Another Love Discourse, page 6
But July third, fateful day, he came to visit some old friend on the west coast. I picked him up in the San Francisco airport and without preamble, at baggage claim, he blurted would you have my children?
Baggage claim! Because saving can be my great compulsion, I had asked my mother to organize a dance party: my mother would snake her arms and ding zils with her friends and he might meet someone.
At the midpoint of her life, my mother had begun to teach dance on the side. This came from a suggestion given by Fawn, the California guru-like figure who was at various points in my late childhood my father’s secretary, our live-in family/couple’s therapist, a crucial director and savior of so many lives including my own.
This bellydance teaching meant that most Sundays saw an influx of women to our home, to the same mirrored room in which my mother would die two decades hence, women carrying colored scarves and finger cymbals. (My mother talking about the happy inhabitation of women in their bodies: the art form began as female-to-female sensuality, she said, deemphasizing that it began as a way to help others in labor.) I never had problems with female stuff, she liked telling me privately, another drag dominion over any betrayal by the female body.
Shall we have a party of bellydancers? The nighttime would unroll in that fine rich-toned cluttered but gemütlich living room which had seen so many parties, the ladies coming out and gyrating or sometimes obscenely thrusting as if at a rock concert, not understanding the discretion and history of the form, though reminded by my mother’s carmine lips pursing, as she had learned well from her Egyptian teacher about constraining flirtation, necessary limits.
In laying out platters on the jewel-toned tablecloth, it became obvious that I should match future Vegas mate with one particular dancer, R, a Fawn student and family friend who would this last year help play overture for the death march of mother’s belongings.
Toward evening, R passed future Vegas mate and me at the foot of the orange-carpeted stairs of childhood home, prancing upward toward the deep lemon-musk-and-jangly-armor-necklace land of mother still putting on her face for the later dance performance during which she would make a grand entrance. Not-yet-husband and I shared the trance of watching R from below. Have I mentioned matchmaking intent? He threw a comment up the stairs. From the landing, R tossed down a sassier joke. That slight ping of jealousy let me know I cared. If not for whatever happened between Vegas mate and me later that evening, the two of them might have ended up together, and I with another marriage and epigenetic history for my children.
Sleeping in Uncle Rick’s room, he was, walls newly painted hunting-lodge green: no place I wished to reenter. Yet after the party I came to hug him goodnight, and was it the coziness of that house or the molecules of that exact second or some tricky signifier which predicted welcome change? A glow of well-being. What slippery augury: we would decidedly lack hygge. In the bond’s unhitching, I ended up deported from whatever home he and I had aimed to create, multigravida, leading to these last years of seeking new refuge.
So why, that July third, did I orient toward him? See another and recognition warms—is that destiny? What imago delights you? The lessons you are supposed to learn. Juggle intimacy and autonomy your whole life, a great circus act, precariously tightrope some destiny, and then stumble into believing you find right land.
Another July third, in Vegas, we joined in eyes of law and friends on the eve of the day of independence, according to the US of A. I walked around him seven times, already knowing his livid rage: did I dissociate? Did the light of nearby candles keep us flushed and close? Was this the right choice?
Sassy R took photos of our wedding, which she had also helped organize, gently shoving three of our living parents down the nubbly carpeted aisle.
And in California this past year of the float, R also became executor of my mother’s will until she smartly shucked the task, another sassy joke sent downstairs.
The orange-carpeted stairs murderously stripped this last month—
stripped, to the great sadness of mother’s last true witness in California, grotto tenant, who said some team must have been hired for two hundred a day—the phrase sticks in my mind—to fling down the fifty-one stone stairs outside, in tied black garbage bags, all the objects accrued over a lifetime of gentle Depression-era, peasant-mind hoarding. Glass crashing, cacophony.
The tenant’s email quivered with outrage: the objects of a lifetime, no dignity!
The last witness to her realm whom I have admired for his stripped-down way of life.
This basement tenant had named his home the grotto. People living the fiercely curated life can seem as if they understand choice, control, and how to have a greater lease on happiness. He lived among four surfboards, three bikes, his weekly service in a food pantry, his blithe thirty-hour-a-week tech talent and the half-time presence of a lovely mellow mate. His good cheer came from all he had eschewed, a message I would soon try to heed. Yet he had not begun the process of divorcing a long-ago wife. Having fathered his one daughter, he had his circle-of-ten friends for whom he would do anything. Some people have an a priori plan, and but for the unstarted divorce, the tenant lived well inside chosen pillars, believing in no afterlife: such could make a person more present.
Together he and I would coordinate emergency-room visits and brainstorm helping my mother whenever Uncle Rick vanished. I would fly to California and the tenant and I met so often over mother’s swollen empurpled toes. How wondrously happy she could be in those hospital rooms, treating each person as a gracious visitor. Her loyal writing group came and she would be there, bubbling and hissing away with walrus-like oxygen tubes inserted in her nose, a diver into the depths of mortality, even though before their arrival, she wanted life’s full drag: her hair and lipstick done, she beamed at her circle of ten as they earnestly wrote with such devotion.
Their work she had produced and put on as plays for years, and they loved what she had released in them: the most creative moments of my life have been because of her. She had evolved a format, being a dedicated student of the form of creative-writing practice—such as it exists—offering them a photograph Roland would have loved toward which they would write, and then exhorting them to recall their favorite moments from the others’ read-aloud work.
The first time I came to be a guest teacher for her—she called it, for her writers, a master class—I was struck by the consumption, not of words but of California delicacies: garlic crackers, morels, overstuffed olives, veined cheese. Their chomping a scritchy ASMR track that accompanied the scratching on paper tablets. For thirty years, her writers met as a group, crunching, shifting, adopting new members and mores, so that around her hospital bed, they lovingly accepted the failing of her form, having learned their greatest lesson from her, that anyone’s content mattered far less than community.
Who were they? Art-adjacent bruised Californians trying to live lives of meaning in between meeting friends for hikes in fire-brushed hills. The great problem Roland says in one of his later conversations is to outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed—
I do not say to explode it, but to outplay it. Her students played and she with them. Together they became one another’s ideal readers, a tail-biting serpent, ouroboros.
Everyone arrives in California gripping strong ideas. I met my future X inside the airport so I could bring him toward my hometown and its power, kundalini, melding, deep-rooted oaks, fire, quakes; the phrasing of his baggage-claim question now seems crucial. Could Roland parse X’s question enough to see how the ancient code of family outplayed me? Alternating days of storm and calm, X managed to nudge each member of extended family and finally me out of our home. There on that first July third, at baggage claim, his joke would be made unfunny only by later years: would you have my children?
In the worst of times, X would talk with his enfeebled croupier father, now a self-appointed pawnbroker, who always tried thrusting on X one particular book which would explain females to his son so he would not be a freier, the word for sucker.
What was the title of this book?
The Biological Tragedy of Womanhood and does that matter now? Has ever a sign been more linked to its signified, so tightly wound? Handing over the book to his son as if a gesture of benevolence: the fantastic symmetry of the mirror. Even non-narcissists need complements. With such a book, father believed, son and I might ascend to the highest heavens of coupledom.
And the oddity of our collective post-ripcord years rests in how memories twist. Who among us has not been thrust out of our past as much as shut within? Homes taken apart and reconstituted and we within them. Years with an infinite replication of pattern mirrored within us all. How can anyone then speak the same tongue?
A story: youngest daughter, the baker, stands with me in line. We have decided finally to get her excellent bread. Joyful or depressed farmers and back-to-the-landers from nearby join each Saturday in an outdoor market to offer goods to those who flee rough cities. Anyone at the market is living out some version of Alcott’s utopia, the gentry-farmer dream of self-subsistence: freedom from vertical steel-plated tragedy wrought by others’ greed.
Daughter and I stand in line. The seller, a young woman in shades, her plank bearing four loaves of bread, begins using a loudly enunciated nonviolent dialect with a man in similar shades, her customer: please step back from the stand. I do not feel safe, I am not feeling comfortable with you. When you speak, I feel uncomfortable. The man is angry, pressing close, he wants an answer to the question. Why are you selling twelve-dollar loaves? How do we know that money goes toward charity? It’s highway robbery! What portion of it goes to charity? His rage that of a frustrated idealist. I’m a reporter, this is fraud, how do you get away with selling twelve-dollar loaves?
What is poor communication? When each treats the other as an object to be managed. When both want to be treated as human, with human needs that can be heard. While his ire is inappropriate, her professionally correct handling of him escalates it, or at least so my survivor’s ear hears.
With another bystander, well-coiffed yet of the fellow compulsive-savior variety, I try to help, and yet the aggressor’s hand grips a tall push-cart: red iron, a heraldic shield of the sort X’s father used to use. The aggressor will not budge; the bystander and I ask the seller if she wants us to watch her stuff as she looks to find security. The problem (Roland or Bakhtin would appreciate) is that no carnival ever possesses adequate security: what adult is there to protect us? No overwatching eye can save moments in which humans play out Babel’s curse, refusing to speak the same tongue.
Having been assaulted too many times, I understand both why the seller cloaked herself in automated response and also how the choice irritated the man. Is it sad that all my years with X teach me to understand exactly why clarity can inflame?
Finally a moment opens, a wrinkle in time, and the pushcart man leaves with the paltriest assurance of his rightness, poisoned ether around us all. What just happened? Youngest daughter, the baker, wants me to explain. What can be said? The man’s rage masked his wound; the seller’s hurt covered her anger; neither found middle ground. That dream of a common language—I still hold it, wishing to be some kind of interpreter. No failure; all is seemingly resolved.
Yet when I recall all the times in marriage I drove to cry alone in cold dark parking lots far from children, sluicing through ice puddles, I wonder what perseverance made me think a certain dialect could help us or why strength fled me: why could I not also flee the dynamic of our arguments? (I kept dreaming of resolution.) Could we not have seen far earlier that the terrible content, the nouns, did not matter? Could we not have ended the thing or, conversely, just focused on peace as love? So easy to see mistakes in hindsight. How easily we fell prey to some curse, Babel or not, believing the spells of pogrom-accented ghosts.
When your mind spirals, it takes great lifeblood just to meditate, say, to imagine a simple black dot—the finality of a period, or death. To englobe what seems so inconstant in this time of people not breathing, whether from illness biological or societal. The O of absence, the betrayal of nothingness, the everything lack can contain. Your mind races rather than finds its home.
That first July third, on the way to my childhood home from the airport, surprisingly, future Vegas mate lay his head in my lap as if a child. At a gas station, he made a big show of squeegee-washing the car windows as I sat inside, making a funny joke out of hard labor. The lineaments of all later relationship are revealed in the first week: his joke of selfhood minus work. I ended up working too hard and he, at home, refused or was ejected from so many jobs or chose his urgent substitute truck-driving.
But how hard we linked in our devotion to one myth. We wished to be that thing, the devoted father and mother, the drag every parent puts on at first conception of the ideal. Our constant slide up and down the spectrum of conventional gender assignment. Father and mother. Who can help anyone now? O we parents are glad for the children. O we lost the battles but gained the beauty of knowing these gifts. These children. O there is never true hindsight but can a new view open? O please.
Hot flash/the unknowable
Roland says the absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out; it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my ‘truth’ and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.
If your body shifts enough, maybe the religious
affections of the world might be restored.
You might begin to know what it means if a goddess rises
from grove gorge,
overheated, invoked:
in this case, your new love strokes your hand, the flush
untied unto greater truth.
You thought you were alone but the earth came searching after you as a mother
after a child, all you can do is rest until stilled
breeze returns. The heart is what I imagine I give. It is not true
that the more you love, the better you understand; all that
the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other
is not to be known; his opacity is not a screen around the secret.
I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone
who will remain so forever, a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.
Youngest daughter has made
a beautiful bouquet gift,
an offering: dried wildflowers
(no starfish)
falling from the pages
of your favorite Roland book
in that glade suffused with heat:
could you not feel all is right
(enough)
with the world
this exact beat?
Atopos
Here, back east,
I keep seeing wrong
things in the right places, howling
faces everywhere but
especially in the upturned
roots: great fallen trees,
guts entombed in mud.
There is no change of death in Paradise, says Wallace, enshrined in Hartford, one hour south of where I usually live in the newish parsonage, but he might as well have been schrying California.
Might as well have said there is no change of Paradise in death: your horizon of hope after a beloved dies may not alter.
A kind of epic without the heroic, Roland says of Maman, mourning her lifelong struggles, and also: what I find terrifying is mourning’s discontinuity. Rupture of a rupture: who loves that?
What becomes a binary best: do we most trust what stays?
Or do we least trust what might rupture?
What if we only know how to trust when ruptured?
The whole time I grip on to the ideal of motherhood
it seems to be happening without
my noticing, around me, in the cracks.
Anxiety
Roland’s mother, cast out of her own mother’s fancy family, makes do in the bosom of the less cultured family of her late husband. Young Roland clings to her: large, at the age where he is meant to be standing alone.
What would Donald Winnicott say? Henrietta was more than a good-enough mother. Present if querulous. As Roland says, days after her death: I keep hearing her voice telling me to wear a little color.
Meant to be: a young man standing on spindly legs facing the photographer. Instead, he clings, watchful, big for his shorts, the distance between the two mandated. The question remains: would he suckle if he could?
Wouldn’t anyone? Middle daughter says she cannot help the jealousy, seeing me hold someone’s flirtatious baby: I miss that belonging to you, she says, I want to be a baby all over. Knowing herself that much.
Later I intone, pedantic: all war comes from the same wish: if not to suckle then to belong! Everyone covers the wish to belong and connect. They feel hurt and over that lay in the mud of righteousness, uproar, spleen, identity, tribalism, the martial.
You should be a daily influencer, she says, I subscribe to stuff like that, it helps me survive, I’d subscribe to you, and in what she says I flush with belonging, feeling I belong not just to her but to the umbilicus of outermost signs, the screen a transitional object, that I might yet become the mother-screen she thumbs and believes.
Baggage claim! Because saving can be my great compulsion, I had asked my mother to organize a dance party: my mother would snake her arms and ding zils with her friends and he might meet someone.
At the midpoint of her life, my mother had begun to teach dance on the side. This came from a suggestion given by Fawn, the California guru-like figure who was at various points in my late childhood my father’s secretary, our live-in family/couple’s therapist, a crucial director and savior of so many lives including my own.
This bellydance teaching meant that most Sundays saw an influx of women to our home, to the same mirrored room in which my mother would die two decades hence, women carrying colored scarves and finger cymbals. (My mother talking about the happy inhabitation of women in their bodies: the art form began as female-to-female sensuality, she said, deemphasizing that it began as a way to help others in labor.) I never had problems with female stuff, she liked telling me privately, another drag dominion over any betrayal by the female body.
Shall we have a party of bellydancers? The nighttime would unroll in that fine rich-toned cluttered but gemütlich living room which had seen so many parties, the ladies coming out and gyrating or sometimes obscenely thrusting as if at a rock concert, not understanding the discretion and history of the form, though reminded by my mother’s carmine lips pursing, as she had learned well from her Egyptian teacher about constraining flirtation, necessary limits.
In laying out platters on the jewel-toned tablecloth, it became obvious that I should match future Vegas mate with one particular dancer, R, a Fawn student and family friend who would this last year help play overture for the death march of mother’s belongings.
Toward evening, R passed future Vegas mate and me at the foot of the orange-carpeted stairs of childhood home, prancing upward toward the deep lemon-musk-and-jangly-armor-necklace land of mother still putting on her face for the later dance performance during which she would make a grand entrance. Not-yet-husband and I shared the trance of watching R from below. Have I mentioned matchmaking intent? He threw a comment up the stairs. From the landing, R tossed down a sassier joke. That slight ping of jealousy let me know I cared. If not for whatever happened between Vegas mate and me later that evening, the two of them might have ended up together, and I with another marriage and epigenetic history for my children.
Sleeping in Uncle Rick’s room, he was, walls newly painted hunting-lodge green: no place I wished to reenter. Yet after the party I came to hug him goodnight, and was it the coziness of that house or the molecules of that exact second or some tricky signifier which predicted welcome change? A glow of well-being. What slippery augury: we would decidedly lack hygge. In the bond’s unhitching, I ended up deported from whatever home he and I had aimed to create, multigravida, leading to these last years of seeking new refuge.
So why, that July third, did I orient toward him? See another and recognition warms—is that destiny? What imago delights you? The lessons you are supposed to learn. Juggle intimacy and autonomy your whole life, a great circus act, precariously tightrope some destiny, and then stumble into believing you find right land.
Another July third, in Vegas, we joined in eyes of law and friends on the eve of the day of independence, according to the US of A. I walked around him seven times, already knowing his livid rage: did I dissociate? Did the light of nearby candles keep us flushed and close? Was this the right choice?
Sassy R took photos of our wedding, which she had also helped organize, gently shoving three of our living parents down the nubbly carpeted aisle.
And in California this past year of the float, R also became executor of my mother’s will until she smartly shucked the task, another sassy joke sent downstairs.
The orange-carpeted stairs murderously stripped this last month—
stripped, to the great sadness of mother’s last true witness in California, grotto tenant, who said some team must have been hired for two hundred a day—the phrase sticks in my mind—to fling down the fifty-one stone stairs outside, in tied black garbage bags, all the objects accrued over a lifetime of gentle Depression-era, peasant-mind hoarding. Glass crashing, cacophony.
The tenant’s email quivered with outrage: the objects of a lifetime, no dignity!
The last witness to her realm whom I have admired for his stripped-down way of life.
This basement tenant had named his home the grotto. People living the fiercely curated life can seem as if they understand choice, control, and how to have a greater lease on happiness. He lived among four surfboards, three bikes, his weekly service in a food pantry, his blithe thirty-hour-a-week tech talent and the half-time presence of a lovely mellow mate. His good cheer came from all he had eschewed, a message I would soon try to heed. Yet he had not begun the process of divorcing a long-ago wife. Having fathered his one daughter, he had his circle-of-ten friends for whom he would do anything. Some people have an a priori plan, and but for the unstarted divorce, the tenant lived well inside chosen pillars, believing in no afterlife: such could make a person more present.
Together he and I would coordinate emergency-room visits and brainstorm helping my mother whenever Uncle Rick vanished. I would fly to California and the tenant and I met so often over mother’s swollen empurpled toes. How wondrously happy she could be in those hospital rooms, treating each person as a gracious visitor. Her loyal writing group came and she would be there, bubbling and hissing away with walrus-like oxygen tubes inserted in her nose, a diver into the depths of mortality, even though before their arrival, she wanted life’s full drag: her hair and lipstick done, she beamed at her circle of ten as they earnestly wrote with such devotion.
Their work she had produced and put on as plays for years, and they loved what she had released in them: the most creative moments of my life have been because of her. She had evolved a format, being a dedicated student of the form of creative-writing practice—such as it exists—offering them a photograph Roland would have loved toward which they would write, and then exhorting them to recall their favorite moments from the others’ read-aloud work.
The first time I came to be a guest teacher for her—she called it, for her writers, a master class—I was struck by the consumption, not of words but of California delicacies: garlic crackers, morels, overstuffed olives, veined cheese. Their chomping a scritchy ASMR track that accompanied the scratching on paper tablets. For thirty years, her writers met as a group, crunching, shifting, adopting new members and mores, so that around her hospital bed, they lovingly accepted the failing of her form, having learned their greatest lesson from her, that anyone’s content mattered far less than community.
Who were they? Art-adjacent bruised Californians trying to live lives of meaning in between meeting friends for hikes in fire-brushed hills. The great problem Roland says in one of his later conversations is to outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed—
I do not say to explode it, but to outplay it. Her students played and she with them. Together they became one another’s ideal readers, a tail-biting serpent, ouroboros.
Everyone arrives in California gripping strong ideas. I met my future X inside the airport so I could bring him toward my hometown and its power, kundalini, melding, deep-rooted oaks, fire, quakes; the phrasing of his baggage-claim question now seems crucial. Could Roland parse X’s question enough to see how the ancient code of family outplayed me? Alternating days of storm and calm, X managed to nudge each member of extended family and finally me out of our home. There on that first July third, at baggage claim, his joke would be made unfunny only by later years: would you have my children?
In the worst of times, X would talk with his enfeebled croupier father, now a self-appointed pawnbroker, who always tried thrusting on X one particular book which would explain females to his son so he would not be a freier, the word for sucker.
What was the title of this book?
The Biological Tragedy of Womanhood and does that matter now? Has ever a sign been more linked to its signified, so tightly wound? Handing over the book to his son as if a gesture of benevolence: the fantastic symmetry of the mirror. Even non-narcissists need complements. With such a book, father believed, son and I might ascend to the highest heavens of coupledom.
And the oddity of our collective post-ripcord years rests in how memories twist. Who among us has not been thrust out of our past as much as shut within? Homes taken apart and reconstituted and we within them. Years with an infinite replication of pattern mirrored within us all. How can anyone then speak the same tongue?
A story: youngest daughter, the baker, stands with me in line. We have decided finally to get her excellent bread. Joyful or depressed farmers and back-to-the-landers from nearby join each Saturday in an outdoor market to offer goods to those who flee rough cities. Anyone at the market is living out some version of Alcott’s utopia, the gentry-farmer dream of self-subsistence: freedom from vertical steel-plated tragedy wrought by others’ greed.
Daughter and I stand in line. The seller, a young woman in shades, her plank bearing four loaves of bread, begins using a loudly enunciated nonviolent dialect with a man in similar shades, her customer: please step back from the stand. I do not feel safe, I am not feeling comfortable with you. When you speak, I feel uncomfortable. The man is angry, pressing close, he wants an answer to the question. Why are you selling twelve-dollar loaves? How do we know that money goes toward charity? It’s highway robbery! What portion of it goes to charity? His rage that of a frustrated idealist. I’m a reporter, this is fraud, how do you get away with selling twelve-dollar loaves?
What is poor communication? When each treats the other as an object to be managed. When both want to be treated as human, with human needs that can be heard. While his ire is inappropriate, her professionally correct handling of him escalates it, or at least so my survivor’s ear hears.
With another bystander, well-coiffed yet of the fellow compulsive-savior variety, I try to help, and yet the aggressor’s hand grips a tall push-cart: red iron, a heraldic shield of the sort X’s father used to use. The aggressor will not budge; the bystander and I ask the seller if she wants us to watch her stuff as she looks to find security. The problem (Roland or Bakhtin would appreciate) is that no carnival ever possesses adequate security: what adult is there to protect us? No overwatching eye can save moments in which humans play out Babel’s curse, refusing to speak the same tongue.
Having been assaulted too many times, I understand both why the seller cloaked herself in automated response and also how the choice irritated the man. Is it sad that all my years with X teach me to understand exactly why clarity can inflame?
Finally a moment opens, a wrinkle in time, and the pushcart man leaves with the paltriest assurance of his rightness, poisoned ether around us all. What just happened? Youngest daughter, the baker, wants me to explain. What can be said? The man’s rage masked his wound; the seller’s hurt covered her anger; neither found middle ground. That dream of a common language—I still hold it, wishing to be some kind of interpreter. No failure; all is seemingly resolved.
Yet when I recall all the times in marriage I drove to cry alone in cold dark parking lots far from children, sluicing through ice puddles, I wonder what perseverance made me think a certain dialect could help us or why strength fled me: why could I not also flee the dynamic of our arguments? (I kept dreaming of resolution.) Could we not have seen far earlier that the terrible content, the nouns, did not matter? Could we not have ended the thing or, conversely, just focused on peace as love? So easy to see mistakes in hindsight. How easily we fell prey to some curse, Babel or not, believing the spells of pogrom-accented ghosts.
When your mind spirals, it takes great lifeblood just to meditate, say, to imagine a simple black dot—the finality of a period, or death. To englobe what seems so inconstant in this time of people not breathing, whether from illness biological or societal. The O of absence, the betrayal of nothingness, the everything lack can contain. Your mind races rather than finds its home.
That first July third, on the way to my childhood home from the airport, surprisingly, future Vegas mate lay his head in my lap as if a child. At a gas station, he made a big show of squeegee-washing the car windows as I sat inside, making a funny joke out of hard labor. The lineaments of all later relationship are revealed in the first week: his joke of selfhood minus work. I ended up working too hard and he, at home, refused or was ejected from so many jobs or chose his urgent substitute truck-driving.
But how hard we linked in our devotion to one myth. We wished to be that thing, the devoted father and mother, the drag every parent puts on at first conception of the ideal. Our constant slide up and down the spectrum of conventional gender assignment. Father and mother. Who can help anyone now? O we parents are glad for the children. O we lost the battles but gained the beauty of knowing these gifts. These children. O there is never true hindsight but can a new view open? O please.
Hot flash/the unknowable
Roland says the absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually I drown, my air supply gives out; it is by this asphyxia that I reconstitute my ‘truth’ and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.
If your body shifts enough, maybe the religious
affections of the world might be restored.
You might begin to know what it means if a goddess rises
from grove gorge,
overheated, invoked:
in this case, your new love strokes your hand, the flush
untied unto greater truth.
You thought you were alone but the earth came searching after you as a mother
after a child, all you can do is rest until stilled
breeze returns. The heart is what I imagine I give. It is not true
that the more you love, the better you understand; all that
the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other
is not to be known; his opacity is not a screen around the secret.
I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone
who will remain so forever, a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.
Youngest daughter has made
a beautiful bouquet gift,
an offering: dried wildflowers
(no starfish)
falling from the pages
of your favorite Roland book
in that glade suffused with heat:
could you not feel all is right
(enough)
with the world
this exact beat?
Atopos
Here, back east,
I keep seeing wrong
things in the right places, howling
faces everywhere but
especially in the upturned
roots: great fallen trees,
guts entombed in mud.
There is no change of death in Paradise, says Wallace, enshrined in Hartford, one hour south of where I usually live in the newish parsonage, but he might as well have been schrying California.
Might as well have said there is no change of Paradise in death: your horizon of hope after a beloved dies may not alter.
A kind of epic without the heroic, Roland says of Maman, mourning her lifelong struggles, and also: what I find terrifying is mourning’s discontinuity. Rupture of a rupture: who loves that?
What becomes a binary best: do we most trust what stays?
Or do we least trust what might rupture?
What if we only know how to trust when ruptured?
The whole time I grip on to the ideal of motherhood
it seems to be happening without
my noticing, around me, in the cracks.
Anxiety
Roland’s mother, cast out of her own mother’s fancy family, makes do in the bosom of the less cultured family of her late husband. Young Roland clings to her: large, at the age where he is meant to be standing alone.
What would Donald Winnicott say? Henrietta was more than a good-enough mother. Present if querulous. As Roland says, days after her death: I keep hearing her voice telling me to wear a little color.
Meant to be: a young man standing on spindly legs facing the photographer. Instead, he clings, watchful, big for his shorts, the distance between the two mandated. The question remains: would he suckle if he could?
Wouldn’t anyone? Middle daughter says she cannot help the jealousy, seeing me hold someone’s flirtatious baby: I miss that belonging to you, she says, I want to be a baby all over. Knowing herself that much.
Later I intone, pedantic: all war comes from the same wish: if not to suckle then to belong! Everyone covers the wish to belong and connect. They feel hurt and over that lay in the mud of righteousness, uproar, spleen, identity, tribalism, the martial.
You should be a daily influencer, she says, I subscribe to stuff like that, it helps me survive, I’d subscribe to you, and in what she says I flush with belonging, feeling I belong not just to her but to the umbilicus of outermost signs, the screen a transitional object, that I might yet become the mother-screen she thumbs and believes.
