty.  "Love you"--a demand for reciprocation, a mark of ownership.

It is no wonder then, that there are women who live their lives alone, chosen or otherwise.

In times that were even leaner than these, I would have to wheel our dirty clothes to the dirty laundromat.  On cold, winter days, the laundromat would house many transients taking warmth where they could find it.  Mary sat huddled on one of the pink, plastic seats, a blanket drawn over her head.  Young Z asked "why is she doing that?" and I told him that some people did not have homes, and she was trying to find a way to be alone in the  crowded place.

Mary had been hurt badly.  She would situate herself and her shopping cart somewhere, the gas station closed for the evening, parking lots, a grassy curb, and hurl streams of obscenities and anger at no one in particular.  She had a little dog for a while.  I felt for her because I knew well how deeply life can wound.  She was always clean and dressed neatly. Seeing her in the alcove of a county building, I thought how I could offer her my empty studio as a refuge, a place to rest and be alone.  But as I passed her she spewed out "You mother fucker!  You fuck your mother don't you?" and my heart shut down.  Once, Mary was settled on one side of Congress Avenue and a fellow in a wheelchair with an attached siren was on the other.  Every time she screamed he would set off his siren in a bizarre escalating cacophony.

Rhonda and Norma live across the street.  Rhonda always drives an aqua-blue car with matching hubcaps.  Rhonda always honks her horn when she leaves early in the morning, she says to get the cats out of the engine.  She honks the horn after she has started the motor.  She has many cats.  They eat my wild birds.  In the evenings she calls them home by banging on a plate with a fork:  "Kitty, kitty, kitty."  She has a loud, slow, southern voice.  Norma is much older than Rhonda.  They are not related, and I have never quite understood why they live together.  After Rhonda leaves in the morning, Norma begins practicing her whistling.  Always the same thing, over & over again for months.  "When the saints go marching in"--things like that.  Sometimes Rhonda gets drunk & yells at Norma in the evenings.  Sometimes she gets her gun and sits on the cement wall and glares at her neighbors.  Sometimes Rhonda has a boyfriend with a pick up truck.  That's when she plays Tom Petty.

Flo Johns lives in the mansion across the street.  Her husband built the house and she lives there alone since his passing many years ago--before I came to live here.  When Z was little, she approved of my nursing him.  She told me to eat bananas for the potassium.  Her jujube trees would drop big, brown fruit into the street until the city cut them down.  She would spend hours on the lawn, pulling weeds by hand.  Durable and strong.  Now she remains indoors in her large stone house.

In the neighborhood north of campus there is an small, elderly woman with snow-white hair  that I am extremely fond of.  She always wears color coordinated outfits:  turquoise blue, spring green.  I hadn't seen her recently and was reluctant to accept that perhaps her time had come.  Today, she appeared, walking the neighborhood, wearing brilliant red.  Red cap, red cotton shirt-dress, red sneakers.  I couldn't help but to say "Morning" to her.  She responded with "How do?" and I passed her smiling.  I want to be like her when I am old.

It is the  fear of being alone that can bind us to a life of compromises.  The truth is:  we are never alone.   There is spirit everywhere. . . in these indistinguishable atoms that dissolve the illusion of the solid. We are as populated as we allow ourselves to be with our senses, our minds and our hearts open to the living.

Near sunset, the park at the bottom of the hill is crowded with people.  The heat of the day finally cooling down, they come to walk their happy dogs, share nature with their children.  Dogs meet & greet & sniff, owners talk & laugh.  Gatherings everywhere.  Neighbors being neighborly.  But once the last rays of sun slip over the horizon, the park empties.  Better hurry before it gets dark.  This is when I enter the park.  When the clouds overhead still glow with the fire of the distant sun.  When there is still light, but an unearthly one.  The day holding on to the memory of what has been.

The pink granite path glows.  I take the path that runs between the trees, down to the creek.  It is even darker there and I am glad of the fear that people have for the dark.  It means I can absorb the stillness alone.  That I can watch the sparkle of the creek between the limestone boulders.  A soft shadow moves from tree to tree, barely perceptible.  It will come to my house still later and give its quiet, echoing owl call.  I greet it smiling.

Emerging from the trees again into the clearing I see the first hopeful star among the clouds and still-blue sky.  Soon it is joined by another and another and another, the sky darkening.  There are only so many stars in the city now.  In part, it was the diminishing stars in the Chicago sky that caused me to leave.  And the abundance of stars in the Austin sky when I arrived kept me here.  Now the people outnumber the stars multifold, crowding the earth, crowding this sacred space.  We forget that we are only a small part of this existence as we busily build and cut and pave.  We forget that some day there will be no one left to noisily buzz away the grass between the cracks or to level the green things to a sterile uniformity, obliterating the chance surprise of an unexpected flower.    I wish I could be here for that silence.

Before the slumber of night, we creatures of this house step outside one last time.  The moon has risen and hovers in the hackberries.  The bats have already flown over and far to the south.  They will return well fed to their perches under the Congress Avenue bridge before I wake.

I hear an incredible scrabbling and rustle of leaves in the dead of the night.   A soft, liquid noise, like a dripping faucet.  Looking out the window, imagine that!  An armadillo!  In the city even.  Welcome.
Perhaps it lives in the mysterious large burrow in the growth in front of my house.

There are nights when I cannot sleep.  I wake at some unperceptible time.  Sometimes the bright moon wakes me in the winter, insistent through the leafless branches.  Sometimes the morning star calls to me.  I lie there, brain churning, unable to quiet my thoughts, unable to settle my body.  Inevitably, the same thing occurs some time near five in the morning.  A car pulls up to Mrs. Johns' sidewalk,  music rumbling from the radio.  It sits there idling.  The car door opens and closes.  After a few moments, the car drives off, turning around in the intersection and then back the direction it came from.  I have no idea whether this is a person arriving or leaving and I never see anyone coming or going later in the day.  It is as if there is someone who comes to her house each day and then spirits away behind her stone walls in the course of the day.  An eternal returning.  This has been going on for years.  As long as I can remember.

The first eager birds begin their song, the sky lightens--again that twilight glow.   I find myself easing into sleep with deep dreams that  this wrinkled, human brain pulls forth from all the noise that has passed before it and the eternal silence of the future.

A thin, undulating, shiny, brown ribbon is waving its way to the busy asphalt street.  I bend down and touch it and it begins squirming rapidly--I'm sorry to have frightened it.  Stooping to try to pick it up, but it is too smoothe and thin.  There is a lucky penny hidden in the dirt of the crack of the curb but I choose to leave it.  This task is more important.  "Did you lose something?" a woman startles me.  No, I'm trying to help this baby snake.  "A snake!  How do you know what kind it is?"  Inherited fear without depth of understanding.  I tell her "Sometimes you just have to trust" and finally catch the thin snake in my fingers and toss it to the cool grass.

It is night.  My thoughts carry me to a place farther along the way where the road curves and it is dark.  The creek has cut a deeply channeled valley into the white limestone and glistens and streams far below.  Like the snake--undulating.  This is the place where the chequered dragonflies gather in the moonlight:  rising & falling, rising & falling--their black & crystal wings fluttering then still in the glow of light.  It is a magic place--one not many of my species notice.  Few cars travel the road.  It is a quiet place.  The dragonflies dance regardless of observation--eternally...

I once witnessed the mating of two, small,  scarlet-red dragonflies.  The male attached the tip of his abdomen to the female's brain stem, her tail held straight behind.  They flew this way for a time, then the male landed and grasped a bit of tall grass.  Gradually, the female's abdomen curled up to meet his torso--finally the tip connecting with his male organ.  Their two bodies formed a heart shape.  A long, pulsing union:
Pulse,     pulse,     R-E-S-T
1              2              3         4
Could write a song to that rhythm.  Oh for a camera!  But I tried to sketch it.  They remained connected and pulsing for the time it took me to fumble through three sketches.  Finally, they flew off, still connected at her brain stem.  Is it exquisite ecstasy for her?  Or is it a slow, forced torture?  The male, drumming, drumming, pulsing his seed into her.  Oh

The place of the chequered dragonflies.  I take you there.  I wear you on my lips like liquid moonlight.  When you rise up to kiss me, all & all is swept away by  an ocean of timelessness--the endless saltwaters of the seas of our bodies--undulating.  I slide down through you and emerge--pulse fluttering like the wings of a dragonfly.

The Wise Woman Chair.  When people come to visit me in the Archives, I welcome them and bid them  take a seat.  They sit in the soft, grey wise woman chair and begin to unravel.   They pour forth and I listen.  They seek meaning and direction.  Words flow from me, I understand their fragile lives.  Somehow I have the perspective to guide them from this chair.  They always leave a little dazed and surprised with what has been revealed to  them through their own seeking.  There is always some kind of joy & revelation.

Somehow the tactile elements of the past, passionate letters, poignant photographs--a moment of time captured and suspended for as long as the paper remains true to them-- combine with what I have learned from having held so many lives in my hands.  A sense of purpose.  There are reasons for the creation.

The Brothers are the spirit of the school.  They leave behind a record of sincerity and purpose.  An innocence in their trust.  And despite denying themselves the greatest passion of all, they allow themselves the sensuality of experience.  But they are old and dying and will not carry the vision much further.  They fade one by one, leathery petals dropping from a rose long past its lush bloom.  They come to me and are surprised that despite their lessons of humility, their lives as sentient beings have merit and meaning.  Brother Romard visited.  He is the beautiful, youthful one, his face still boyish under the aging spots and powdery white skin.  I had him almost giggling convulsively before me as I told him that I would treasure & cherish any words of his creation that he might provide for me.  He wriggled, grasped his softening belly, laughed at the thought that his contribution had worth.  I told him that as a creative person I knew well of the voice that speaks *through* a person--it is not ego at all.

He seemed surprised.

If nothing else--I can give these fragile, outcast brothers a sense of purpose.  A reason for having lived.

There was a time when I would visit my always-friend John.  He has a wise woman chair in his house as well and I stayed long hours into the night drinking red, red wine with him and listening to his life.  We would both become stumbling drunk and part with big hugs and grunts.

John is an announcer for the morning program on the local public radio station.  He plays what moves him.  Often the music he plays has moved me as well and set me on course for my own journey of exploration.  For some time now, I have chosen silence, but yesterday, I turned his program on.  I hear a guitar piece that is familiar.  Oh yes, Tom used to play it.  Tom was the one who urged me to dust off my abandoned violin which led to a 20 year outburst of music.  The piece is "Spagnoletta" I remember.  But Tom never practiced enough and his rendition was not as precise as the one I now listen to.  A little too precise.  Measured, controlled.  Well executed though.  So I am lost in thought about the part he played in my life and somehow our existences caress on occasion.

John then plays a pleasantly predictable "pop" song.  The words, though, ring through with something that catches on my spirit:
 Gleaming in the dark sea
 I'm as light as air
 Floating there breathlessly.
 When the dream dissolves I open up my eyes
 I realize that...
 Everything is shoreless sea
 Weightlessness is passing over me.

 Feel so light
 This is all I want to feel tonight
 Feel so light
 Tonight and the rest of my life.

 Everything is waves and stars
 The universe is resting in my arms.

 I feel so alive
 This is all I want to feel tonight
 I feel so alive
 Tonight and the rest of my life.

John announces what he has just played.  It is by Nina Gordon.  And, imagine that:  "Spagnoletta" was indeed played by Tom.  Both new recordings.  Our lives.  What enormous oceans they are.

And later in the dark I gaze upon the moon and she brings me answers.  The words of "Tonight and the rest of my life" continue to haunt me.  Light.   Unencumbered as I live my own Walden.  Alive.  I am so happy for this life.

I dream a complex web of a dream.  I was following my designated route and had come to a large amusement park room with many people.  In the center of the room was an escalator/ladder that was a required part of the route/amusement park.  One stood on the round, silver-steel "rungs" which descended like an escalator and appeared to gradually become slippery and more distantly spaced.  A young boy in front of me was afraid to proceed because after looping around, the rungs horizontally entered a foggy, plastic-molded shape tube.  Rounded protrusions.  The closest I can come to equating its form is a caterpillar.  So it was like entering a hollow, semi-clear, large caterpillar body.  There may have been water involved.  As I passed through, I thought "nothing to it."

Look!  I have already come through!

I started working when I was 14 years old, waiting tables at two highly competitive coffee shops in Chicago, both owned by Greeks.  I had favored Laurie's as a customer--buttering my "TPR" (Toasted pecan roll) and consuming endless coffee and Kent cigarettes and discussing young philosophy and religion with Sue Kaniuga and her remarkably green teeth.

My sister worked across the street at George's.  The owners of Laurie's jokingly called my sister, me & my mother "maruli, tomatis and grimili":  lettuce, tomato and onion, and said together we made the perfect salad.  My mother was the onion.  I was the ripe, round tomato.

Bill, one of the owners of George's fell in love with me.  His young, quiet wife was pregnant and he was starving.  He called me "Cookie."  He was rather attractive and I would sit with him in one of the booths.  I made sure to have shaved my legs smooth, smooth for I liked how he stroked them as we kissed and kissed between my serving customers.

One of the customers was a highly religious Jew who became incensed when I delivered his milk and meat at the same time.  Another, Dennis, was a photographer by night who would lure women to his apartment with promises of portraits and the hint of something more.  I was too young for his games.

But Greek Bill...oh he promised me the world.  He promised to give it to me better and more than I had ever had before.  "How many times?" he asked me of my boyfriend.  Still a virgin and not quite sure what he meant,  I would go home and see how many times I could  with my pillows tight between my legs.

One of the 45's on the jukebox at George's was the song "'Sagapo' means 'I love you'" and Bill would play it over and over as the dishwasher worked himself into a drunken, mad fervour and threw dishes to the floor shouting "Opah!" as they broke.  Bill wanted me to come with him behind the refrigerator.  "Please, Cookie,"  he begged.  He became lovesick with me.  I was the answer to his lust's cry.  He called me at home.  If my mother answered, she would hang up on him.  If I answered, I would lie and tell him my mother was home.  The curiosity of his desire & hunger became a dreadful disease.  He frightened me.  He repulsed me.  I shut the door against him.

And some months after he left, I did lose my virginity with my Jewish boyfriend after a night of "Opah!" souvlaki and too much Retsina at Diana's restaurant.

Cookies.  Tomatoes.  I am some entirely different strange fruit.

"To dwell in silence is to dwell in possibility."  I am reading a bit of fiction to ease the path to sleep and this bit of meaning leaps out of the book by Jane McCafferty.  Forever hovering on "what's next?" I am living this life in the present here & now as never before.  Moment to moment.  The signposts of meaning and significance flashing into view along the path of  life and swiftly receding like so many directional signs on a highway.  What seems huge at the present moment is eventually forgotten unless recorded in some way.  Recorded as a bit of music, a letter, a poem , a building, a seed.  And then the future will wonder "what was the MEANING of it?" and look for that flash long gone.  Perhaps it will be rediscovered through the memorial left behind and reexperienced with the same expanding surprise.  This is the gift of our human nature.  We alone are able to wonder & create & record for others to share again.  An accelerating accumulation of miracles.  For this is the cynosure of our existence.

Edifying.

North of Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan there lies the ruins of a grand mansion that was said to be haunted by the last matriarch, the foundation all that is left along  with a cable car tunnel that went down to the pool.  Definitely a presence there...a sad, still one.  Wistful.  Things left undone, regretted hesitations, missed opportunities.  An air of glory past...like Great Gatsby.  I spent the night on a ledge there with one or two of my when-things-were-magicals, the white dawn muting the presence that keened through the night.

Camping recently in Lockhart State Park.  The park has that same air of glory past.  Something sad in the air..perhaps some kind of shallow  joy haunting & hoping for revival.  A Louisiana-thick swampiness in the air.  Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the thirties it has a 9 hole golf course for Z and his best friend to be teenagers in; hidden, forgotten places for me to explore.

I experienced almost a sensory overload of so many images & senses filled with wonder & surprise in only one 24 hour span.  Eyes only opening wider to let more in...

 Leftover rock bridges spanning the drought thick creek...ochre stone of some sort.  The entire park defined by the stone (as most are:  Pedernales is limestone, Mineral Falls is that rough red-black rock, the mountains of Big Bend--speckled granite and so on) a sandstone perhaps? dense dull yellow with a brown orange cast to it.  In the river HUGE fish, 2 feet long, a black hatch-square design on the sides, black dorsal fin, red-brown lips & tail.  They appear in the morning turning lazy, bold arcs in the green water.  They are canny.  There is evidence of many unsuccessful fisherman in the bright bobbers caught in the tree branches.  More birds than I can even begin to remember.  Tiny busy ones having animated, varied dialogue as they flit about.  Cuckoo!  But then at dusk there is something that begins with the cuckoo's clicking clucking sound and drives into a shrill two-tone mechanical scream.  Unsettling.  Perhaps an insect.  The loud crows making sure that we knew that day belonged to them in their coded caws long before the sun rose the next morning.

The boys go to sleep as I quietly read some distance away.  The campground is almost uninhabited and a rare silence envelops us.  I stroll around the far loop at the end of the road (again a sense of something grand lost here...what was the purpose of this?  what had been here? because there is a presence) with the half moon so bright I could read by it and the so-clear stars--a tangle of them to the south that I do not recognize--my mind thinks leonides (though it was probably scorpius).  Silent and light and dark and still.  And look even a hint of the milky way--I haven't seen this since the desert mountains!

Silence into light.  Then it must be stillness into dark.  Balanced in the half moon.  I am one for stillness and dark.  But the things that give light in that darkness draw forth my silence.  Together forming a whole.

It must come from the joy.

Leonides:   star showers.  Perseids:  a star falls down the sky.  I fumble quickly for your name before it fades.  And then some minutes later another star streaks across.  Your name again.   On my lips.  I smile.

Half moon haunts me in my tent all night turning into a cross of light as it moves through the fabric of my tent.  Strange owls hoot, a small group of coyotes bring up a short cry.  The river musical as it slides over the resonant rocks lodged in one of the CCC constructed falls.  Strange and wonderful.  The dreams I have as I turn throughout the night are full of meaning and portent, there are great men conveying thoughts to me again...but I lose them in the restless night.  Somewhere in me, though the depth of them remains and I know I will recognize them in the books I am reading.  The deepest impression is that this has specific significance to ME within my life, which I already knew, but I am glad to have made the significance clear.

Hiking the next day...more evidence of lost grandeur, crumbling, lofty ledges where the privileged would look down upon the slow river far below.  A green river.  I find a magical place for swimming to come back to when there has been rain, a cove with lush plants--watercress, others--all around and a deep pool to cool in.  I recognize too a hog plum, somehow I just know what it is, and taste the small fruit...brown juice dribbling over my fingers and I take only a small taste for I do not trust my recognition entirely but yes it is indeed one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted.  Like bread pudding in a fruit.

And I find long, black & white striped tail feathers a hawk of some kind and deep-belled purple flowers.  It is good to have this odd, neglected, park so close so empty of chaos.  We will have to return to this silent stillness again when it is cooler and has rained.  Perhaps by then I will know the names of some of the birds that I do not know this time.  Perhaps then I can swim with the huge fish and trust that there are no snapping turtles or striking snakes hiding in the green shadows...

...but that slight edge of fear of the unknown--not knowing--is what makes it all the more, isn't it?

Heat.  Settled in thick and constant like a heavy muffling blanket.  The body moves slowly through it and the mind even slower.  In accepting these endless days of 100 degree temperatures a certain resolvedness sets in.  It becomes soothing, relaxing.  It is not particularly hard drawing this dry, hot air deep into the lungs when I go running and it is still 100 degrees just after sunset.  It is those that struggle against it that suffer and swelter, oily beads of sweat popping out in impolite bodily places.  You must take what life gives you and ride with it.  The silent, still heat that will end some day and then it will be too cold.  I would much rather have the lazy, loose muscle of summer than the rattling, shivering cold in the bones.

I saw the first hummingbird of the season a few days ago.  A dark, quiet female.  Today they are out in full force, females battling high in the tree tops.  Fierce creatures...mighty warriors for such tiny frames.  They say the females arrive first.  Folk wisdom deems too that it is eight weeks from when the hummingbirds first arrive to the start of cooler weather.  Late October.  So be it then.  Eight weeks of the stretched hot, dry days...of withering Asian landscapes.  I don't mind these alien plantings dying...they don't belong anyway.  I have been waiting for them to die.  I accept death.  I will not be present at my own death--far too busy wandering elsewhere, I'm sure.  I wait  for the chinaberry trees to fall so there will be no more hard seeds to wound my bare feet.  Those florae that do belong here valiantly send up their blossoms of red, purple, white and yellow.  They clarion call the hummingbirds.

Too, I can escape the heat in the library building that vibrates like the innards of a huge mechanical purring cat.  Comforting.

I will not be present at my own death.

Within this blanket of heat I sense a bad will.  I arm myself with talismans & stones to ward off any  bad magic pointed at me--a green eye at the outer edge of my right hand to stare down & defy any "mal de ojo" directed at me.  You do not know my name.  You cannot know my true name.   I am so strong & joyous in all the good things that life offers in this hot green moment.  There will always be the small annoyances, but here & now this life is such a very sweet thing.

Sparrows randomly scattered among the bushes, beaks open and panting to let some of the heat out.  Squirrels sprawled limbs splayed, bellies flat on any surface that is cooler than the air--usually shaded cement.  It is as if this is a challenge...a test by fire.  Can you make it through this?  If not--get out.  Go to Philadelphia where apartment buildings are crumbling due to the incessant cold rain.

A large bird flies by outside in the distance--it passes across one window panel, disappears behind the woodwork, reappears in the next window panel and disappears again around the corner of the house.  I know it will reappear in the next window, I THINK it will, and then I lose faith just at the moment it appears again.  And in losing faith I have lost my ability to find it and know it.

Denying the heat only makes it hotter. Denying anything only makes it bigger.  Especially our personal histories.  I've seen that steel door clang shut on the past:  oh I am not THAT anymore.  But you are and it will only haunt you & gnaw at you in your dreams and manifest in bodily tics, twitches and pains.  We must not lose sight of what we have been, regardless of whether it was foolish or wise because without it we cannot be whole.  Allow ourselves our wholeness, not the fragment of our present role.  Hot, sweltering summer is one of the seasons.  Things seem to die but they are reborn when it rains.

It will rain again.  Perhaps even today.

Pausing in the kitchen to drink a cup of water, I look out the window.  There is a large flurry of feathers.  A hawk? because sometimes they prey on the many English sparrows.  Good god no it's a roadrunner!  What could have possibly brought this bird of the wide open spaces to my crowded urban spot?  You're welcome to stay though.  He perches on a tree limb looking somewhat disoriented, his crest rising & falling with thought and delayed movement.  A sparrow flitters to a branch above him.  He looks up rather concerned as one sparrow after another begins filling the tree.  I think he fears mistrust that will develop into their ganging up and scolding his alien presence.  But they remain only busy unconcerned sparrows and he relaxes.  He hops his way up to the roof & I lose sight of him.

Senor from Mejico comes to the Archives.  He attended St. Edward's High School and claims to have graduated though he barely knows English  Some time in the 40's.  Looking through the yearbooks, he remembers and points out this one, this one.  Which of the Brothers still live?  Yes you can find some of them still in St. Joseph Hall.  Ed Norris?  No he has died recently.  Senor pauses for a long time.  "He was a very good man."  Basketball coach.  Yes he was a good man.

Senor tells me he has 14 grandchildren.  I am impressed.

Senor looks at the Sweethearts.  "I knew nothing of women when I came here.  Not how to touch them...nothing."  I say he must have learned with 14 grandchildren.  He laughs.  He has had two wives.  Both left him.  The second was a German woman from Brazil.  She did not know Spanish.  She was homesick and he let her return to her home.  She did and soon after asked him to send a divorce quickly --within a month--because she wanted to marry another man.   He says:  "Sometime you just have to let go."

He is rough, worn by the weather.  His skin is leathery but swollen by a life of bad diet and strong drink.  There are small, red wounds scattered about his face & on his lips.  His hands are stiff and ungraceful.  His jeans look uncomfortable below his barrel waist.

He shows me pictures of his ranch in Mejico...distant mountains...clouds of cool fog rolling in.  He owns a lot of property and raises horses.  His grandchildren are happy playing on his saddles in the kitchen.  It is never hot there.  His grandchildren are beautiful.

He is happy/sad.  He tells me how America is good in the Appalachians.  How he traveled alone in his truck in the Appalachians:  Virginia.  His truck broke down and people helped him and brought him to their families.  He knew their families in this good part of America.

He finds out my name is Ingrid.  I try to explain, yes, it is Germanic but I am Latvian--a little country in northern Europe--but of course he doesn't know what I'm talking about.  Germanic...I leave it at that.  Yes, remarkable coincidence.

Rising to leave, he reaches towards me.  Why  is it that these archival confessions lead to deeper feelings?  I turn my head...I have no desire to embrace this old man.  He kisses my cheek.  This is a first.  For all of the opening of doors I have done, none have reached such a state of physical demonstration of appreciation.  His kiss hangs there wet and disturbing.

Lonely man.  Good man.  A good road to you back to your cool, foggy mountains of Mejico.

I am glad you know about letting go.

Because sometimes you just have to.

I think of pears suddenly.  It must be the squirrels.  Squirrels like pears.  We had a pear tree growing next to the house I grew up in on Troy Street.  The pears were hard and brown and bored with insects.  A shame we didn't eat them.  But the squirrels did, dropping them after a few nibbles to noisily clatter on the green-wave fiberglass roof of the patio.  They would startle me as I sat out there smoking my illegal cigarettes--tremendously nervous about an unexpected parental return--or making Claudia Maslin jump as we shared our first joint.  Now it seems a lonely sound in the broken silence of time unbound.

One of my first lovers was pear shaped.  Pale, soft, creamy skin.  I washed all the dirty dishes in his sink.  He had me take photographs of him riding his dirt bike round and round in circles around me.  I took a photograph of a beautiful milk thistle plant instead.  He included this photo in his goodbye card and hinted that some day I would be more mature. He wrote in green ink.

I know when a pear is perfect to eat...never when you bring it home from the store.  D'Anjou pears are  the best.  In the winter, I put them on the window sill--their fat bottoms round and full of promise.  In a few days, I gently push the very tip of my thumbnail into the green skin.  They yield easily, willingly.
I once thought sharing the perfect pear of seduction would prove universal connection.

There is the pear within my body:  my uterus which undergoes transformation.  An aching pear when I have my menses--dam bursting.  Unbelievably huge when I was with child.  Clenching as it returned to its small state.    Emitting a dull, wet throb as it slowly transitions to a state of silence.

Now, I suffer the small hard pear of my sinus that  lies lodged in excruciating pain at the corner of my eye.  It is as if some small animal has been trapped & died there  and is now putrefying -- its vile, yellow fluid  seeping down my nasal cavity.  Unbelievably disgusting.  I am noone's beauty today.  Broken.  Yes, I am broken.  Completely.  You gave me this.  But I took it willingly.

I will survive even this.  Phoenix.  Til Eulenspiegel.  With a laugh.

Up there--the clouds billowy white in the blue sky.  I rise up with them--my fluid body evaporating.  Racing the sky.

Even this.

Change in the weather.  Heralded by rain & storms.  The thunder rumbling.  I answer:  why always these shatteringly destructive storms which make the earth shake the house quake and then leave the cold slicing wind to cut through the rest?  Why not something that endures?  Change.  Change is necessary to keep us awake.  Life is so kinetic and thank goodness for that.  I like wearing my warm flannel pajamas for a change.  But my feet & hands are cold and soon too my nose.  That's the part I don't like.

The howling north wind driving before it sweet migrating birds.  Flocks of yellow bellied butterfly-flitting warblers, catbirds with their black caps--uncharacteristically plump--feathers puffed to insulate against the wind.  I don't know why I love the birds so much.  Because they are so vibrant, so beautiful.  So alive their little hearts beating in their warm breasts.  So sure of their purpose.

Instinct.  Were we to be so driven by instinct.  To know what is right and unerringly pursue our paths.  Why does it become so confusing?  Because of the changes.  One moment you are here, sitting calmly typing at your desk and then suddenly the phone rings and the wind cuts through again.

My hands are cold.  My feet are cold.

The box elder tree is sending forth small green leaf buds.  Now. In October.  After the seasonal miscarriage of the dry hot summer when it dropped all of its leaves, now in October it thinks to begin again.  The rain has tricked it.  Buds the size of mouse ears.  Time to plant the corn.

I see the vast canvas of the future stretched white before me.  It is held firm by a steady heartbeat, murmured as it may be.  Who is to tell what daubs of color, what flows of mud & rock, what drops of blood will color it.  What drops of rain will cleanse it.

Only at the other end--there far in the distance--when I am standing at the end of physical need will I know what this has been.  Meaning?  Well there's no meaning in it.  But there is depth and purpose and experience and creation.  To feed the whole.

It is life.  Kinetic, changing life cut through like a knife.

Shhh.  Be quiet.  Silent.  Go there.  Far away.  Where there are no tires frictioning on asphalt.   No wires busy with images & words. Humming. Screaming. Walk far away from it.

Walk inwards.  Into the earth.  The dark silence.  Inside the stone.  Into darkness.  Blow out the light.

There in the still darkness within you connect.  With all that has ever been.  In the core of you, there flows an eternity.  The current of spirit that runs through everything.  Through the stars, the stones, the trees, the humans, the insects, the birds.  The rising moon & the setting sun.

In that humming silence, you will find your connecting soul, your answers.  You, I, everything that has ever been is there.

Sometimes I know more that I should.  See more than I should.  It is only a question of paying attention.  Listening.  Hearing.  In the silence.   The silence between breaths, between heartbeats.  The silence between change.

The place to go inward is somewhere in the center of the sternum. The entry point.  The long, slow pathway inward, downward.  In, in, in.  Far far far.  And then suddenly it is everything there connected.  All dark & silent.

This is the place to go to heal. The silence of recovery.   To realize that one is only a part of the whole and experience only contributes to it.

Drink it in.  Suffer.  But be it to the core.

We are the macrocosmos in our microcosmos lives.   Accept yourself.

Silence of butterfly wings.  Monarchs flutter & flitter south.  Effortlessly, silently.  Distance is not a gage, merely a constant.  Seed bursting may be explosively noisy on some level but silent on ours.

Snow falling in the black dead of night.  All sparkle, flash & light visually but soundless as it pillows and blankets the flat echoing city.  Four in the morning. You can feel the huge connection.  As if it will explode.  But it remains mutely silent, waiting for you to listen & hear what is not.

I drown myself in the silence.  It will all come true this fairy tale when I am ready to rejoin the shallow clamour of this business of living.

These silences will mean something to somebody.

Everything to everything.

Eyes.  They say eyes are windows to the soul.  Indeed they must be for in eyes open to me I have seen the soul open and exposed.  They reveal how clear the heart is in how clear they are.  They carry you past the veneer of the skin & learned gestures.  Evasive eyes have something to hide.  Open eyes carry love, trust, sadness and a certain wistfulness of hope.  And wisdom.  Or innocence. Other eyes cannot be looked into because you do not care to see what you know you will find there.

Read the eyes like a book of the soul.

Read the hope in them knowing that at the same time they may be drinking in your own revealed soul.

Open ocean stories of unexpressed emotion & longing & wonder.  They become the muse's wellspring of inspiration.  Beautiful.  Dive in.

From Alma Mahler to Emily Hale.
From consuming fire to distant beacon.

I have had many muses.  Distant, inaccessible--I had drunk deeply of their eyes and became intoxicated with their wistful, hopeful promises.  Once retrieved, sometimes decades later, they lost their magical alchemy--the everyday-self veneer stretched over the mystery and dissolving it.  Hiding it behind a cloudy curtain.  It is hard to be true to the soul within.  Reality can be a blunt mistress.  Reality can deaden dreams.  Dampen their jewelry sparkle.

I witness two huge snapping turtles mating in a shallow pool.  The male's claws clench tightly to the edges of her large, hard shell below him.  He thrusts suddenly into her once then pauses at length.  Again thrusting once then still.  And again.  The grasp hard & commanding. The thrusts demanding.  She is drawn deep into her shell except for one claw which flails blindly  for balance in the empty air. He threatens to topple them both upside down with his heavy thrusts.  She does not willingly participate.  Her eyes are contemplating the dim light within the window of her shell.  Perhaps her eyes are shut.  Or alternately open then closed

She would rather be a muse.

Outdoors, stretching my body, I hear the noon hour struck by the bells of a nearby church.  Slow, patient, resonant.  The bell tones dense as they travel the waves dancing in the air.  Amorphous, nebulous, watery, heavy they float to my ears--sometimes clear & present, sometimes scattered by winds, dulled by a thick atmosphere or lost through the ceiling of blue sky.

A stately contrast to the electronic double-time beeps of the alarm clock world.  Jarring slap:  welcome to the day.

There have always been bells.  Growing up in Chicago, North Park College a few blocks away would mark the quarter hours.  Walking to high school in the morning through the college campus I could gage whether I would be on time for class, my shower-wet hair frozen in icicles that clattered brightly with the bells.  The bells that commanded me to hurry to my music lessons or paced the slow torture of student recitals as I went over & over the stumbling places in my piece in the  rehearsal rooms downstairs waiting for the younger students to finish first.  The bells were of no assistance--I inevitable failed at some point in my performance.  Angry.  My bow a reflection that I knew the applause was given as much due to ritual as genuine appreciation.

There are bells at the campus I work at now.  Albeit electronic, still they have captured the ringing convincingly enough.  They toll slowly when they mourn the dead.

Large, heavy bell tones have a transformative power.  When did the churches learn to make use of their dark, commanding magic?  They have caught me too.

We were staying in a guest house in Tubigen, Germany.  My mother had studied medicine there during the war and she was returning to remember...just to remember.  I remember clean, starchy white sheets and plump, down filled comforters in beautifully laced duvets & enormous pillows.  An old place.  Very clean.  We shared the small bathroom tucked in the corner of the hallway with other guests.  Going for a walk one day, I stepped out of the front doorway.  Suddenly,  the bells began pealing.  It seemed all the churches in the universe were sending out their cries:  deep tolling, steady bonging, piercing ringing--chaos all out of time and then through some trick of circumstance joining into a synchronized, measured pace then falling apart back into cacophony.  My memory has me flung  against the thick, old, grey stone of the building, pressed up against it by the noise.  And it has me for one liminal moment thrown back into an older time...transported by the demanding bells...a time when the churches had a firmer grip on the lives of the people who clustered about them begging for grace.  Begging for the promise of an eternal heavenly life:  anything, anything  you wish I will do but promise me something better than this life of mud & disease & poverty & scum.  Oh bells promise me this salvation and I will come, come, come when you call & I will fall on my knees & be yours when you command for you do command so convincingly.  So demandingly.  Your voice is so otherworldly.  I am mesmerized by your dark magic.  I believe.

After the bells rang out their last notes the air was left a vacuum of emptiness.  They left me hungering as I roamed the stone cobbled streets into the forested hills above.

Knelling.

The mulberry tree grown fat next to the front steps weeps dark tears from its grooved bark.  It bears witness to the secret of a young boy who jabbed at it thoughtlessly with a blunt knife so many years ago.  It will not forget.  The wounds do not heal.

Have you ever harbored a secret?  Hidden & dark within you?  Or perhaps a secret so bright within that you fear it will shine out like a ray of light if you but part your lips?  Some secrets can  make you feel guilty if the hidden is unacceptable to one's nearest & dearest.  The guilt can knot itself up with worry & anxiety around the magic of the secret and destroy both the secret and you.  What is worse--the secret or the guilt?  Love or jealousy?  Light or silence?

My secrets?  I know what language the moon speaks and what she has to say.  I have an immaterial lover that comes to me in a thunderstorm.  Things thought dead often come to life again.  There are minks hidden in the coastal thickets of Oregon and they are stalking chipmunks; there are moonbirds in the night, snakes in the creek; where toady holes are--where the mushrooms sprout.  I know when the owl comes what she is looking for.  I know the holes the ghost crabs drop into in the white Gulf sands.  I know the secrets of your heart if I choose to look there--if you choose to let me look.  The greatest secret I know is that nothing comes to you if you expect it.  You can hope--to be sure--but one must never EXPECT.  By removing the need, the universe explodes open to you.

What are the secrets the old trees hold?  The seasons.  The slow knowledge--the slow flow of fluid from the roots to the crown.  Brother Simon tells me he hears the plants when it rains:  "I hear the green things making their sounds..."  he purses his lips together in a kissing, slurping sound.  “The trees hum:  hmmmmmmm.”