small fires

I am thinking about transitions. Then I find this:

Lucifer
— Dean Young

You can read almost anything
about angels, how they bite off
the heads first, copulate with tigers,
tortured Miles Davis until he stuck
a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.
The pornographic magazines ported
into the redwoods. The sweetened breath
of the starving. The prize livestock
rolls over on her larval young,
the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs
of the clockworks. I would have
a black bra hanging from the shower rod.
I would have you up against
the refrigerator with its magnets
for insurance agents and oyster bars.
Miracles, ripped thumbnails,
everything a piece of something else,
archangelic, shadow-clawed,
the frolicking despair of repeating
decimals because it never comes out even.
Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm,
the impurities of darkness
sometimes called stars. Mostly
the world is assignations, divorces
conducted between rooftops. Forever
and forever the checkbook unbalanced,
the beautiful bodies bent back
like paper clips, the discharged
blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.
Coppers and silvers and radiant traces,
gold flecks from our last brush,
brushfires. Always they’re espousing
accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow
not in the aimed-for heart but throat
that has the say. There are no transitions,
only falls.

—

Outside the classroom of the preschool my son attended last year, there hung a shoe organizer - the kind with pockets for each shoe to slip into. Lining the walls of the long corridor of classrooms, these “pockets.” Communications home. Newsletters. Permission slips to be signed. Snack lists. “Check your child’s pocket,” we would be told. “Don’t forget to check your child’s pocket.”

At the end of most days, the pockets would be empty. I would walk halfway down the hall to check, then walk back toward the parking lot, my son in hand. On the worst days, though, all the pockets would be empty, except for one. A sheet of white paper, that had been folded in thirds and stapled shut. An incident report. Something had happened during the day. My son - screaming in class, a tantrum. Or kicking. Or throwing himself around, his arms flailing. “We took him from the classroom,” written carefully on the lined form. “He apologized and then we took him back.”

The teacher tells us: “He is having trouble with transitions.” When they move from one activity to the next. He needs to be told several times, in advance, what will happen. If something happens that he is not expecting, he will fall to the ground and cry. As if leaving one thing and going on to the next is more than he can bear. 

—

I sit at my desk in my office which is no longer to be my office. There are white binders, stacked. File folders, bulging. Tacked up on the wall - cards and notes written to me to mark various occasions long passed. Lists of phone numbers. 

In the late afternoon, I begin taking these down, slip them into a large envelope. I stand up. I pace. I walk to the window, watch people crossing the street at the light. A man in a black parka waves at the driver of a bus passing by. 

—

We take him to a doctor. We talk about transitions. About what we are and are not doing to assist him. We hear the names of the various conditions he might have. 

We take him to occupational therapy, where he sits on a wide swing while a woman throws beanbags at him and he tries to catch them. He rides a tricycle down the carpeted hallways. He stacks foam bricks and knocks them down. 

My friend shrugs her shoulders and frowns. “He’s four years old,” she says, “maybe his condition is that he’s four.”

“I am sorry,” my son says, we approach the pockets, my heart sinking. I take the white sheet, tear through the staple. “I’m sorry, mommy,” he says again. “It was by an accident.”

—

How is it, really, that we are to live? To know what path to follow? When to search and when not to search? What impulses of the heart to suppress and which to bring to light?

When to leave one thing and go on to the next? 

When to fall to the ground and cry?

—

One evening while I am still in college, I get a call from one of my closest friends, S., who is home, unexpectedly and having a party. “I want you to come,” she says, “everyone will be there.” I am hesitant. 

“We miss you,” she says. “We haven’t seen you out in so long. Not since.” 

She doesn’t finish the sentence but she doesn’t need to. Not since my mother’s funeral. It has been several weeks. No one knows how to speak about it. 

It is a three and a half hour drive to her house. 

“You can spend the night here,” she says. “Sleep over. It will be like the old days. Just like it used to be.” 

It is already growing dark as I head to my car. 

By the time I get there, the party is loud and sloppy. I wander through the rooms of her house, looking for her. Across every surface it seems, there are people draped in various stages of disarray. I spot her in the kitchen. We hug and she hands me a plastic cup of pink liquid. “Drink this,” she says, “and all your cares will disappear.” She says this last with a wave of her hand. 

“I’ll be right back,” she says, as she heads off carrying another two plastic cups. I don’t see her again that night. 

I lean against the counter and sip the drink. There is a giant bowl of it on the table, with several plastic cups floating in it. A couple stumbles in, refills their cups. They raise them to me and I raise mine back. 

I don’t stay the night. I am tired from the drive and the weeks of weariness. I know that S. will be upset with me, but I slip out and walk down the block to my car. The night is clear and cold. 

There is very little traffic on the highway. The sky is filled with stars. I speed back in the darkness toward my apartment, to the bed I share with a man whose voice, whose hands I will eventually forget. 

Another goodbye I will have to say. 

But not tonight. 

M. returns from Austin with the Dean Young book of poems and I’m all aflutter, swoony. I am late to this, I know, but look:

Delphiniums in a Window Box

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.

If you are looking for breathlessness, does it get any better than this? 

—

His plane lands in Boston late at night. He drives through the dark, through the pouring rain. Arrives in the small hours. I sleep so lightly that I hear him on the stairs, ascending. Overnight, they are building the bridge. Overnight, the jackhammers, relentless. It is barely sleep, what we do. Our bodies entwined, suspended. Held there, for a few short hours, hovering. 

—

Morning is a celebration. All of us back together again after so many long separations. The pleasure of it, palpable. We huddle around the kitchen table, even with the papers and the catalogs piled on top of it, even with yesterday’s unopened mail. We are all chatty and loud and laughing. We cannot walk past each other without touching, as if only to prove that we are all there. 

And then we are not. We head out in different directions where we will pass the hours of the day with other people, with other concerns. 

But aren’t these the moments that we will remember, years from now, years after the places that we went and the things that we concerned ourselves with today have faded from memory? This boy, crawling up to his father’s lap, grinning. This girl, perched on the edge of a chair next to me, her hair falling in her eyes, her eyes alight. This laughter. 

This man, this woman, this reaching out across the impossible distance of where one of us ends and the other begins. How we are trying to carry this love.

Won’t we always remember the trying?

—

Once in the early days, we fought about some petty thing. We were in the parking lot of the movie theatre. I got so angry that I left him there, drove off. It was raining. I drove to a nearby strip mall, circled around, fuming. Wandered in and out of the stores, lightheaded and sad. Eventually, I went back, but he was already gone. 

—

I am looking for grace in the small moments. I am looking for a kind of redemption. I am trying to make meaning from this chaos. This swirling world. This collection of losses that we all carry with us, the weight of which threatens to topple us at any time. 

These grand gestures of language are attempts to contain it all. 

There is grace, I think, in the trying. 

Finally, a break in the clouds. After so many days of rain, after so much darkness, light.

The heart lifts. The head tilts skyward.

—

I meet my friend in the parking lot of the restaurant but when I find her, she is talking on the phone. She waves her hand at me, but keeps talking. She gestures that we walk. I follow her from the parking lot down the block. She walks slowly so I hover behind her, not knowing whether there is a plan. It is early, the sky still light. The air is cool. She is laughing. “I just don’t think that’s what she would do. I mean - she might, but it seems unlikely.”

“OK. Sounds great,” is what I hear her say. “OK. OK.”

She hangs up, tucks her phone in her purse. “That was him.”

“Who?”

“My love,” she says. The man she has loved for decades, but has never told him. They worked together, years ago, maintained contact through his marriage, his children. Through her many ill-fated loves. 

“He wanted my advice on a story he’s working on. For a film treatment.” She reaches back into her bag, pulls out a tube of lip gloss, slicks it across her mouth. 

We keep walking. 

She turns to face me, brings her hand up to her heart, pats it. “Oh, I just love him so much.”

The street is so quiet. There is no one out, even though it is early, even though it is still so light. 

“Look,” she says, pointing. “That red door, with the sky behind it like that - it looks like a Hopper painting.”

I nod. “It does.”

—

The restaurant is crowded and loud and there’s no space at the bar, so we go back to my house where I mix drinks, put some cheeses and meats on a cutting board. A little bowl of dried fruit. I find some candles, light them. We sit on cheap folding chairs at the dining room table. The chairs we bought seven years ago when we moved in to this house: “They will just be temporary,” we said. “Until we decide what we really want.” 

Seven years later, and I hardly even see them anymore. The way you no longer really see the things that are closest to you. 

“So I think maybe we are just friends,” she says. She is talking about a man she has been spending time with for months now. “I flirt with him. I touch his arm. I lean on him when we are at shows. He lets me. He doesn’t pull away.”

“But there’s no spark?” I ask. 

She shakes her head. “But maybe there could be.”

“I’m not sure it works that way,” I say. 

“I would try,” she says. “I think I would try.”

—

Here is a line I have stuck in my head. From “After My Own Heart,” by Dean Young. 

I want to think of you busy,
maybe washing parsley
and I am completely forgotten.

—

I miss my father. It is strange to say it, since I hardly knew him, hardly remember him. But I think it’s possible to miss someone you don’t really know. To miss, perhaps, the knowing of them. To long for that knowing. 

I want to say that there are stories he told me that shaped me. I want to say that he built things for me with his hands. I want to say that his hands lifted me up, as as child, to the window, so that I could see birds perched on tree branches. “Look,” he would say, “can you see them?”

I want to say, “Daddy, look. I am still your little girl.” I want to say, “Daddy, look at the woman I have come to be.”

Look at me. Here I am. Can you see me? 

One day after school, he took me to get french fries and we drove up to the window and ordered the fries with extra salt and handfuls of ketchup packets. We sat in the parking lot, with the windows closed. I put my sneakered feet up on the dashboard. He tucked a paper napkin into the front of my shirt and then another one into his own. Our fingers were covered with salt and grease. 

“Your mother would not approve,” he said finally, when we were done. But this, I already knew. 

—

I always search for your face
even when I look straight out
at the fog over the sea
and the fog over the sea
becomes my face. 

—

In the counseling, during the divorce, when I talked and wept sitting upright in a chair where so many other people had wept before me, and so many more would weep after me, the doctor once said, through my weeping: “Perhaps you fear intimacy.”

It was all I could do to keep from lunging at his throat. 

Tell me about intimacy, I might say now. Tell me how not to fear it. Tell me how to plumb the depths of my own unknowable heart - to take what I find there, spread it out on a tray like a small, bitter feast. 

Impossible
to cut your own heart out but if you do,
maybe you’ll grow another. 

—

Upstairs, my son is shouting to nothing in particular. Shouting, then quiet. Then I hear him racing down the stairs. He is coming for me. I hold him in my lap. I wrap him up in my arms. I kiss his forehead again and again as if the touch of my lips alone can erase the frustration that lies beneath. His mouth is upturned. His chin is quivering. Tell me what’s wrong, I whisper into his ear. Tell me all your troubles, so you can set them free. 

After everyone goes to bed, I stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open, poking around, seeking solace in its chilled contents. I close the door, open it again, walk back into the living room, put my feet up on the couch. Within moments, I am back in the kitchen, pacing. 

—

When the revolution comes, I hope that it is me and this stupid refrigerator full of uneaten food that will be among the first held up as examples of ridiculous excess. 

Your mother worked as a secretary, you say? 

Yes.

And later, when she couldn’t find work, she took other jobs - babysitting for other people’s children while her own were home alone? 

Yes. 

And your father stood behind a deli counter, slicing meats all day? 

Yes, until he could no longer stand. 

And what is it that you do? 

Me? 

You. What is it that you do, exactly? 

I go to restaurants, sit at bars, buy expensive cocktails and little bits of food that come arranged on bone white plates. I laugh with my mouth open wide and lament the poor selection of wines by the glass. 

“Not a single bordeaux?” I ask incredulously. “And you call this a wine list?”

That, it seems, is what I do. 

—

Even with the warm sun, even with the mossy smell of the earth beneath my hands, I feel the futility of it, this morning. Of the hours spent on my knees with my ass in the air, facing the street. The cynics driving by in their cars, honking their horns, making their jokes while I silently curse the people who let their dogs relieve themselves in my garden bed.

My arms are scarred. My fingernails are broken and dirty. My knees ache. 

Some years, you tame the rose bush. Some years, the rose bush tames you. 

—

My mother drives me back to college after a particularly difficult weekend. The time that we are not fighting, we spend in angry silence. As I gather my things, she spits out in a fierce whisper, “Run back to your friends. Run back and tell them how stupid your mother is, how she doesn’t even understand Schopenhauser.” 

To this day, I am grateful for the singular moment of grace that kept me from shouting back as I slammed the car door: “Try Schopenhauer, Mother. Schopenhauer.”

—

I sit at my desk, drinking coffee while my family takes over the kitchen. It is hard for me not to go in there, orchestrate, but I resist the impulse, keep my distance. 

I’ll say it: I don’t like the days that I am expected to be happy. That I am expected to feel something. I am uncomfortable with certain rituals. Holidays. I am not at my best. 

I have never understood the appeal of breakfast in bed. It seems to me an invasion of privacy. I think: crumbs, spills. I think: Give me a minute to emerge from this cocoon. 

I know, I know, you’re thinking: what a delight I must be to live with. Indeed. Count yourselves among the lucky ones.

—

I woke this morning, having started this last night. Woke with it on my mind, with the desire to complete it. To have one thing, this morning, done. I am at odds today. I am thinking about poetry and language and frustration. About love. About gratitude. About grace. About the people I have lost, the things I have lost. Once, I wrote a story in which I enumerated the things that I had lost. From 1 to 17. I called it “Loser.” M. said: It’s a little heavy-handed, don’t you think? 

I am running out of words. So here are some borrowed:

Late Valentine
— Dean Young

We weren’t exactly children again,
too many divorces, too many blood panels,
but your leaning into me was a sleeping bird.
Sure, there was no way to be careful enough,
even lightning can go wrong but when the smoke
blows off, we can admire the work the fire’s done
ironing out the wrinkles in favor of newer ones,
ashy furrows like the folds in the brain
that signal the switchbacks and reversals
of our thought and just as brief.  Your lips
were song, your hair everywhere.
Oh unknowable, fidgeting self, how little
bother you were then, no more
than a tangerine rind.  Oh unknowable
other, how I loved your smell.

Opal
—Dean Young

It’s not that Monet cared that much about stacks of hay.

Your feelings will never change, you’ll just stop paying so much attention.

A whole summer’s songs go by, the whole house turns blue.

A friend will need some help carrying boxes to the curb.

So slowly you’ll reach into the pond’s reflection of your own face - as if reaching into your face! - the tiny fishes will brush your fingers like nerves made of water.

Someone else will have to be young enough to climb the scaffolding around the town hall to derange all four of its clock faces.

The same laughter will have to work the rest of your life.

A friend takes your arm in the woods, it’s darker turning back.

You point at an opal in a glass case and the person behind it is only too glad to let you see it against your skin but it’s someone else’s skin you want.

You didn’t get everything but you got a lot.

—

Last Christmas Eve, I walk M.’s father down to the jewelry store on Main Street where I am to help him choose a gift for his wife of fifty years. He doesn’t need my help, but it is thought that he might appreciate the company and so I wrap my scarf around my neck and wait while he puts on his coat.

The sidewalk is icy. There is snow on the ground. We walk slowly, carefully. I keep my arms out for balance. I reach out to hold his elbow when he seems tentative.

We look at earrings. At hoops of different sizes. We consider gemstones. Amethyst. Smoky topaz. I can no longer remember what, in the end was chosen, but it is wrapped carefully with a gold bow and M.’s father takes the little white box and puts it in the inside pocket of his coat. As I imagine he has done countless times before. We are thanked, wished well. The bells on the door jingle as we leave - this whole block like the set of a movie, with its beribboned storefronts, its tinkling bells. Even the weather agrees to play along, offering a dusting of snow. Just enough so that when the wind blows, it can swirl up on the sidewalk.

As we leave the store, I ask if he is hungry. Should we stop for lunch, for a sandwich? But he says no and I can’t help but feel as though I have failed at my task. My company has been inadequate.

We walk back up the hill. We are quiet, mostly. I wonder what he thinks of me, the wife of his youngest son. Of the boy who was something of a surprise. After six children, this last blessing delivered unexpectedly.

The boy who let his hair grow long, let it fall across his face. “I can’t see your baby blue eyes,” his mother would say.

“But they are not blue. They are gray and green and brown,” I say the first time I see them, close. We are lying on the floor of my apartment in the dark. Just a spray of light cast on us by the lamp on my desk. He says nothing. And then for such a long time, we lie still. It is quiet.

—

There is a photo of me as a child, taken while I was still in Korea. I am sitting on the ground. I am holding a cracker up to my mouth with two hands, nibbling at it like a squirrel. In the foreground, the skirt of a woman who has just walked away.

—

I take my walk this morning in a fine gray mist. As I approach my house, I see stray pages from telephone books scattered on the sidewalk, on the lawn. I pick them up. The paper is damp and light, crumples easily in my hand. I cannot tell where they are coming from, or why, each morning, there are a few new pages to replace the last. As if someone is passing through before I rise, scattering them like flowers.

Two houses down on the lawn of the transition home, the men have tossed popcorn and crumbs of bread on the ground, all around the base of the tree. The birds gather there, and the squirrels, too. I worry about them, as they all take their fill. The men watch them from the wide front porch, where they smoke cigarettes and pace. Surely, these treats must take their toll on these small bodies. Surely, they will pay a price for these indulgences.

—

Over the weekend, the weather is glorious, so we drag out the grill and carry the chairs up from the basement to eat out on the brick patio beneath the shade of the overgrown holly tree. Our friends stop by and we offer them grilled vegetables and meats and we drink wine and eat until our stomachs ache. The light fades.

I carry the plates and glasses inside, line them all up on the counter. On the last trip up the stone steps, I notice the climbing rose vine is about to bloom. I go back to look more closely, reach out to touch a branch and almost instantly, a pin prick of blood appears on my finger.

—

I’ve developed a rash on my skin. It started on my right arm and has now spread to my left. The ankle of my right leg. Across my stomach. Angry red lines. Like I have been clawed at. It is warm to the touch. Each morning, I clean the areas. Apply creams and lotions. Each year, about this time, my skin erupts. As if triggered by the coming heat, the blooming. All these tiny ruptures.

Here is the thing about the body: The lessons we learn, we learn them young and they lodge within us, within our very bones. More powerful than memory. Before language, before thought. We wear them on our skin.

These bodies, the beacon for all that we carry. The way we move through the world - the things we touch, the things that touch us. If you look closely at me, can’t you still see the girl that I was? The left-behind girl, sitting cross-legged on the ground? Every pulse of my heart like a lighthouse signal flashing: come back. come back. come back.

—

Of the father: We hear the story about how he shuffles out to the porch one night in his bedroom slippers. Down the front steps and out to the sidewalk, turning left at the corner. The same path we take to the jewelry store. But he goes on, past the main street with its little shops, down to the campus where he spent so many decades of his life. A student finds him, in front of the locked door of a building. Oh, dear man, weary man: what is it you remember? Where is it that you are trying to go?

—

The best days start like this: a walk in the quiet of the early morning, the air still cool, the light rain on my face. The track empty, save for the geese on the grass. And when I am soaked through to the skin, I make my way back - past the ancient tree with its broad canopy of leaves, past the sweet honeysuckle vine, past the mounds of pink dianthus, the rows and rows of hosta. I turn the corner past the the old rusted mailbox and see the gray stretch of highway, the spires and rooftops of the city rising up.

This city. This house. These lives, these loves.

This body and all it remembers.

I didn’t get everything, but I got a lot.

One project ends and another begins.

I began this last summer - the air warm and sweet. Days spent by the water, the sun the sand. 

The summer ended. 

Good-bye perfumed touch of summer
the light was so responsive

I turned 40. 

We went to Paris, rode the trains. Drank coffee on the sidewalks. Asked: “Is it possible that the sky is more expressive here?” 

The winter was long. We counted the constellations. 

And then, spring. 

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

And spring made its promises. 

And we made our plans. 

I believe Icarus was not falling as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

—

Now, I spend my hours in the garden. Time passes. The sun on my arms, the dirt on my hands, on my face in my hair. 

And I read and I write and I go to meetings where I talk and I read and I write and I rush home every day 

to put my hands back in the dirt
to feel the warm earth firmly beneath my feet
to see the rooftops and the spires of this city rising up

fallen city, ruined city
city with all its broken bridges

And so I begin again. Not here, not in this place but somewhere else and I will tell you when I know. 

dear theoretical loved one,
in parting I give you everything

—

Again, this morning, birdsong. And the cooing of doves. 
Again this morning the hum of the highway. 

The light through the leaves.

I will tell you when I get there. And so don’t leave.

you didn’t get everything but you got a lot.