Meg Sefton's Blog, page 75

The Bed

[image error]

French Finds, flickr

 

When they marry, they have a double. It is her box-spring and mattress. She bought it with her mother who taught her how to shop scratch and dent, to decorate with little.

They take it with them to Vermont where he teaches college and she works in the library. A river runs by their window. Birds perch in the tree outside. She makes stir fries and soufflés and stews. She writes thank you letters. She smoothes the wedding ring quilt over the small expanse of their mattress and straightens the dust ruffle. There is no money for paint but she hangs sheers on the windows. At night she lies in bed and wonders how she will sleep while – she finds out years later when she knows more about men, knows about her man – he dreams of other women. While his dreaming goes on unabated, she thinks of their next meal, how she will shop for it, and when she finally can’t sleep, she gets up, empties trash cans, has a beer. They are young; their bodies are thin, almost pubescent, though they are in their twenties. Their love is small. It is more on the surface. It has little depth. But in the double they make do. They are lithe.

Things are different in the next town. This is where it gets rough. She is not interested in a baby and they are very, very busy.  He is getting his PhD. She is chasing an ambition to know God. She is getting a Master’s at the seminary. When he protests, she reminds him of their first date and what he said he liked about her: She had goals. They live in the seedier parts of Denver, in the only available apartment they can afford. She cries for the simple beauty of their place in Vermont, and maybe something else, but it seems the narrow bed accommodates only so much, either visions of beautiful girls and delicious meals or visions of beautiful girls and delicious texts she devours whole. At this stage, she is not much of a housekeeper or cook. As if in rebellion, the plumbing under the sink breaks several times, the halls stink with boiled cabbage, the twisted vine on the balcony yields only one flower. Yet they see Leadville, fly fish in the South Platte, make it over icy passes in their tiny Japanese cars, camp in the desolate Rockies under the stars, ride through mountains on bikes.

They are more tired and yet she makes sure they celebrate holidays, makes sure they have parties. They are around more people with children who don’t always understand the delay in what is supposed to come next and why she would sit in classrooms of men training for something most women don’t do.  When she is not full of energy and stress, he finds her on the double, stretched out in an inexplicable bout of near catatonia. When he finds her there after a day’s work he is filled with fear and talks her out of it, away from it, whatever brink she’s on. Eventually she gets on meds, he takes care of her, and she gets moving again and she doesn’t need him as much. But he has no one either, not really, he’s on his own, but she doesn’t see that. Thin love and depression causes her to see him in only one way — how he can help her or how he can hinder.

In a wooded college town in Florida, he’s up for tenure. The women there are more beautiful than ever, than any other town in which they’ve lived, yet he feels a sense of peace about it somehow, as if he’s not so tempted, as if his dreams are not so wayward. He’s going to have a baby, a son, and he lives in a beautiful house, an old wrap around clapboard house with a yard big as a lake, a “piece of land”,” he brags. “Every man’s got to have his piece of land.” By now, she’s convinced she’s not a theologian, but she knows she’s something. How could she not be something? She makes peanut butter cookies with honey and vegetarian noodle dishes. She watches deer outside her window and a new flock of sheep down the road. Before the pregnancy, she drinks scotch on the porch, sometimes in her nightgown. No one is watching, there is so much land and that gives her freedom. When she knows she’s having a baby, she switches to iced tea. She watches the birds on the telephone wire. She walks to the pecan orchard across the street and down winding roads of broken down shacks and grocery stores. When she returns, she sees a black snake crawl out from the bushes beside the house and slither down to the foundation. It is mesmerizing, beautiful.

An interior designer helps her find a scratch and dent queen size that will follow them for years. She admits it fills a space with a presence, though it is too ostentatious for her husband’s taste, but now they are making separate decisions. She sees him almost never and she must do what she must.

He gets used to it, though, as a necessary evil, but also simply as a necessity. The bed is big enough for their baby and eventually, she buys the baby a little bed adjoining theirs and she can nurse him in the middle of the night. She spends hours on the bed, looking at their child. Their big bed is big enough for a big dog that loves to lounge and although it is not big enough for the four of them at once — dog, baby, father, mother — it’s big enough for failed plans and forgotten dreams, for tears and bitter fights, for cold refusals and private physical love, for family times in front of the television, for random naps during the day, for a scared child seeking the comfort of his parents, for a sick child seeking to watch cartoons and fall asleep. When the big dog must be put down, a smaller dog takes its place. It crawls on their backs while they sleep and on their pillows and there is not much worry or fuss about this. When there’s been a bad night of too little sleep or restlessness, they chalk it up to the needs of their child, and, later, when the child is grown and doesn’t wake them in the night, to the pressures of the day or to the pressures of the times in which they are living.

They are planning for a king size. The pool of worries and unmet desires and fears and depths of their prayers has widened. The unspoken desires and unmet needs pass between them. Their child, coming in to say goodnight, makes them forget for a while. So does an early nodding off so that the other must pull off their glasses, make them roll over, turn off the television and lights. They want one of those beds that will accommodate the late night movements of the other without disturbance of the sleeper’s sleep, the dreamer’s dream. They no longer have to dream the same dream, or fill the same space as in the early thin love days. There is no worry about this. Is this good or is this bad? There is no consensus.

First published in The Dos Passos Review

My Father is a Birdman

[image error]

birdman by topinaris, flickr

My father is a birdman. By instinct the birds know him as a living man and not a statue and so they hover near his still, sitting frame, standing on their little bird legs, perching on his shoulders and knees, poking their heads into his pockets looking for seed.

My mother declared him petrified, useless. That was before she left him, she a bird herself flown from our little yellow kitchen of continuous spaghetti dinners and fried bologna sandwiches.

My father is quite an active man though as I grew I came to understand just not active in the direction desired by my mother. “Son,” he says to me, “Every bird in the city will be fed by sundown, he says, every bird will get their taste of my cones.” At night he coats pinecones with peanut butter and rolls them through birdseed.

He teaches me what to do so I can help him after school. Rather than show me how to play ball or take me fishing, my father teaches me the ways of his art.

“When you are with the birds their feathers become your wings,” he says, “their cooing the secret stirrings of your heart.”

His oddity never occurred to me though kids at school laugh at us saying my father shampoos himself in bird shit, my father would one day be taken up into space by a huge flock, my father was about to sprout wings and strut around like a pigeon, my father was CEO of birddom, my father was Bird Jesus and some birds were going to be saved from the birdpocalypse in which there would be a birdbath lake of fire and the 666 bird.

My father lost his job when he came back from the fighting. His eyes were torn away he said. His heart was in the gutter. At work he kept his jaws locked when he was supposed to speak and he kept getting lost and not able to find his way to meetings and conferences.  That’s what he told me the first night we smeared the pinecones with peanut butter then rolled them through the seed spread out on the newspaper on the basement floor.

“A man is not meant to see another man’s bone, the skin torn from muscle, another man’s guts, his brains,” he says. “It is not meant for man to see man disassembled for at the sight, you lose yourself. Both you and the man so disassembled lose the dignity it is meant for a man to have. Without dignity many things are not possible.” As he says this, he slides one of mama’s silver knives over a pinecone. He doesn’t specify exactly what he means by this and I didn’t ask.

That first night we do a few practice pinecones for the backyard. We hang them from the trees with the yarn Mama left in her sewing basket. My father has me climb up among the branches and tie them around the limbs.

Then we sit on the porch and drink sun tea.

“When I got back,’ he says, ‘your Mama was the only one I wanted to see, well, besides you and your sister.  I felt guilty because what have I done to earn her, Lord. That’s what I said to the Lord. Nothing, said the Lord. But she’s yours, love her.

“I did love her but I couldn’t love your Mama well enough. That’s a lot of pressure on a man, to love an angel. No matter, son, you have to try, when you have the chance, when God sees fit to bless.”

Nights we hang lanterns from the tree, lanterns we make ourselves with mason jars and candles. They were the jars Ma had collected over the years for canning and since she hadn’t come back to can strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, corn, okra, beans, by fall it seemed she was not coming back. On these nights we take our pinecone operation to the picnic table out back and work by the light of our homemade lanterns.

“We’re gonna roll these pinecones for peace right out there to those birds.”

I thought what use my classmates could make of such a line.

“Once I rolled grenades into enemy zones,” he said. “I saw what no man should see if he expects to stand come judgment. I am paying for grenades with eyes that don’t stay shut at night.”

“It’s ok, Dad. You are doing better now. You take care of things.”

“Don’t hurt another man, son. Let them lock you up before you take another life. Promise.”

“Ok, I promise,” I said and put my hand out to shake and he hugs me with what I recognized as a man’s dignity.

First published in Still Crazy: A Literary Magazine

Mrs. Pompidou

[image error]

hairdos by Bryan Olson, flickr

Mrs. Pompidou was troubled again. The traffic jams in her hair were becoming quite the nuisance. When Mr. Pompidou passed, leaving her with jams and messes, it was quite beside her to know how to deal, what with all the gridlock among her roots, the accidents on the bridges and arches of updos whose structures were collapsing under her aged, weakening hair. She needed a miracle, she needed a sculptress with an investment in lacquer and confidence in engineering with a certain je ne sais quoi to ease her troubled mind and make her forget about her beloved Henry who would wrap her hair in the evenings and help her sit upright in bed in the mornings, blowing on her curls and byways to get the traffic flowing again, making appointments for her when it was time for repair. She had found little respite from her sense of loss and spent some time in the mornings by her rotating fan, remembering his gentle ministrations.

She was 92 she would tell Molly Popkins who wheedled and fussed over her at the Curling Salon. Dear Molly, whose hair was more like a train slightly derailed, one half of her hair cut short and the other suspended in free fall, a giant blue waterfall. Ms. Pompidou had read in the magazine she picked up from the grocery every week that there was a lot less respect for symmetry in hairstyles these days. “It’s too matchy match” complained the world super model whose middle aged body looked more like a woman of 20 as she donned her belly button in her very public self-promoting lingerie clothing line. “Matchy match” had become an anathema though Ms. Pompidou had grown up in an age of classic architecture, an age in which jarring others with a sense of disproportion was impolite at best, insane at worst.

Yet Leyla Pompidou has decided to disturb the salon with her own sense of immediacy, of a worsening crisis on her head. There was a part of her that was even a little happy to create her own trainwreck when she showed up unexpectedly, her rusting Chevrolet sputtering forth protest, and Leyla, tiny body and all purse, nails, and hair, clomping across the hot Florida asphalt in her cream block heels. She liked the stir it created when she pulled the door to its fullest, hyperextending it as if it were a double joint, stirring the bells to jangle in shrill alarm.

This was critical, the way she entered, the way they all started, for her hair could never be allowed to relax and they should be on alert of her intentions. She had felt the ghost of her Henry speaking to her from his portrait over the mantel to stay the little Leyla he had always known, “ma petite chou” and she would be damned if she was about to let him down now. It was in her hair, French tips, and screaming orange lips she would remain despite the waterfalls around her, the sloppily drawn glosses, unnatural colors, despite Molly Popkins’ lectures. “It is time for a change, Mrs. Pompidou,” she would say and so Leyla was deeply suspect of the sink, deep conditioning treatments, long toothed combs like saber tooth tigers threatening to take her starch.

She was able to freshen her French tips Mrs. Byrd while she waited for Molly to help her, Mrs. Byrd who understood, whose age  Leyla guessed to be around sixty and whose husband had died trying to trap nonnative game in the Everglades. Mrs. Byrd understood the importance of classic beauty in the face of the wilderness, in the face of changing times. She spoke under her breath about the changing shapes and colors of nails, for the worse, she said, the colors of bruises and burned suns, shapes like sickles.

“Let’s wash your hair today,” said Molly when Mrs. Byrd had done and Leyla was clawed and properly manicured.

“I object, you know that ma belle.”

“It’s time,” said Molly and she called for an assistant to help, to help seat Leyla in a reclining chair by a sink and assist Leyla in staying still for the procedure.

“Oh no, oh no!” said Leyla. “My Henry would not approve! Oh how you are treating me! He will blow through this door tonight and destroy everything! You are warned!”

And then she felt the trickle of warm water work like fingers through her roads and beltways, her tall buildings and tenement blocks. She heard the cry of her people as they were funneled down the sink, though some managed to make it out of the flood altogether and bounce upon her shoulder and down upon the floor, scattering and skittering hither and yon across the floor.

“I am worried about you Ms. Pompidou,” said Molly Popkins. “There could be bugs in here. At Curls we want to help you. Don’t you think that’s what your Henry would have wanted?”

“Oh not like this, not like this!” Mrs. Pompidou began to worry about the glue on her lashes. Just how undignified was she becoming? And to suggest she had bugs in her hair! To even think such a thing! Henry had always attended her appointments, to make Mrs. Pompidou happy, to take her out for dinner afterwards, and a trip to her favorite consignment store for a few antique baubles. Henry, so stately and strong, sitting, waiting for her with his legs crossed in his suit with his Wall Street Journal snapped out and open before him. He owned some can fields and they had wanted for little though they were by no means rich. Yet he would never have stood for this. And who would rebuild what they had built together the updos built upon updos, the fragile intricate weave delicate and strong.

They sat her up and put a towel to her head. “Henry, Henry!” she said extending a pointy nailed finger to indicate some man framed by the window beside the door. Molly motioned the man over and Leyla saw it was only a boy waiting for his mother, a long tall teenage boy she knew from church. “It will be alright, Mrs. Pompidou, it will always be alright even though Henry is with God now you’ll see.”

“Oh you young people know nothing!” she snapped, though she instantly felt guilty and so patted the young man’s hand in reassurance. “Of course you’re right, and how silly of me, a crazy old woman. You see, I’ve just lost all my people. I’ve lost all my roads and infrastructure.”

“Shall we rebuild, then?” said Molly, hopefully, and she began to blow out Mrs. Pompidou’s clean hair while the boy returned to his chair. Molly embarked on the process of cement, of lacquer, of shoveling up, dry setting, soldering. She built mile after mile. She stood on a block to reach the top, to create spires, curls, finials, flowers. It wasn’t the same as when Henry had lived and yet when she returned home again and set a cup of warm tea before his portrait, she felt a warm flush in the house, a glow, his approval.

She had forgotten her bauble. She rushed off in the Chevy.

static

[image error]

Outing p. 676, 1885, flickr

At the posh Mexican restaurant where her writer friend would be lecturing Ms. Myska ordered a margarita but in “not too crazy a glass, please.” The other women in attendance thought that amusing. Ms. Myska thought the likelihood of accidents quite strong especially since attendees were sitting in rows of chairs and not around tables and she only imagined herself tipping a top heavy vessel. Besides, she had grown, she suspected, somewhat queer in her manners, having sequestered herself for so long, and probably rather queer in speech too, hence the laughter.

And yet, there was the long lost friend, acquaintance really, that despite Ms. Myska’s hesitation to get out again and risk embarrassment, she was determined to see and show support for her friend’s literary efforts. Ms. Myska felt, after the sickness that nearly took her life, she had become a bit of an animal, a rodent, really. She had also grown depressed. She had also developed deep worries for her son. Many days she was speeding to catch up after all that had felled her. She was amazed someone could come out with a book, was a bit jealous perhaps, her own efforts having spun into tiny stories of which she was proud, but her attention on more meditative projects had proved itself to be as brief as a turn of the second hand.

A powerful woman stood as master of ceremonies, someone Ms. Myska had known in what felt a former life, a woman who, having been exposed to a Ms. Myska story, let her have it when asked for a critique.  “There is so much static in your story,” the woman had said, “that when you read it out loud, I just want to plug up my ears with my fingers like this,” and she demonstrated what she meant by plugging up her ears and squishing her eyes together. It made Ms. Myska sorry and yet she revised the story and gave it to a small journal who quietly published it, having found it acceptable to the eyes at least. Still, the rift was beginning to form between Ms. Myska and her city, and that was one of the points of contention. Of course she wanted to belong and was moved very deeply in a way that negatively affected her mood after that point. Was she fooling herself? Ms. Myska would always ask that question. And yet she wrote anyway and rarely asked anyone what they thought after she read her work out loud.

“Energy vampires” the lady master of ceremonies, the representative of establishment literature “are people we want to avoid. “People who complain, people who are passive aggressive, people who drag us down.” The margarita was just the right balance of sweet and tart and salt, which Ms. Myska didn’t mind flicking her tongue to the edge of the glass to taste. She didn’t even mind if someone saw. The lady was thin and wiry, a fairly attractive person for about seventy whereas middle aged Ms. Myska had become a bit more plump and matronly, something the MC hinted at when Ms. Myska re-introduced herself to her secret long lasting nemesis: “You look so different,” the wiry lady said, “I hardly recognized you.”

The MC woman had apparently moved on from teaching writing to some kind of coaching which taught every moment was a chance to live up to one’s fullest potential. As part of the introduction she was giving a snapshot of how she could help everyone move to the light, which was what, apparently, Ms. Myska’s novelist friend had done under the tutelage of the grand MC.

It would always be thus, thought Ms. Myska, thinking of the chips and salsa she had seen someone order at the bar. It had looked so delicious she had wanted to place her own order for the conference room but then she would have to juggle too many things without a table and then people would really look.

The sweet face of her friend made her happy she had come. At last she spoke of her twenty five year effort to produce her successful work.

When Ms. Myska got home she found she had forgotten to take the dog out and so she had had an accident and so she took her out and gave her a snack. The sink was full and her son had called, wondering if he could speak to her on the phone before he went to bed. Clothes were strewn everywhere, old projects still waiting. She was home.

Valentine Man

[image error]

jojo nicdao, flickr

Along the shore of his lake in the city of lakes, he fashions boats from waxed paper, affixes huge tissue heats to the corners, sets candles inside and lights them so that the miniature craft are drawn along on the dark water. Lovers pay fifty cents to see their hearts set on fire and set adrift only to witness their incineration somewhere near the opposite bank, the cinder and ash ascending into the grey twilight, the smell of burnt paper, like kindling that flames and is quickly gone, filling the air, an acrid, comforting smell of home fires and warmth.

No one asks him any questions about the meaning of all of this or how or why he started, nor does he think of it too much. He thinks only of the delicate feel of the tissue, the lightness of the string, the slippery paper smoothed and sealed by wax, the fire on the water, the lovers’ faces as they stare at what they have paid for, prompted by who knows what, fascinated to see what becomes of their boat though they all must know what will be so why do they stay to watch? It is a mystery. Are they sad or satisfied somehow in the justification about their beliefs about tissue and hearts and fire, or had they hoped to see their boat, of all others, land on the other side?

Every night a woman who brings him a snack of rice and vegetables wrapped in a tortilla pays him fifty cents to place something small in her boat –  tiny babies for Mardi Gras cakes, bodkins she wore in her hair when she was a girl, pieces of wool from her sewing basket in which she kept materials to make socks for soldiers, crosses she buys in packets of ten, pieces of kibble. She always has a prayer and dedication which she asks the man to recite though every night he protests he does not have his glasses and every night she gives him her late husband’s readers from the nightstand, and as the boat floats out, he says her prayers for the soldiers, the young life, the married couple, the single women, the woman herself and her cat and her grandchildren.

He found himself saying a prayer for himself one night as he set a boat in the water containing a gold heart. He snatched the boat back, soaking his trousers. He retrieved the heart. This is my gig, he said gruffly, as if she had affronted him with something. She asked for his blessing upon the heart. She asked him to kiss it. Instead, he chucked it out into the lake with all of his force where it plunked into the dark center and disappeared. They stood for a moment, the frogs screeching in judgment. It’s time to get a move on, he said. People are waiting. Indeed, a line had formed and that was the last night he saw her.

Every night he was hungry for the food she gave him and every night he had nothing to wonder about, what she would put into her boat, how she would ask him to pray, the feel of her late husband’s glasses upon his nose. How missed that feel, strangely enough, and the strange prayers she had written, not like the coherent prayers he knew, but her erratic thoughts upon a subject, not a petition, but a statement as if she were telling someone how things were. He missed it.

And so he collected things for her, things he thought she would like, things he liked too, things forgotten and dusty in closets, things from childhood and a career and family from another life, and he put them in boats and watched the hearts burn and the boats sink with prayers on his lips uttered in a strange tongue, her way of speaking and thinking that had infused him and he believed himself capable of finding that gold heart had only there been money for proper equipment and younger lungs. But in its depths the dark lake held his gift and he did not mourn but for the first time understood why couples waited until they saw what they knew would come to pass, and that in the waiting they anticipated what was most beautiful, a beginning and an end, all at once.

Inaugural eve for the modern day Ms Myska

[image error]

Existing Behind Us by Derrick Tyson, flickr

Now Ms. Myska lives on the edge of her city, her townhome overlooking a small forest, more like a stand of trees, where once she had found an old dollhouse, where once she had found a muddy salsa CD without a case, where once she had seen a Florida black bear wandering through the scrub oak and pine. It was the place of meeting between Ms. Myska and people who also lived on these outskirts or who dumped their things here, people she had never met but got to know through the objects they discarded. It was also the place of meeting between her and animals, her and trees, her and the moon which peeped first through the trees on inky nights and then rose overhead, attended by a smattering of stars still visible in her relatively undeveloped part of town. Her home extended out onto the woods and she welcomed whatever came to her through her doors and windows.

The son of Ms. Myska had made it clear to her he did not want doors and windows open when they had any of their noisy electronics on and this out of respect for their neighbors. Though she was normally compliant with this line of thinking, when he left for school on the morning of the eve of the inauguration, she opened her door and let the forest and the bears and the folk who may be sleeping among the trees hear her winter music: pieces by Liszt, Vivaldi, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, thoughtful pieces, pieces reminiscent of snow, pieces reminiscent of the holiday just passed, pieces reminiscent of the silence of space on a cool evening, pieces reminiscent of the majesty of the Florida black bear, pieces reminiscent of the hope of trees. On this eve, she played for trees that they may have what they need through a cold winter, or longer, through a holocaust of trees. She played that their seeds would burrow deep into the earth to be kept for a time not quite possible to image but the fulfillment of which was the fervent desire of Ms. Myska.

If I start thinking, “I have to restore my historical co...

If I start thinking, “I have to restore my historical consciousness!” or “My life depends on reknitting the past and future into my experience of the present!” I will feel overwhelmed and probably implode into depression. But maybe changing my experience of time can start with more simple decisions.

via Make it New: New Every Morning — Rock & Sling

After the soccer game

[image error]

N17_369 by Vivs_mol.jpg

Three loose limbed gazelles, free of shoes, of hair stays, of parents, of brothers, running full tilt under a black sky, a full moon, the green grass under bare feet, a sprint from post to post, long hair liquid, laughter escaping lungs a long held secret.

To the National Committee of Alternative Fuel Sources

 

[image error]

Experimental 013 by Allen Ang, flickr

It has been well known for quite some time that on the outskirts of Munir, a city that could well be considered a test city for a heretofore untapped source of fuel, the bodies of the useless women currently are housed. We use the term “bodies” to denote that for all intents and purposes, such women as these are barely alive by today’s standard of living and for all intents and purposes will soon be dead, either through despair or other natural causes induced by such. And we say “useless women” to mean that such unfortunates have no use in our mainstream consumer society and must therefore must be removed in order to fulfill their highest potentialities: The usage of their bodies as an alternative fuel source, their heroic sacrificial contribution to our community.

We have found marginalized groups have the highest wattage output per kilogram and though findings remain uncertain, we surmise this must have something to do with the epic operations of the soul that is crushed and aggrieved. Having observed the transfer of energies of suffering beings into ghost forms upon death, we are determined to tap into this energy surplus and use it to the good use of the operation of our fair city.

Our future alternative fuel source are the bodies of women who die naturally in our community center designed to house them, women who have lived well past their prime, those women who, in life, have been neglected by husbands, who, by sheer neglect or harsher means, express their displeasure as well as women considered burdens by their offspring where once they were considered vital sources of nurture. These women have cadavers that will burn most efficiently and we will see to their disposal as we honor them for such, giving flags and medals and ceremonies for families, large mass punch and cake gatherings with balloons.

Unless such women have managed to overcome the barriers against them and build a world for themselves based on talents apart from chasing male providers’ affections and the nurturance of children, midlife women often find themselves at a place we provide a death house we call sunny meadows to signify heaven though we do not by any means indulge in the practice of euthanasia. In addition, we attempt to meet the essential needs of our residents of sunny meadows while practicing restraint in the spiritual fulfillment mandates for housing a human being, realizing the energy potentials would be compromised should happiness be complete.

We are not beyond taking women or any beings for that matter who, lost to despair, are simply searching for a place to exist, beings who have lost functionality in our free market and now we bring up women whose existence is now compromised by value judgments places upon them by our commander in chief, value judgements which have varying levels of devastation depending upon circumstances: politicians and activists labeled “nasty,” beauty queens labeled “pigs,” actresses labeled “overrated,” pre-menopausal women who bleed, violated women labeled “liars.” We anticipate the bodies of all such marginalized women and more whose psyches are crushed by the current oligarchy will make an excellent source of fuel in our alternative energy program and anticipate in fact an uptick in fuel reserves to get us through times of famine, that is, more benevolent future regimes, should that eventuality become realized.

When evil flourishes, either privately on the personal level in homes – between family members, a husband and wife, children and parents – or when it flourishes in our public sociopolitical  machine, we are operating in the black and so we say, unofficially, of course, may evil reign, yet it always does. It is simply a matter of degree and so this method of securing this previously untapped fuel source is flawless.

 

 

Come back, my selkie

 

Shattered Dreams by Liam Maloney, flickr

 

They say the selkie is an embodiment of a dead soul, manifested in the form of a seal. The first day of spring dozens of seals washed up along the Jersey shore and it was among this wreckage of creatures I searched for you. How else to account for your disappearance into Grand Central the day we watched the silent protestors lying down to mark the murder of an innocent woman gunned down by the police? We met under the Pisces constellation, do you remember? I held your hand. When I let go of you, you disappeared in the crush of people of the terminal.

They say a man can capture a selkie and make her his wife if he captures the skin she lays aside while she sunbathes and frolics in the sea. He must hide it or she will put it back on and swim away. You may be somewhere off the shore. We have been told not to go near the seals along the beach, as if I have ever had the right to approach you in your freedom. But still I miss you, Maire.

I lit a candle for you at St Patrick’s. I listened to the young choir, their voices piercing the clutter of scaffolding, caressing the Pieta partially obscured by a tarp. A rose lay at the feet of Christ and Mary, the mother of sacrificing and long suffering. I went back to Grand Central and looked for you among the people who may have seen you in the station. I described your long dark hair, your chocolate eyes, your long limbs. I spoke with the man who slept beneath Orion’s belt, to the woman playing a saw with a bow, to the copper man still as a statue. I wondered if they may enjoy some special frequency not accessible to the rest of us as they lay closer to ground tremors, stars, tears, accidents.

You used to say whenever we visited the city it didn’t matter we didn’t have a plan. We must at least always meet here, at the Station, by the café, the place of our first meeting where we each enjoyed a madeleine and cappuccino. We agreed upon this. Do you remember? Remember when we spoke to the Portuguese couple new to the United States, whose grandparents had migrated through Ellis Island a century ago? They were so proud to use their newfound mother tongue. And I learned something about you too, as we spoke to this couple. I learned of your Irish roots.

I cannot find you and I cannot find the skin you left along the shore. As I said, the police have told us not to approach the seals who will bite. Is it any coincidence I still have the marks from where you bit me? Was that a sign, warning, a portent? We are told the seals are hungry and have come closer to shore to wait for the tide to bring them herring.

Are you happier there, in the deep? Is that where you are? I would like to be gentler with you now in my attitude toward you. I would like to be able to say I am happy if you are happy. But here is what I think: You may as well be dead, you are so thoroughly missing and no one has been of assistance, not even the police in all of their brutality and misguided energies.

I have not given up hope. I have found the remnants of a seal, long perished, not quite the skin as in the legend, so I did not embark upon that turn. But I will find the skin of your being and take it for my own and hide it in a place you will never go and you will have no choice but to love me if you are still among us and not lost to the abyss.

Today, I consulted the woman playing the saw. She sat near the entrance to the crosstown train releasing into the air a song like the music of the spheres, of the sirens. She said to expect you, but that you would not come in the way that is proscribed but through an alternate portal. I was to go lie on a grave in Brooklyn and she wrote a plot number down on a piece of trash. How did she die? I say. But the woman who plays the saw pretended not to hear and so did not answer.

I have no proof to myself now whether you were real or wholly imagined, we never exchanged rings or any little thing, only intimacies and whisperings, shiftings between sheets, our bodies in light and shadow. And yet how to explain this hank of hair I keep in my pocket?

I boarded the train to Brooklyn. Passengers boarded a train on a parallel track. We leave together, both trains, going at the same speed, passing through tunnels and stations, the pillars between us framing parallel cars like the frames of an old movie. Do you move parallel to me now? At the cemetery, where I am directed, there is no sign of you.

At day’s end, the day before I have to leave the city, I go to the museum and find a giant statue of a woman, made of candles, burning. I stand for hours, watching her melting, thinking of you shedding your pelt. I want to put my hands into the melting wax, feel its softness and heat but the museum guard is watching. What if I told him what I was searching for, would it matter to him? Perhaps he had a love like me. Perhaps he had only a dream, would it matter? Shouldn’t men share their dreams?

I should talk to this man, brusque and stern, share what I found of a selkie song. I copied it from a big book at the library and kept it in my pocket so now the paper is soft and worn, the writing faded. Shouldn’t men share their dreams?