Author: Inthegazeoftheother

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Buzz

  

Twirling silence spun in whirring generators

refrigeration unit hums and frozen hours,

pumps and siphons, pins and drums all agog

thrumming fullness into empty space. 

The music paused, would-be customers pass,

glancing, penetrating a vitrine store front,

peering into promise of some other time.

I witness the throng of pulsing gravity, 

cocooned in chewy, thick combinatory air–

warmed, tossed, settled, clinging to steel.

A noisy silence bathes my skin, electric

charged, solitary, trapped and buzz coated.

Time is irreverant, caring little for the sacred–

breath, love, chance, and tones inaudibly clear.

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Day 4

  
What I knew about me back then, at our separation, was that I was good with kids, a nurturer, and had ambitions.  Driven, determined, stubborn and tenacious, I was good at school. From my mother I learned that I needed to have the last word. I knew that I was an avid reader and got lost in books and fantasy, that I conquered books even as they slayed me. Dictionary in hand, I painfuly trudged through The Hobbit in sixth grade, just like the burglar himself wearily and anxiously trudged through Middle Earth. That same year, Edgar Allen Poe taught me that I loved stories and had a vivid imagination, thanks to my haughty pompous pet-procuring teacher who read the class Poe stories each day for a week.

I knew I loved words and writing and was a good speller. I knew that I had an eye for boys at a young age; a sixth grade kissing birthday party spinning the bottle and playing post office taught me so.  Stealing my first kiss on the soft lips of John Hoffner, a boy I mysteriously found attractively full lipped and soft cheeked, I was inducted into the secret rites of the heart as harp, strings, tones and eternal whisperings from the beginning of time. Who could articulate why some boy looked good in 6th grade? The world of boys and kissing was enrapturing.

I knew that I had a fighter feminist spirit. While I did not march or take up any banners, I grew up with an entitlement to equality branded on my will, an adopted militancy that girls should not be mere slaves to men the way my mother was to my father. At 12, I asked in earnest self-righteous anger, why my mother put up with his abuse: nasty, virulent words and waiting on him hand and foot. Her bemused response that I would understand when I was older did not assuage the anger.

I knew that I was loyal and believed in monogamy then. I also knew that I did not believe I owned “feminine,” me who spent high school in coveralls and construction boots, choosing my clothes as protest and comfort. I have been often labeled earthy, and I was with a man who adored chic.

When we met, I was carrying 15 pounds too many even for my 5 feet and 8 inches, which allowed me more leeway than my shorter sisters. However, most of that weight was lost by the time we separated, the result of over a decade of conscientious health and fitness. I gave up smoking and started working out, dancing in college, then aerobicizing when that came into vogue in the early 80s, after which I took up running, tennis and eventually soccer. I was active and hard bodied at the time of our separation–lean, firm and tall.

So when I first sat in a therapist’s chair and declared I had problems with my femininity–something I dreamed or believed at the time, not even knowing what that meant but suspecting it had some critical role in JM’s lack of desire for me—and the therapist, an older guy probably in his late 50’s (I was 28), said, “No you don’t. Just look at you. You’re wearing a skirt and a nice blouse…” I didn’t really hear the rest because I became incensed. How dare he tell me what I was or was not! I left and never returned.

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23 Days: an excerpt

  
He and I would kiss on the couch after smoking weed and drinking wine. I drank my first bottle of Margeaux with him, straight out of the bottle. It was 75 bucks back in 1979, steep for my minimum wage budget, and purchased from a corner liquor store that sold it at room temperature on a circular rack with other bottles lesser known. It obviously had not been properly preserved in the coolness of a cave or even a refrigerator. 

However, one sip for even one uninitiated to Dionysus’ treats at the time, I thought the description “liquid pearls” fit. That was my immediate impression and it was divine, almost as luscious as kissing those wine-soaked lips, fleshy, soft, sweet, and conversational. He knew the art of kissing, that it is a conversation not a monologue or a preview to the stabbing penetration to come. He caressed and rested softness on mine, kissed my lips as well as my tongue, no hard sucking or mindless tongue windshield wiping my poor JM switched on whenever we kissed. 

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Exactly Ten Raindrops Fell Today

  

Delaying the inevitable chore,

distasteful, disagreeably utile,

cracking open a creative divide,

writing mercenary words to eat.

Powerful procrastination widens

my eyes smoldering laser-see

the clouds churning charged,

ready to release and pour rain.

The storyline unfolds just then:

He had a girlfriend at the time.

Saigon had fallen two years prior.

So, his coming trailed calamity.

She walked the color of caress,

peaked fem-enigmatic effusion,

lithe boned and delicate fleshly.

Her name, a chilly winter song,

juxtaposing a bronzed-fire will,

she led him to the sun wingless.

And I watched behind a column

I constructed far too narrowly

to hide the heavy haunting me,

the girth of stony mind sleights.

I, velveted brown-eyed insecure, 

peered around an Ionic pillar thin,

to gaze on a gazer, distant-drawn

drinking her gauzy gray-blue sea.

His eyes pierced her silken skin

hollowed her safe harbor’s vapor.

And there he knelt, nose in the air

sensing the suck of the sea’s loss

ebbing tides of futile passage…

and so it begins, drops descending,

disrupting imagery as I trace them,

all ten of them mustered in distress

great blustery burst of all but naught.

Like sitting by the window waiting

for inspiration and steely wit to spin

commercial cogs of nil to the world.

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Boxed Orchids

  

Gone from view, vacant stares through empty glass

where boxed orchids now hold your station

by the rise of not enough occasion 

and too many glances past.

I once held your gaze through the reflected glare,

the sun obscuring encircled simmering eyes

unrelenting in the search, seeking surmise 

somehow, and now your portrait still

replaced ironically in nature’s pride

perched on sills

peering inside 

out where you refused to shine.

 

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Mistress Secrets 

  

The mistress holds many secrets, 

not just the corporeal of clandestine sex.

 
She collects clues in nature’s trails 

in bleedings 

slathered like massaged love potion of entrusted lives. 

And trust there is–not to tell

while the other reveals: 

all sorrows and aches, disappointments and joys, dark desires and flighty fantasies. 

She swallows words with their heartbeats inside her body 

and emanates fumes of lust as interpretative salve. 

She is whore-preistess.

 
A mistress locks like a safe. 

Her world shutters in space 

like the smoke-stale, nylon-curtained windows of a cheap motel screening daylight. 

Her misty spell casts doubt and fear, longing and dread. 

Will she tell? 

She is harpy-savior.

 
She can tell–

how hungry he is for affection, how desperate she is for care. 

She recognizes the drift in the gaze that lids evanesce in the throes, 

orbs inward facing a racing heart of agonizing desire, painful pleasure’s release. 

She is spell-casting springtime.

 
She knows the cards that contain the house, 

which ones can be plucked without disturbing the structure, 

without crashing down the careful construction. 

Sentinel at gargoyled castle keeps, 

she is creator-dragon.

 
The vault she is has no combination. 

Her honesty and trustworthiness stare ironically into the abyss 

of human heart relation–re-kindling the rhythms of lie and sleep, 

walking and waking, 

truth and destined failure to hold neither an eternity nor a lifetime. 

She is prayer.

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Losing one more time


Let me wallow in the warmth of losing you one last time;

like sleep, let me wish for more.

Let me pumace dead skin of my heart layer by layer–

again, this time for sure.

Polished, it shines to the pulse of another now

though never too late

it is, but how

to let you slip past me in one more rhyme?

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In keeping

  
Walking away

into the folly of night

my eyes followed your heels

as they lifted and lightly pressed

against the notion that keeping is outside

when everyone knows losing means never having.

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Transformation

image

Spoke a spiritual self,

and my world swelled

my head full visions of life

intent on living with intention;

realities and modalities flickered

like moths worshipping tensile light

before me like a card bridge in mid-shuffle

soon folding in flattened before the game begins.

Observation and witness transforms without elimination.

Pure illumination: Intend first and the rest unfolds manifest.

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In which we witness a prayer

  

 

 I’ve looked into the eyes of this movingly tender and beautiful photo of my daughter fifty or more times since discovering it. She allows me a glimpse of her social media life in but one place: Instagram. I am grateful for it. There I can peek just a little to see what others see of her, what she allows to leak. I know her and don’t know her.

But this picture is poignant for several reasons. It is the one picture I believe I have a leg up on all of her friends, acquaintances and public, maybe even a significant other. I know the look in her eyes. I have been fully immersed in the practice of recognizing what lies behind the surface of her expression since she was born. It was a method of survival for both of us. Is she hungry? afraid? frustrated? Anger was always obvious. But differentiating between shy and reserved took some deciphering, some investigative study, and close observation on my part.
 
I had to discern between what I read–over-read really–in books about personality traits and behaviors from what my gut told me silently, wordlessly. Motherhood is the scariest ride at Disneyland times 100. It’s often a matter of life and death. The twists and unexpected turns cannot always be calculated or anticipated.
 
I have grown to recognize by an unconscious alarm in my head when my daughter is sad or slightly afraid or both by nuances. Her veneer always seems collected, polished plain and emotionless when she is settled into herself. When she is playing or performing, her face is a farcical mask of glee or humor or goof. She lets it out all hang out.
 
But this subtle look behind her eyes is sad sorrowing pain, one from prolonged stress of doubt and fear, standing on the edge of the fall balanced to the very brim of standing it. She abides. But she slides down into the “feels” of it sometimes.
 
I never set out to steer her into college sports. It took me along as it took her. One day I was her coach among all the other six year olds, trying to entertain and teach, and the next I was helping her decide whether to accept a college offer to play the game in another state. Recreation soccer blossomed into a competition that could only be sated by club ball, which always sold parent hopefuls on the steep price of a scholarship.
 
I cannot say that a scholarship was the lure for me. I figured out the math early on. For all the years of paying for trainers, club fees, equipment, travel and this and that peripheral fees, I could have paid her and her sister’s college by investing the money in passive income yielding ventures. But the lifestyle of soccer promotes health and the outdoors, hones the coping skills of competitors and educates the athlete to her own limitations, desires and nature.
 
I don’t regret the time and expense of it all. What else would have driven us as a family to places we visited–together–from hotels in deserts to hell holes to luxury digs in gorgeous cities? The drives alone provided family time we would not have scheduled otherwise. And I often ask what will bring me to lay myself down on the grass of an open field on a Saturday sunny afternoon in the breeze, imbibing the disparate smells of trees, wind and turf, when my children no longer play?
 
But watching my determined, ebullient, driven and light-hearted child-woman as she steps through her days of doubt and illness, waiting for her brain to heal, I wonder why I–we–wanted this. Of course, no one picks a course thinking something terrible will happen, something will go wrong. And even if we ever think about the possibilities of injury, failure, or loss, we gloss it over with a deferment and hope: think about it if it happens. Such is life lived as us.
 
She will survive a concussion that has driven the joy out of her first time away from home experience and exacerbated the hardship of that transition (something she has not managed too smoothly since I can remember) in school and life. But will I survive her Instagram pictures that freeze-frame the story of that grief and turmoil? Yes. With the faith and prayer of the priest and scientist, I watch.

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