Liquor Store Walk

Liquor store walk! A big letter "C": two blocks over, eight blocks up, and two over again.
     Today I reached across a chain-link fence and pulled a newly-opened wisteria to my face. No smell. Later, balanced on a slender branch that seemed to have no source, a single fist of lilac punched through the underbrush of a neglected yard. The encounter was like a sudden meeting between old friends, as I stooped to inhale the distillation, cupping the blossom in both my hands as my mother did my face.
     Advancing up the street, past the little front lawns like vernal bath mats, the boxy side porches with their out of season chairs huddled together for warmth, everything in its right place but more sharp-edged in the cooler, fresher air of this last March week, my body unfolded in the walk like a swimmer's legs and arms open to caress the sea.
     Warming up, my muscles slowly reclaimed my wounded mind, subsumed it—lovingly, as a mother puts a bowl of soup down in front of a young son—restored order among the sensations, a hierarchy of personal survival. A temporary end to pain.
     A cheerful walk.

Pym on a Saturday Morning

Pym is in the yard, in the bright February sun, looking up to the porch with a gentle rebuke for the wasted booty—all the hydrangea branches and the peanut shells that failed to compost—he must enjoy alone. He sits like a sparkling pin affixed with a jaunty angle on a gown of moss and raw umber. His effect is to heighten, to focus.
     His is the worst kind of loneliness: pleasure that is not shared. He returns again and again to the ground, always finding something to lift with his mouth and toss into the air. Even Franklin naps inside a trapezoid of sunlight on the kitchen floor. We all ignore his bliss.

Windex Etude

     My mother had to have the radio on.
     It popped out of her luggage before the Sea Breeze, when we traveled.
     She entered any room as a surgeon or a teacher might have, her hands always busy pinching and shaping the space, modeling the clay into a stylish bust—a perfect room. Music and ashtrays. Milk glass candy dishes and plastic flowers. Side tables and throw pillows.
     She progressed across the floor picking up dirt, bent like the Negroes in old plantation photographs. I remember her in white cotton pullovers, the sleeves jacked tightly up her forearms—the better to accommodate scouring the bathroom sink.
     Her slippers, always parked beneath her silvery velour swivel chair, napped the weekday afternoons away like a pair of cats. The placement of her cigarette pack and lighter had an enviable formality—a neat, happy decision: a couplet.
     She wipes the phone receiver, flips the calendar, and disappears into memory.
     Quietly, I rotate a philodendron's face toward the sun. 

The Box Collector

An artist is someone who is constantly searching for containers in which to put ideas and observations.
        I myself have an obsession with clean, empty cardboard boxes. It never occurred to me until tonight this connection to my drive for an organizational principle. One works from the outside inward. Where there is a structure, the words (or images) flow into it. Most often, finding the empty vessel is the hardest part of creativity.
        But the creative urge itself remains a mystery. It is more than psychology, but often soiled with it. It is more than observation, but dependent on it. It has long been unresolved whether great works of art transcend the personality. Like a candy bar left to melt on a sunny window ledge, I tend to believe talent cannot be extricated from the person with whom it is involved.
        I do not believe very many artists have been consistently good, and I do believe some wonderful things come out from humble places.
        No package is ever completely tidy.

Full Moon

We carry such a brave weight each day, like a lead vest. The other night I saw the full moon from my garden, and I just collapsed into tears. So many loved ones lost, so much sadness. And the tranquil, stately light of the moon shining down on my living shoulders, bathing the hydrangea and the stones of the walkway. So beautiful and sad.

Useless Information

Some information is useless, and it is best to forget it. The tiny, pursed shape of my mother's mouth in death. I can't do anything with that image. It isn't a puzzle piece, or a lesson. Remembering that my Aunt Ada cut out the fluffy heart of her watermelon wedge and put it on my plate, her conspiratorial eyes shining in a bright smile, might induce me toward kindness today. But no one alive now knew her, the soiled white straps of her summer sandals, her uniform of straight skirts and tucked-in blouses, her necklace of glazed nut shells that taught me what the color brown meant. Hairpins everywhere! That was my childhood.
     I have separated everything into piles, and there is some matter here that cannot be recycled. I sought to draw memory into an outline, each entry tidily indented beneath the line above it—an inverted Christmas tree of ideas, my thesis of myself—shuffling away from the left-hand margin of the page.
     But the strongest impressions, pulling against the center like magnets, still lead nowhere. Lucid, canonical in detail, the sights and sounds of a lifetime—shorter than it seemed—refuse to lie down. 
     Best to put them out of mind.

August Afternoon

In the house, alone, all day with my dog dying of liver and kidney failure, I think about quitting drinking. Twice I've gone to the pantry and looked at the red line of wine, crouching at the bottom of the large green bottle like a resting ballerina folded onto her legs. I can't decide which goodbye is harder. There will be no more dog walks, no more drinks at sunset. My life, already in trouble at 20, advances through its new 53rd year by a fresh batch of relinquishments, by the loss of things that just a short time ago I seemed left with. I have run out of excitement about myself. I will not be remembered or grieved, like this dog. And I will be cold sober each day, saying my goodbye to the sun.