More Then Than Now

I was going through pictures of everyone.  Five years and six years ago when there were fewer wrinkles and more food on the children's faces.  Few toothed baby smiles and running around without any pants on.  Piles of blankets for toddler and baby to pretend to read side by side.  Our old house, the two rooms full of sun and cracker crumbs, and some pictures of him on the couch, ripped green shirt on maroon couch and a smile that makes me eat gulps of some nameless feeling that feels like falling down.  I keep thinking of the kitchen floor where there were deep gaps between the slats of flooring.  I could never get that floor all the way clean.  Even when I bothered to try.  I used to like to sweep it and mop it.  I liked to have the back door open on that big sloping yard and how it sounded when he came home.  There is no place for the picture now.  Sealed in a screen, a big quiet stretch, the still of the dead.  I can barely animate him in my memory or remember the kisses the whispers of promise.  I can barely make it mean anything now.  It maybe never did.  I don't know when that is supposed to stop gutting me.  Maybe when I stop thinking of it, I guess.  I get tired thinking of him, in his new life moving on and what I become in the undertow, the disintegration.  Eaten by the waves he makes moving away.

Paper Cutout

Almost five years ago, my body began to vanish. I was stretched on my bones some skin and flashes of this and that, mostly an emergency. Now there are mounds of me; piles and folds with no more flashes but streaks and spots. It's a portrait of a wet dog with sandy fur. It's a half of a thought that keeps me from really getting things done now. As if that is different. I stopped drinking beer so there might be less of me. I drink beer so there will be less of me. There is clearly a problem there. There just keeps being more of me, my crowds of inner children, my night time hunger, the strangers I can be. I didn't sit down to say things about myself really. I was thinking about storage spaces and the piles of stuffed boxes that smell of damp evenings and dusty dining rooms, tables for scrabble, slender tan leather shoes, disfigured chiffon and heels worn from street dirt in the rain. I am yawning, swallowing stuff. Stuff hemmed into more and more of me as I become massive and retreating and surrender. Hoist my flag upside-down, a haunted ship cemented into a tourist harbor. A broken TV with only the sound, not synced to an endless shifting of constructed color and blighted memories, they solarize and warp and stutter, ravaged by the time passing over and over and over, twin rivers running forward and running backward. I hoist my belly in the crook of my arm, vestiges of it's usefulness coming into focus and darting into the foggy obscurity of daydreaming and I crawl inside the picture of myself on spindle legs, blasted in sunlight when I thought I might go out, just like a light. A bright flash and the trace of rose geranium, a dream trying to consider itself.

Stirring

Garlic and parsley and red onion. The pot boils. I can't stop the torrent, the lack of knowing, the way to stop the constant skirmishing, the constant backlog of how things got this way and how impossible it can be to change anything. For the third day I woke up and couldn't think. This is beginning to be tiresome and so I make soup. I clean rooms and make soup and plead. This is tiresome so I think maybe outside would be better. If only we could be outside and there would be some remedy on the wind, that the hot, humid air might hold the secret to the puzzle of how we don't fit and how we can't fit, so we clash and screech and cry. All three and me just like a baby. Marking time till something relieves me from this paralyzed spot and I finish this and I stand again. Someone is stuck in a chair.

Meatball Sandwiches

For my part, there is a warm smell in most of the house and the children gently play with tiny animals and put tiny animal things in the houseplants and creep around speaking lightly with voices almost whispering. The cat howls, never satisfied with the food or going out or coming in.

Today I attended a seminar in what education in the Dominican Tradition means. I have a cold in the hot heat and my chest feels weighted. I'm tired and Don Quixote seems to call out to me, like a whiny telepathic, to follow him and his squire through the beginning. Sassy Cervantes. I plumb the dregs and think of the sonnets I might set as a prologue to whatever it is that will mark me in history as something more than future soil. That's cheerful.
I have been sleeping poorly, something wedged in my sleep making my dreams bright and painful and sequential in a way that only makes sense while I am still half asleep. This morning I was making some excuse about this ancient bowl crumbling in my hand and putting shards of clay into the salsa I had made and was serving to friends who looked with strange compassion on me as I set down the dish on a watery table. In real life the phone was ringing and ringing. I feel so tired and my eyes are burning from the residual onion vapor hanging in the air.

What's more...That's the same as always. Another Wednesday.