Ars Practica

          I am alone in the house.
          The kitchen is bright and clean and empty. The dishwasher has groaned its final bars and the silence is delicious.
          I slice a Stayman apple on the scrubbed maple cheek of the butcher block.
          The change in my status, the kitchen sink's blinding white regard, creates an atmosphere of vision. There have been too many biographies. All I know about myself, all I ever cared, is that I am not Tolstoy. 
          Yet I have been each person I read: blushing at the sophomorics of Plath, dyspneic as Jean Stafford and Dylan Thomas drank themselves to death, stepping alongside Wallace Stevens to the office ... understanding Genet's lust too well.
          I have been Cinderella too long, and all that's here is laundry. The only stars are in the graniteware. There's a full day of work.
          That seems to be the thing, not being afraid to work. My poet's hysterics—my campy phrases and comparisons, my perfect eye, my brilliant feelings—never got me anyplace. That was the only thing I knew how to do: react.
          Now in this house we will see what can be done; at this late hour, in the face of melancholy itself. I have waited long enough. Now I shall fetch what I need myself—and perhaps a bit more.
        

Valley Forge Winter

          Re-reading Canterbury Tales my nose is again cold, walking west on the tracks away from the tiny yellow station—into the woods. It was the winter of 12th grade English: Idylls of the King, Macbeth, and Jane Kernshaw's year-long tan.
          I loved only the weekly vocabulary list—desultory, recalcitrant, peregrination—syllables strung together like chords out of Schoenberg. 
          I walked in the deep snow toward the chapel, through the long stand of pines. The park, my sense of the world, was like a sealed white paper envelope. 
          Back in the apartment my mother made softballs from the used wrapping paper and pinched dead poinsettia leaves. Glen came over in his reindeer sweater and Bonnie Franklin haircut and we took turns posing for my new camera. She apprehended the impossibility of the friendship as rapidly, as silent and confidently, as a shutter opens and closes.
          Now the pilgrims forever walk those tracks, dodging the Norfolk Southern as it blasts out of Abram's Yard.
          They come out of the woods below the parking lot, behind the tiny stone chapel where Julie Nixon was married. The site is pushed up against Route 23 like a tenement with a carillon, but the grassy slope across the road—down to the white spring house and back up to the high ridge of County Line Road—is the subject of many photographs. The children with sleds and toboggans put Currier & Ives to shame.
          Over their shoulders, looking back across the Schuylkill River valley, Vaux Hill Mansion is too perfect—an historic fiction, a trompe-l'œil. Beyond its tree-lined driveway the slopes of John James Audubon's home recline like firm green buttocks.
          I sat with a glass of Christian Brothers Burgundy—even at 16—cheating on my homework with the Bible. Our new minister was 'Full Gospel' and I chased the Holy Spirit like a lover; but I was too intense even for Christ, who needed His space, in the end. 
          But Glen complimented the beauty of my glossolalia.
          I loved words.

Fall Weekend

          Gary scrapes the hoar frost off the windows and drives away with his bag of gifts, flowers, and his best suit. 
          I stand in the driveway and wave. I am thinner, and I feel the map of my former body—smell the ghostly breath of old love falling and crying against my torso and thighs. 
          But the busy sun banishes the frost from the Ipomoea vine, and I am alone in the house. The dogs turn quiet and dig in for the long wait.
          My companion—my consolation—is a pack of Marlboro I found, unopened, on the ground. 
          Back then it was Benson & Hedges, and before that Winstons (by the carton), and before that Dunhill ... and of course before everything were the gold-tipped Sobrane "Black Russians" that Sara fed into the garbage disposal when we were 22. 
          My boss in the copy shop on Walnut Street asked me Does it come off on your lips?
          I was narrow and lovely. There are too few photos.
          But I was 31 before my fingertips started to warm, going from one to the other, waving goodbye in cold apartments, subsisting on French toast and reading Absalom, Absalom! in the television-less evenings. 
          My twenties were hard as ice.
          I quit my job and moved into a whore house in Fishtown. I still have the pages of tic-tack-toe I played with one of the boys in between rounds of sex. Walking to the El stop, I was so stoned the blocks seemed to multiply in front of me. I biked for hours in Wissahickon Park with a minister—his mother was the first female eye surgeon in the country—just for apple pie and ice cream at Valley Green Inn ... and the twenty he slipped me when he dropped me off.
          I was what they called easy to be with; a good listener, my shirt cuffs folded up high on my arms, my Salvation Army loafers two sizes too big dangling from my instep like luggage, my rent always overdue. 
          Once, my mother called: I mailed her one of my twenties.
          A tooth that had flamed in pain for months crumbled like an oyster cracker in my mouth during a dinner date with a sculptor; I excused myself, spit the fragments into the toilet, and returned to the table.
          Running on Pine Street to make the half-price cover charge at a new club, a hole in my shoe landed on an upright carpenter's nail projecting from a plywood sidewalk panel in front of a renovation. A perfect, bloodless puncture, I leaned against the brick townhouse and untwisted the shoe from my foot. A company nurse at the job I had started only a week before saved my life.
          But now the sun is unfurled onto the dining room floor, and Gary has already called asking for directions north around a stalled interstate. In my haste, I discover the Google search page no longer links to maps. 
          I decide against a fourth K cup. The dogs turn in their sleep.
          Shivering on the back porch, sucking deeply on one of the Marlboros, I wonder:
          Do we live one life or several?
          Am I the same person, or a different one?
          I can feel my hip bones, again, just beneath my jeans.

On the Eve of My Marriage

          Sitting in the tub, pointing my chin into the milky old silver shaving mirror, I draw the razor across my face.
          A single candle burns.
          It is my last date with myself.
          Tomorrow I will find out that I have been loved despite myself—the pouting, querulous, monster child who spoiled his loves like freckles of marinara on a white linen shirt.
          There were many. I sent them running.
          And I guess I wish she were here for it, the blindly selfish, myopic—gorgeous—monster from whom I was cut, a depressed ginger snap.
          But at last we are not alone, Marion. We are not as bad as all that.
          The mirror clouds with steam, the water circles down the drain, and we are off!

Poison*

Your old photos come like bee stings,
each one disablingly magenta, dead-ripe plums
suggesting your jaw line from another time,
but still a blur at 1200 dpi.
You weren't always mine.
Yet I invented you, like the others. My imagination,
spinning like a car wheel after a flip on the icy interstate,
cannot be stopped.

Like Joan Crawford relaxing between takes,
I'm busy knitting sweaters from lovers' lives, odds and ends,
midnight stories carried on your breath, or daytime facts 
handed out begrudgingly: We wanted different things 
is all I know of your divorce.
I embroider it.

Those old tales of your deceptions,
the linen choreography of your surrenders,
hit my brain like nicotine:
I get junked up on you. Your eyes 
are always thinking about something else—
while your mouth won't stop propositioning me.

Behind three or four pairs of eyelids old dramas live,
escaping my stenography—the football player
who broke Alice's heart, Jose's German girlfriend,
Bob loose in Provincetown—an ocean heard 
remotely through a conch shell. The passionate
bard of my own obsessions, sometimes I wonder 
how my subjects fared, after my blood ran clean of them. 
Is anyone observing their legs and lips
with my archivist's nerves? Who follows them 
in furtive glances now?

More to the point: Was it love's warm regard
that poisoned me? 
Or its sweet-sweet fury
elsewhere.


*Vaguely inspired by "You Sent Me Flying" (Amy Winehouse)

Home Again

          The PVC glue had dried and all that needed to be done now was to connect the garden hose. The plastic shower stood at the bottom of a daringly short flight of concrete steps leading from the backyard, and the July sun was like a glamorous city skylight on the yellow- green algae of the walls.
          I put my glass of white wine on the third step up and covered myself with patchouli soap. I missed the country.
          The week had been like a celebrity biography, in which the subject takes half a year to do nothing—to shop, stay with friends in France, or read. Playlist followed playlist, sunset (with the sound of couples quietly talking in row boats) followed sunset, and I was never too full or too tired or too drunk. We played cards late into the night and once as I went to bed I saw daylight rising from behind the cedars, the color of fresh blueberries.
          I had quit my life but my young companions regarded me—spoke to me, waited for me to reply. I lost a little weight without trying to. I won a couple of the rounds of cards. I took my arms away from my face where I had braced them, waiting for my life to crash—to flip over into the Delaware canal on a rainy night, trapping me in the back seat with my memories.
          But this shower was a surprise, like a new friend or a wad of bills found in the hamper. After the sixth week of not hearing from the plumber, Gary plopped it down over the French drain with a chic little teak-wood platform and a dish for soap. After 22 years of baths in the old tub, ringed by a motley row of tiles and blackening caulk, the shower was a treat. 
          It stood tall in the cellar way with the top of its white neck bent like a swan's.
          I dusted off my ego and started steaming vegetables and exercising again. For the first time in years, I stood at the mirror and looked long at my face, trying to recognize myself in it. Something about the jaw was different—the spine of a book that has been fully read, laid aside.  
          I have come back. 

Minuet in G

          Crawling through ebay, I can never find it. The music was common as table salt—like book club copies of Gone With the Wind, or electric waffle irons—and the lithographed head of Beethoven is repeated in different lay-outs stretching back to the twenties. There are scores of copies in the 100+ drop-down view of auction listings.
          But none are the version from my childhood, my first piece of music—the first musical notes I ever read. The outside was a field of Creamsicle orange. Beethoven's head was dark blue and—I believe—in the upper right hand corner.
          Of course, even if I found it no copy would have the penciled letters, in the archaic cursive capitals, carefully written above each note. I had left my grandmother's disintegrating pile of sheet music behind, in that last half-hour walk through the house, picking up pieces of my childhood as if at a blue light special. I chose a mantle clock, a butter dish, a spiral binder of handwritten recipes—stuffed with cut-out panels from boxes of jello and recipes clipped from the local paper—and a bunch of Bibles.
          "That looks like it might be valuable," the man said, pointing to a decorative vase. I put it in my box out of politeness. I broke it a few years later and Gary carefully glued the pieces back together, my childhood and my adult life briefly, tenderly intersecting.

A Poor Player

          Daylight from the bedroom windows wakes me up at 6:00.
          My phone is not on my night stand.
          The lights are on, and the dogs wander the downstairs freely, not in their crates.
          I make coffee but it is too weak.
          And I remember what I did last night.
          Even my silence is not quiet enough for my past, and I see the same faces that my life grew away from, like a houseplant craning up out of a dark corner.
          Some of them are kind, and I wonder whether it is the kindness of good fortune—a happy childhood and a solid career—or the mercy that comes from suffering, from true character.
          I refused their civilities, insisting on love. Knowing it would never get better for me, I made it much worse. 
          I am terrified of the commonplace.
          I am Frances Farmer on This Is Your Life, her hair swept back into a brutal bun, a cravat like a silk noose, her eyes hollow and black, crawling back from the delicious excesses and articulate rages—a mannequin in a prim wool suit, her anger itching just below the neckline.
          I am still here. And look, I'm just fine.
          I have too many feelings.
          It is a diagnosis. It is not a respectable status.
          I have outlived my personality, and like an old T-shirt it hugs my belly, outlining my monstrosity. 
          I am a joke, told at a dinner party.      

The China Frog (A Belated Mother's Day Card)

          My canary yellow bedroom was on a corner of the large apartment my mother and I shared, for $140/month, when I was 10, 11, and 12.
          One Saturday morning my mother and I crouched below the windows, one looking onto the gravel parking lot and the other onto a high, treacherous sidewalk between the buildings, watching Tommy McCabe stagger from his Dodge "Rambler" to the front door of his apartment building across the way.
          Tommy had spent all of Friday night at the "Moose" Lodge and was just making his way home—lapsing in and out of consciousness—after my morning cartoons. My mother, smelling like Crest and Aqua Net, was absorbed by the scene. She had probably seen him pull into the parking lot from the kitchen window and had come into my bedroom for the best view. 
          Tommy was her lover.

6:00 a.m. Bath

          It is a rare thing, a cold May morning. The painted radiator is hot to the touch, and the noise of the pipes comes from the heart of the old house—comforting and anonymous as a pulse.
          Tiny rounded pieces of four or five different soaps float on the milky water: rose, lavender, sandalwood, and patchouli tadpoles swim around my belly, compounding their scents.
          The steam from the tap rises and meets the first light coming in from the window. The corners of the room are dark, still in night.
          Everything is the color of pearl. The old white tub is smooth and faceted as the inside of a giant shell.  
          My cat regards me from the top of the toilet seat, closing and opening her eyes more glamorously than any actress, more attentively than any nurse. She stands perfectly as a toy; she is an illustration of a cat.
          I hoist my dripping leg into the air, but I cannot hold it straight. I have coiled and tensed through all my years—no warmth can open me now.   
          I step into a thick, clean white towel.
          I still love the world.

Easter 1967

     1.

     In those days Pennsylvania Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, went through Lancaster and Columbia without a bypass. After Gap, and the half block of fussy, oddly contemporary Amish shops that were like a five-second commercial strip tossed into a corn field, you entered Lancaster, passing by the Hamilton Watch building and WGAL TV 8.
     But my mother would have already pulled over, probably someplace outside Coatesville, at a converted gas station or perhaps a simple wooden stand, to buy flowers. 
     One year, it was a single pink hyacinth in a pot—entirely plastic—that I held in my lap like a goldfish bowl or a delicate treasure, picturing my grandmother's face when I would hand it to her.
     Together in the blue bucket seats of her Mustang, I can still hear my mother punch the cigarette lighter into the dash to get it started, and I can smell the raisiny tannin of her Viceroy pack as I fished one out for her to light. She held the metal cartridge up to her face and sucked furtively, suffocating me.
     The metal seat belts lay across my lap like chrome barbells.
     The drive to my grandmother's house, "100 miles!" as my mother used to say, always rounding up, as imprecise as her gift wrapping or her motley Swedish meatballs, was the greatest pleasure I knew as a child. Crossing the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge with its deco lanterns, driving by Lake Redman splashing up against the scoured-out rock of Route 83, and finally spotting the steeples—still only about as far south as Hametown—of the two facing churches at the very top of Main Street, each marker in the journey increased my excitement.
     A system of narrow, angled streets—and finally alleys—led to my grandmother's large backyard. As soon as my mother had pulled into the grass drive, defined by two handsome white fences and a lonely black lamp post, I was pushing against the heavy car door, running up the long flagstone walk with its treacherous caterpillars of sod between each gray or aubergine piece.
    The back door was already open, my Aunt Ada bracing it with her arm, one foot in the kitchen and the other on the top step, preparing to catch me in her arms like a runaway shopping cart.
     It is a moment—for the remainder of my life—with which I compare, by which I judge, every abstract pleasure. 
     It is a singular, ecstatic touchstone.
     Above my head, now buried in my aunt's apron, I could hear my grandmother greet my mother, her tone like contralto molasses.
     Well Marion!
     There was a reserved pleasure, and a hint of admiration—but nothing that you might expect toward a woman who likely predicated her much-loved only son's suicide.
     My mother would stay the night and leave after coffee and toast the next morning.
     The big old house, with its oversize furniture, lumpy carpets, and dark, stinky bathroom seemed stubbornly ill-suited to my mother's efficient style and constant grooming. The vanity lights on either side of the tiny bathroom medicine cabinet were never turned on except when my mother was there, applying or removing something from her face or daubing at her hair with a rat tail brush.
     Ash trays were produced from deep within cabinet drawers, and my mother's cigarette smoke hung in the air above the kitchen table—confused.
     The chiming clocks all had to be stopped for the night.

In the Alley

     Through a garage door two toilets sit together in a backyard smiling like ceramic dolphins.
     The sun is high and the shadows are short. No one is around.
     A sofa the color of Crayola #47, green yellow, waits for the trash man.
     Though I am walking slowly, too slowly for 53, the gaps in the stockade fences are still fleeting hints—accelerated as the dancing light from a film projector.
     The men in the group house gently float their muthafuckas into the air like quarter notes.
     My cat jumps off the step to welcome me home.

An Early Spring

     On a bright Sunday morning, the winter that never came loosens its grip on the grass and vines that never really went away.
     The older generation is gone, and all that's left are tiny paper bathroom cups and candy apple vials of Mercurochrome. I can't bring myself to throw the stuff away.
     And so many photographs of vacations and Christmas Eves and new cars.
     They were children in the Depression, and when they were 40 the earth was 40 along with them, squashing out its cigarettes and arranging colored glasses of Jello in the refrigerator to set. The stars clinked in the night sky like drunken ice cubes. A wall-to-wall carpet of sprawling elementary schools and jazzy churches rolled out on top of the old farms. As if there had been no time before, everything was modern.
     Now snow exists only in jpegs of Colorado, or David Guterson novels. Our correctness is our religion—a whole-grain enlightenment. Children are the new adults, fascinating and authoritative, thriving in the soil of our confused emptiness.
     Our Januarys cannot even freeze the ground. We cannot make a memory.

New Year's Day

     The pork roast is in the iron pot fat side up, like the bare back of a pasty, overweight guy passed out upon a mattress of sauerkraut and apples matter-of-factly, unresponsive to the beer and chicken broth splashed on top of him.
     Gary is on the phone, reintroducing himself to his mother. Last night he said, apologetically, I wonder what it must be like to begin a new year not knowing whether you will live through it. 
     He struggles with grief's suffocation, its undertow sucking him into unfamiliar depths, further out and further out from his bright, dry, breezy beach of Signals catalogs and upholstery swatches and New Yorker cartoons.
     The year begins with a groan—the expected hangover, the late, groggy start. My body moves to heal itself again, perfunctorily. For the date has not been reached when my organs can clean out their desks, take home their mugs and placards, or cash in their vacation. The job of taking me metabolically forward continues—a bit less efficiently, though, like the enthusiastic, unsteady song of an old dishwasher—into a pointless future.
     The boys nap at my feet like two wiry throw rugs, so certain of their lives with us, so happy within their rituals.
     I drink the rest of the beer I didn't pour on the pork.
     Gary hangs up the phone.