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.

From the Window, November

From the window, November looks too much like grief to me; this is why I recoil from it, at first. From the window, the stark, slender trees, the gray--I think of my father's cancer diagnosis and untimely death. No, I don't think of these things; these are not thoughts. These are the antitheses of thoughts, thoughts suppressed but moldering somewhere inside me. There are other antithetical thoughts: who is next? Me? My husband? One of the kids? November is the mark of our vulnerability. It reminds us of the pending treachery of life and we shiver accordingly.

But when I cross the threshold and go out into November, walk among the fallen oak leaves tinged with lace-like frost, touch my hand to the slender, stark trees, peer up at the timeless meditating firs and down into the cold, clear water of the river, I want to submerge myself. I am aware of a melancholic beauty--the Persephone of the Underworld, prayerful and accepting of her fate. This stage, this necessary reflection is, too, a part of existence.

The Pool One Night in October (from Upon Waking)

Everyone was in the pool that night, my father and I, his football buddies--men I had never known or seen before, figments of men. My father, showing off, took the babysitter in his arms. She leaned back and her breasts popped out from under her bikini top. She slipped from his arms, embarrassed (she was such an innocent thing), submerged herself as the men roared. It was dark and chilly, an evening when the dew settled early; we had no right to be in that pool.

I unpeeled the layers of water to find her, despite my being intimidated by her beauty and youth. She was shivering from cold and anxiety, and her lips were turning purple. We hoisted ourselves up out of the pool, walked across the dark, dank grass. Suddenly I felt nauseous. I stopped, pulled parts of bodies from my mouth, arms, legs, feet. I looked down and they were strewn about the grass.

Then, the actor showed up. I worried about my breath, whether he would notice; he was once my lover. Surrounded by his entourage, he moved passed me toward the pool. I waited for him to turn back, to acknowledge me, to acknowledge, perhaps, the young beauty next to me, but he didn't. He was swept away with the crowd.

A Question of Herons With an Answer by Mary Oliver

There must be some point when herons know they can't make the trip south.

I started wondering this sometime in October as I walked the woods along the river and saw the regulars--geese, mallards, gulls, sans the tall delicate birds that approach the river with semblances of curiosity and grace. During the summer I would see the white ones perched in the large oaks along the river's embankment; from the road they looked like draped handkerchiefs, pure white, newly laundered.

Today I found my answer in Mary Oliver's poem "Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh." It's funny how poems can answer questions churning in my mind; it's almost as if I'm being directed. This is what the old herons do: they wait. They wait as the cold whittles their bones and starvation loosens their flesh. At some point their "wings crank open/ revealing the old blue light" and they let go, "first one then the other ... into the ditches and upheavals." They become the water, the marsh, the bending grass.