hold on, the dream says. head out of my life.

[ivyology]

The fever is broken. For now.

I traveled today to the city I've most called home, to see the girls who gave my high school years all the very best memories. It was exactly what I needed. We were all of us miserable, but together we achieved some catharsis. I am not happy to say that my troubles were mild in comparison, though perspective is a necessary thing.

What to call these friendships? How to describe the inexplicable endurance of this connection between us, these people I now see less than a dozen times a year? It is something intangible, elemental, that I can only be grateful for. I know it will not always be there, that it is perhaps gasping its final breaths even now. I am grateful all the same.

And Smith drama, I must say, has nothing on the pedestrian, lower class theater of Fulton, NY.

Comments

the touch

[kayfilm.livejournal.com]

For months my hand had been sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
But when I looked in it lay there quietly.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.

The hand had collapsed,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traces like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into the fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.

And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand--just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won't do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won't do it.
He comes with the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.

The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.

Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come.
-AS