A Southward Tide

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

Tag: daily life

October 3, 2014

Coming Home

It’s been almost three years since my father died. The passage of time is terrifying. It blinds. It mutes. It forgets. Yet every time I fly home from wherever I’ve been, I pass the space, the rows of chairs to the right of security check, where he always sat, waiting for his daughter to return from college, then from New York, then from God-knows-where, I travelled so much to run away from things.

My husband waits in the pick-up lane, car turned on, sometimes he’s smoking a cigarette by the curb. It’s actually faster that way — pick up and go. But Dad always parked and waited inside the airport, right where the limousine men stand with their dry-erase signs, right where I could see his face light up when he saw me. He was always early to things, maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. He always went the extra mile.

Every time I fly home, I pretend he’s still there. Using my powers of imagination, I see him for a brief second. Sometimes I chose what age he is, younger with his wild mass of black hair or the years right before the cancer, a bit too thin, the warning sign we all missed, silver hair, receding but still wild. The image is fleeting. It breaks my heart a little each time. But still, I say, “Hello Dad, I’ve missed you, it’s good to be home,” and he responds, “Salut, ma cherie” and kisses me on the cheek.

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May 5, 2014

Love is Ever a Fickle Friend

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he brings me pretty threads to lend
then points to me the broken seam.
My rosy cheeks aflame, I teem
with shame. Please forgive me Love,
I meant to wear the other glove
but somehow slipped into the stack
those panties from a while back –
I could not resist another wear
But why indeed, Love, do you care?
They graced your body time before,
old hems you once stitched and more.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he traces circles with a pen
on inked skin he sketches dark trace
then quits the draw, deserts the space.
Body penned with strange design –
Love once here leaves me behind.
My figure cold in deserts deep,
upon my form your mark does keep
everlasting grief – Please go soft
the needle’s prick bears me aloft.
Though up on barren hillsides dwell
the unrequited love you quell.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he offers tattered cards to send
of all the tangled cities known,
desolate streets we walked alone.
I hand them out for all to see
for Love reminds me nothing’s free.
To love but one or many more
costs forever the familiar shore.
To love many or just a few
we abandon option to renew
and by the crumbled ramparts stroll,
city obscured by love’s cruel toll.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he gives me reason to pretend
that all along I played charade.
And now subtle memories fade
into the shade of moonlight cast.
Love – you always moved too fast
I caught you only with a glance
the timeless twirling of lost dance
or twilight on horizon’s cut
my dreams astir in instinct’s gut
but earthly bound as humans, we
can’t know you, Love, eternally.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he clangs the church bells to no end
In rose-hued nave we say ‘I do’
then to the disco crash the few
bearing testament this dim hour,
flee the witnesses grown sour.
But on the floor stay Love and I,
feet shuffle to a tempo shy
one million years to eternity
as I shall not forever be.
Yet ever young, Love shall reside
alone without me by his side.

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May 4, 2014

A Solitary Thing

At first,
it was foreign.

The better part of a year
it took to become part of us

and we became accustomed.

We plotted:
what medications
to bring to the bedside,
what broth,
what puree.

We measured:
steps down the hall,
sunlight,
temperature.

We found a fragile balance
in this no man’s land

and while it slipped into
the clicks and clangs,
we rested in the forgetting.

But eventually it became more than us;

more than our imagined credentials,
more than the pats and hurrahs
we gave ourselves,

more than the sympathy we were
bestowed for fighting a battle
not our own.

It became foreign again.

And we lamented the years
spent forgetting
and getting on with things.

Though the system kept running,
the broths and purees,
the tray with its colored days,
the blankets and slippers,

we took to whispered tones.

It was no longer ours,
but his alone –

a strange solitary thing.

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April 11, 2014

Lucky Stones

As a young adult, I wore a boxy Liz claiborne purse, gray or light tan with a thin leather cross-over strap, filled with pencils, erasers, flavored lipgloss and a few lucky rocks. I had collected a gray skipping tone, the size of a big grape, and a smooth hematite. I was shy and when I felt challenged, my fingers would turn over the stones in my bag, infusing me with providence and power.I was an animist; my stones had souls. I cannot quite remember when I grew out of them but it was not an obvious transition. In high school, I shoplifted crystals from nature stores at the mall. In college, I collected frogs.

Finally I abandoned the needs of childhood to ground myself with physical objects and instead retreated to the colorful recesses of my mind, where fantasies trumped the day. For years now, I have hedged on reality. Even when two beautiful children have presented me with magic beyond human imagination, I have maintained my own dream life, a foot-out-the-door of this world, a vague morass of happiness and drama where no decisions need ever be made, just possibilities, endless possibilities.

I have my own versions of lucky rocks, ideas that help me get through it all: moving to Los Angeles or even better, Bali, irrational crushes, careers I could never pursue, hobbies that remain out of reach and things I have no intention of acquiring. At my wedding, I felt terrorized by my own uncertainty not so much because I lacked in love but more because I lacked the ability to live within the compass of regularity. Happiness was something for people that understood what this game of life was about, I reasoned.

Yet as I pursue mindfulness,I must let go of the notion that something outside of myself, be it a rock or a distant dream, fulfills me. And for a dreamer like me, this is bittersweet.

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October 20, 2013

My Mother is an Extinct Bird

My mother is an extinct bird
sketched in children’s books,
surviving in imaginations
grand and small.

The old mantelpiece man
narrates this flight of auburn fiction,
his pipe alit by the tale’s wind.

How can I follow her
when she is a vellum-bound kite,
tracing pinpoint crescents across the sky?

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October 14, 2013

A French Summer

The plane landed at Roissy onto a tarmac that mirrored the drab June sky. Always the day of her arrival was unseasonable weather. The French shook their heads and said the same thing “Ah! Ce temps.”  55 degrees and overcast with a ninety percent chance of rain, a hundred percent chance of gray. Summer by no standard.

France was its most insufferably French during the first hours spent escaping Charles de Gaulle airport: the interminable wait for the bags, the queue of dusty taxis to ship her off on highways flanked by concrete bunkers and sloppy graffiti. The scenic roads of France. Supermarkets housed in lego-blocks with chipper names like Conforama and Bricolorama, factories resembling Ikea versions of corrugated tin shanties, barely alive plants peaking above plastic coverings.  Further inland they drove, past the white-tiled tunnels with their overhead yellow-lit rectangles, past the wastelands of suburban brick flickering offside the highway barriers like images from a moving train. Resting her head against the taxi window, listening to the haggle on the radio, she felt acute disappointment. 

And the countryside did not seem quite right either. It was more crooked and wobbly than she remembered. They passed cigarette-stained towns with peeling shutters and windowsill doilies, old ladies in black orthopedics and knee-length skirts, mending handkerchiefs and knitting stiff wool. France had let weeds grow along her roads, in her gardens, up her trellis; the bristly stalks of unknown plants had taken over the clean corners. 

She was reminded of her grandmother and this made her more depressed. 

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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October 2, 2013

Losing Ma’loula

In the summer of 2005,  I travelled to Damascus to visit a French couple just before they moved back to Paris, a short week of sightseeing as they packed boxes and said their goodbyes. I only had time  to tour the capital and the surrounding umber hillsides carved with ancient Christian churches, caves and villages. As practicing Catholics, my friends had become close with a presiding  priest at Mar Sarkis, a sixth century Byzantine monastery in Maaloula. Though I spent an entire day in Maaloula, I remember very few physical things. Instead I recall a vast interior landscape, a silence and gentleness, an expansive sense of mystery and wonderment, coupled with the well-worn solitude that a  traveler experiences in ancient grounds. I sat inside the church and waited. I do not even know what I was waiting for, but it was worth the wait. Maaloula is somewhere very few Westerners I know have traveled. It is not Petra. It is not Angkor Wat. It is not Teotihuacan.  It is living – a quiet soft village, one of the last places on earth where people still speak Aramaic. It is a treasure.

The news reports that Maaloula has been seized by extremists, the Al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda force operating with Syrian rebels. Many if not all of the ancient Antiochian Orthodox or Greek Catholic churches, monasteries and convents have endured some degree of destruction – altars and shrines smashed, domes pierced by mortar. There are reports that some have been completely leveled. Most Christians have fled. Perhaps it is propaganda. Time will tell the truth.

They are calling it a political thing. A thing of blame. But I l say it is a human thing – this deftness at devouring ourselves.  Like the worm Ouroboros, we eat our own tail. We smash ourselves repeatedly against the wall of time, we burn our idols, we obliterate our myths, we kill our Gods. Narrowing our intentions, we make so tiny the wormhole we must squeeze through. If only we were really the worm Ouroboros, the worm eating itself, the worm born of itself and from itself, the regenerative worm. I do not know. But I know that today we pay a great price when we destroy our own mysteries.

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