Goats

Sewing

I sew up the world, saying goodbye, then come back to discover myself still here, with a little time on my hands. What to do? How to unsew it? How to pick apart the threads and release the life from them?

Sometimes one can do too fine a job of packing, seamstress of a life.

*

When the wind drops, I hear a ringing bell.
Later, I walk until I find the goat whose bell parenthesized the afternoon.

*

Stomping grapes into mash, a sticky pulp dresses your toes, calves, a bit of your thigh.

Seasons

This October, crystalline air has made a disaster of me. But a good disaster, a mess blown apart by beauty.

It’s the clearness of the air, the lucidity of each rock, the scent of carob that trails me down the hill and up again. I seem to follow it to a precise place in my heart.

The bomb of autumn blows you apart.

Still Raining

The day, a sieve.
My heart, a hole.

Travel

Being air-borne has little to do with the plane: you’re launched on the wind of anticipation.

And so it goes: island hideout to island metropolis. Hardly a wrinkle as you step out into the press of people that is Manhattan.

Odd as it may seem, the island with its rocky hills and animal cries prepares you for the press of crowds. Anywhere, you need to retract your self, allowing space for everything else.

In one place, you make room for blue things -- sea, sky, and wild irises. In the other, your tiny self lets loom the bulk of rising things, tall people, buildings, exasperated cries.

Hearing Leaves

In that almost cramped garden patio of the restaurant she’d chosen, I heard music. It was nothing so complex as a symphony, more like a pop song, an insistent beat with a short, tantalizing melody. Was it latent jetlag -- the plane’s engines still in my ears -- or something else, the brain’s desperate attempt to put order to nonsense?

She said it was the leaves in the trees, then pointed to them above.

Later on, every time she said Buddha, I said human, until we left that conversation behind.

God’s Gifts

After months of absence, he’s about to appear. You twist and tremble in your seat, wondering if he’s already onstage but so changed in appearance that you’ve missed him. Will you be unable to recognize your son in this new role?

For years, the two of you have been running between stage and street. The hysterics, uncontrolled emotion, the broken cups and torn clothing. The constant minor deaths and renewals of spirit. Playing a part in a sometimes unappealing play has been exhausting.

When he appears, you hear whispers:
            “Star quality.” “Broadway-bound.”

Juggling god’s gifts: if nothing else, talent is a spiritual conundrum.

Bitten Nails

He bites the skin around his thumbnails with religious fervor.

How is it that religion nabs some, while others merely bite?

Shocking

This, she said, (and I’m sorry to shock you) is poetry.

*

Powdered Sugar

She has powdered sugar on her hands that transfer it to her dark pants. When I comment, she says: Oh, I just brush it away. And she makes the movement, but only spreads it around.

Exuberance

Are my teeth (#18 and 19) cracked, the one under the crown, the other one there in its cup of (spongy) gum? Who can know? How to determine? Fractured? Like friendships, and one’s hold on life when mortality can no longer be dismissed?

Or is it just a question of too much exuberance filling then cracking the craters hollowed by fear?

Peas

Peas for dinner? Raw or frozen?
Is it a frozen part at the heart of me, or just a reticence?

Music

The quick-flutter of the urban plum outside my window has the sound of muted castanets. This is what begins to happen when the idea, music, takes root in the synapses: trees orchestrate.

Hawk

“Hawk on the t.v. antenna.” He whispered it to me as I collected the almost-dry sheets from the line. No wind, just the dregs of the day’s light through accumulating clouds.

And there it was, a hawk sitting on the t.v. antenna. “Good reason to have one,” I said.
And he laughed.

Vocabulary:

What’s up there. (sun)
What we like to eat. (dinner? ice cream?)
We all go home with something in a pocket. (love?) (money?)

Color

Anxiety renders me see-through.
It’s sadness that colors me in.

News

Every day, on my way to buy a newspaper my husband will read in less than fifteen minutes, the boys on their bikes race up and down the highway, showing off for the girls in tight jeans, their chubby overfed bellies hanging out. When a boy on his bike goes into a slide, smashing onto dirty asphalt, the others run up and slap him on the back, laughing. Green buses ride up and down the national highway carting boys and girls in tight jeans and modified mullets back and forth to their village homes where small, dark parents hit trees with sticks or rakes, bringing down a profusion of tight green olives.

Goats

This is me, putting everything in plastic bags and surreptitiously driving them to the dump.

I avoid disaster by giving before it’s taken?

Walking away from the dump, I feel triumphant. At my back, the goats lick their hairy lips.

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