Liars

I read the article about feminine desire 

in the New York Times Magazine, and now 

I can't stop thinking about arousal.  At work

I look at women coming in, 

wet and glittering from freak snow showers,

and wonder, What a creature you are, like me.  

I am not, 

they reported. 

I am not. 

I am not. 

I am not.

Yes I am! 

cried their bodies.

Yes I am!

Yes I am!

Yes I am!

See?

Theresa told me one night that some mornings she wakes up, stares up at the sky from her pillow, and starts to cry because the day is already too beautiful, already too good, and she has ruined it, simply by seeing it so.  I turned my head so she wouldn't see my eyes roll, come on, even while, with all my heart, I wanted to see the world her way, to feel the shape of every hour falling away.  Those days, instead of doing Illustration homework, I would sneak up to the sixth floor to be with her.  She fed me hot butter croissants spread with Brie and milky tea, we danced and held our bellies laughing, we were so generous to ourselves, secreting away our time.  

I thought she was a planet, touching down to meet me.  I thought she knew of better things.

And the things she spoke of, all of that melancholy, all of those roots and nuts and leaves fingered to lace, those things were real to me.  To be overwhelmed by a pungent rotting fruit pit, to drown in every shifting mood and melody, to stand awestruck and bleary-eyed on a Baltimore side street, gaping at the sky and the night clouds coming in, was a new lifeblood multiplying with a billion more red blood cells than I'd ever had before, thundering little life-savers shoving their way around the universe.  The more I knew her, the more the world exploded into ecstatic particles, and soon it seemed that every cell of me should meet every second of my life with the crashing of cymbals, the gasping of waves, more, more, more.  

  

  

It was too much.  For all of us.  Within a year, every member of our tribe fell to pieces.  Some of us ran into hospitals and watched the doctors watching, another flew home to West Virginia and burrowed in the undergrowth.  I slipped out of the city and spent the winter in a Massachusetts group home where they read O'Connor and Twain to us after dinner.  I slept so much that winter, slept inside of books, inside of woodboxes, inside of snow drifts and sunken gardens, then one morning woke up and taught myself how to fold fitted sheets.  

The mycologist found me in the basement doing laundry.  He always wanted to share his feelings with me, even though I had nightmares about his red face and naked body.  I think he liked my black eyes.  They reminded him of a dark haired girl he used to baby-sit, back when his skin was still fuming with alcohol.  He remembered everyone being so disappointed with him, buddies from high school, his brother who ran marathons, his mom and dad who continued sending him small things in the mail even before he could call for help.  But this little girl turned to him with glad eyes, she lifted her arms to him.

I didn't want the mycologist.  Didn't want his own red river of feelings.  He would cry when I asked, How are you, press his praying hands into his eyes, and thank me for asking.  He carried field guides and photo albums from room to room, aching for someone to notice and inquire.  In his helper room on the first floor, he drank tinctures and sweat alone over the humidifier, desperate for a cure.  He wanted to cure me, but I didn't let him.  

Instead I ran outside to the icy clearing and slid on my back to stare at the sky, silent and black.  Everything important was light years away, burning away, unfeeling.  Take me, I would ask, take me.  But nothing moved, and the quiet settled over me like a comfort.  

I want to be alone these days.

Akin to Wyeth

Tierney Gearon

I suppose I should write words about these images.  My art history prof would want me to.  But I can only say how much I don't understand what art is, why it affects us, why we see an image and it compels us to cry out silently, 

YES!

I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN.

Happy One Year Anniversary To Me

A year ago today, the Empire Builder swung into Portland, Oregon from the north and the east, carrying me in its carpet belly.  Knees up on my wide Amtrak seat, I pressed against the window and through the green, I watched the industrial yards and piney hills grow and shrink back, fell in love at first sight with the slinky gray Willamette, followed tiny cars with my eyes as they swooped over the river on the great winged Interstate, and tired to imagine it all in the moment, the life I would lead, the people I would know, the bed I'd fall into, the neighborhoods I'd roam, my places, my own, all inconceivable.

And this past Thursday, on a whim, I threw a potluck, called out to my friends, "Please eat with me!"  Bring your oafy boyfriend and your bearded husband, maybe carrot sticks and wedges of grapefruit, let's sit together and tuck in to a giant pot of vegetable soup, let's split a beer, let's gather up our knit newborn caps and send them overseas in a cardboard box, let's groan together over sweet vanilla ice cream laid over slices of hot zucchini bread.  And they came, and they filled up the room.  We ate to the bottom of the pot, we crowded the kitchen and stepped on each others' toes.

At the end of the night, with all guests gone, Kellam threw off the lights, and I turned on the dishwasher.  The three of us fell into our chairs in the dark.  We sat and talked for a long time about generations and then about Battlestar Galactica.

Oh!  Sometimes I remember!  I didn't buy this life at the Target Greatlands or from a college catalogue.  I didn't inherit it from my mom or dad or older sisters, I'm not borrowing from my little brother's posse anymore.  One year in the Pacific Northwest and this is what I have.  It is so quiet, most of the time I don't even notice it on my skin.

But for the record, I know something's stirring.  I feel it in my sleep as I turn to my side.  I remember in a blue glimpse, a half-breath.  I hear it in a church service, burning against the wall, words coming from a man I hardly know, I hardly care to know.

I want to call the stirring growing.

I want to call it Lies-Turned-Down.

I want to catch it Once in my palm, just to see if I'm getting it right, just to see if I'm aiming true and not wandering, not wasting, not passing on the great adventure.

Onward and Upward?

ONWARD AND UPWARD!

Love Woman

On the last night of my stay in St. Louis, I slept with my mom on an old twin mattress down in the basement where I used to live.  It's her bed now, they don't say how long she's been down there in that blue windowless room.  She worried if we'd fit.  But of course we fit, we're family.  And after we pulled the covers up around our ears, and after we closed our eyes, she told me about all of the boys in college, the other students she knew from China and Hong Kong, how they made a list of girls, how they ranked them, and how for no conceivable reason ("I don't know why!") they put her at the top of the list.  They really liked her! those boys in school.  They tried to kiss her and she'd duck away.  And under the covers of our little bed, under the darkness of our eyes, I heard her true surprise.

How did she find her man, the man she leaves each night to sleep alone in her daughter's cold bed?  How did he find her and pluck her from the top of so many lists?  How did they love each other before they stopped?  Why did they stop.  Why did it end.  

The Deer

You never know.

The body of night opens

like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.

And on the hillside two deer are walking along

just as though this wasn't

the owned, tilled earth of today

but the past.

I didn not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind's eye-

there they are, in the long grass,

like two sisters.

This is the earnest work.  Each of us is given 

only so many mornings to do it-

to look around and love

the oily fur of our lives,

the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle,

Days I don't do this

I feel the terror of idleness,

like a red thirst.

Death isn't just an idea.

When we die the body breaks open 

like a river;

the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

-Mary Oliver

V-Day

This shall evermore be my day of victory.  

I punched and jabbed in a boxing ring, shoved my hands into damp and sour bag gloves, felt my quinoa dinner rising through my throat, but sashayed out at the end of the night, red-faced and laughing.  

I wrote a boy a note, my very first proposal, I said, Sir, I've been thinking.  We should pet kittens together.  We should attend snobbish literary events together, sir.  Listen here, sir, I believe this is what we should do.  

And in reply, he wrote, "Ma'am, I *completely* concur."  With stars around completely just like that.  We shall snuggle kittens together.