Something Like

It wasn’t even her reunion but it was damn close.  The years had stored up, had built up into an enormous pile of something that needed sifting to find any sense in it and she’d never been one to slow down long enough to sift.  This time might be different, would be, something. 

This is how, because it happened. The three of them were sitting on a bench on Long Point’s eastern side, overlooking the fog-bound milky-blue lake. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The hushed tones of their talk were practically drowned out by the slurred whistles of the Baltimore orioles that were high above them in the deciduous canopies just filling out with green. Both sexes sing, she remembered, unusual, at this time of year, spring, the courtship phase. She could also hear similarly deafening warbling vireos, or was it just her?  

It was reunion. And they were back in Aurora again. A place that is never as easy to get to as you think it should be. The roads are direct, traffic usually scant. It flies under the radar and they loved it for that. But it can be a challenge to find your way there. And harder still sometimes to find your way back.

They walked to their rental car, climbed in, two in front and one in back, and drove down Lake Road in the direction of the college. Along the way they passed a small cottage with a shed roof on the lake side that none of them had noticed before. It had a simple sign in a window, for rent, and phone number.  Morgan, in the back seat, called out “Stop!  This is something.” As they turned down Annie Lennox singing “No More ‘I Love You’s,” she said, “We have to take a look.” They didn’t mind stopping though they seemed to not understand her interest. After all, they had an open invitation to stay with friends who had a large ranch-style house in the center of town, why stay way over here? But it was right on the water.  It had a wraparound deck.  Walking around it though it seemed too big for just her and whatever writing she had in mind to do there. It had a loft bedroom but she couldn’t see it well enough to know if it would work. It had a large kitchen.  She could have a party.  Something.  Nobody had a pen to write down the phone number so she took a few photographs of the house. They turned onto the highway and then onto Cherry Ave and started thinking about making dinner.  She kept looking at the pictures she’d taken that day, so overcast.   There was something.  Some thing.  The phone number showed up clearly in the pictures. That was good. It was a start.

 

Cleaning out Mom’s apartment

Spring, or nearly.

Driving 84 south through familiar towns

approaching Hartford street names,

Ruby Road, Cemetery Rd, Asylum Street, and

all the bury’s:

Danbury, Waterbury,

Southbury

then Entering New York State

horse farms, rural fenced-in

pastures and parking,

ringing the doorbell,

getting buzzed in

by my sister scowling at the doorway:

what? I hit some bad weather, yeah rain,

pouring rain

coming through Connecticut.

It takes longer than you think you know,

anyway.  But she doesn’t, won’t admit it,

always speeds through

somehow, trips that take me 4 hours

she manages in 3.

The apartment, all mom

though she’s gone.

Corrugated boxes, flaps gaping, await.

Opening drawers, we’re finding terrible lists, what is there.

What is. In her handwriting.  Forks, teaspoons

soup spoons.  Butter knives.  Steak knives.

Every drawer holds a scrawled index,

contents.  Identity.  Holding onto, the details.

Debris, pictures, there’s an order here to the

jumble of identities, the pen-scrawled backs

and even some fronts. Who everyone is/was.

How can you write across a picture? well you can

and sometimes you must.

To tell the story of how they went missing.

The attempt to hold on to all of it

while letting go.

My sister hands me a box, tells me

to get started there isn’t time.

That summer blood

That summer blood ran down my leg when I stood up

and soaked deep into the ground.

I was twelve and suddenly

keeping a secret, a family secret.

Our family vacation a long drive down

to Charleston in a new car,

the maroon Buick Skylark wagon.

Maroon maroon everything

maroon that summer.

Our first station wagon,

new car smell intoxicating

I breathe it in lying flat on my

stomach ache I’m destined to have

every day in the back

stricken, convinced I’m dying: way before

the seat belt law, dawn

of welcome restraints while

dad drove and Mom navigated

painfully so many discussions

the best route

Mom’s better way

and faster and dad’s

ridiculed with my little sister drawing

or taunting in the backseat. 

Gas station bathroom stops

break the monotony

I see blood again, erase it

futile improvising everything

determined to remain silent

in my bathing suit as long as I can

stay underwater in the hotel pool

but she sees my blood one morning,

looks at me in a frightening new way

holding the offending cloth

betrayed or a combination –

pride and fear and

jealousy and rage and then I hear her

heading to the dining room

not even getting down the steps

completely already

calling out to dad I wasn’t a little girl anymore,

everyone within earshot and

she seems to want them all to know

I’d become a woman she said it like it happened overnight.

No red roses

No red roses
this Valentine’s Day.

Banned for one week in Saudi Arabia,
land of my birth. Lucky
we got out when we did.

You would laugh to think of all those
tourist dollars going up in smoke,
love affairs thwarted, but an
awfully good excuse.

Who knew that the religious police
could banish all those scarlet petals?

Will hands that persist in
giving such gifts be sliced?
We’ll see that tonight on CNN,
the lead story on Valentine’s eve.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice just visited
your favorite flower shop.
They didn’t like anything they saw there.

To think of you finding love in Saudi Arabia. And
when you wanted to marry it was illegal.
You had to fly out.

I hear Bahrain deals in scarlet
all right and plenty of it. They let you and dad in.

The price of red roses on the underground market is high today.
Choose carefully, and your bouquet will be delivered by cover of darkness.

New view

When she moves in
it is early spring.

A ground floor room
in the locked ward
with a roommate she rarely sees

who right now sleeps in the hallway,
sunk deep in her wheelchair.

That’s not for her though it soon might be.
For now, she can still move,
just a little unsteady.

She’ll mostly rest here. Sleep in.
The bed looks ok, a little small.
Who knew she’d ever have a twin bed again.

Here’s a new view.
A large picture window that
frames the Housatonics just north
beginning to lose their winter white and
show green.

Outside too is a gentle slope, a hillside that
runs down to Route 7.

But she can only fixate on the colony
of huge dark birds gathering on the lawn.
“I don’t like them,” she says. “I don’t know why they’re here.
I don’t know why they’ve come.”

First a few, then more.
They swoop in, flapping gigantic wings.
Their red heads ugly and unfeathered, naked.
They roost there, and wait.

So silent, this place.
Winter draws to a close.
The scavengers get all the best seats.

Overhead we know

Overhead, we know more than we think we know
of v-shaped gaggles or wedges,
Canada geese. Unmistakable.

Robins are spaced far apart
in a loose flock, they
maintain their distance.

Starlings and pigeons are tightly flocking.
They move as one.

A murder of crows their opposite,
a loose flock, each with its own idea
of where it wants to be.
Tattered sails flapping darkly.

A band of jays is spaced so wide
they pretend they’re not traveling together.
Their distance is equal.

A trembling, a charm of goldfinches undulate in unison:
listen, you recognize their
chittering in the chill evening air.

Common redpolls and some finches zip ahead or slow down
in tight flocks in a perfect unison.

Cowbirds sweep across a field seeking food like they’re on a relay team, all a game to them.

Hawks and falcons don’t flock.

Mom on my birthday

It was a day when I saw my mother
and that was good,
all that day it felt good and
right my day to spend as I
pleased and as long as that day
lasted that was a good day,
not an easy day but a good one
and that was yesterday for a time
though it was today and
I was at the table
in the common room
with my mother.
She sat to my right and
asked “Is he a good boy?”
and I said, yes, he’s a very
good boy and she said to
him, “do you know
that she is my daughter?
do you know that?” and he said he did.

Then she asked all over again, and again,
as if for the first time and
he said he did
and later said
he was glad I had this
day for my birthday. And I
thanked him for being so
patient. I thanked him again
at the toy store in town when I
bought him something he
found that he had to have:
a knight’s shield, and I thought
this shield is going to
get us through this day.
Motion-sensitive,
when you touched it it made a steely sound,
the sound of a sword’s blade.

Such a day it was
to see her, rushed and
then over but it
hung there in the air for
a little while, a
mixture of things good and
not so good something like
pain though
mostly good
to see my mother
on my birthday.

Hand-drawn map of Pawling, NY

After the accident with her car totaled,
Mom reconstructed it on a hand-drawn map on her living room floor
on her oriental rug, meticulous in her use of 4 x 6 index cards
and color photographs.

She was going to have her day in court she said
to prove everyone wrong, they were all against her.

She had a photograph of every house along
the way beside the road. 

She’d made several trips
downtown now on foot for her fact-finding, for evidence.

She used Matchbox cars and one Matchbox truck—the one
that crushed her Fiero and

nearly her. “I used some of this stuff when I was substitute teaching.  For the kids, you
know.  Now of course I’m out of business.” 

She pointed to one house, knew the man who lived there. 
“He lied.”

Patient at the light
behind a tractor trailer
in the inner lane, blinking to turn right
she inched up and pulled even in the right lane.

He never saw that
low-slung car when the light turned green and he began two-handing
the clockwise turn of his steering wheel.

“He said I made a mistake, he
doesn’t know how it really
went. 
I know I was in the right.
I’ll show them.”

She did too.
At Justice Court she showed them everything she had.
Her illustrations.  Her demonstration of events.
Her car, like a child to her though perhaps more beloved,
towed to the dump earlier than day.

She fought.

Frozen haibun

I couldn’t get my car to budge out of the iced-over parking space angled down as it was now–no longer flat as it once had been.  I rocked it back and forth, reversing and reversing, gunning that motor unmercifully. 

Damned ice–every minute I needed to get out was being eaten up by all this futile rocking.

But then something gave.  My car was free, nearly, halfway in the road now I tried to put it in gear.  But there was no sound now, no movement.

On Pine Hill

my car in neutral

a final push to a final resting place.

White River haibun

After the bus had been serviced at White River Junction we heard the announcement to reboard.  We sat for a long while.  Then the driver, a new one for this final leg of our trip, said our bus had a problem and we’d have to wait for them to locate another one.  He said to sit tight while they unloaded our luggage and transferred it to the new bus.  We continued to wait as the day darkened.

The mountains change shape

on the threshold

of night.