A Southward Tide

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

Tag: death

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 20, 2014

Kriya and the Eternal Quietude

I’ve been meditating. At first sporadically, then regularly and now sporadically again. I believed once I became a regular meditator then the desire to go within, to experience the soporific bliss of the quiet mind, would never leave me. I believed I would never stray from the path of spiritual enlightenment. But challenging my mind to shut up has proven to be much like physical exercise, on/off and sideways in binging frenzies. I wish it were not so. I wish I enjoyed routines and was less of a commitment phobe. Or that I was an early waker, a start-the-day on the right foot person, someone who did not forget important diurnal details like being grateful. I also wish I was less susceptible to my emotions. So be it. I am nothing but what I actually am.

We’ve started a bi-weekly group meditation practicing Kriya Yoga. On Mondays we meet at a yoga studio, the door open to a landscaped courtyard. In the dimming purple light, we enjoy the tired squawks of the island’s host of green parrots. On Thursdays, we meet at my mother’s surrounded by hundreds of my father’s orchids. Over the stereo comes the voice of the guru directing our breath and focus – up along the chakras, through the crown of the head, the base of the spine, mantras slipping softly through the blabbering particulars of the mind. Somehow this brings it all together and forgives my daily discrepancies. In the group, my meditation practice thickens into subtle shades of oblivion. Each time these friends and strangers coalesce with mats in hand, I am amazed. Why do they keep coming? Somewhere in the space of silence we become threaded together.

My father was a classical music aficionado who had also filmed some of the great performers and conductors of the past century – Karajan, Arthur Rubinstein, Menuin. In his last days with cancer, a friend threw a private concert in his honor at our house, with a harpsichordist, cellist and contra-tenor. At dinner, the contra-tenor asked my father what the most beautiful performance he had ever heard was. Later this contra-tenor would sing a cappella at Dad’s funeral. My father answered that it was the sound of silence in an ancient 10th century monastery, monks in genuflection, heads bowed to the great final prayer.

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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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March 27, 2014

The Old Maids (Excerpt of new short story)

I saw her once after her brother died. She lay on the bed like a deflated bag, her legs like two sticks sticking out from under the comforter, her skin paper thin except on her feet where it was thick and cracked,  her unclipped toes curving painfully inwards. The room smelled like rotting flesh. It was not quite the smell of death which I remembered when cancer had starved my father. It was the smell before death, the smell of bedsores and soiled sheets, the smell of old crackers and cookie crumbs caught between the corners, the smell of molded milk in brittle teacups and all the dusty porcelain pillboxes with their painted spaniels. Old age merged to illness merged to death and with it, a litany of smells. 

When I entered, only a faint recollection traced across her eyes, which opened momentarily under the weight of drugged eyelids. She had been lost for some time, Richard had warned. 

“Tante Brigitte, it’s me.  It’s Marie,  your niece,” I struggled for words, “I’m so sorry…”

“Sorry for what?” 

“We were so sad to hear about Uncle Maxime.”

“What’s wrong with Maxime?” a heavy eye pried itself open.

Her brother Maxime had died three days before. He was in his late eighties and had been hospitalized for months. No one was particularly surprised but it was still sad. He had died alone, before Richard or I could arrive. The nurse told us he had been calling for Brigitte in the throes of death. He was confused, not remembering that his sister had been too feeble of body and mind to hold his hand during his final hours. 

“He’s gone, ma Tante.”

“What do you mean?” her eyes rolled to the side.

I patted her hands, frail bones like dead birds. She would pass soon, I thought. Probably like her brother: drugged, demented, in solitude and fear. The sad fate of a certain kind of elderly person, marooned by their own choices, each twist and turn of a life balanced on self propulsion, dangling like a broken filament until all that remained was a blank ceiling and the vague recollection of a nurse wandering in and out of the room, the steady hum of painkillers and the ultimate arch of death rattling through their lungs. 

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March 18, 2014

Freedom is Bought With

I was twenty-three years old when I broke up with a long term boyfriend in Cairns, Australia. Six years together, I felt dead, suffocated, spit up and rehashed. On the great Australian expanse, I was walking in a cage. I thought it was him.

After the cataclysmic breakup, I travelled south, alone and against the advice of my family. Previously vegan, I started smoking cigarettes and living off ice cream and beer. I lost weight. I tanned brown. Somewhere along the Gold Coast, I hitched a ride out of some crappy backpacker town. It was a long road to wherever we were going next, maybe a day’s drive. The driver’s name was Pip. He had red hair and was kind. I cannot remember the others but the station wagon was full. Pip drove through a straggled eucalyptus landscape, a pale orange earth, snakes sunning on the strip. Sometime after dark, we pulled into a rest stop. It was dangerous to drive through the bush at night, animals on the road, kangaroos smashing fenders, cars in ditches, no ambulances for miles and miles. Pip fixed up a hammock above the picnic bench. Underneath, I rolled out my sleeping bag, a feeling of giddiness in my heart.

No one knew where I was. Not my family, not my friends. I was thousands of miles from the last memory of me and for the first time in my entire life, all the expectations, all the stories and lies disappeared. I was relieved of myself. Under the southern hemisphere sky ablaze with stars, a feeling of total freedom crystallized and with it, concurrent, at the exact same moment, I suffered the loneliest feeling of my life.

The following morning Pip took me aside and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Why?”

“You have barely spoken since we left town. But last night, you were so happy sleeping on the bench. You even smiled.”

“I just broke up with my boyfriend of six years,” I told the half truth and he seemed satisfied. Truth was, it was not the boyfriend that was breaking my heart. It was life with its gaping mouth and awful truths: freedom is bought with self. The freedom we crave is the freedom of little deaths. We pay with pieces of ourselves – the triumphs and failures, the dreams and delusions, even our loved ones, even our names. And without me, what else is there? Freedom is a feeling best left for the gods.

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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 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 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 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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