Charlie Murphy

Baby Quilt

With some luck I might finish this before our baby is born. I really should have machine-quilted it as the design and piece work is what I enjoy doing anyway.

Wacky blue exposure. Inaccurate, but I like it.

We don't know if we are having a boy or a girl so don't read anything into the color. Actually, I suppose you could, but not about the gender of the baby, rather about the fabric donors. My father, my uncle and me. Much of the fabric for this came from a seersucker suit my father gave me when I was in high school. Needless to say, it no longer fits. The blue and white dress shirts, how I saw him clothed everyday for two decades--not to say he wore much white. Actually he was more likely to wear pink, but that would be a different quilt I think. I admit some of the Oxford cloth came from fat quarters I bought but the evocation for me is the same. The medium blue fabric may have been hand-dyed by my uncle, or it might have been from and irregular lot. In any case, there was no repeat. It was fabric he had packed away, presumably waiting for the right project to come along. So, another memorial piece. One to be thrown-up upon.

Medicine Cabinet

Finished and mounted the medicine cabinet to match the base. It's all a bit much in a small bathroom, but what the hell.

More installments on the gypsy hut.

I finally finished our bathroom vanity. It is modeled after an Indian bowl Mary bought at Target. Of course, we also wanted it to connect to her bedroom furniture Despite the fact that it took a ridiculously long time to finish, with being distracted by various things, I actually rushed the painting a bit.

This also was the first time I've tried doing a mosaic. Would do several things differently and suspect that if there were a subsequent attempt it would go much faster. Still, I enjoyed the process a lot and am ok with the result. The tile was purchased at Mosaic on a Stick, a great shop on Snelling Ave.

Above was the top while being sealed. Below is a closeup of a door.

There's something strange about the scale of the parts of this thing, the faucet for instance. But, as I told Mary, if we get sick of it, next spring we will have a very cool birdbath.

I'm working on a matching medicine cabinet which will be done, hopefully, in a few days. I still need to pull cable for lights and the fan too...

23 Things on a Stick

23 Things on a Stick is a statewide, Minnesota library learning project for which I sit at work and get paid to blog, but not here, here. The intent is to get library staff more digitally savvy about so-called Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 issues. I'm not sure if the point is to explore how user-generated and modified content is changing how information is stored and accessed, or just to be knowledgeable about services our patrons might be using or might need help with. Both I suppose. I don't have to participate, but it's an excuse to learn new things about familiar web apps, or perhaps to think about them critically or philosophically for the first time. I will find it a challenge to blog in complete sentences and organized paragraphs. I will find it a challenge to revisit my prejudicial assumptions about things like Facebook and Twitter (23 Things is especially big on the social aspect of Web 2.o, if that doesn't sound redundant). Given that I am one of the least social people I know, it should be an interesting experience. I am already surprised to find that Twitter is kind of fun.

What's a Decade to Me?

Here is a quilt I put away without finishing over ten years ago. For one reason and six hundred others it never came out again, but then it did. I pulled it out recently--to me recently means six months ago--and was plugging away at it. Even more recently, like two nights ago, a cat--the same one in this picture--puked on it. So, the upside is that now I know the brilliantly gold African fabrics I forgot to set/wash before using didn't run after all.

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.

Pfew.

Rei iki bomba, that sweet reek of gasoline, I know it doesn't make much sense, but that's all I am, all I am is the smell of gasoline on your fingers, with the green sun in your eyes and the smell of tomato green and tobacco hornworm floating over, and under--such an olfactory basement they made!--the solvent notes. But that's it. I'm sorry I don't have more, that I'm not a mafioso or an electric monkey who pees blue molten gold. Sorry I'm not an investment feaver banker with realistic cry and daily diaper wet. I'm the time between seeing the blood and covering your mouth. The space between the hearing of crying and the making it up the stairs and everything is ok but there was that awful space and I'm sorry but that was me. I would like to be the flavorful, vanilla infused space between the spatula and your tongue, and the notes and floats and vanilla waves of silly just your birthdays, I wish, but all I am is the taste and not the memories. Thank god, actually, that belongs to you. But gasoline, you can't, probably, unless you're my brother or my cousin, or one just like us, you probably can't know what gasoline means to me and that's the thing, that's the individuation of self that occurs only with old of old and old pick ups and tractors and ignorance. So.

Bone butter

I can't lose the cobwebs, the bone butter, the delicate scaffold, that marrow comb. I should talk to the dead, to this party I host. One after the other and another again. It's not that I'm sick of them, the persons of the dead, but I can barely see what's going on around me. Clouds of perfume and old shirts, buzzing voices with nothing new to say, never again. What did she say, she’s said it again, and yes I’m ready, I’m ready to go to Wong’s, already out the door and gone, I am, on and down the way. Can't shake the dead. I've had to accept that lately. Can't get away from them. A boat full of bones. Bones and flowers and pain-hazed eyes looming before me. Horse teeth and china blue eyes and thick hands slapping the table, the slap and the wonderful laughs.

It’s got nothing to do with my gray hairs, with my squinting, all the little deaths I feel inside me.

It’s the eyes bobbing in the coffee. Bloated tongues and gravelly oil pans, his spoon in the coffee, clinking clinking clinking. OCD and the smell of old nicotine on glass. Brown rivulets and helping your dad and the lung-stopping Windex in that small airless space, choking with sunlight. Popcorn and unpopped corns on the floor mats, the sweet reek of gasoline. My father.

But there's the one I don't talk about, and why should I? She shot herself. Sneaky ghost. The absence of sense and wondering what the bomb was, from what direction the revenge will come. You don't want to open a can of chili beans and see her face erupt. Spiritual botulinum. There was a time after she died, there was a time when I would be riding the bus and see a woman about five-five, auburnish hair between the shoulder blades, I would see a dress full of flesh-air and freeze. Holy fuck with the prickling singing and the ruptured cells and the tingling, the heart cast loose and wondering if it would ever be good for anything again, this seeing-a-woman-walking-down-the-street-while-riding-the-bus? Mostly you wonder, at least I did, if she had fucking pulled a prank. It’s been almost six years and I’m still wondering, still dread hair dyed a certain shade of red.

It's kind of silly. And annoying.

No I don't have cable...

The second season of Weeds will be out on DVD July 24 this year. Of course this may be much less exciting for those of you with cable. You, however, can look forward to the 3rd season's premiere on August 13.

Straw and lead, peachwood and the perfect BLT, almost

All my thinking all tangled up in the bottom of a junk drawer. It occurred to me recently that if I ever want to write anything ever again I might have to write about the dead, even if only to burn it. One of those things. Enough people have written about enough dyings. I have no interest and no desire to be one of them but I might have no choice, just to get it out of the way. All these ghosts, even of the living, so maybe there's no hope of untangling the times. I warn you. Be wary of your basement. Be wary of the piles you make intending soon to return. Olive green IBM Selectrics and curling smoke and random riffs and too much Pledge and so many dirty ashtrays. The children’s books waiting, moldering with hope.

In the bubble space, I can't get rid of them, sticks in the river. Styrofoam and six pack rings and one curly haired black dog, dead in the Kings River. Ten pound mono, Pepsi cans, ivory satin deeply quilted, bad make-up, a rosary wound round waxen hands. One difference: when I die there won't be twenty mismatched decks of cards that someone will feel obligated to sort and divide and save despite missing the eight of clubs, jack of hearts, the five of fives. No bright jokers, crisp despite the tattered boxes, the rubber band shrapnel, or the odd buttermint frozen in a flash of hospitality.

I'm made out of straw, I'm made out of lead. An old man climbing icy stairs. I'm a leaf slowly on fire, down the sidewalk I go thinking I'm getting somewhere.

But I have peach wood and a woman's hair. Bright frenzied marbles from the garden and worn out beats from tapes I won’t throw away. I saved the Marshmallow King, deep in the bubble, deep underground mining for time, making a bed between the mites. Odd pan of used motor oil and bag of sulfur, a row of slightly ragged teeth-- how they shined! Everyone, everyone is beautiful when she smiles. Sincere, thoughtless happiness is so, so hot. The warmth of you when suddenly it was night. The eyes of you when you once, just that once, smiled with your whole being. Some of these things are hard to fit in blue plastic boxes.

That damn memory, damn bubble, the hospital bed and the monitor and the parted mouth and the eyes. The catheter and the dried skin. Relentless beat, skin drum of eyelids and the hurting. I would rather think of the almonds and the figs. I would rather think of carpeted trunks, extracting fishing rods and Styrofoam coolers from that clean steel oven of a 1978 Dodge Aspen. I would rather think of miracle bacon and the dynamite mayo blowing minor holes in the burlap and muslin, dropping stitches in time. Aluminum foil, weeping tomatoes and cold Pepsi.

Then, you know, there are just those days you wish, you wish you could step outside, step outside this life. Just sit on a bench in the warm shade of an easy tree, sit and smile and pass the time with a beautiful girl.

I spent some time living in the hot, faceted bubble of that granite spine, smelling the breath of water striders and cottonwoods. Another bubble. Aborted embryos each one, each mnemonic sac of fossil love. Born again and again and again and wondering how we got into this mess.

Of beginnings there was the mud, the clay. Dogs quickly given names, grocery bills growing and paid, the planting of figs, the planting of vines. Of pomegranates, there was the thin wrinkled red leather, glossy lance shaped leaves, spines of surprise. Of protruding stamens and puckered sunrise, of bright nacreous pout, bold flesh pebbles and hair sentries, I can’t say what they knew. Children were born though, and grew warm and grew cold, brown skin drifting in heaps and rolls. Eventually we burned them, or buried them all.

I wish we left something behind more than corpses, besides photographs and nicotine stains. Not Rubbermaid bins full of papers and change. Not an oak box of ashes or a rusted tackle box, though tackle boxes are nice. Not Oxford cloth shirts and jaundiced underwear. Something small and new, but big enough to have weight. A dimple, a ripple in the surrounding space. Something you damn well won’t forget. A kidney stone. Maybe something you could hold in your hand till it grew warm, shining with curiosity, with uncertainty and unfocused, loving grief. This stone you could lose but never give away. Something new. There one moment: A corpse, my loved one, the death sigh and the grieving. The next: Here, I’m holding a stone, a living stone, a stone of the dead.

“Who was that,” you’d ask me. Maybe you’d stopped by, with the coffee, for the time. “This?” I’d look down, surprised myself by the glowing lump of malachite in my palm. “I don’t know. Must be something I picked up in Mictlan.”
“Yes, yes,” You’d say, impatient with the lack of bacon, the lack of coffee, the lack of today, “But who is it, that stone?”
“My father,” I’d say, or my grandfather or my friend or my aunt. What do you do with your pants falling down from the weight of the dead?

There would be fights over who might hold this stone of no forgetting. Promethean probate. It would be beautiful, but maybe it would show the stain. Inclusions and pits and striations, yellow zebras and mink eyes and cobalt veins. All at once the beauty and the shame.

Mine, I hope, will smell like coffee, or lavender, or tomato leaves. Lemon on fine hands. Hot pavement and new rain, cool freckles and blue cat skin. The wrinkles in your shirt, the sudden air conditioning and the smell when it somehow turns out all right with no hearts broken and no souls stained. If nothing else, I hope my stone smells like a window left open for the blue hours. Your feet on the clean floor and the smile you didn’t intend.

Blooming today

Prairie phlox above and dianthus below. The phlox has a beautiful, sweet smell but--and I can't believe I am saying this--I wish it smelled more like old fashinoned cultivated phlox.

The darker pink dianthus has returned three years running. We haven't had a normal winter since I planted them, still they certainly deserve their reputation for hardiness. The native Rudbeckia below should be blooming in about a week. Monarchs have laid eggs on that milkweed, but no caterpillars yet. What I neglected to photograph this morning is all the native spiderwort. From one six pack three or four years ago we now have volunteers everywhere. Good thing too, one of my favorite plants. One last thing while making garden noise...there's a male red-winged blackbird in my neighbor's backyard calling for all his worth as if he intends to stay. I've heard they visit feeders but I would hardly call our yards a normal territory. Strange sound to feel in my head up here on the bluff, in this house and year.

The Perfect pair of shoes

And if it weren't for the word, I don't know where I'd be. Not that word. Any word, though some are better than others. The word of velvet the word of stone the word of brittle yellow pages. The dust and the bone ash and the fine root hair. You think someday the sun will break, it will blow out, rain shards of egg-colored Bakelite. This sun of broken green bottles and clear glass, the dried up Wild Irish Rose, smelling of angry bees. This sun of enormous slides and swings and filthy chained tires under 395, the highway. Brick and algae, mold and slate and slugs, the things that give deceitful comfort in memory’s hard-spiked box, this shattered sun plinking and rattling, cooler than you'd expect, a dirty yellow hail slowly turning black, tumbling us into blindness, drifting under ten thousand typewriter keys, nothing but word dust after all.

And then it seemed that life should consist of more than chewy brown loogies, like lung dust wetted with worm jizz and worked into a gritty paste, so I quit smoking. It's Saturday afternoon and my wife is dreaming. Paint her with cinnamon and paint her with oil. An accident of limbs and breath. Pile her high with rabbits, the deep fur and bright eyes. Bring her the fresh, sharp sheets and smoothed off regrets, I wish I could. I wish I could bring her, right into her dreaming, bring her a dolphin riding a manatee. I wish I could bring her the perfect pair of shoes and leave them where she would find them. I mean the perfect pair of shoes.

Of course they will have style, style too fresh and original for my words to describe. But these shoes will also make her feet smell like fresh strawberries and feel like liquid satin on clean, soft skin bathed in spring sun, rolling, limbs akimbo just after. These shoes will match every item of clothing in her closet. These shoes which I would sneak into her dreaming will be on sale. There is only one pair and it fits her--both feet, each shoe. Every other pair was destroyed by funky dream fire. These shoes she will find and bring home from her dreaming to flaunt, these shoes will make me eat my words. "You did," I will say. "You found them. You were right. The perfect pair of shoes." "And they were on sale," she will say.

Mary and I got married

I can't remember if I mentioned that. September 29, 2006. Small, as we are. Cloudy, bit of rain. Grateful for all the folks who made it. Some pictures...

Wedding

Went to Mexico just for the McDonalds

Slowly loading a few other images here....We actually didn't take many pictures.

Dead Bigots and A Brief Vacation Reading List

Just took an hour and a half to get my hair cut...heard an old man commenting on the mystery of white people adopting "colored" children. As I writhed uncomfortably, thinking about all the razors in the room, my barber caught sight of the smoke starting to seep from my ears and changed the subject to the recent death of the Great Fat Bigot Himself, Jerry. I was able to talk about how the old intolerant, self-serving, hypocritical fucker will not be missed--now grant that I have no idea if Falwell was racist, but he was certainly intolerant--and hope that got the message across. I was afraid for a minute I would be finishing my haircut at home.

So, the books I'm taking with:

Dress Your Family in Courduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez--and no I haven't read that yet, really!, why no I haven't, so piss off--but I am looking forward to it.

Some Cicero, On Moral Ends, as I was supposed to read it for a class years ago

A blank journal, huh.

I may well find some awesome trash at the airport or in Mexico. What I especially look forward to is reading local phone books and neighborhood papers once I get there and yes I can read enough Spanish to get it on. God help me when I speak though. Terrible accent and mind-lock and every tense ever invented fighting for primacy and leaving old squid paste on my tongue such that when I open my mouth horrifying clouds of disarticulation pour forth. Anyway, yeah.

Got this habit of reading phone books from my dad. I don't travel often so it doesn't much come up, but Larry, if we found ourselves in a sterile motel room in some warmed over vacation town would prop himself with phone book on his lap and do strange things...not depraved, but definitely strange...the kinds of things an anthropologist or geographer might get away with, but he was neither. I suppose an urban planner had every reason to do these things without embarrassment, but who even knows what an "urban planner" is? Anyway, Larry would read the yellow pages, giggling and sighing and saying, "Son of a bitch" in quiet tones, blowing smoke and flipping pages and possibly wishing his son were not sharing the room with him. Still, here was Larry, giggling, "Twenty-four gun specialty stores, holy shit." Pages flipping, "Oh ho! Bill's Taxidermy on Montero Ave., established 1927. More taxidermists than the last town I was in." Smoke and silence and air conditioner peace eventually stillness leading to something about maps and rail yards rivers and orchards and time, always time stalking us both, though I can't remember Larry ever facing time.

"Owen, there are more grocery stores in this town than car washes...Son of a bitch."

So I'm looking forward to reading the phone book, if they have one and I'm sure they will, when I get to Mexico.

Irritating blogger

Ok, blogger is slightly irritating at the moment. Was trying to change photo in profile. Won't accept anything. So this was the one

or maybe this

Promises

One of these days I have to post something that makes sense. Something with a beginning and an end and a good bit in the middle. Maybe even read it before posting. No, seriously. That might not be today. Today will mostly be cleaning, fretting, running around and, in some way, sweetly grieving. Mary and I are going to Mexico just as Minnesota is fatly and sweetly and brightly and richly rolling out spring. I hereby dedicate the last five minutes of my life to the adverb, its long legs and whimsy.

Last night with the dog and the stars and an unsteady Earth spinning too fast while I breathed in tide pools from oceans never visited, suddenly a nighthawk. Something about those birds. The first, at least my first, this year. Maybe later I'll sift around in my head and try to remember every one.

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.