The Man Who Fell (from Upon Waking)

There was a mattress in the air, navigated by cables and the people atop it were drinking, having a party, looking down and pointing. A strong wind blew and a man toppled down, or did he dive? There was water all around, azure blue stretched wide in rivers' mouths between peninsulas; he missed, hit his head square on the asphalt, and bounced. We swerved around him, aghast. We stopped, turned around, went for him. Time passed, or better, shifted from one frame to another, and I was inside an ambulance now, looking for bandages. The man should have been dead upon impact. The man should have been dead, but he was sitting up with a line of blood down his temple. Another frame shifted: in it my daughter dove into a tidal pool, but she didn't know how to swim. I dove in after her, thinking, what an adventurous spirit! There were barnacled rocks, seaweed softly moving in the tide, friends and strangers perched on the surrounding jetties. Afterwards, we went into a summer cottage with full view of the inlets, the mouths of the bay, the blue, blue, and I was still thinking how he should have been dead, but something in me chose otherwise and death would be postponed.

Winter Moths

Papyrus nymphs
of no certain beauty
but certain lives
not unlike my own
(in certain ways)
color of dust, bothersome
like dust
diminutive and diminishing--
an equilateral triangle
of wings clinging
to the door, the window
a visual staccato-- iterations
in December
welcome themselves in
crash into your face,
spiral up, up, up
seeking
what we all seek
in the end
in the beginning
a portal, illumed.

Vanishing Point (from Upon Waking)

There were zinnias, aligned in a row along his country home driveway, each with a patch of snow in the middle of it--evidence of a climate gone awry. He saw her taking a shower, this young thing with young legs and arms, long maiden hair. He was older now, debonair, some would say; he had made his mark in the industry and was respected for it. But she could feel his desire, his longing to ravish youth, vitality, devour it like a chocolate eclair.

When they went to his flat in New York City as a couple, there were movies on the walls, images so vast they made her anxious. He had every amenity in this haven, this brownstone in a neighborhood where other musicians lived, composers, notable writers, artists with their work in MoMa. She went to the courtyard to make a call to an old friend. The friend had said she was going to visit her in the city, but there was apprehension in her voice now. Curiously, when she looked into the dark pane of a window, she had noticed new lines etched across her face, her hair not as perfect and maidenly. She had told her friend that he had started to notice her flaws, how perhaps his friends saw her dimpled ass, the peek of a varicose vein behind her knee. She was losing it. She told her friend that she was certain she was losing it.

It started to rain and the courtyard became a pool, vast and green. She touched the cement filigrees of the walls. "I haven't talked to her in years," she gossiped, and she said it as an affront, as if it were the estranged friend's fault and she had nothing to do with the severing of the relationship. When she hung up the phone, she had a fever. She went back to the flat and found no one home. Her mother took her temperature while she was lying on the sofa watching the images flash across the walls, images of bombed cities, crumbling buildings, rubble.

It was time to accept it for what it was, she thought, an entity moving toward some vanishing point, where everything that flashes, wanes, then becomes nothing at all.

A Matrix of Orbs

Yesterday I sat in the car staring at the landscape below my mother's apartment complex. It appeared to be farmland, but it was a cul-de-sac only simulating farmland with a red barn-like house and a white livestock fence, and a green pasture-like lawn. There were trees shedding their leaves, and many trees with leaves already shed, the sky with a puddle of sun. I wondered about the trails there that led to a field of corn beyond, what animals roam there. Then I closed my eyes. I sought a particular peace that would bathe my mind, baptize it into new thought. I had been feeling weary and needed respite. I was a woman sitting at a fixed point, staring out. My vision was limited to a certain square footage, my eyes being only in front of my head. I thought of an orb with a thousand eyes, each with a different perspective. Then I thought of this thousand-eyed orb at a thousand different fixed points. Would this be omniscience? This would be God; this is how I interpret God, the all knowing. My small, limited mind can only tap at the door of understanding.

This is why faith is so important.