I fear
I have eaten the world
Until I could take no more bites
Waistband snug
Stomach now elbowing into lungs
I am slumped at the dinner table
Useless hands slung at my sides
Spoon quiet on the linoleum floor
You are pure seventies magic
In every time-creased photograph
A spectrum of browns; a moment washed in cognac
You would have loved it here
I can see you now–
Standing at the helm of the machine
Harassing its flippers,
bells ringing furiously as the score climbs
You would shake the beast!
Nearly defibrillating it on the spot
Reclaiming the glory of your Silver Ball days
I could not tease you apart from this place if I tried
Right now
The bay is more portal than place
I will let it take me anywhere other than
This moment
Whenever, whenever
I am standing in its wetlands
Eyes on a skyline,
strung from two bridges
Heart turning to overripe fruit
On days like these, it is treachery that
the eucalyptus, standing sentinel along the road
Is not native
And the mustard
(Swelling from every crack in the highways)
Was spread by Spanish missionaries
Does anything ever truly belong to us?
I just might believe in ghosts
Because I can imagine
Yours is right here
White ether steps on Shattuck
Wind that hurts the hollows of my ears
In the marina
I howl back,
quarreling over the mechanics of time and space
I refuse to believe that
You no longer exist
And
If you’re anywhere at all,
You must be right here
(An attempt at one poem in one sitting)
This glacier
Sits at the base of my throat
Juts through the roof of my skull
Splitting me from
Ear to ear
It’s the first thing I see when I look in the mirror
I sneer at its point, poking through my crown
Messing with my part
I’m really not used to the thing yet
It’s even worse went I can’t be alone
It melts all over damn near everything
Others pretend not to see the puddles
I pretend not to be constantly wiping them up
Neither one of us is convinced by the other’s performance
At night
its weight pulls my head from
Shoulder to shoulder,
As I try to scroll vacuously on my phone
Eventually I stop fighting for balance
And fall asleep
Pinned to my dreams
By its gravity
In the future
I’m hoping to feel the glacier
Less and less
I don’t expect it will ever
Disappear completely
But maybe one day
I will forget it exists for an hour
Or two
It feels silly now to think of how I first imagined my father’s death. I envisioned a tidy but gut-wrenching wrap up. I thought he would die having had the conversations and completions I imagined come with the territory of terminal illness. I thought I would watch him slowly check the boxes of long postponed to-dos. Maybe bury some hatchets. Trim up some loose ends. I thought our send off of him would feel sad but complete. But all of that would have required my dad to accept that an illness could be as terminal to him as to anyone else. There never was a moment of true reckoning. I don’t know if he ever really accepted his mortality or if he just lost the very last drop of will in him. One day he was determined to live forever and the next he was demanding to die.
I talk to him, still. Mostly while driving or when I’m alone in the house. I tell him I’m sorry for the way he died, for the dignity stripped from him at the very end. I tell him I don’t understand why he shut everyone out but I understand that it’s what he needed to do. I tell him I am wrecked from having watched him suffer in those last days. But I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I am staring at the remains of this all, still utterly confused. I look at the life he lived; one of risk, rare accomplishment and love. And still, one so incomplete. That’s what is hard to swallow. Surviving him means that I am left holding everything yet undone, everything that’s still a mess.
But I am no longer angry. I spent years being pissed that we couldn’t speak frankly about his diagnosis or inevitable death. I quietly mocked his god-complex and sat in my resentment. Only in the last month of his life was I able to see that he was doing his best. And that he was just so heartbroken over what his best had become. I’m still confused but I will take that any day over the unbearable weight of anger.
I took notes as he was dying. I thought I would one day want to sort through the snarl of memories from that week. The notes say things like “Mom makes the coffee so black” “Half-drunk La Croix cans everywhere” and “Benjamin Button”. I read them now and they don’t make sense. I know the meaning of the words, yes. But why I thought I would ever want to remember those days is strange to say the least. I am haunted by the details; the memories as a whole feel like a sick nightmare. I can picture something as small as the way the back of his hair stood up, mussed from pillows, and all of a sudden I am gone gone gone. I have only enough perspective to say this has changed me, irrevocably.
One of my notes said “plant myself in the soil of grief.” I don’t yet know what that means but I will. I am. This is where I will be.
Studies show
The smartest women are the loneliest
I won’t excuse myself from this table
To play humble
I will drink to the six-cylinder machine between my ears
Salute it as I scream
wishing not to see ten steps ahead
Wishing to stop generating so many selves
That need watering
The poet
The mother
The lover
The seductress
The fire eater
But they were born hungry
What a pity
To deny them
Something to sink their teeth into
The first Buddha was stolen from my front yard one night. Its stone face peeked through the yarrow and lavender I’d planted in the narrow run. My kids dropped the second one trying to take it from the back of my car. I didn’t say a word when I saw it in pieces on the concrete; only walked away, dejected. A few days later I walked into their clubhouse to find that they had commandeered my hot glue gun in an attempt to piece it back together. The sweetness (and futility) of that scene hit me straight in the chest.
The third Buddha is a heavy, stoic head I found at the Good Stuff thrift store on my 35th birthday. I drove it home strapped into the passenger’s seat, the neon orange price tag still irreverently stuck to its forehead. I thought very hard about never taking it off.
The fourth my daughter found for me. This one a fat-bellied, smiling Buddha.
“Get it, mama! You have to get it!” she said. “To keep the head company!”
I did. Of course.
I’ve always been more than happy to appropriate the good parts of religion and leave the rest. At nine, I was captivated by the idea of being baptized. I had not been raised to consider my soul let alone to worry it might need saving. But church seemed like something irresistibly normal for a girl who could already tell she was anything but. A pretty white dress and a party in my honor didn’t seem half bad, either. At sixteen, I wore a cross I had cast in silver and set with a piece of jade. Being the godless little shit that I was, it delighted me to discover the necklace had the added effect of pissing off bible-thumping classmates.
Maybe the Buddhas started out as a gimmick, too. Just like the cross and the would-be baptism: an atheist’s shallow flirtations with the divine. But I think I’m starting to understand: they are a stand in for something I wish I could hold. Something I hesitate to even name. A name would feel so narrow for what I have slowly come to call mine. I’m not sure I can even call it a belief. Beliefs can be such hard, inflexible things. So hard they turn into weapons if you’re not careful. I only want to hold the things that soften me and remind me all separateness is just an illusion. I only want to stand at the intersection of chaos and karma and swim in the mystery of it all.
It’s 3am and I wake up in the dark, thinking of snow. My lungs feel heavier imagining it packed on the roof. I never knew I was claustrophobic until my first blizzard. Nothing holds me tighter by the throat than the idea of being trapped. The cold licks at the backs of my arms and I am wide awake.
I am not much of a painter but I know you don’t throw a layer of white paint on a canvas and call it snow. You paint around the white: in endlessly morphing shades of blue, shards of gray for shadow; even pinks and lilacs here and there to make it glow. White is what appears only when you step back to see the whole.
A few nights later I will dream of him. My dreams are rarely vivid, more of an impression of color and shape and place. But the feelings are always clear as day. Lately, I feel most alive in my dreams. I am in strange, looming cities. I am in Korea, Rome, a cartoon version of San Francisco. I am everywhere and I am with people that I don’t know but I can feel that they love me and that is all that matters. In this dream nothing else sticks other than the image of him seated, slowly turning his face towards me. And when I see him it’s like I’m feeling for the first time what it will mean to lose him. My dad is dying. My papa. This thing he’s been holding at bay for nearly five years is getting so close now. And I don’t know how I will do it. I don’t know how I will lose him and still be ok. When I wake up the clarity is gone.
The grief darts around my body. I only find it when I’m not looking. For months I jammed the tip of my tongue into the backs of my teeth until a callus formed. I didn’t even know tongues could callous. But it felt right to have a physical manifestation of the pain. And one day I just stopped doing it. The grief moved. I’ll find it again. When it’s ready.
I keep stepping back, expecting to finally see the white. Ohh, there it is. There’s my heartache in all its blinding, painful hues. I keep expecting grief to park itself on my chest and stay. But it never does.
So I keep waiting.
It feels prudent
To distrust an anesthesiologist
Imagine
the gall of a human
Who can obliterate pain
I couldn’t tell you
The name of the first
But I could tell
He was fucking everyone but his wife
Unclench your fist, he barked at me
Or I’ll get the board
The man would knock a cake pop
From a toddler’s fist
(The nurses searched fruitlessly for
Coy veins buried beneath
Skin, pale as roots)
Get the goddamn board, I growled
The shine of civility
Wiped clean from me
Another’s eyes
Roamed my body
As my daughter sobbed in my arms
He looked past her, pointed at my tattoo
Harry Potter? he guessed, idiotically
I could feel the bizarre taffy pull of his flirtation
The absurdity of being sexualized while holding a crying child
Rage and disbelief
Thrummed in my temple
Only the one
Whose medicine lived in her voice
laid velvet on my cheeks
Would cast light
In my darkest hour
She quietly peeled back
the thin layers of my perception
Until I was merely
Pattering heart
Trilling breath
Trembling,
I laid the marionette strings in her hands
And let her
Sing my insides to sleep
We never met, but I think of Ellen all the time.
At 26, she lost her leg to bone cancer. In pictures I hardly notice the cane and missing limb. She was beatific, always elbow-deep in a project or adventure. In one home video she digs for abalone on Bodega Bay. In another she shows the camera an enormous amanita muscaria, silently gesturing a slice across the throat. Don’t eat it! The fucker will kill you, she warns. She taught my father, her grandson, pottery, cloisonné, and metalsmithing. She instilled in him a reverence for the forest, for conservation before the word had become a marketing gimmick. I am enchanted by her and the way her life took its shape through grit and fanatical creativity.
I had to dig for these details, of course. Because when you kill yourself, one moment of your life tends to sharpen and the rest become filler.
She asphyxiated herself in the garage. It’s not the violence that has always struck me but the level of planning. When did she decide? How long did she have to wait until everyone was out of the house? Did she not, for just a minute, think of taking a nap instead?
I once asked why she did it. I’ve never heard of a note. Art was a hard man to live with, is all that was said. I have never really believed that one shitty man could smother all her light.
The truth, I suspect, is simple. And sobering. Ellen killed herself because that’s the cloth she was cut from, the kind that is equally and intensely present to the wonders and horrors of life. I bet the jolting green of lichen on wet bark made her catch her breath. And I bet she lost count of the hours spent feeling hollow and small; an endless, silent scream. I bet I know the feeling a little too well.
Suicide is that strange derealization that happens when you stare at your own face in the mirror for so long that it becomes unrecognizable. And the longer I stare, the less sense it makes. Frankly, it’s become funny to me that the greatest threat to my personal safety is my own flimsy will to live. Fucked up, but also funny. I’m not trying to shock or worry anyone by making light of it. It’s just that the shock has long since worn off for me. Now it’s just something to manage; more irritating than alarming. I have no lack of love for myself, and I know I am worthy of living without this, if only I could. I’ve never made plans or hurt myself. It’s just there, buzzing around, sometimes descending on me in urgent and disorienting ways.
I know the feeling of slowly inching away from a precipice. I know it because I’ve taken those small but crucial steps so many times. It’s how I feel when I take the second pill. And every time this happens, it’s the same bittersweet realization. This is the real me. The one that lives beyond the shadow’s reach. And I’ve spent so little of my adult life as this real me.
I don’t want to live a tortured life. I doubt Ellen did either. It feels so needlessly tedious to sidestep the landmines that litter your own mind when all you really want to do is live your life, drink a few cocktails, enjoy a few sunsets. I wish I could write a different ending for her. I wish the lore of Ellen was something else entirely. But I think I’ve held so tightly to her story because I’m determined to move it in a different direction. I’m committed to saving my own life. Even if I have to do it over and over again.
She wore a brand new sundress that day. As always, we met on her mom’s front porch; she chain-smoked while the feral cats roped around our feet. I can still see her leaning against the house, turning her head to blow the smoke away from my face. It was late May and the creek was already dry. She talked incessantly about nothing at all as I tried to prepare her for what would happen while I was gone. I still don’t know if she noticed that I could hardly stand up but that was the one thing she didn’t say a word about.
That day she showed me her new dentures and teased that she had finally grown an ass. She was a year clean and convinced she was getting her kids back. I was pretty sure she was, too. The judge presiding over her child welfare case had uncharacteristically wagged his finger at the mismanagement of it all. Everything pointed to reunification. I would be gone for her next court date but fully expected to return to good news.
There was no way to know the judge would have a near fatal heart attack the week before her court date. The new judge ruled in favor of Child Welfare. They ended her services and by the time I came back from surgery in mid-July, her phone had been shut off. When we knocked on her mom’s front door we were told she no longer lived there. I looked for her behind Safeway, where she had been living before she got clean. For more than a year, I was always waiting to see her.
Last August, I finally did. The sky was white with heat, cloudless. My coworker E and I had the AC cranked as we pulled into the Walmart parking lot. I hadn’t fully exited the van when I saw her making a beeline for me. She was wiry and tan, her skin leathered from living outside again. Her teeth were gone. She hugged me almost violently, as I tried to say hi. But we were skipping the pleasantries and she was sobbing in my arms instead. Because everything she once feared had come to pass. And the only thing to do was sit in the rubble with her.
“They really fucked her,” E said, as we drove the bypass back to the office. I nodded. The smell of her cigarettes and sweat still lingered on me. I waited for the familiar cascade of emotion to pull me under, drag me somewhere dark. But it never came.
I see her sometimes in the lines for free showers on Washington Street. E says it’s like a carwash for human bodies. I think of the words my therapist says that always make me laugh, and shift me forward: This is the gig. She means it in the Buddhist way. The gig: our soul’s assignment. This is the shit we signed up for. We agreed to crash into each other, and hold on for dear life. To try to tend each other’s wounds, but always risk inflicting even more pain. I don’t believe in endings, anymore. It’s all just another drop in the wet, inky middle. All of this.
They sit in the coffee shop
Against the artfully defaced concrete walls
The girls
Hang on the shoulders of their ‘men’
“We’re adults now”
One says
Sardonically, I think
Because who could really tell
The way their limbs wild about
Their voices swing in laughter
The way they’ve barely stepped foot inside
Disappointment
A place unto itself
I won’t be the one
To suck warmth from their coffee,
Breathe despair into their mouths
***