Wind

6/14/2005

A canal. Dark brown, still water, curved into combed wakes as boats pass, flags as brave as happy dogs' tails. How can a city be so quiet? Trams slip by, bicycles wheel almost silently. You walk, down the brick-lined tree enfolded canalsides, up over the slightly humped bridges, pushing through the stream of air; it curves into combed wakes as you pass. We all create a wind as we walk. Is this, then, a wind, an air story?

The boy pulls his bike down the stoop, its tire bouncing on the pavement. He props it against the railing as he shrugs on his backpack, then mounts and is off in one continuous, dancelike movement. The wind ruffles his hair as he rides, pushing it off his forehead, mild May wind, roiling behind him in the wake of his passing.

The winds of all our passings are roiling memories. Where there are many automobiles, the winds become a hurricane, too fast, screaming by, scouring out our thoughts instead of nourishing them. The winds of our passing when we are not involved in it, when we are not walking or pumping pedals or pulling oars, those winds blow too furiously for us to keep up. But silly humans, we think we can.

6/14/2005

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

The sand wave

3/31/2005

I can't believe this is the first item of the year. The end of April, the middle of Aries, after the equinox and its full moon and Easter. The year when spring came in February and the rain is now scrubbing away all traces of it.
So, diving in, the wasted graph, the graph you don't want to read but which allows all graphs that come after it. The widget, the holly, ivy, berry, red raspberries in the back yard, not to mention dandelions. yellow suns and the blood of the holly and berries, color spots, spots. spots you walk on and those you avid. dark spots. the new leaves in the elms have brought back the mystery of summer. there are footsteps above, can I concentrate regardless. there's a pot on the stove heating my mush, can I concentrate regardless. can I not worry about spelling, about the disease, about the roughness in my neck. roughness. bark, scratching sand sandpaper sand in gears stuff that stops things, dust in the arteries, dust in the machinery, not on the fields the dust blows away leaving the rocks without a cover. the footsteps are distracting.

Ah, earphones. The mush is now with me with honey and strawberries. This graph too will be a throwaway as I lean into the alpha. waves crash and... waves of sand. a tsunami of sand, rising and rising, the component grains ordered into a cresting Japanese wave. It washes over the village and covers everything. it's an annoyance, all right. Jurgla sighs and gets out the heavy feather sweeper and pushes the sand off the table and across the floor and out the door to the yard. The sand is tan today, sand color, and full of sea-sand nutrients. It will grow good gourds. They have sand inside them, but once you wash it out the seeds are delicious. It's never occurred to Jurgla to eat the fruit. Perhaps that's a good thing, because the fruit would make her desperate to fly kites. People who eat of the fruit of the gourd of the island where the sand waves wash over go mad with flying kites. They can't stop to eat, so they starve. Their legs give out as they race across the sand, trailing bits of balsam wood. The kites are made of their mothers' old nylons, and they never need tails because the wind over the island is constant. If the wind ever changed, the sand waves would lose their integrity and the sand would sink back into the sea. Eventually the wind would blow the remaining sand off the rocks of the island and nothing would grow. Islanders would have to stop flying kites, if they could, and haul buckets and buckets of sand to cover the rocks so they could grow gourds and maybe an occasional paw paw. Otherwise, they live on the eggs of shore birds. Sometimes you can see a bird riding the sand wave, regal in its warm embrace, flying off just before the sand crashes onto the rocks and covers the village.

The islanders, then, pray to the wind. they pray that it will stay constant so they won't have to haul sand themselves. They fly prayer kites, a constant line of color, the color of dandelions and raspberries and holly berries, if only they knew these things. But they were on the island where the colors came from the rocks and from dried yolks of bird eggs and the pollen of the gourds, a strange color we would call raspberry.

It's a strange life on the island, where the music comes from shaking gourds and singing in mimicry of the wind, where the children are allowed to run on the sand and tumble and play as long as they find the requisite three bird eggs apiece every day. And that is play, too, clambering over the rocks of the shore and finding the hidden treasure places where the eggs lie. The birds mourn the loss of the eggs, but they lay new ones, and there are so many more birds than there are islanders, so everything works out. Jurgla sits on her porch and watches the sunset, watches the wind push the clouds in the same direction every day. She sits and drinks coconut juice with an egg in it and knits palm fiber, the bark of palm, dyed ochre with the soft rocks found in the center of the island, ochre the color of the sky, the color of her fingers, stained with the dye.
3/31/2005

Breakfast of weirdness

Here's an attempt at a boring slice of life:

My mother, 90 and in full possession of all her faculties, imagines (and if she reads this I hope she understands that I am reaching for a rhetorical point her, forget the facts) that she cannot tolerate gluten. This has something to do with mysterious rashes that seem to inflame when she eats wheat. Oats, a staple in her diet for decades, are out, too.

So she tries a few gluten-free products. One of them makes her itch the more. She decides it's because it has corn in it. So she gives it to me. I already have the pasta, flour and oatmeal she cleaned out of her cupboard.

This product is gluten-free breakfast cereal, the kind you have to cook. (We always cook from scratch in our family.) It contains ground-up corn, brown rice, buckwheat and "sweet white sorphum." Yum. Not. Maybe. Why not try it?

I make some. It cooks up like cornmeal mush, thick and inclined to stick to the pan. As it cooks, I notice there are cute little red ink marks on the cellophane of the package where Mom tried to note the proportions of cereal and water she used, but they are mostly worn off and illegible.

I make myself a mocha and wait for the cereal to cook. I put away the clean dishes. I stir it. It sticks. It bubbles in a farty way. I have time to wait for it to cook because I don't have to go to work till 3 p.m.

Are you still with me? You're nuts. This doesn't get any more exciting.

The final result is so thick that I have to boil a bit of water in the kettle to thin it out (I don't want to serve it with milk, that's in the mocha, along with the espresso and chocolate sauce -- homemade, of course). I serve it with a little butter and some maple syrup. It's really rather nice, like cornmeal but lighter and less cloying. I like brown rice, anyway, in any form.

I sit down with my bowl of cereal and my nice mocha and start reading the New York Times. A story about the teacher who was the basis for the Broadway play "Doubt" unexpectedly moves me to tears. While I am blowing my nose, I think -- today is the day I am finally going to blog. And this is the result.