A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Month: November, 2013

November 26, 2013

Buzzards

After high school, I vowed never to return to Palm Beach, a thin sliver of island that reminded me of all things lost in the cranky cogs of adolescence: wide-eyed jubilance, minnows and unconditional parental love (Later I learned their boundless love was not as mythic as teenagedom suggested. But that took decades…)

The tropical sun was reserved for holidays when I could loosen the vice grip of New York City and laziness became art: poolside reading, Dad’s cooking, twelve-hour sleeps. Over cocktails, I hated it here – how fake, weird, racist, stupid, greedy the inhabitants, how soporific the lifestyle. Couldn’t you just roll over and die in the blaze?

Then on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, a conspiracy of fates shipwrecked me. Moored by family illness and eventually love, I stayed, bought a house over the bridge and had some kids of my own.

Time rounded those reactive edges that tugged me to and fro, that trapped in the dooming treason of choice, the youthful delusion that life is anything other than the reinforcement of habits.

And slowly, the world unfolded before my eyes.

The buzzards float along the currents of the winds, hundreds of feet in the sky. In late afternoon, they swarm on buildings that edge the Intercoastal, covering the mirrored windows with hunched bodies. Actually, they are no more buzzards than butterflies, but rather two species of vultures: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. The former is the larger of the two with a red face and beak, while the latter has a smaller wingspan, a gray face and beak.

Egrets peck through the palmetto grasses and troops of white ibis with hooked bills hang out on the curb of my neighborhood. Often bobbing alone on buoys, pelicans sometimes fly in formation along the crashing surf.

By the glittering blue of the Intercoastal, a hawk beats its wings above the water where old timers on fold-out beach chairs cast their lines, reeling in whatever they can hook, snook if they are lucky. Every evening the sky blooms purple and neon pink; the moon rises over the ocean. And in my garden, hibiscus flower, three types of gardenia and some sweet almond vines.

The two Vanda orchids hanging from my front porch remind me of my father. His grave is shaded by banyans in the old cemetery. Above him, the buzzards circle.

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November 21, 2013

I Want to Live a Simpler Time

I want to live a simpler time
and a simpler place
where stoplights are flags waved at random
across a plaza of crisscrossing horses

I want to journey a hundred miles by carriage
where ruts of mud splinter wheels
and dandelions in the fields
they grow for the picking

I want the priest who marries me
to have a garden
and a mistress
and a son

I want the boat that floats my ashes out to sea
to have a high wooden mast
and a lass upon a widow’s walk
measuring time by the ocean’s setting sun

I want no man to know the mysteries of my soul

Alas I live not in a simple time nor place

Instead the plaza has green and red soldiers
that flash their lights in combat
at compact cars and buses

at the sailor’s wife with her Italian lover
and the preacher pawning fortunes by telephone

and at me barefoot and lost in the midnight lane
street lamps alighting my soul for all to see

my time is an intricate intersection

a tangle of crisscrossing wires
like inside out carcasses
I cannot recognize my end from your beginning

and mystery is a windblown dandelion
wafting upwards for us to watch,
stopped static in the plaza
by a red soldier waving his flag of war.

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November 17, 2013

A Mushroom in the Cupboard

[excerpt from middle grade children’s novel]

I am not making this up, I promise. There was a mushroom in my cupboard, more specifically behind the cupboard. Even more specifically, there were two of them, and they were in cahoots! But I only found this out later, when it was too late to point fingers and throw wild accusations.

After all, who would have believed me?

Growing up in the French countryside, I learned to fear two things: Gypsies and Merules.  (Socialism was the thing to fear later in life – but for the moment it was Gypsies and Merules).

Gypsies stole children. This we all knew. When their distant bells tinkled through town, our neurotic nanny, Genevieve, would whisk us from the garden. We were untamed, my twin brothers and I – Gypsy children were probably better behaved.

Genevieve had the annoying habit of picking her teeth when she was nervous. During caravan-jingling-through-town times, up shot her left hand to scratch a front tooth and down shot the right hand to drag us to the basement kitchen. We were promptly set to some menial task like de-stringing green beans. Elbow deep in vegetables, Genevieve would launch into frightful tales of Gypsy thievery. Dogs, horses, children, cars, watches, wallets, you name it, they had stolen it. Storytelling soothed her because her tooth-picking hand would creep out of her mouth and dip into the English cream.

Merules were the other thing to fear – though I was not exactly sure why. I just knew that adults were terrified of them. These secretive mushrooms lived in the walls, and if they appeared, the roof could fall on your head. At night, I spent hours staring at the ceiling for any sign of collapse. Merules claimed their territory wherever they lay spore and did not discriminate in their destruction of the old homes of France.

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November 12, 2013

Impasse

You whisper under breath
that life again begins to pass,
the image flickers like Muybridge’s horse.

And the weight that brought you born to air,
the weight that taught you how to breathe,
stops breath again.

You start to pass.

The ticks of time of waiting stretch
and the waiting waits for you to fall
The waiting waits.
It’s what it does.

You wait with it for none to pass.

The flicker of the running horse
starts and stops in false pretense.
Because life begun, it never ends.
It never ends.

You wait with it
until the weight that brought you to this pass
lifts

and in the space breath left behind
the waiting stops.

[One of my first poems, 2006]

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November 11, 2013

Even the Orchids Miss Him

Even the orchids miss him.

The last few years  he fought the cancer, the orchids exploded in their most vibrant expressions. Perhaps knowing what they knew, they created final symphonies of color where and when they could, blooming and fading as they do every year according to some mysterious tropical calendar. Plants know their temporality better than we – some dying after just one year, some duplicate, propagate, shoot off into replicated bundles, some bear fruit, pecked by blackbirds, their seeds deposited miles away into the clouds. There is no birth, there is no death, just cycles along the wind and under the arms of bees.

And then he was gone, that presence they had sensed for hours of each day as he walked the long rows of the orchid house. The orchids have faded since he passed. They are in mourning, like dogs missing their master. How many plants in the wild have human friends? These were the most beautiful orchids in the world simply because my father had walked through their house, loving them as his own creations.

We can change the colors of the world with our hearts.

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November 10, 2013

The City is a Cage (Excerpt)

Last night I saw the saddest thing I have ever seen. I saw a homeless man talking to mannequins in the vitrine window of a lingerie store. The boutique was raised above street level and faced an old catholic church. He had walked up the bicycle ramp, leant backwards against the handrail and was holding court with immobile figures in perpetual pose, this hip cocked to one side, that thin forearm twisted outwards, a broken limb extending glued fingers in provocation. The street was empty; the cast of lamplight orange-hued on the brick of the church walls.

The man made small gestures with his hands and mumbled. Occasionally he nodded a half wit smile.

Maybe he was talking to his wife, the woman who left him after his cash ran out and his hallucinations grew fearful. He was telling her of that time she lay naked beside him while he braided a lock of her hair in two long twists. She laughed as she ran her fingers through his handiwork. She was always undoing things, always putting them back to the way they were. Later when he lost his job and his mind began to wander, he blamed her for the unraveling of things, but really all she had were those two strands in her hands, while in his own was his entire life, unwinding slowly.

As I walked past him, these fancies seemed ludicrous. Truth be told, I bet he was a dirty bastard, who just wanted to fuck the painted models upside down, rip off their lacy undergarments like he did to that whore once, back when he had money for whores, back before he went crazy.

I had seen him walking the block before, talking to himself in a stained Members Only jacket, or sleeping face down by the corner deli.  In summertime, he walked barefoot. Now he wore dirty Adidas with the back heel crushed down like a pair of slippers.

Did it matter what he said? His face was streaked with dirt, his clothes stank – the point was that he was talking to mannequins dead behind glass. Off their pert uniform asses hung the price tags of the living – price tags for sex, price tags for cheaters and lovers, for real midnight whispers and real touches, not this cold cupped hand stretched towards him like a horror movie wax figurine.

When I got home to my studio apartment, I imagined him mouthing poems to the windowpane, a flight of autumn leaves floating his words skyward.

I opened a bottle of cheap red wine. It spilled down my throat, filling my stomach like lost phrases.

I cried myself to sleep last night.

(excerpt from short story “The City is a Cage”)

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November 5, 2013

The Way They Looked at Him

The way they looked at him you’d think they’d been diagnosed too.

Which was more difficult – his friends looking down on those cavernous eyes, remembering every emptied bottle, all the misbehaviors of youth, or for him to see death reflected in their gaze, exposing a nostalgia years past due?

When he could still stand, dragging himself along on his IV, did he ever look at himself in the bathroom mirror?

Does a dying person think about form?

Did he pause to look into his ice blue eyes? Did he say goodbye to his wide smile, the long slender fingers, the sallow hollow of his cheeks? Did he think – when I go, she ceases forever to be my daughter? Maybe in these last moments – did he think – I will stare just a few minutes more into my mortality, refracted in immeasurable waves in their terrible loving eyes?

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November 4, 2013

If Only Words Could Fly Like That

Sounds cast from piano strings
build phrases like skyscrapers shells,
a window lattice of violin bows
slashed by the conductor’s hand.

If only words could fly like that,
ruthless slicing the atmosphere
like the grid skin of an arithmetic city.

The music rises in adjectives and verbs,
the cello spins prepositions to rarified heights.

Our words have not the tensile strength
to buttress the transoms of this geometric land.

But our ears, they float heavenward
along polished beams and glass planes,
gliding like rational snakes up a vertical map
to coordinates unresolved,
supple and punctilious.

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November 3, 2013

Feelings Aren’t Facts

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when my father dies. What are we going to do with all those tears, Dee-da, my aunt said while we wait in the hospital corridor for Dad to go. Dry your eyes up before he sees you that way, my uncle says.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am pregnant. Why do you have every symptom in the book, asks my husband, as I cry all the anger away and lash out all the fear?

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I try to explain myself. You over-process your emotions, my therapist says, cataloguing them in binders colored Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am sad.

How do I meditate when I feel this way, I ask the guru. He replies, you meditate anyways.

Sadness is a river that flows straight from the gut, the river Styx into which our tears eventually trickle, deep pools of sorrow swirling through all consciousness, around our ankles, always within reach. Joy seems like Sisyphus’ fruit.

The guru says build from the ground up and your arms will reach the fruit. Elevate your consciousness and you will no longer be stuck in the morass. The fruit has always been there but you have been too busy staring at the puddles by your feet.

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