Stone woman

4/1/2005
The fool's day. 0. or sometimes 1. or is it 21? The first and last Tarot card. The card of innocence and beginnings. Except that the innocence never seems quite true, does it? How can a trickster be innocent? It's a different archetype. Oh, oh ... this is the exercise, not the essay. So enough about him (could the Trickster be a her?) and on with the show.
Coffee coffee coffee. The first time she married, she drank it black. The second time, she added honey. The third marriage added the cream. She sits, terra cotta tiles under the metal legs of patio furniture that could break the tiles. Metal on stone. She is a stone woman, a Taurus born under Capricorn. Capricorn is earth, brown, rich, crumbly. More like the coffee than like the mug. This woman is the mug.

The stone woman sits with the bars of the sunrise (barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, who care if Keats was at the other end, the antithesis of sunrise, the antipodes of the day?) -- the stone woman, Avril, has the desert-colored sunrise on her face and she is not aware of it. She is frozen in stone, frozen in her past of grudges, a past of unfulfilled promises, many of them made to herself. Debts unpaid, many of them incurred by her. Her immobility, her unhappiness, carves a great cavern in the Universe, a void like the grave. If there were tears ... but stone is immobile and impermeable, the moisture coming from outside, the rain. The rain. Then she drinks the coffee. The darkness, coursing through her, like black blood, drawing energy from the rock. Like water washed over gems. Her gems are amethyst and garnet. The colors she sees in the sunrise -- is she seeing? Yes. Her eyes water. I am losing this image. It is too immobile. nothing is happening. Water on the headphones, trying to cut out the clatter of neighbors in their car, making clatter and chatter. O tempes.

A return to coffee and brown sugar. The brown sugar woman, more like earth, more crumbly and sweet but with a slightly bitter core. There is bitterness in the back of brown sugar -- taste it. She is at war with the stone woman. Her name is Susanna. She has not been home, to the cold house with the stone tiles on the floors, has not seen her mother, the Earth woman, Avril, in many years. Avril does not know of her daughters, sweet round dark babies who bounce all day. They live in on around an island, a jungle, a friendly jungle, in the middle of the city. The jungle protects them. Susanna has to leave them. She must journey in the caves of ice, must meet Coleridge and tell him where Zanadu lies. She has research to do and she must leave the bouncing dark babies, Tad and Zimmer, with her mother. There is no other island.

The stone woman doesn't know what to do with babies. It has been too long since her own ones. She puts them to play on the stone floor. The sun has warmed the tiles and they are happy. They sleep. She bakes them a quiche. They are too little to eat it, and besides they are asleep, so she eats it. It's been too long, again too long, but the warmth and the cheese and the egg crack some of the granite. She decides to put in some bamboo flooring. But she is a trickster, remember, life's fool. She was a fool amassing an unsurmountable mountain of hard feelings and difficulty.
The children wake and she feeds them custard.

4/1/2005