Portland, OR, June 4th Conversation: On the Bus Ride Back

I’m on the bus. The Weather People have promised biblical rain and lightening. But it’s still fair outside. Very humid, and I’m glad the bus is air-conditioned.

My cell phone rings. The ring tone is the theme song from I Dream of Jeanie. It’s my mom.

“Do you know what happened today?” is how she starts off. I had been on various busses for an hour and a half already—interviewing for a job that had come to nothing.

“What?”

“David Carradine’s dead.”

“I know,” I say. “He hung himself. I mean hanged himself. In Bangkok.”

“He hanged himself?” she says, like she can’t believe it. “He was off drugs. He didn’t even drink anymore.”

I’m awfully beat, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if it is my mom, so I try to keep the lust for sleep out of my voice. “Prolly why he killed himself,” I say.

She brays (very familiar). “That’s exactly the sixth funniest thing you’ve ever said,” she says, marking detail like she thinks she’s J.D. Salinger. “Because I’ve been keeping track. But hell.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Your father and I knew him.”

“I know.”

“He got your father arrested.”

“I know.” I know the stories as well as she. I know them better, probably, but I don’t say anything to upset her. History’s her subject. “How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m fine. I went to your sister’s award ceremony the other day.”

“I didn’t even know she had an award ceremony.”

“Well, she did.”

“Did she clean up?”

“Do you know what she got?” Mom asks. “She got the Spanish award. I didn’t even know she spoke Spanish.” “She’s terrible at Spanish.” I know. I used to conjugate the verbs for her homework.

“I don’t really know her,” she says. And then, “She got the Spanish award. And she got the lawyer award, or whatever. And she got the Psychology award, which I like to attribute to me.”

I laugh, hard. I bray. I cover my mouth, because people on the bus look at me. “That’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said,” I say. Dancing on the edge of a knife. When I’m done laughing—and my eyes are wet I’m laughing so hard, inappropriately so, my laugh turning into a cough that I try to disguise so my mom won’t guess I’ve been smoking for the last 10 months— I ask, “Was she happy?”

“I didn’t see her.”

“What? Why not.” The knife. I shouldn’t have asked.

“I’m not welcome at those things. I had to ask Pamela to come with me I was so nervous.” She brays, again, like what she’s talking about a particularly hysterical sketch on SNL. “I wore sunglasses and a black turtleneck. Haha. We sat in the back like the Blues Brothers. Ha. I had to have a beer beforehand I was so worked up.” Everything she says is careful and deliberate. I am, I know, her last surviving audience from the previous world.

“I saw the Bellwoods the other night,” I say. I like to think that I’m above the emotional word games we play, but I feed her ammunition like a animal eager to get shot. “Peter sends his love.” Peter always, always sends his love.

“Oh god,” she says, her tone her own perfected composite of weary disgust. “I don’t care.” I am silent on my end for a second too long. “Or it’s just that we don’t even have anything in common anymore, and they chose their side and everything.” We might as well be reading off a script, one that has been tattooed on our hands or on the insides of our skulls, ones that we ourselves wrote.

Peter and Sarah, or definitely, at least, Peter, don’t think that they chose sides. They are under the impression that they were dumped—unceremonious casualties of divorce.

“Your mother,” Peter, with his comforting Londoners accent, says to me whenever I see him, “was very special. People were inevitably drawn to her. She would start talking to her and everyone would fall in love with her. I loved her, I love her still, very much.”

I want to lecture him. I want to tell him how many friends she once had. I want to tell him how many business partners she’s chewed through and abandoned. I want to tell him that she’s good for a few years and then she makes you into her enemy: her mother, her father, her brothers at one point or another. Her best friends. Her husband. Her. Daughters. I’d like to shake his hand and congratulate him, I’d like to look him in the eye in all sincerity and say, “god, man, don’t you understand the bullet you dodged? Don’t you know how much easier it is to be without her? Don’t you realize that all my therapists have told me that she is incapable of real love? Don’t you see that she has no one with whom she started out?”

I don’t know what I really think. I know what I really think. My mother taught me to confuse think and feel. My mother taught me how to answer the phone properly;

“Is Hallie there?”

“Yes, this is she…”

She taught me how to hold the steering wheel of a car, how to make up golden excuses, how to lie. She taught me to like Yeats, and Raymond Carver, and Dorothy Parker. She taught me that a clean cook is a good cook. She taught me how to run. How to fasten your pants lying down so your jeans fit. She taught me quarter tricks and bar games. She taught me that boys always fall in love with girls who can play the guitar. She taught me that there is nothing more important than my family.

Family cannot abandon you.

Family can abandon you.

Family. Abandons. You.

“When are you coming back to California?” she asks. I’ve told her this a million times. Every time I’ve talked to her since Dad got me the plane ticket back.

“I fly to San Francisco on the eighth,” I say. “I’ll be in Santa Barbara on the ninth.”

“Well, come around if you want.”

“Mom…”

“I know, but come around sooner, too, if you want. You always, always have a place here.”

“I know.” I know what I know. History is my subject.

Exultation

I remember how her body pulsed, in its tepidity,

to one day burst with fluid—unwieldy, obscene,

for months her body leaked and reeled;

Doughy feet were folded into tennis shoes.

Hard and tight like a melon, her skin grew translucent—

Candles set behind wax paper; she glowed,

and through her skin was visible a delicate network of veins,

spidery and blue, and no longer just her own.

Indeed the body was a vessel for

her pain (and for her pleasure.)  Her navel was a telephone,

as it was rictus, circle, portal, heirloom, hole.

 

I’ve heard some women eat the placenta of their born.

I’d have served it to her on toast points,

            if she’d wished, I’d have served it to her with wine,

 

because when her body finally fountained and flooded,

some part of me burst, too.

My heart thrummed tremulous and raw,

and fluttered out of me.

 

I put it back in my mouth, but found I couldn’t swallow,

            So I tied it in white string and put it in a paper bag.

            It’s sitting on the shelf, now.

            Vulnerable; exposed. 

Baby

Five hundred years ago,

in the rose colored sheets of your marriage bed,

you gave birth to a scaly little baby with full eyebrows and lashes

and an incongruous laugh

that you’d insist, every year, slicing the pink ice-cream cake, sounded like

bells in the snow.

That was a long time ago, but you still recall with infinite fondness

Your daughter’s nubby stumps of wings that

Protruded from her shoulder blades like

Underdeveloped angel wings

(they never grew, really, and the prickly gray feathers that appeared every winter

would fall out, come spring. There was no mistaking her for

an angel.

There was no mistaking her for a relative of the dinosaur, per se.)

But as I was indicating, she was forever condemned

Earthbound, to crawl around the squares and circles and tits and phalluses

That walk the earth; to circumnavigate their clumsy feet

(she stopped growing after she was three years old, didn’t she?

She was the size of a breadbox.)

And she would hang from the silver bathroom fixtures and ceiling fans,

And her black, crescent nails would click musically along the counter tops

And hallways.

She was not unlike a human, and that she could not talk was not an indication of intelligence,

Per se, but rather that she lacked the proper vocal chords

and lung capacity.

But I’d like to talk about you, how you were the real phenomenon,

How you, with the endless tenderness of a Mother would

Rub into her knobbly spine and scaled skin

Eucalyptus oil, and buttermilk, and Johnson’s cherry-scented baby lotion

to make the scales disappear

(and though they never disappeared, they became soft,

so that the cousins brave enough to hold her would remark on the silky texture and exclaim,

“Soft as a bare baby’s ass,” and then blush.)

Daddy left home pretty early, didn’t he?

You missed him for a while, but there were greater pleasures to be had

(your daughter’s girlish giggle broke the air like

one thousand green eyes opening.)

Maybe he saw too much of himself in your little girl,

Too much of hell in each leaf colored scale,

(if he did, he misunderstood.)

Or perhaps it broke his heart to bring a damned thing into the world

(it’s an unfair world, he’d have said)

You were intent on joy.

You alone would delight in her innocuous spit bubbles

That would break and refract sunlight into its

Infinite rainbows across the kitchen tile.

She would coo, and make bird droppings into the quaint cotton diapers your mother

Had sent before her birth. She was easy to clean up after, and

The fact that she ate the heads of your dining-room table

Crysanthemum and marigolds with her tame pirhanna baby-teeth, invited you to say that

She had a delicate disposition.

And every woman friend of yours was aghast, and began to talk.

And when they started refusing the tap water from your sink,

Or started rinsing their diaphragms in lemon scented disinfectant,

Or eating full, snowy cloves of garlic raw and crying big, fat, desperate tears and

Praying to Jesus, his father, Mary, Moses, Abraham and the Holy Ghost and Santa Claus

That they would have human babies,

soft and pink and healthy, ten fingered and toed, with

delicate genitals and belly buttons and red, red blood,

you forgave them because the love you had for your daughter was

free of spite. She had come from your womb

and you had cut her umbilical chord yourself with delicate silver scissors,

as the doctor vomited into the plastic waste basket beside your bed.

She refused breast milk, but you ungrudgingly filled her bottles with

Chicken’s blood and heavy cream, as desired,

And you knew she was a good kid. She was yours and beautiful.

This was a long time ago, and since your daughter was born into this world

Things have changed.

People don’t discriminate against lizard children, anymore,

There are hotlines, and support groups for that.

Your baby accidentally bled your terrier Muffin to death once, and

That caused a crisis in your neighborhood until a family friend

With a diploma in medicine prescribed sugar tablets that he swore

Would terminate her violent tendencies.

But this is a poem about you, and how, through your infinite love and loyalty,

Your selflessness and maternity, you bore a perfect misfit

To this world, and how when your own mother, dying of stomach cancer at the time,

Looked into the baby carriage and, without commenting on your daughter

Labeled you a Martyr,

You quietly put the baby on your shoulder and left the house and did not talk to her

Again until she was almost dead and forgiveness was due…

And how you’d pace the nursery with the bicycle wallpaper

And hum cowboy songs into the spots on her baby head where ears belonged,

And lay her down in her special bed of chicken fluff and flower petals,

Where she’d curl up into a sea shell spiral, into herself,

And sleep

And probably dream.

(2007)

My Interest

You say, “it’s interesting how we all try so hard to be

interesting, isn’t it, how you do and I do, how we try?”

How we talk, you and I: circumlocution: how

our hands engage, instead; “it’s interesting,” you say again.

 

“You’re interesting,” you’re insisting, “Intelligent:

I’m smarter than my mother, but that doesn’t make me interesting—

Instead, I just accessorize with Lichtenstein or Plath.”

You laugh; self-castigation, but you’re worried—I adore

that I can read your particles of thought within the

patterns of your hands, that interests me. 

 

I moon away— I croon internal, swoon, and numb, articulate,

“If you’d only let me lend you, dear, to see yourself,

my head, my heart, my hands, and then…” 

You shake your head; dissent (you’d never let me give them up,

not completely, anyway. What part of my heart interests you?)

 

It interests me, our disconnect; how infinitely curious and

sad.  My interest in you never will suffice.

(Certainly not my adoration; how interesting,

how interesting your mouth; it makes cloud shapes.

I’d like to stop its movement with my hands.) 

(2006)

untitled

what do i want to do?

blue lips tugging at a cigarette

smoke waltzes up my arm

now in the ashtray lie my crumbling ideals

isn’t it funny?

trapped in an old film noir,

the venetian blinds cut up hard light like

concrete or

cold fish.

a little red sun! my cigarette dies

(it’s killing me)

maybe it’s not so funny after all.

i forget why i want to go to college

i strike another match and the little

halo of light echoes

orange on the blue walls.

hard to breath in this light.

the morning’s sunshine scrambled eggs

congeal in the sink

but i can’t move myself to

clean the plate.

(2006)