A Southward Tide

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

Tag: health

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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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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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 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 11, 2013

Memento Mori

An open casket wake. Deceased in his eighties. Slow unfolding dementia. Minor stroke. And peace a few days later with his family by his bedside.

He wanted the casket open. His wife would have it preferred closed but she kept his dying wishes. There at the end of the hall, I can see his long nose peaking out over the mahogany.

I never saw my father after he passed. That was an image I chose not to have. My mother and brother gave me that choice; they went to the hospital to take care of the details. As awful as he looked the last days of his life, there was still blood circulating in his veins.

At this gentleman’s funeral, I am seeing a dead body for the first time. I understand now why people say that the dead look waxy. It is not a cliche, there seems to be no other way to describe it. A carved stone. A fake dried up skin ornament. A rubber caricature. All the features are elongated, the angles accentuated. The head is propped improbably while the chest disappears under sateen. I wonder why a man would want the world to see this abandoned vessel. I’ve heard it brings closure, it helps solidify the grieving process, heals the wounds faster. Perhaps it was a custom he brought from his past. Perhaps there was some hubris too in opening his own corpse for display, a final morbid joke, a memento mori that forced us to witness our own mortality as we looked upon the remnants of his corporeal placeholder. 

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October 8, 2013

An Orgy in Heaven

I love the rain. The thick oily rains of South Florida, the long growling baritones of thunder that roll off the ocean. As a child, I wanted to run wild through the lighting with bare feet, splashing through knee-high flood waters. I wanted to sit in the pool and face the heavens, the big beautiful metallic raindrops soaking every last thing on this good earth. Nothing was safe. Nothing was saved.

In high school, my favorite time to write was behind the wheel of my 1994 Saturn coupe after a tropical downpour, the slick black road reflecting a world under this world, the translucent Florida sky slivered below a band of storm clouds. I imagined stepping onto the asphalt and slipping into another dimension.

Yesterday the winds whipped up the palms, twisting them in angry caricatures The sky turned purple gray. From under my front porch where I sat with my two children, I watched the rains come a few pulses later, a wild-abandon dance-naked happiness surging in my heart.

I hope the rainstorms in heaven are terrifying and savage orgies, blasting and exalting the angels, demons and strange heavenly furniture.

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