Not everything is about you, of course, but that's just it. This was. You went to the Starbucks bathroom and when you came out you saw yourself on his sketchbook and you realized he HAD been watching you. You looked at yourself on his page, you looked past him to him and you realized you were not invisible although that is how you had lived and felt for the many years you walked by his side. It was, if you'll allow it, a kind of rebirth. To be seen.

And a few years before that you had had this vision of your body, your grown outlandish adult woman body, wet and sleek with afterbirth, your long dark hair darker from the slime, curled like a comma in a hand that must have been His, against a pulsing black backdrop. This was your first second birth. And many many years before that in a peach-colored dining room you had had a similar image, only this one was you in your flannel strawberry pajamas, a smaller thing, undeveloped yet and flat, in the same hand. Not reborn, just held.

Now, as you shed your doubt and bitterness in pounds of flesh, you again are reborn and revealed anew. All of this is just uncovering. We uncover down to our pith until maybe our teeth are left and maybe our bone pieces file down other bones pieces as they are all gravelled into the world. If we are lucky we may see the thing happen in moments, like a trick of the eye, like the hour hand's Pleiadean  twitch to the new hour.

To be blessed is to know it is happening, the uncovering, the birthing, and to allow silence and space and sometimes a song to stitch the two ends together.

My life is a quilt I will lie beneath when all the pieces have been gathered.

Letters to Someone I've Yet to Meet


The other day when you noticed the way the pine trees gently inclined towards each other
and said something about how mutual benefit is not the same as love I wanted you in a way
that was mutually assured destruction. I knew I would love you down to the dust we'll both
become, and I how like a pine I was then, sure, strong, ever-green, and burning hot. 


I cannot imagine your eyes but I know you will stare steadily when I describe how I am not afraid to hurt, to break, to go. You will already be doing these things and your hands will be cracked and rough from the work. You will have built and rebuilt cities and I will come with a bucket of cool water and offer you a drink.


We will meet when I am naked of all the fears from before. It will be when I have hollowed
out my belly of expectations and when love has become more than a silhouette against a horizon I keep very far away. It will be when disappointment is but a path I've walked, when solitude keeps a chair by to my bed and sings me songs. You will not begrudge him his place because you will have your own paths, your own singers of songs. 


You will pour coffee with a strength in your fingers that makes me want to break over you
like a wave, and you will notice the egg-white matte of the predawn sky and say how like a canvas it is, waiting to be painted.

The Computer Lab And Other Rooms of The Mind

You looked very hard at them and said: have you ever felt your ribs? Your cheek bones? touching each place as you said its name, slipping over the curve of bone. 

Some of them are looking up somatization and others the money that isn't there when disaster strikes the third world. Mostly though, they stare at shoes, their lips moving towards the screen to taste the rubber. 

I heard your steps, so I hid, he says, now returned to the classroom by the escort of his conscience and rebellion - it being too simple to run away when you don't want to sit in the yawning chairs nor stare into the mouth of your teacher, which is moving like V's going south. He would rather present himself the reformed Raskolnikov and practice his eyelashes on you. He wants retired petulance, not a fugitive life in the hallway. He wants open arms and doting forgiveness. You feel like God entering Eden. I already know what you did; why do you hide? You say to him in the silences between your words. 

Some are researching the metastasization of desire and you feel the breast over your heart skittishly as you assume your love has spun itself into strings of death that weave through your flesh. But you are all too sensitive and you taste the illness when you stare into the screen, and so you look that up too, the depth of our desire for the knowledge of  our own end. Everything is a mirror you say and Narcissus did drown. Be careful my ducklings. 

There are other higher things in the room with you that you don't know how to describe, but you see a woman with long hair and sad eyes standing on a cliff. She is not sad for herself. Her hair blows back, all this way to you, and sometimes, it catches in your mouth and you know what it is to break. A sentence fragment they said to themselves to better understand, to turn over the idea in their hands, is something broken. A piece of something. 

You are all fragments of a greater whole that was planned and as you are swept together by the great hand that cleans all, you hear the drag against stones. Some of you are clay, some glass. You clink and chime. There is music in the breaking, the gathering. 

And you have spoken now of the bones and the singing, and you have learned both from many hands and also that you should no longer say what has been said since language broke into being, but love is an old thing and no less buoyant for the cracks. Who are you to say when words die? Who are you to bury them?

To One Dead

 Maxwell Bodenheim

 

I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me.
I stooped to question a flower,
And you floated between my fingers and the petals,
Tying them together.
I severed a leaf from its tree
And a water-drop in the green flagon
Cupped a hunted bit of your smile.
All things about me were steeped in your remembrance
And shivering as they tried to tell me of it.

I am a soft shell and a hard tack. this is because I am only learning what I am. I am not either of those things and the concrete details become gravel, loose under motorcycle wheels, like an Ani Difranco song, when I reach for them. This is why I cut my hair - I am too many different things and the shapes don’t fit. I remember that summer. We went to the beach house of his parents’ friends. We stayed for free. It was in Rhode Island where the sands were whiter and the waters cleaner than in Connecticut where they are trapped by the sound. We stayed up late walking the beach and watching the glowing fluorescent creatures in the water. We rolled around on the sand kissing, his hands in my shirt, and when we saw an older couple far away, we said “we will be like that some day”. When they came closer and turned out to be his parents we laughed and I buried my head in his chest in embarrassment. We canoed through reeds which brushed our boat and made little sighing sounds. We loved each other very much, but every moment of love was like two lids slowly separating so an eye can see. We were very far apart when the world registered and the eye blinked clear. At night we put complicated jigsaw puzzles together on furniture that felt always moist from sea air, and I learned to hate the cardboard pieces in my hand and his. Those pieces fit. I was the thing that did not.

But I am a slow-moving iceberg; I am cold and frozen and always leaving that moment. For many years I was the skin right after touching stove coils, that moment when first there is shock and pain, a hot so hot that it feels like ice for a moment. But now I am ice. I am translucent and clean; you can see through me to little dreams of life frozen in my depth.

This is not to say that I am wanting anything. I am just still a little stunned.