"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
Come to me
Be in me
Lie by my side
Thumbnail my spine
Soft-brush my face
Look in my eyes
Finger-loop my curls
Ear-breathe my sighs
Toe-touch my heels
Elbow my side
Arm-snuggle my neck
Chest pound my breath
Come to me
Be in me
Lie by my side
Where were you when the middle aged woman in the Suburban cut me off on the freeway, and I beat my fists on the steering wheel in adrenaline-filled rage, bruising my fingers?
Where were you when I ached to go home after a long, late work day and night, and the customers, a mom and her teenagers, came in five minutes before closing and stayed in the store for 20 minutes after the doors were conspicuously locked and the dishes loudly clanged and banged in the sink so the world could hear my irritation and exasperation to no avail?
Where were you when the barista totally screwed up my order and had to re-do it after making me wait for 10 minutes, resulting in my risking my life and others’ on the road as I drove like a mad woman to get to work on time, my head pounding from raised blood pressure when I got there?
Where were you when my adult daughter forgot to pick up the dinner I asked her to bring me three hours prior, even as I was working her shift for her so she could get her homework done, the indignity and betrayal that boiled my blood and caused me to cut her down with cruelty in words and knife of guilt?
And where were you when the clearly guilty ones unabashedly told lies under oath about me, causing me to gasp in horror and dismay and anger and disbelief and dread and angst and wrath and despair…?
Where were you, my good witch, to remind me how much power I give the powerless? Where was your wave of the wand over the glass we peer into, showing me how much I fight the familiar profile of the masochistic female who takes up as little space as possible, accepts suffering inflicted by others with rage then resignation, and doubts her own truths in deference to others’, only to flay those efforts in a flip of the switch–unravel reality–when ceding my grace and acceptance of what is, where I am, who they are, with knowledge of my own powerlessness over others, and the gratitude and equanimity to bear that accession?
I needed you those times to tell me, “You’ve had the power all along, girl. The rubies are the moments of opportunity, of power properly placed. Now take it on home.”
What’s it like to land on a comet with its flaming tail at the speed of night? The fantastical imaginary of the ordinary citizen can only know a breath of it. If only such a landed probe could take pictures of all of the people looking up in awe and wonderment at its passing. That would be the ideal outcome, to capture the best of the human spirit as it is not in the human capacity to reach beyond our galaxy as we sit on the earth now, but it is in our capacity to dream and imagine and reach with our minds.
Perhaps that is what space travel will be eventually, a cosmic astral projection of minds to other minds in distant galaxies and that the stuff of television shows and NASA or other space agency attempts are mere clumsy limitations of the mind. The physical transport is an outdated mis-read of where humans should be directing their efforts–not at transporting the body to other galaxies with improved technology for craft life but transporting the mind through developed improvements in using more of the human brain, much more than the ten percent we do. If scientists can figure out the workings of the brain and how to use more of it, we would go farther in all of our feeble attempts, due to lack of imagination and physical ability, to space travel the verses–uni or multi. That’s my dark matter hope. As grand as our meager steps are in proportion to who we are, I can only speculate that more brain is better for bigger steps toward human survival–if that is even worth it. My limited brain cannot imagine what could be more important.
Philae successfully landed on Comet 67P. The scientists in news-flash photos, mostly men, and I seem to be the only ones excited about that. Though the landing did not go entirely to plan, that didn’t dent the jubilation of the paunchy breath-holding middle aged scientists who hopped, jumped and hugged in high-five glee and release at its touchdown. The love and pride for their cyber child was bounded only by the liquid vision of the for-once unshielded tears of these utilitarian fathers of the brave foundling. One of her thrusters did not thrust, but she is safe and is useful nevertheless. If she does what she is programmed to do, take pictures and collect other data, she will bless her human makers with information unknown about the travels of a lone comet that circles the sun of its destruction, succumbing to the irresistible force of suicide, desire and heat.
So long as there is an infinite unknown, I anthropomorphically will it to be so: that she brings back an ancient love story beyond comprehension for its pre-dating and surpassing human imagination. That way we can continue to wonder and strive, which is the best humans have to offer.
She will give us imagery to parse and dream about, analyze the pre-solar system traces so that we may sniff the scent of our own origins–even just a hint. The human mind will take it from there. And if those paunchy old and young science-saddled men and women get nothing more than a glimpse into the relationship of a comet with a blustery sun that blasts and winds like the litany of a curmudgeon whose cranky rant on a rainy arthritic day thunders and grates, then humans will be that much more edified. They only need new clues to edge ever nearer to the ever elusive answers to the age old questions that echo in the ignorant blackness of the deep-of-darkness matter: How did we come to be? Are we alone? Why does that even matter?
I stew, seethe and sorrow. I am a woman.
I love.
There is a yearning. It penetrates the wall of silenced fear.
A slow ache, amorphous yet round all at once.
Closed circle.
I am broken. I was never really fixed.
It’s just that I feel the lack of a whole now.
I age.
No longer I bear the one way pouring.
What goes out must have a coming in.
I am sere.
My mind teases out strands of sense.
They float above my pavement feet.
I waver.
It is time to be honest, let it seep in.
Some people must die and go home.
To free me.
Limerent lover, you caught me when I fell from the sky, unable to fly any more, like Marquez’s winged Gabriel landed in the chicken coop, a mute wonder of decrepit miracle and obscene spectacle for sale. My wings had been clipped from the systematic circus of prosecutorial car clowns and elephantine asses braying in the windy tents of their failures. My flight was downed by opinion–a crippling injustice. You, imagining the first man bemoaning the lack of his mate, knew my journey even before I spoke it. I was the sign. You were the signifier.
Pouring into me the hope of a happy ending, the magic of healing and soul-worn revival of the A-1 amphetamine or the super pill of soporific splendor, I was your mother duck after the ardor of digging elongation from the dark enclosure and safety of the shell. You stretched. Your first light was the sun’s reflection in my tear-stained retinal orbs, blinding your peripheral vision forever and altering your perception of the pumping pinions of this bird, discerning a halo through the steaming breath in the cold of that fall night of your birth. I was your real.
Soon the collage I collaborated with in the making was filled with wind-swept plains of dust and despair or poppy plummets into sweet surrender-ful liquid love potion stares of hypnotic release. Wherever love and hate could be found I was there: in the trees that conspired to collapse the condor’s nest and in the giant avian mother’s courage to free her ovate unborn, in the evil of cardboard figures of terror-filled torturing shadow puppet fights and in the savior soldier’s merciful sacrificial sword of righteous right. I was the paste on your brush to sparkle your smile and the crusted crud on the blade of your unclean can opener.
Shooting up my words, your veins thicken even now long after the flash of my tail light has faded from view and the neon sign points to the hotel next door. Plum with the injected placebo of blossoming romance and forever ending rivulets of passion dribbles eked out of a nano-glance, a sliver of a smirk, an eye glimmer from a passing head light, you are confirmed. It means something. You have thought two thousand times in two thousand hours that it is so. In truth, you have obsessively intruded on the tale, remade the story.
You once threatened, the plot must end well or there will be no end to sorrow’s cascading falls into the mountain crevasses that poorly piloted Cessna’s crash into and crack up their cargo–ordinary men and women with a taste for the daring. The height of expectation and card castles is too great, the air too thin and be-speckled with polluting particles for a pure realization. Limerent. Listen. You.love.you.loving.me. That’s all.
“The chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three.”
Kelly and I did puzzles on Sundays, mornings mostly, when the New York Times double dared its daily puzzlers to take the bigger, harder challenge of the page-wide crossword. We were both super sleuths, so we toiled as two resolved to solve the mystery of the hour it took us to fill in all of the empty spaces between the black of the uninvited and irrelevant to the game–like our world on Sundays, just us. There were no other people or places more alluring than the chicory of our coffee, the shaded sun on our table, and the pencil and paper inked with our patience–unconditional time. We were peaceful and complacent then. The metronomic congeniality of our pocket of a world was no more, no less: in the middle of hurry and sleep.
Kelly was a mechanic. No matter the make, no engine escaped the exhaustive expertise of this meticulous and measured engineer with a temperament of a lover scientist: observant, percipient and objective, yet warm, conciliatory and intuitive. I often heard, “They all have the same components with a switch up here and there to make me go mad.” And even so, even after having handily fine tuned many similar models before me, the puzzler could not calibrate my candor nor loosen my brakes. Typically, my symptoms–the broken parts–never showed before a somewhat stranger (like finally taking the car into the shop for that noise that suddenly disappears), but with time and travel, the intermittent accelerator hesitation, piercing brake squeals and mysterious trunk rattles made the ride rough, uneasy. And so, after much studied twisting and turning and torquing, the chassis collapsed. I was an enigma.
When Kelly moved to the black, I would bring that scratch-pad stretch of space and moment to mind when suffering the turbulence of spinning-on-the-teacups Terry or enduring the ennui of Edward or Kim or Ken or Sam. Back then, I longed for presence of the puzzle, of even-keeled Kelly time in our kingdom of suspended seismography, no pantomime of the naked love or the jealous joust or the sentimental snore, just Cadillac calm and Bavarian precision.
A time for telling truth has come upon us now.
We needn’t lie to get us through these times
You see it in my eyes and writ upon my brow.
No need to say you understand these rhymes.
When writing is the mistress:
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” – Winston Churchill
First a mistress then a master, does Churchill mean that at first writing a book is alluring, a release into a world of pleasure, and then it becomes dominating, controlling, and confining like an addiction or a duty? In other words, it starts with the idea of writing a book, the germ of a subject that could spread into thousands of words, which inflames the contagion that impels the fingers to tap in order to scratch the itch and twitch of adrenaline desire-thought. The impassioned writer proclaims, “There is a book in me.”
But after the initial caffeinated burst of bluster-strained strands of webbed words–clever and comely–the chore of the work settles in, each day pouring water into the well to keep the once deemed fertile land irrigated and quell the fires of doubt and douse the flames of drudgery in the daily threat of stage five alert word draught. When the ideas stop flowing, the writing is a task of terrible resistance and fear sets in. The writer frets, “I don’t have enough, not good enough, not enough heart, authenticity, interest. But I have invested so much time and ink, I can’t stop now.”
Or was Churchill a switch hitter and he just means that writing a book is like loving a woman–not your wife–being in her control or under her spell, and then like loving a man?
No, he means that writing enslaves. It is an enormous envelope of time and thought, and the promise of her–writing–what she potentially makes of her lover–writer–is a sculptor of marble ideas smoothed into delightful statues of truthful experience and penetrating insight whose vision inscribes beauty into the minds of those envisioning the word figures and rests there completing that mind, that reader, who is forever changed or confirmed or comforted by some moral missive, sublime image, or worldly flavor.
In reality, the writer is a whittler of wood who shapes a block into a toy sailboat by toiling away at the carving craft hour by hour to make animation from the inanimate. The writer makes sound from ink. Perhaps it is this need to be heard and to connect with another human being that is the real potential that arouses the desire–the ultimate desire–that causes the penner to heed the call of the word, arise each day, wipe away the sticky, silken threads of the dreamscape, to hack away at the mental chains of complacency and write. That same desire thereafter ensnares her in the matrix of predator and prey, reader and read, writer and book, the book she violently tosses at her readers.
The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Up came the sun and dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.
Writers are spider mistresses.
Miss Carly is large and wide and witty in frills and curls.
She laughs her great big O lips open like sails unfurled
Revealing white washed toothy rocks beneath the bow.
Sweet meats and candied nuts, she eats stern to prow
Slicing, chomping and dipping her pain in syrupy swirls.
Her heart is big and soft and fat like the sloop of a smile.
She loves with cloying quotes of snips of poems in piles
Atop a pine dresser of smoldered stains of incense stubs.
Fond of scenes, the woman shouts, “Aye, there’s the rub!”
For no known reason nor time and place, none I reconcile.
Miss Carly is single and lonely and sad in her loft on high.
She peels the pity from artist friends like lemon to rind
Causing some internal cringe and outward nervous laugh.
Prizes, patronage, palimpsestic poems and photographs
She gives, sipping sweet tea afloat a sailing ship of sighs.
Her sunsets painted and sea becalmed, her puppet primps.
The magic made by canvas painters, mere circus chimps,
Is poor compare to bread and cakes Miss Carly foreswore.
For she is set on turbulent vomitous seas to settling shore
To lose her sea legs, her fine girth and sycophantic simps.
An undeniably aching yet slumbering craving, she must fall back endlessly, eyelid-enwrapped orbs unable to keep her consciousness, which slips down into the darkness with claws still clutching and inscribing their twitching seismographic indentations in the eyeballs as the arms of it, consciousness, stretches wincingly, impossibly lengthened for the body to lie in the depth of darkness. She goes deep.
I speculate that she is not falling, implying a misstep, away from her conscious self but has turned and run. Who wouldn’t? Her life has been hard. She was neglected by an unloving mother, one who was abused herself by cruel parents. Her father was a specter who haunted the apartment, manifesting a physical man on payday. Her mother rarely cooked for her or comforted her or advised her of the dangers of the world. No, she was left on city corners at 4 years to find her own food, hoping that the mothers and men entering the five and dime would offer her something without her having to ask. And they would ask her with irritable concern, “Where is your mother?!” and feeling ashamed, she would make up a story that her mother was sick.
But no documented illness kept that mother from cleaning and feeding her baby. Embarrassed and unkempt that child was with untamable kinky hair that refused a brush even if one were offered it, and a sizable gap in her two front teeth. She was scrawny and sallow, though with sharp, slit-eyed hazel-glistening maturity and wit. She was a meerkat.
Eventually poking her head above the layer of grimy gutter life, she cleaned herself up and then mistook love for sex. Knocked up and married at 16, she merely survived a childhood of neglect to enter into an adulthood of abusive banality and benign ignorance. She married, like her mother before her, a ghost of an unfinished man, a workaholic incapable of appreciating the finer things in life–books, art, mystery, passion, and romance, namely: her.
But he gave her a family. Children salved the sore of scooping up in arms love she missed out on. Only, to overcompensate for her own shadow life, she spent every moment caring for, thinking about, worrying about and attending to her inevitably affected children of greed, helplessness and jealousy. She fed them too much, cleaned them overly, loved them enough but not enough for the canyon of need she created in them to be the sole capturing eye of the gaze of her great giving.
She raised them. They came to visit on weekends with their growing families when they themselves grew up and away, but she, heliotropic, contorted her body reaching for the circling sun of her prodigals who, in turn, rounded back to her, their heat center for hot food, unconditional love and sound advice. Warmed and wiser, they left her withered in the waiting for their eventual return. Until they didn’t.
So long as she could give, they came. When she could no longer give–her core cold like the moon’s with her shine a borrowed reflection–they stared and stammered and shivered in unimaginable loss and fear.
She forgot how to make the dishes everyone loved from the recipes passed down from her grandmother, the only woman who cared for her but left her only too soon, days before her fourth birthday. Dishes that made home–their home–like blintzes and pirogies and beef stew, were irretrievably lost because her children forgot to ask her how to make them. She couldn’t remember how any of them started, though she made them hundreds of times over her 75 years.
Nail biting in isolating anguish, her children suffered alone, for she did not understand what everyone noticed. Her husband alternately shrugged and shook fists at the sky. No one knew what to do with her. When she could no longer speak, they stopped coming. But she could see; she could hear. And for many years she still could.
Trapped in her muddled thoughts so long, wasting away, her body dis-remembering how to process food into fat or even how to chew and swallow, she closes her eyes now like no one has ever closed a pair of eyes before–her face drawn in by the corners of its angles of cheek bone to chin, skin sucked tightly to skull–and exhales.
No, she is not expired. She is pure unconscious desire now, streamlined to her essence and sinking into the only place she was ever going to anyhow. She succumbs to the lure of the lover and beloved, and it is a release like no other in her candlelit dusty life.
She opens her eyes again, and the illusion is gone. I can no longer see the purpose and direction, imagine the lilting lie of the siren’s song, “Come to me, my mistress and be my Penelope awaiting her king’s return. Rest in my bosom, my touch, my caress.”
This is how I cope these days with the agony of her slow decade-long disappearance. I imagine she is on a mythic sea voyage, sailing the still waters of slow afternoon noddings, drifting down into the arms of her self-embrace and so engulfed in the arms of the loving mother that she was born to be and always will be.
I stare into the searchingly bewildered eyes mirroring a woman focusing her lenses, and see me. There it is! The three second connect, her recognition marked by the eye twinkle and quick spasm flash of an upturned corner of her mouth, the missile memory launched in my direction absorbed by the heat of my desire. “Hi Mom.”
The sound distracts her. Her eyes move off mine in the direction of where she thinks the sound came from, the cataract gaze returned. I look away. I pick up my keys and move to the door, glancing back briefly before touching the handle. Her eyes cannot follow me at this distance. I walk out the door. It’s time to pick up my daughter from school.
In the gaze of the other 