scale

(the girl laughs at me for all kinds of reasons.  my voice is wrong, my inflection, my words, what is behind my words, my ideas, what is behind my ideas - what came before ideas?  even my knees are wrong, my body, my shape, my size.  my smell.  my smell is wrong.  i am about to speak.  i am about to think.  i am about to be wrong.  what?  what is she afraid of?)

dawn's coming

at the end of each day
a dirty fistful

each morning
a clean hand

another performance

my dear sweet daughter, both perform and do not perform.  
do you understand?  be yourself.

on the way to the performance

 

october tree

 

from:  Rememberance

 

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

(The Book of Images, trans. by Albert Ernest Flemming)

geraldine elshire lived in this house, as i live now

upstairs

geraldine elshire was quiet around the hub of what she was as woman

upstairs i barely breathe

the sacredness of body and family a church beneath me

the tear

in the corner of the bedroom is a small tear in the wallpaper.
it is begging to be torn open.

so it is with buildings and bodies and soil.
so it is with sparrows and sunlight and darkness.
so it is with poems.

is there any one thing in the world then that is real;
real independent of its begging?

even my spirit is a beggar.
even the thing that resides on the other side of my spirit
is a beggar.

a conversation; and we eat cake

my son and i are doing what?  something over the kitchen table.  oh, i am cutting and lifting two pieces of McCain's cheap-ass marble cake out onto two mismatched saucers.  what are we talking about?  i can't remember.  but he says something about thirty years from now and i say, oh, wait, how old will i be?

oh, i remember now.  we have been to the library and we have taken out books to read.  he has appraised the return date and as i cut the cake he imagines aloud, what if they were stamped to be returned thirty years from today? 

again i try to tabulate, how old will i be? (what year is it?)  will i even be alive in thirty years?

he looks at me and says, mom, you'll be 72.  you're, like, healthy.  you should be alive, barring a car accident or a heart attack or, as he puts it, something stupid. 

what about murder, i ask?

oh, that would suck, he responds.  i mean, it would really suck, he adds for emphasis.  if i'm murdered, i want to be, like, shot dead, not cut up, or remember what happened to the guy in Fargo, in the wood chipper?  nothing like that.

ya, me too, i say, or, me either.

we eat our cake.

late at night while the self is not watching

i tries to find the truer self~