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and the heater’s on
tonight it’s raining. the front door of the church is wide open, and beyond the porch is black. it makes me think of my mother. she used to do things like that: leave the door open in the rain, the windows, wildness just streaming in. i don’t miss her. but sometimes i do miss the smell of the rain through the wet screen, a feeling that the wildness in me had a home.
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depression
somewhere between the coffee with a sweet friend and the three boxes of cookies you brought i felt a little more like i might make it through the day. the week even, possibly til may. still i was afraid to go to sleep, i might not get up. but here i am, again, surviving. it’s what i do. and all the overwhelm of work and the phone bill and the ever present possibility of eviction or accident or simultaneous disasster all the sad past and inevitably tragic future and all the faults that damn me and the seventy eight mistakes i made before noon yesterday alone are just a trick to get me in the store, where everything glitters and is deadly. i’m not buying. i have coffee and a lot of cookies. it’s still dark out but the edges lighten a little. at the airport
striding to the gate past the sees candies and the refrigerator cases with soda and wrap sandwiches, past gramma and grandpa arguing and a little girl who looks like she is definitely going to start yelling as soon as the plane takes off, i notice how quickly i walk and with so much purpose. these days i’m going somewhere. i have somewhere to be late to, and when i’m done i can stop for coffee. or take a drive with the music up loud, or look at books, or grab milk at the grocery store. this is not my story. this is someone else’s story i’ve landed in. in my story i’m high and crying on the floor, i’ve got gin in my water glass. in my story i’m still in bed, i’m back in bed, the day was four hours long. i’m permanently stuck in the edge of a memory that catches my thoughts up til i’m dizzy sick. i’m not well enough to drive, but it’s ok. i have nowhere to go. please don’t come to tell me i have to get back to the narrative with the endless pills and cliche suicide. i like imagining my destination more often than my past. i’d like to think that little girl close to screaming saw someone hurtling by just in love with everything, alive, on the way. hopefully not in too much of a hurry to lift her head and notice the sun slice the wing of the plane as its wheels catch the ground. february 15th
the truth is i don’t really like light comedies where love is sticky caramel. i’d rather not be swept off my feet or transported to a tropical destination. i think roses lack character. the truth is i love the lemongrass on the side of the road. i would prefer a walk to a movie. i have a destination and i’m taking myself there word by word in the dark. trouble
enough, jesus. go away. i’m just going to forget my prayers and sleep. call me next week, i have time on tuesday. maybe. maybe i’ll delete your messages, ignore your texts, trash your emails. you make trouble and you argue with the cops. you bring all kinds of people to breakfast, you never get the bill. you lead me down wet stairs and i fall. i have gravel in my knees. i’m tired and terrified of your next suggestion. yet then i’m remembering that overpass and how you dragged me back, your persistence lifting me from the bathroom floor. you make me want the morning. am i really ready to kick you out? i’m not sure. let’s talk tomorrow. tonight be quiet. sit here and put your hand over my hand. let me fall asleep and undream everything. it’s always friday night
thanks to tom your car breaks down, the pipe busts, your kid’s temples grow too hot, your keys get locked in the car, your girl gets arrested, and it’s always friday night. the office is closed. go to the emergency room, go to the after hours extra dollars specialist, wait til monday. we have no further information. it’s friday night and you’re on a cold corner with no coat and no cigarettes. the music from the bar blasts. walk away. jesus is not in a shot glass, or at the bottom of that green bottle. here: your sister on the phone with a number for someone who might know, the locksmith arriving on time, a finally sleeping child, water from the tap. now a neighbor with five bucks, and an extra marlboro red, and matches. for mary oliver
it was not long after he died. i was alone in his trailer packing boxes, the light that afternoon was bleach on my hands. i had only been in the place once. he had been embarrassed, in the end, to have ended up alone, in a trailer park, with a silver pickup and a dwindling check. he didn’t want me there. and then on the bulletin board above his desk, a many times folded printout of your poem. he must have kept it in his pocket. wild geese. the heading home in it, the love in it. he was not always good, my father, and i did not always love him. but we both loved that poem, and the world it imagined. i threw the poem away but it sneaks up behind me some mornings when the light is particularly hot and dust dances on my desk. “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” i am turning toward the possibility that this is true. a prayer in real time
there are about a million things to speak against: from the definition of ownership to the desecration of the packed dirt, from the definition of borders to the desecration of my own body. words do not erase the ink on the judge’s papers, the surveyor’s lines, the letter stamped on your birth certificate. words do not breathe life back into the ones we love, or back into the days we let slip past. but these words are here to pick the lock, to lift the window. please climb out. i’m coming too. this is a prayer in real time: listen to it in your coughing engine, in that radio commercial, in the hold music. this is a prayer that drowns out your boss and the bill collector and the preacher who sells hell. the world is more than dust and sinew. i call you holy, i call us holy, i call it all holy. new year reflection two
(with thanks to Sam, and June) i wasn’t in a very good mood: thinking about family, thinking about all the work that didn’t get done, and the ridiculous pile of wrapping paper. then you laid your head on my lap curls jumping in all directions. you wanted me to look at your sketchbook. i was not prepared for your insistence that i look: really look. i didn’t, mostly. but tonight those teals and pinks are rioting my mind. you are eleven. all the possibilities are out there. you open their wire bound spine and hand them to me. i am officially over forty. all the possibilities are out there. orange and sienna and shocking green. something taking shape. i will dream loudly and in color. turning
when you open the story of your hurt you might be left alone chewing the words like sand. it’s ok. one day you will wake up and the sand will have dissolved like bread. you will sing the light back into the world. |
Authordani gabriel Archives
February 2019
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