"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Arbitrary framework the hours make;
the shadows perform tragedies on screen-less walls.
When I was 12 I discovered an ache inside me,
one only quelled by singing the love song antidote
in lilting swallows warbling trills at the edges.
Nature offset flame in cool wind balancing my moods
that hatched my youth to full fledged childlessness.
Today is just a day; life expels to slowly turn pinwheels.
My older sister played the grooves off this album in 1971. I can still recite every word to some of the songs, and I often burst into a refrain of “Aquarius” when my first-born, Aquarian, squares some of her traits to her zodiac sign. Sometimes I belt out the tune merely because it is such a belting kind of song and the edge of my range register of the song can induce a near spiritual experience or maybe it’s just the oxygen deprivation.
Hair defines.
My hair has always been a badge of horror and honor. Growing up in the hippy long straight hair parted down the middle fashion era, my hair was a horror. I was mortified that my mother had to cut my black frizzy mop very short, pixie style, to save her the time and grief of taming it, the snarls and fuzz that did not hang but billowed everywhere like a balloon around my head. My hair grew out not down.
But in the 70s when Jimi Hendrix had already made his mark and died to solidify it, somehow afros for everyone called the day. Then, my hair was perfect. A pic and a shake set the wide puffy do–like a giant woolly black powder puff–for the day. Not a hair primper, that suited me fine.
When the 80s arrived with its feathered bangs and poof teased hairstyles that required hair to hang up and down vertically not horizontally, I was in trouble again. Though my hair did a bit of a mullet in the early 80s, it was back to the search for the perfect stylist professional enough to make order out of the chaos that was my willful unmatched sides of thick naturally unruly curls doing their own thing. Terri and John did decent jobs with my head for the shearing every couple of months I endured to keep legit.
After the 90s, short hair to medium length hair cuts managed a certain neat professionalism to my look until the end of the first decade of the new millennium when the ever-tightening yet losing the grip of my hair’s will came to an end with Gina, the whispering sideline soccer mom color specialist who subtly wooed me into her kitchen swivel chair for the leap into another’s appearance: long blonde, straight hair.
And the chorus kicks in:
Gimme a head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy
Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair
I’d find more than the prize to keep myself on
or the road
if I were your eyes.
If I saw what you saw,
I’d be wary too,
wondering what next, who else wants what I have,
what I need to protect.
Gazing out from yours,
the world would be clear,
hindsight perfection,
for mistakes are costly and pre-calculations wise.
Peering from under your nose,
I’d assess what’s what,
figure people out,
know their numbers,
predictive labels paying off in fearless dividends.
And if I stared at your desire,
the way you do,
square in her face,
laser cutting pupils
penetrated retinal heart,
a mirror reflection I’d see chestnut fire burning me.
A cello rests in a room, its neck snugged to the corner,
nearly facing the wall in neglect as if ashamed,
calumny’s dust.
Never her fault, I never loved enough, not until late, too late.
I played for spans.
A public school music teacher examining my third grade hands declared,
“You have long fingers; you’ll play the cello.”
And pronouncement became performance.
I practiced and played: solo, ensemble and orchestra.
Competitions endured at the lust of a failed cello teacher and complicit parents
yielded no more than a B plus plus, merely a red ribbon.
But I scored Romberg’s cello sonata into my fingers for life.
And the taste, a hint of burning desire–first conquest, then mastery.
Until the mid-70s teen culture enwrapped me in smokey rock concerts and pubs,
boys and weed.
And the cello lay low in my childhood home ’til California stole me.
She plays me time to time, decade to decade since then,
testing my resolve and desire, the want-it factor.
She breaks my every attempt, every dream of recapture,
having long ago mastered me.
credit: clker.com
Today, I am the other woman.
Well, not THE other woman but another woman.
You see, I’m not myself, so I must be someone else.
Someone like me, who I am most other days, does not hide
does not steal away from the controls to cede the center.
Not the spotlight but the hub, co-equal and convergent.
But all the other mothers took my role today, the hiders
much-to-doing but not without martyred smile and cheer,
disposed to giver-worker-bee-busy-as-a-buzz-on-beer.
But I have always been eye of the storm where the stillness
of separation–me from them–oxygenates breathing space.
And yet today, I played her, the subdued sideline spectator,
the other woman waiting in the wings to seduce the shadows,
bait them cover me in downy anonymity, cog-less care free.
Who is she, this other woman impersonating me?
Christmas day felt like a jail sentence to a Jewish kid growing up in a largely gentile neighborhood in the sixties and seventies. When I was 4, my parents moved the family out to the burbs, away from Brooklyn’s dirt, crime and Jews. It was not their intention to remove us from tribe, but the trade off was a clean newly built blue collar neighborhood in which my mother could build a home. Ours was the lone house on the block without Christmas lights every December, the one with the large bay window sporting an electric menorah with blue light bulbs that turned slightly to the right to light up, each of the 8 nights. I remember both loving and hating the singularity of our tradition on this street in our town on Long Island.
But nothing compared to the boredom of Christmas day when there were no friends to call on, no malls to hang out at, no stores to browse in or anywhere to go really. My folks could not afford to take all 7 of us to the movies and only every once in a while we made it out to a Chinese restaurant. The day seemed endless, especially since I never watched much television and was not much of a reader before age 12. Time made its magic back then, elongating for miles in psychological hyper awareness and mental ticks to routine stuff I was not able to do.
Now, the opportunity to be imprisoned, pajama-clad in front of the fire the entire day, watching movies I did not know even existed, not cooking, cleaning or even eating most of the day winds down the year perfectly, like a day-long vacation. Permission granted, I laze and luxuriate in voluntary house arrest that whizzes by in the magical time of a slow-but-quick winter day. Gone too soon.
Peace.
“Pass the salt, please.”
I look up at her from my veggie quesadilla plate, my eyes suggesting an answer to the question in my expression, but her face shows no comprehension. She wears sunglasses inside the restaurant.
I pass the salt.
Two shakes and she sets the shaker aside to pick at fake cheese melted over corn tortilla chips. Biting the triangle tip of a chip, she glances up–I think–at me, my head recently returned to face her after scooping up random bits of salsa to topple over one of the soft triangles targeted to dissect and devour.
“When do you think you’ll know? I mean going back.” I ask but already know the answer. How can she know?
“I don’t know. You’re asking me something I can’t possibly know. I mean I could recover next week or continue on like this forever or get hit by a bus as soon as we walk out this door.” She waves to some indeterminate place beyond the restaurant walls.
I know what she means. The asking leaps over logic into faith like a ghost limb needing to be scratched. Nothing there but habit and the act of speaking.
The gap of knowing and being spans eons now. We both know it, and yet we dance this ancient witless dance of caretaker and charge. It’s my job to ask the unanswerable questions and hers to stem the flow of fear with uncertainly, freeing and terrifying, reminding us both to surrender and enjoy lunch.
“Can we have a peaceful family Christmas dinner and forget for a few moments? Will we?” I ask uncertain of her answer, the truth of her answer. I fight the terrible urge to cough.
“Before the bus hits? Sure. Might as well.” She laughs, picking up the salt to shake it once more.
Merry, Merry, Merry to one and all!
“When are you getting your Christmas bonus?”
“This week, like I told you.”
“Do you know which day this week?”
“Can you give me break?!! I’m sick and you’re pressuring me for money!”
“I asked a reasonable question. You need to get a grip. Just say you don’t know if you don’t.”
Dialogues go like this sometimes in long-term relationships. And it is hard to imagine that the speakers still love each other. “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” Strother Martin says in Cool Hand Luke.
Lurking behind this simple conversation lies fear, frustration and comfort. The backstory is the whole story because the front story makes little sense. One world colliding with another, each orbiting a separate sun.
HE awoke sick at a time far too stressful to be sick, the holidays. And SHE asked a simple question at the wrong time, when HE was off to work feeling like shit. SHE asks, unsuspecting of the pending attack awaiting a target, for what gives him a great deal of stress and frustration: not enough money earned from working a demanding job HE detests when so sick.
Her voice–after so many, many years–triggers both irritation and security, a safety net landing when all of the rest of it, everything else dissatisfies, falls down or short. SHE provides both acceptance and provocation. HE depends on her loving him warts and all. And so HE abuses with abandon with cutting words never sliced into another human being. And SHE abides, knowing that tests far greater than this one have passed, their history too deep. Until SHE turns tables on him.
I want to help her. She needs me. Burrowing in a hole will not make the world disappear, the majority of it anyhow, exclusive of a select few pieces to which she clings dearly, obsessively, as if these things–broken pieces of jewelry, ash, cookie boxes and wood shavings–were life itself.
She makes me love in a circle: the start lost in the end of caring, hurting and discarding. I give up and then cannot let her go. But she must be severed. She demands it, not so much in words as in self-destruction, persistent non-choices that astound anyone with a will to live. Slow suicide.
And yet, instincts hard as granite kick in, mindless protection that deny her death. The inversions and subterfuge she contorts herself to, no yogi or circus acrobat of the soul could compete.
The darkness under the bridge comforts her, dims the white light of panic, the incessant static of electrified fear. Those who love her may only bear witness, cannot be the net to her fall. She of scissor mind makes it impossible.
And yet, she is my very own hunger artist, living on trapezes, flying from dumpster to dumpster’s refuse treasure. She refuses a hand. She believes she has her own, enough for her. But her hands shake and hold nothing but fairy tales of embroidered delusion.
And though she drives me to pound my head on the wall to relieve the pain of reason, the crisis of choice and chaos and cold winter nights, I love her still.
credit: mentalfloss.com
And so I sit before you, father-mother missing moon sheltered from the rain above the clouds, intuiting the vacant stare observant.
Though core-less we two, you cold, me warm, a higher vantage point edges your sight supreme at such a remove.
Like you, I borrowed neighboring light lent unwittingly, beneficial excess of the mindlessly ebullient glow of splashing smiles.
Sprayed sunshine at the concert last night in a stranger eye-lock and motionless high five link, praise to musical gods enchanting.
Leaked light of courtesy in rote rhythm of seasonal cheer upon all us retailers and commerce night keepers: “Happy holidays!”
And idle conversation in endless express lines as I count the water meat drops in frosty plastic packages while checkers chat up customers.
Reflect now, we two lunatic hollow grims of burnt out starry stories–so many–whirring past like molten lead dripping burnt passion burst.
For we watch the rain the same, you above, me below, cool companions invisible neon in the night, filtering nothing, just bouncing rays.
In the gaze of the other 