A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.
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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October 31, 2013

A Spectral Rooster

My second year at the University of Chicago, I moved into an apartment owned by my roommate’s father, a professor emeritus of Arabic Literature. Years before they had purchased the flat on the cheap as the previous tenant had been murdered there by her husband. She had been a sculptor; traces of clay were still visible between the floorboards.

It was summer in Chicago. A few days before the other roommates arrived, my boyfriend helped me move into the grimy walk-up that had been uninhabited for a decade. I had just purchased a single size futon, presumably to torture him. He squeezed next to me on the dusty floor of a bedroom with no air conditioning. That first night, we somehow convinced ourselves  that a human size rooster would soon be seen walking by, its sharpened spurs clicking on the floor, pausing at our bedroom door long enough to turn a feathered head and merciless gaze towards us. Terrified, we ran off to sleep at his mother’s house. So visual was this fear that even today I hold a crystalline image of that rooster in the mind’s eye.

A few years after college, I traveled to New Zealand with the same poor man. We were camping outside of Queenstown and walked to town one evening to watch The Ring. Later back at camp, I bawled in fear. The images on the screen, the images in my head, were no different than reality.  I would not have been surprised to see that evil child’s ratty wig of long black hair and bent arm snaking though the zipper of our tent

From childhood I have carried through the concept that if a negative thought alights on my mind but for a second, that thing, awful, tragic, or terrifying, will be willed into being. It began with the ‘Bloody Mary’s’ chanted in front of third grade bathroom mirrors and continued with ghost stories, roosters and later the sense of impending doom that surrounded almost all of my romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I have not maintained the logically opposite belief: that wonderful and enchanted things will happen to me if I dare to think about them. And neither have I done much to dispel the negatives. The notion of creating phantoms, tragedies and car accidents with the mind is an intoxicating delusion. But today is Halloween, so you’ll forgive me if I choose to resurrect nostalgic ghosts – spectral roosters walking bandy-legged through the past.

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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October 26, 2013

Baudelaire Preferred Laudanum

I misread a Baudelaire poem once
and thought:
“He had it all wrong.
Conversations with nature
are, in fact,
hard to come by.”

The ocean never answers.

Cross-legged, cradling
quandaries like lambs I’m hesitant
to cast upon an implacable altar,

I beg the rolling tide
for some sign.

close by a sandpiper needlepoints

is that a sign?

a gull
swoops

sign?

waves crash
louder than

a moment

ago

Thank God –
there is an ice cream shop nearby
because this business is tiring.

Baudelaire preferred laudanum.

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