Thinking of Spring and Memorials and Things

Soon. Well, maybe not that soon. The above is spiderwort from last June, so I guess you could say it's already come and gone. But the sun is confident now and leaning into us, a whole different god from high January, and, even in Minnesota, a brisk walk brings Spring sweat and the dream-taste of pre-pubescent pollen.

Also a year, or more, I can't even remember, late. This dresser I painted for Mary. I haven't yet been able to take a picture I like so I haven't bothered sharing. I finally decided I don't care and so here they are. The light is the problem. I should have dragged these outside before I put Mary's clothes into them and taken proper pictures then, eh. Oh well. These were a vanity and a nice tall dresser which belonged to her maternal grandmother who passed away this past year. No one wanted them but Mary and Mary wasn't so sure. Unfortunately, when they got into our house they began to emanate a particularly strong odor of old cigarette smoke. Long story short, several different attempts at cleaning and various existing insults of time had left them in such a condition that they were scheduled to be junked. Then, one day in Target's so called global bazaar Mary and I are walking and she indicates a certain painted piece and says, "Could you do that?" And so I did, or something like it. I really do like these a lot better in person than in these photos. There is a warmth to them, a richness which we really wanted, both for aesthetic reasons--I mean simple decorating reasons--but also because they represent a tangible link with her grandmother. Handling a drawer pull day after day that another's hand has handled day after day, one wants to honor that life and memory even if in such a prosaic way as in storing one's socks. The colors and graphic choices were meant to reflect Mary's interest in Indian decorative art as well as her grandmother's Swedish nature. Also, I couldn't help thinking of Mary's strong interest in tattoos and tattoo art in general. Finally, though it might sound kind of weird, for much of the painting process, which was more ritualistic and repetitive than intellectually creative, I found myself praying. It didn't seem like a bad idea at the time and so, one way or the other, I found myself considering these to be memorial celebrations.

Spring thoughts from last fall

Twelve days till the vernal equinox. I think. The light's coming back. It's been about a year since I quit smoking. Still several inches of snow on the ground but I dreamed last night of a flowering plum, an erupting column of small pink blossoms. Goldfinches this morning were still stripping seeds from last year's Agastache foeniculum, which always makes me glad I don't give-in to the pressure to "clean-up" everything in the fall. In any case, as always, I find myself moving very slowly. In thinking about latent heat and lingering summer sun versus the fleeting and reflected light of late winter despite the same day length, I remembered scratching out the following journal bits last fall. Since I last posted in September, it seemed appropriate to pick up there.

***

Here I am, a stick of incense, Tara, good stuff, bouncing between my lips. You do strange things after you quit smoking. I admit it’s been a while—6 months!--but I would still kill you and your sister’s chinchilla for a guilt free smoke.

This fall, the light is the thing. Shouldn’t be yet--it isn’t fall, but the low angles know. There is a way to worship light, with closed eyes and cold feet, stars bursting on retinas. With wet, shining black stones, bluegill farts and first cups of coffee, weathered, first-cut lumber and fish shadows. Long shadows of ash handles, wheelbarrows and the legs of a child, their slightly darker, gray silhouettes over gray gravel crunching, rolled sock tops and bowl cuts, there in the light it will be burned forever. The thin, long shadow of my brother, purposeful in jerky human gait along that pea gravel driveway. Watching the glow from behind the blood veil.

Being pushed by this low angle light, bent over and forced close to the earth. There's that sense of stretching out, of grinning, feeling the whole infinite spread of Earth. The sudden, tattered vent feathers of a chipping sparrow, filtering the sky. It is the fall light and the butterflies have gone. It is the time of tiny birds, the fast hot, searing hot hearts, the three toes and the goofy beats, it is time for them to move on. I love it, don’t get me wrong. It is the light of wheat-sheaf Jesus and assorted martyrs, of mothers and manna--heaven-based bake-sales raising money for new harp strings. This is the light from which her neck hairs were woven. The cave light. The light in the womb of no beginning. The pressed curls and nostalgic dew, suddenly rising heat revealed in the sun. But, this too is just the light of a disinterested sun. The light of a gaseous body so far away, it strikes us at a funny angle from time to time and masquerades as God. I do wonder sometimes what was our first God. What was the first concrete abstract worship we committed? Would it have been tipping our face to warmth or smelling the quick-green rush of Earth? Would it have been a full belly or blood-filled loins? I don't know, but I wonder a lot, when it was and what we were loving more than ourselves or if it was just ourselves we've been loving all along. Don't know.

I have a problem with the present, I know. I have a problem. I wonder sometimes if this nostalgic malaise, if this love of things I have known might prove fatal.

That’s the danger, I guess, the danger in knowing, the danger in loving. It might kill you. How will you move on, how can you? You leave behind mysterious pink organs unknown to science. You leave behind honeycombs woven of fish scales shining in dust and draped in daisy chains of cracked coffee cups. You are a blue tile sunrise alive with yellow powder, sweet jasmine powder and lime green polyester, and purple vinyl shoes, too tight, and there again, it was almost fatal. Here comes the earth and here comes the quake and, less distantly, here comes the hot smoke of incense in my eye.

The things I’m in love with are legion. My god, I can’t count the colors and the herbs and the wrinkled petals of crepe, the chevroned grasshopper legs and the soul-chaffed wood and the eucalyptus smoke and the lines that anchor your eyes. What am I supposed to do with the wet wool and the snail slime and the thrilling underside of a displaced alley brick? I even love that hair on your coat from the cat I’ve never met, and how couldn’t I love you for it, and I haven't even met you but I love the bend of your teeth in your sudden smile and bark of a laugh. That’s the steel, the stone, the silly girders. My world and its slightly unconventional building code, its everlasting bricks. All tumbled in a heap.

***

So much for random thoughts from last fall. I want to look forward to Spring, but this year it feels like waking up before you've had enough sleep and you know you're going to be too fucking tired to do anything well. Anyway, we'll see.

Fish heads, rotting chicken and the Most Beautiful Smell of Sexed-out-Linden

Here she is here is that May 7, 2007. Here she is and finally I can smell the pollen, the limpid, languorous plant-sex on the air, hot and heavy. But she isn’t, not this air, not this pungent, olfactory soup of beguiling sweetness, she isn’t that hot or heavy yet. Is it a boy or a girl?

Ambiguity is ok when it’s not even the same kingdom. I can’t discriminate what wetly commandeers my nose. But. I can’t believe it, there is linden already. There are cherries and Siberian crabs and real cherries, these wild women growing on the banks and slopes of the railroad cuts, the Virginia cherry and the pin cherry, mad women smelling of cosmic cheese and elf breath. There is the sun, just enough, and the heavy breath of water, and she knows what the fuck spring is about. I can’t believe it.

I tasted her this morning, outside the Comcast building, which isn’t exactly, but we’ll call it that and at least the owner had the sense to plant these rose family matriarchs, hardly native but hardly caring, this is their light, this mist and twilight light at noon suffused with gelid lead light, this is their gravid space, this space of ageless lust and wonder. This, and the low river crying for water. The pregnant air teasing.

Come! Come! Waiting for the rain, another day, and I can’t believe the lindens are blooming. They call them basswood around here.

Walking with Donny, I think I was about ten, god knows, he says, he says. I say, I love the way the lindens smell. He says, “Jesus Christ, it smells like a French whore.”

Well, I wish, I wish I’d said, “Jesus Christ, I’d like to meet that whore.” And who wouldn’t?

But I didn’t say that. Besides, I don’t think that even a sophisticated gay man such as my uncle Don would suggest Linden, the blossom alone, smells like a French whore. If it did, lord, I’d still like to meet that woman. He must have been smelling spring in my city, that Washington, D.C., and we were a half block from Hayden’s, on 7th, just before Independence, and you know what’s coming, if you’ve been there, you know you can already smell the crepe myrtles, you can smell the rotting chicken in the 55 gallon drums behind Eastern Market.

The spring, the spring in Washington, Jesus. They shouldn’t let men be teenage boys in D.C. That just shouldn’t happen. And god help the young women, I’ve no idea how it hits them. The cherry blossoms and the hyacinths and the lindens and the sodden maple blossoms red and spent and swollen and blown in drifts along the bricks. The electric green grass ready to wilt already. The marble sweat and the moldyc copper roofs the steaks burning at Mr. Henry’s the old beer and fine scotch pissing on the sidewalk from the Hawk and Dove, the sodden newsprint from Trovers, come on, come on, the junipers and the yews the limestone and the moldering ghosts at the Library of Congress and your nose is in there, in the perineum that is 2nd St., S.E., there is St. Marks--it welcomes you—and there is the space shuttle and there is fifth grade and there are women and women and women you’ve known. What are you supposed to do with them all, with every bobbing breast and perfect thigh just misted with sweat and spring heat clung to by batik and patchouli and lemon and there, at the Tidal Basin, with the crabs and the cherry blossoms, where even the breath of the earth, the cool musk of the soil itself for god’s sake, even the heart of the earth is a dark eyed woman, a woman of blinding light, a woman of ripe simmering heart and just baked bread, a sweet child’s kiss and another funeral you missed. Jesus, what are you supposed to do with a city like that?

Somehow this will comeback to boxwoods, or maybe it will come back to lavender, or maybe it will come back to Yoo-Hoo, I think it will. I think it will come back to rotting children, I meant to write chicken, and chlorine from the natatorium. I think it will come back to Old Sam pissing in the shrubbery and the zoo smell of metal railings and the old pee smell of alleys and the pure psychotic death smell of protein in hot sun, that smell of chicken in the summer. Cause before you know it this spring will be gone. And sometime soon Eastern Market will be repaired, rebuilt and restocked and re-loved and re-walked and somewhere, at least I pray to god, somewhere there will be a child with tiny sandals, there will be a child wondering at the awful reek of these extra bits rotting in the sun, the chicken and the fish, there will be a hand so small holding in wonder and fear, there will be a brief journey into the sun, through the forest of knees and swaying hips, the broadcloths and polyester, the flowing prints, the black skin and cocao butter the white thighs with blue vein crepe, these knees and thighs and crushing brush, that hot rancid breath breathing the cheeses and the crab cakes, please Jesus bring that on back and don’t change a thing, bring back those tiny fragile fingers and that love bring back that love of sidewalks and raucous voices. Bring back the summer and the grocery sack bring back the magic in the bricks and fumagatory green paint and heavy brasses. Bring back the breath of a dead snapper's eye and the hot delicate, cool-genital-tingling sheen of a reclining scallop, bring back the Christmas trees and that was where Christmas trees came from and bring back the Virginia and the Maryland and the tidewater accents bring back the coveralls and the fish heads and the strange nasal speech that was so at home so much more at home. That was home, there with the homemade bread and that was just where the bees lived and the red wine in plastic cups with the fundraisers, that was where we'd buy our bananans and there everybody wanted to tear it down, and yes Rosalie, yes my mother, I do remember, I do remember that day in the VW Bug and the standing down of the mayor and the Jim Mayo, god rest his soul, and so many souls to rest, but there was the red wine and the summer nights and there were the dances and the plays and the fragrant leather feet, the making of a community art space, the black paint and the white paint, the folding chairs and that is how it's done I guess, you were always there to show me that, there is always a way to get it done so I don't worry about it, I know they will build it , the South hall again, and probably flush with cash and without counting a single penny, mostly that seemed to be it, red wine and hungry people and folding chairs and the white and the black.

Fast moving that spring

So fast. Grackles one day, robins, juncos. House finches, then kinglets, suddenly a kingfisher. There were great blue herons and double crested cormorants. The goldfinches have been here all along, progressively putting on their colors, chickadees calling with sweet relaxed excitement their two-tone whistle. Unlike the psychotic cardinal pimping his territory at half past three in the morning. And yesterday the first chipping sparrows. A week ago the first brown creeper though I didn’t know they left. God, I wish spring lasted ten years. Spring, for me, needs to be a mighty epic. Books and shelves of books of days and lifetimes spent in the moist light of wilting pink blossoms. Ceremonies and processionals, months devoted to the muttonchops, chestnut no less, of the chestnut-sided warbler. And he would wait, everything would wait, every drop of rain and every malignant mass and every dropping cherry blossom. I just want ten thousand years with cool wet warm sun on my knees, a girl’s hair, worn, happy perfume, young anxious fingers and silly smiles of gladness. Tired feet and tired eyes and thrilling heart resting tenderly in the explosion. I just want another ten or twenty thousand years in that easy afternoon. Spring, even the air tries to sneak a finger along your ribs.

Meanwhile, these confused tulips with frost-burned tips bloomed so furiously their petals almost exploded. At the very least I think their thin, curiously wide and flat necks are broken, splayed, sore, but not unhappy it seems. So quick and here already my tulips look spent. No idea what happened this year. I really have to plant daffodils this fall to extend the storm of color.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, my native plants wake up like long-legged, gentle mad-women, fierce as badgers and soft as the fat cheek of a two year old sleeping, eager as new water through the breach. Follow the light, follow the light through the dust country. That was your toe print, that was the stone that bit you, that is the love of your brown eyed dog, patient, intelligent and gone again through the breach. These plants I set loose. I think, "God bless them, please."

Please. We're lucky these plants don't come for us in the night. Maybe they do. Maybe it does all come back to the nose and the electric beetles. Brains of dung and scratchy chitinous feet croqueting us back to heaven. They take over this yard fast enough, but not fast enough for me. Will I ever enjoy that eternal moment of volatile oil and blistering sun again? So ephemeral, so silly I won't even share that moment. I haven't yet, not even now, not even with you. But there is something in these oils escaping into the sun, there is something in these plants waking up and dancing brightly against the crumbling wall of bleak, blank idiocy.

Anyway, I found out when I got home this evening that Eastern Market burned last night, or early this morning. Quite a blow.

Thank god for the bob and the dip.

The years, the years you spend with them, with their hair and their furniture,
with their earrings and their chipped dishes, their tattered photos and dog-eared books,
Rumi andRimbaud and Faulkner and Atwood and Jean Auel and Stephen King,
with the books they couldn’t throw away from the classes they finished and almost finished,
with the Monday underwear, the worm-holed lace and polyester, the sieve-ed cotton,
with the broken elastic, the worms of square rubber, and the stains too obvious to mention,
with the blankets their grandmothers made for them,
with the sour plum stones of decisions digested before you existed.

You live with these things and they mark you. This is normal? To love some stranger, someone you’ve never met until you’ve met her? This person, this person who has opened your mail, tossed your socks in the dryer, this person who has cried for you, for you, she is not even related to you. Sometimes, sometimes, you turn around and she’s dead.

What are you supposed to do with that?

Sometimes it will happen before anything happens,
before you are granted the right to bear a title,
before you are qualified to be widowed. Sometimes she will go,
in the day, in the night, in a car, an ambulance, a bed pan,
in a hospital bed, bed pan, but she’s gone.
Sometimes she will go down the drain in strawberry swirlies,
down the drain of a hotel bathroom in Mexico.

Sometimes, silly, she will have survived that and
you’ll not only know about it, you’ll be dumb enough to think it won’t happen again, but,
Sometimes it will.

Sometimes, on a Friday morning,
the week you broke up,
that week you finally had to go
—see, that happens, and it should be some kind of ok—
but it’s not ok, not ok,
not ok. She, will sometimes check into a hotel
in a picturesque river town—not quite Mexico, a nice enough town this one, but too Republican—
sometimes it will happen that on the way to this hotel along the interstate,
there will be a Fleet Farm, and at this Fleet Farm they will,
Sometimes, sell her not only a rifle, but ammuniton.
Sometimes,

She might drive back to your town and kill you,
if
only
for
breaking
her heart.

But this time she didn’t.

Sometimes, she’ll continue on to that charming, minor resort--really minor--resort town hotel and she’ll get a room. There, she’ll finish what she started in Mexico. A rifle this time instead of bloody vomit. No hospital, no recovery, no shrinks, no meeting you, not-this-time. And I really do have a problem with time.

Sometimes it’s all about the hips. There are hips and there is a beat and there is the heart of the world, what can you say, but-help-oh-Jesus-fuck. Thank god for the line of her, cutting through the day, keeping you above the tide line. Those hips and thank god for her, the thighs and the slim rondure, the arc and the sway, the precious cresting of god’s imagination that is, sometimes, a woman, ringing the bell, the bell of denim and taut chevrons, the bell and the spool of dreaming, the line of mysterious, tricky thought from navel to ankle and back to chin again, the line of cool cheeking left behind, if only in the mind’s eye. What does that skin smell like? What does that skin taste like? What is that, that kite of one life cracking in the ions before you? A butterfly mated to a rabbit, the grace and the softness and the airy pure, lemony-sex as she floats by, ringing that damn bell. How could you not love that? How could you not want that, the skin of dancing shadows?