| |
JUNE 1979-JUNE 1991
I never described all the amazing sensory events
of my weekend. Too busy exploring more. Drew
YHWH in the sand, a picture of the parting of the
Red Sea . He takes each successful insemination
as a cue to start another affair. She tells her sister
the story so she can rest herself—then the sister can’t
sleep. Aunt Maudie’s Day care, Saint Vincent
Academy. At the same time maintaining
this incredibly highbrow philosophy. I guess
My mother’s more than a little like a nun
And this is one of those kill-the-mother dreams.
His accusations contain a whiff of irony
as well, since these two character flaws
of Elizabeth’s are also his own. Why is
our compulsion for survival to out of whack?
We wanted to clap, but it didn’t seem appropriate.
So we all yelled instead: oral magic. Book of Shadows.
Plato’s Cave. Penn & Teller. Irigaray. Now he’ s mad,
I’m sure, or else sick or distracted or sullen.
The problem is that the ludic memory, the mimicry, the fiction,
The “make-believe,’ the “let’s pretend”—which—, as we
know, made the hysteric subject to all sorts of disbelief,
oppression, and ridicule… The anger all
muffled in cotton-wool resentment.
It’s a feeling I’m not used to.
NOVEMBER 1991-AUGUST 1997
When I woke up, I got the Bible Denise
Whitlow gave me for my 16th birthday
and found the scripture. I need to remember
the path behind me. I also sent in my deposit to go
to church camp all over again. But she was eerily
beautiful in her costume, all cheekbones and teased,
thick, prematurely gray hair. They were quite nice,
especially Anita, who wore jeans, boots, and a
sweater, perhaps a gesture toward American customs.
Last night, we walked through the seven streets and saw dogs,
old men, dates, baby carriages, revolutionaries, a Spanish
woman with long red hair and a baby face flirting with her
girlfriend’s—husband? date?, a circle of lesbians, a group of friends
In their 20’s, male and female, consuming a beautiful plate
Of bocadillas.
Yet the more self-contained I become the more I’m
invisible to the outside world. I’ve become, like my
fiction, something people can’t quite make out.
I think it’s great news—she’s been freed—so I say
“congratulations” on my way past her and
into the hall. Both of them emphasized the size
of the sky in Kansas and my mother told a story
about watching the skies for tornadoes, being
carried down into the cellar in a blanket, her father
raising the slanted door of the cellar to check
on the storm. Last night at Legacy Jean read
a story about animal death. I was wearing shorts,
for once—what I went to bed in—since I knew if I
took time to change, Pico’s temper would never
hold out. Still, the green sometimes does
as much for me as sleep.
AUGUST 1997-SEPTEMBER 1999
Slow fall today. The rock face is so broken and irregular
that you can almost see the hieroglyphics. Joseph
was cooking dinner, which we ate in a hurry while
I fed the baby and read the Clinton portion of
The New York Times. He has cried for the breast
a couple of times in the late afternoon when he’s tired
and I haven’t been hardline about it. We went to Saint
Louis instead—tried Cuivre State Park where the Frenchman’s
Bluff Trail isn’t even frightening and Doug caught
a baby raccoon. If we limited our socializing to an hour
And a half there wouldn’t be time to get bored or annoyed.
Then he came to bed and we had sex again, followed\
By contractions that had me up several times during
the evening and then just lying on the living-room floor
watching Conan O’Brien. On the way back from the funeral,
we stopped at a state park, saw a man cutting down a tree
with a chain saw, fed the baby in his pack, went
to the river and skipped stones, considered getting wet,
considered spending the night, then filled our canteens
and got back on the road.
published in Fence, spring-summer 2002
Copyright © 2002 Trudy Lewis |
|
