didaink

The Aqueduct of You

I’m still looking for ways to find you, honor you, and bring you back to life.

When I see your picture or your handwriting in cards that were once freshly peeled from their crisp envelopes, you are near me again, and I can almost feel you in the room. You're going to enter any moment but tears arrive instead. And helplessness rings the bell like a restless delivery man.

I can’t hold your hand or inhale your perfume, that familiar swirl of vanilla and laurel spices will never splash my cheeks again, and though I try, I can't fully hear your spontaneous giggles, but I remember you stalling for more time like an embarrassed child with her hand in the cookie jar, thanks to a stray gray hair on your elegant chin.

As silly as those memories seem, when I plucked at those unwanted whiskers like you were my very own little hen, they are the same images that slice and cut me now, and I am the airborne flip and flap of a carp gasping for air, desperate for the flow of water to revive me. Then I'm the embarrassed child, longing for her mama, going room to room, searching for you inside a big house with old, worn-out clichés.

After four years, you’d think I might’ve learned to accept it and embrace how long we had one another. You were after all almost 90, an incredibly long life and legacy of children and grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, holding your place in this unyielding world. And yet, it felt too soon--will always feel too soon. I wanted our time to go on without interruption, without age, without illness or frailty or pain. I wanted the comfort of your voice just in the next room or in the phone call across the miles, but still I wonder why you haven’t found me like you did before.

Will Clair de Lune ever play again in a garden shop that I wandered into looking for white cyclamen? Will I see a Monte Cristo on the menu and watch as you walk back to our table, shaking your head because I’m inhaling it with powdered-sugar fingers instead of a clean fork and knife? Will I hear Shakespeare’s voice inside the velvet treasure trove as I stand holding its soft red binding in that grim hallway with cheap green carpet that made my eyes and stomach ache? You inscribed it to Dad in 1982 but I found it on a throw-away shelf inside a building that was never your home. And Voltaire’s optimistic girl, not boy, whose arms reached for me and tucked a thin blue book inside my jittery hand in the East Village while strangers passed and looked on? It was you who turned my head that day in time to see the irony and reflection written in gold near the dusty glass case.

But I haven’t heard from you in so long, though I believed you’d keep trying to reach me somehow ~ now it’s as if you’ve forgotten me. Then I shake my head, knowing you could never do that. You wouldn’t know how. That’s Death’s dirty work, not yours. You would never abandon me.

So I will call you back, try you again and again, until I can hold your hand in mine, admire your glittering umber, put my cheek to yours and construct myself again in the folds of your unmistakable skin that grew me from seed. And I will make myself into the bark of your Ceylon tree. I’ll become your attar, an essential oil, the salve that heals a grown woman's heart. And I will flow and swim and drink from the aqueduct of you.

Choices

I chose to drive his car fast in the rain so I'd be there when he woke.
I chose honesty because of all the lies I breathed and spoke.
I chose dogs and cats and mice and Latino men in hats.
I chose Pepper Trees and Eucalyptus in summer, a Magnolia for my winter blues.
I chose Dickinson over Whitman indoors near a fire.
I chose traveling without a clock.
I chose baths and bubbles.

I chose waterfalls and somersaults.
I chose orange and green.
I chose ice-cold cantaloupes, though the menu read ripe Honeydews.
I chose songs.
I chose forgiveness over blame and hope to remember this when asked to name names.
I chose my parent's reputation.
I chose Ella then Billie then Etta on Sunday Kind of Love.

I chose Cullum then Debussy then Mozart on lazy Saturday afternoons.

I chose No when asked to say Yes.
I chose equal inheritance.
I chose contact with aliens because borders don't belong to people in clothes.
I chose marriage equality after just six months but couldn't say "wife" for well over a year.
I chose peonies and counted petals listening to his pretty talk.
I chose to lay like a flying squirrel when the water filled my borrowed wet suit.
I chose mystery over comedy and comedy over tragedy.
I chose dark hair, though I'm curious about the silver ones.
I chose an older taller man who cut hair too short.

I chose to turn my back on the younger, curly-haired Kinsley who could play anything.

I chose to keep the antique earrings.
I chose 525 miles on a bike from San Francisco to LA.
I chose pedaling with just the one good leg.
I chose to rock with babies.
I chose to kiss her forehead and caress her elegant fingers, though I avoided her rosary.
I chose nothing when she offered me everything.
I chose 6 but now know it's code for 9.
I chose sound over sight.
I chose my 17th year to rewrite.
I chose pickles and pepperoncini.
I chose admitting I was wrong.
I chose accepting I was right.
I chose listening and learning over pleasing.
I chose love in the end and love at the beginning.

 
© didaink 2015 All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Calling Miss Charlotte

C-anopied by a smoky-blue midnight
A-ngels crack through the beaming oval egg
L-ighting the opening indigo sky
L-ooking upon us below sitting brave and bleak
I-nside an eight-sided glass mirror
N-either judging nor ignoring our wilting
G-ifts to the world

M-erely present and acknowledging that we remain
I-ndifferent without its warmth and wisdom
S-hining on us, but mute and dull and gray if we don't look up, we'll miss the diamond
S-haped marque flashing “Detour” in the echo of the turn

C-hariot, sweet chariot, he rode high and cherished even before
H-awa began to help care for you and him
A-fter so much suffering was
R-eleased from her life and then
L-ifted from yours ~ and every so
O-ften during these last six months, I would look down at your sweet
T-umbleweed resting peacefully on my lap and wonder if
“T-ogether again” really does
E-xist… after our bodies release our souls up to that glowing yellow shell... Could it be that hidden deep inside it are the answers we’re all hoping for? And yet, maybe you found them in the caress of his soft angelic face, long before the moon whispered its secret, long before you told it to him.

 

 

Engine, Engine Number 9

N-one of it matters, except the shape of teal green against black
U-ntold stories, planted with the seeds of songs
M-elodies you hear in the amber dawn but never inhale or
B-reath for fear no one cares, a runaway train wails an
E-ndless chorus, the vibrato of a distant ghost
R-ising into the abyss without ever revealing why he left without you.

N
I
N
E-ight but never 7 - a single digit imagined or real? 6, just upside down.

Sunrise Calling

S   een it before, I have, below the roots of the black walnut tree.

U  nderneath the core of the frozen white rain, I could

N  ever fully understood what it was doing growing there

R  ising like fresh dough inside a forgotten rust covered pan

I   t couldn't be held or stopped or erased, this I remember, but you could

S   ugar it with hope and watch its dried-up leaves bloom again --

E  nglish tea brewing, a queen's idea of wild Kenyan caffeine, it

 

C  an never be replaced or changed or reasoned by the grit of the newborn's cry.

A  nd it can't be pushed or pulled or kneaded inside this rusted out pan.

L  et it tell its own story by watching the plain brown wren.

L  oafing at the ground, she’ll pick and choose just the right time to lift her wings.

I   t can be heard through her feathered ears, in the rhythm of her own heart’s beat.

N  ever doubting she will fly again, never wanting her color to be the robin’s red

G  one before the cold wind pushes at her back, her nest is built, the day ends, then begins.

 

A strange, earthly place

11:11am

Place: my unborn baby’s room, rocking in her big yellow chair. 11 years ago.

I look around the room and see all the pretty warm things I have put into place, all the soft colors, pale pinks and yellows, lavenders, sweet-pea greens and fine white organza. The iridescent curtains catch the streaks of gold hitting the windows and I pray that she will like it here on Earth. I want to protect this mystical angel growing inside of me with every ounce of strength that I have left. I want to keep her peaceful and warm in this chair, in this little room, while I try to prepare us to walk through the big world outside in heavy overcoats -- a world that in ten years might be colder than it is today and too painful to explain.

“I will protect you from all that is yet to come. I will teach you well. I will try to not repeat the mistakes I made before I found you, before I rocked us here in this sanctuary,” a promise I make with my hands connected across my enormous belly. 

“We will spend our days and nights rocking in this big yellow chair with the baby white stars and moons. We will sort this world out together. My secret angel, I promise you this.”

I look over to the empty crib and see him sitting all alone on newly laundered lavender sheets. He is the very first present that I brought home to this room and this chair, a placeholder, the size of a newborn. His colors match the gingham crib bumper that I picked for her at first glance. He is patchwork, made from bits of tattered pieces of cotton that gives him the form of a young rabbit, sporting a tummy that might make a lovely pillow for her heart-shaped face. I see this baby girl, whose eyes I can only imagine, hugging him with her buttery arms and lacy fingers. He’ll bring her comfort when she’s alone, I think, when she awakens and there is no one there, when she needs someone or something that is just her size. She will tell him about her world of magnificent shapes and hands and colors. Oh, the stories she will tell him as she giggles and bites and chews on his tender paw.

I wish that I had never given that old safe-haven away, wish I hadn’t replaced it with another. If only I could rock her in it now, eleven years later, glide and roll her worries and the pain away… but at least he is still here, even if he clashes with all the new colors. He is still as patient as he ever was, content to sit alone, awaiting her return to this strange, earthly place.

 

 

Meet my muse (formerly known as "Mariah")

The wind... I'm watching it. Its power, humbling. Its voice strong and bold, it begins to chime. I decide to take notes on what I see and hear as part of my writing practice, a ritual I’ve recently begun before I begin to chip away again at the chapters in my book. What starts out as a ten-minute exercise on writing with presence-of-mind quickly turns into a sixty-minute lesson on resilience.

And today she is my muse. She makes no excuses. She doesn’t wait. She simply moves ahead and picks a direction. There are leaves and branches and twigs pressing against her and, yet, she stays straight. Three crows and a large black V of geese fly in the opposite direction and she pays no attention, she’s on her own journey. The clouds cling to her and sail along across the blue, attaching to her back like a papoose. At times she is fierce and relentless, a mother in control of her flock, her voice, the loudest sound in the sky. If you get in her way she will push back against you and not let you pass without a fight. She’s come too far, traveled too long to be stopped now just because she’s had a little trouble along the way.

And then there are the moments when she is calm, when she lets the clouds have a rest. I see her gently push the wind chimes back and forth like a baby giggling in his swing, and I wait for her to fully stop. She pretends to, almost intentionally trying to fool me into thinking her journey is over, she’s going to take a break, hang up her hat. Then a swirl of leaves dance a circle around my feet and off she goes again, full speed ahead, to finish what she started -- her next chapter, about to begin.

 

Amazing Grace

Today the temperature hit 102 degrees while I interviewed an eighty-nine year old Tennessean. She cried cool, forgotten tears then slowly wiped them away as they rolled past her tired-out cheekbones. She told me to call her Grace instead of Miss Grace when we first began. Me, sitting close enough to hold her hand now and then, typing as fast I can when she races up another hilltop of stories that can make the hairs on the back of my neck itch. 

She speaks with a voice that is just the opposite of what her name suggests. "Simple elegance and refined movement” could never capture or tame her -- she was and is much too free for that -- but her honest grit gives way to something waiting below, and it reaches out to me like a child that's been overlooked.

It is a gamble to listen to such personal things from a woman who says exactly what she thinks. My girlish instinct is to duck and cover from the words that fire from her seasoned Southern tongue. They shoot past my ears then echo into them like a misfired rifle. These grown-up fingers have learned, though, to type without judgment, and so they scurry across the keys and gather up her words as they fall. I roll the dice again and wonder what Grace will say next.

She throws a “Dad Gummit” out across the table, frustrated by things she cannot change now, then calmly lobs a “Pawpaw” to me with that certain Southern charm that reminds me why I am here – to listen, take notes and observe – all the while feeling privileged to be in Grace's company on this fiery June afternoon. Then, while she shows me pictures of her children when they were young, I watch the brutal Southern sun outside her bedroom window steal the innocence right out of the sweet blue sky.

On my drive home, cool air soothing my face and neck, I think about the day she learned to shoot her first gun, “A beautiful .22,” she said. She was seven. It was 1929, the beginning of The Great Depression. The same year her mother died.

I drive past a giant Magnolia tree and it sparks an outline of a wiry brown-haired girl in heavy black boots and a plain white cotton dress.  She is walking alone, setting out into the lush shady woods of Tennessee to escape the burning afternoon heat -- her sandwich in one hand, her gun in the other, her Daddy’s dog by her side.

Now, I am beginning to understand. 

 

 

The Sanctity of Saturday

It’s perfectly still, holy and quiet on this Saturday morning… the only sound in the house is the tap-tapping of my fingers across the keyboard.  I’m studying the cumulus clouds (I learned about them last week from my second grader) through the cathedral window above our front door. 

They are happy clouds, just as the science teacher wrote on my daughter’s picture – puffy and fat and lazy, just laying there, doing nothing.  Then I see a plane fly through them and I wonder if they might be upset now, interrupted by our world… irritated by the need we all have to go and be and do.

“Can’t they have a little respect?” I picture a mama cumulus saying, venting to her groggy husband, huddled-up close to her, “It’s Saturday morning, for goodness sakes!  Not even seven o’clock yet!”

“Mmm… hmm…” he agrees, too sleepy and peaceful to care.

My clicking and tapping across the keyboard is joined now by the murmur of my son waking up followed by the tiny thud of his little feet hitting the floor.  Saturday morning has shifted and moved.  The airplane, out of site now, my son’s silhouette in view.  I watch it softly make its way down the stairs to find me.

Mrs. Cumulus and I give in.  We stretch and move and open our arms. We nudge our husbands awake and let the day begin.

 

Unto Morning He Flew

Unto morning he flew

A defiant burly fox sparrow

Our perilous hero

Swooping out into blue

Cerulean first light, our sapphire awakened the sky

And in between the ambers and green

The chime of nature

Locked sides, then released him

Sailing mercifully

Beyond Orion’s forgiving white sword

Basking there

In his own pink nebula dawn

I hear his unmistakable call

Chirring with hope and wisdom and song

His voice, a fiery echo of life

Everlasting

His eyes, the aqua blue swirl

Of love flowing strong

© didaink

For Paul

January 31, 2005