2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (16 page)

Philadelphia came to me today with that choking in
the back of your throat. The almost crying that happens when you
visit time. I felt weak, needing to sit a moment in George
Washington's sunrise/sunset hopeful launch chair.

REACTIONS TO THE BROKEN HEART: A MONTHLY PLANNER

January:
What am I to do with this foundation-rib he's
blaming me for stealing again? I relive the same repercussive week
of apocalyptic beginnings. Living it too hard-aware. How much
genesis can a heart endure? And how was it before, when we were
one? I cannot remember now what with the new light shining in my
eyes and the new creatures in my Eden.

February:
Driving fast in a thick storm there are windshield
rivers forming over my thoughts of you, riding an old
us.

It's dry in my head where you’re asking
again why I held back my hand from the together forever we could
have been.

I don't know.

Dots of rain, stunned from falling, pause a
breath, hold tight and take things in, before running on to join
the windshield streams. Or they’re just swept up quicker than that
without a chance alone. Just blown back and off streaking into the
sky.

In that moment.

Now see the path of you and me, so close no
obstacle fleck of windshield dirt or glass ripples between us. But
I hold back my hand, for a moment, savoring me in the years without
you.

March:
"Sometimes I don't mean what I say," he said to me with
reassurance.
How can he think that's
true?
&
Why do
I believe it?
Reassuring and holding on but
then remembering some words used to be: "I love you."

April:
Which flowers were those in that wet-stormed tree? The
fighting ones. The abandoned ones. Pink prayer hands with their
candles close to black swaying branches. Which flowers were those,
babe? They must have had a name. You knew. But I knew better. And
then we both were wrong. What is there to pray to? The rains laugh
too often, I think. And the pink-white fingers fell. Browned in
veiny-torn creases at the muddy feet of a Japanese magnolia tree.
But it didn't matter when the wind came: votive light left without
question, fluttered away out of those thousand praying candles that
weren’t lit for us, left a green-shard lawn strewn with torn-open,
torn-off, torn-down and away, ripped-up, ruined, pink-white
petal-filmy hands.

May:
I can hear you. I can hear you laughing. I can feel your
laughing when there are times when you should have called or might
have thought to have called that were filled with each other. There
were times when your eyes might have fallen on my picture or you
might have remembered a good time we had together but instead you
were cooking dinner or finding the tuning fork or chain saw. It
never enters your mind and that is why you're laughing.

June:
At home, Marie went on dancing with no one but the ceiling
fan. There were two eyes somewhere else about to cry. Or so she
thought.

July:
Damn. His mother must've been seething mad to look down at the
horror in her arms. She must have been. Torn apart, as I am now,
and abandoned. Helpless. Left to look on and wonder. Is that the
way it was, ma'am? Is that the best love can do? 

August:
Now don't get the wrong idea about this wind. It
wasn't a harsh wind, ever. It was a warm, circular wind—perfect for
easing the sun's intensity on your back, or for whooshing your hair
into your mouth, but not for throwing sand into your eyes, or
making you wish you had worn a jacket. It was the music that turned
silences between diffident lovers into a song of crashing waves,
which they both understood must be listened to. It was the
governess wind that rocks you to sleep in the cradle of your house,
and the reassuring wind that reminds you that you are alive—if you
are forgotten.

September:
It's midnight again and I'm writing a letter for
later. For the past week at different moments my eyes have filled
with tears. I have taken walks that led me nowhere and have started
sentences which in the end meant nothing. When I want to sit down,
I make myself stand up and move forward. When I have gone on
aimlessly for too long, I rest alone. All because I know how much I
will miss you. 

October:
I didn't know he did it,

but he’s gone hunting again

(damned) with his twenty-two.

Leaves crunching through

the woods. Shepherd panting

out his trotting tongue. A summer

goes by and he's back again with some

(dripping) kill. Asking me to slice it,

to cook it up and feed it

to him and the dog

as if I didn't notice the

(wet) carcass, bloody red, was

mine once, my subtle

hope, my expectation.

But it was always fair game.

I suppose I even made it a

(fucking) test. There it is.

It's constant and will be there forever.

So he took the challenge. I was

right. It stood still. An easy target

for the hunter

(ready) with his twenty-two.

November:
I planted my bulb garden yesterday. I figured I
was not going to waste sixty dollars' worth of bulbs because I was
a lazy ass who was always thinking about you. In order to assure
that I was not a lazy ass I chose not a sunny warm dry day to
plant, but instead, the dreary wet cantankerous weathered
yesterday. My neighbor yelled at me twice. About the twenty-degree
rain on me. About the coat I wasn't wearing. About the gravel I was
planting my garden in. About the fact it was one in the morning. Oh
well. I put in an excessive amount of pink tulips. I don't know
that I am necessarily a fan of pink tulips, but in they went. And I
covered the entire new bed, which has been double dug and has all
sorts of good eats for little baby roots in it, with leaves from
the back of the house. Then because all these leaves were blowing
in the wind I shoveled some of the wet broken-down leaves from the
street. People rake their lawns. Put the leaves in the street next
to the curb. And the rains come. And the cars park on them and
break them down. Perfect mulch. And weight for the dryer leaves.
After I was satisfied with that layer I went inside. Then I
wondered how many petroleum products were in those leaves from the
street on my sixty dollars' worth of bulbs in the
ground.

December:
It's as if I am not in control. I've got the dark
quiet, the refusal. I have a soothing rain. I even have the time.
But I can't. Why is that? Because it isn't enough to do it just for
me. Life begins in the time and in a mind that won't get
sad.

I have a fat deaf cat who sits on her hands all
day smelling the carpet. There must be better role
models.

MR. BEAT

There's a bassinet

on the window ledge

and Grandma's arms

to away-brush the

snow, Paul. Oh, Paul,

such a story to base

your life on.

And from so far away.

DEW

After the rain

senna leaves

are jewelry farms

and the wind

a migrant worker.

ENDS OF GOOD
THINGS

My father retired this year. It was a mixed
occasion. My entire life I have known him almost exclusively as the
guy who grades papers at the kitchen table all night. When I went
to sleep as a child, his shadow shifted across my bedroom door when
he got some raisins, marshmallows, or oatmeal cookies.

Students called the house with pathetic
excuses for missed exams and my father would listen patiently and
continually give second chances. At faculty picnics where it was a
little too cold to swim and where we would spit watermelon seeds
across the cracked cement basketball courts until some priest
yelled at us, my father stood talking. But other days we drove
slowly all over any piece of land that St. Joe ever owned,
listening for birds and looking skyward. Once Dad woke us all out
of a dead sleep and shuffled us into the car. He’d heard an owl in
Drexel Woods and insisted we come hear it too.

Hoo-hoo-whooo-ah! He stood there in the
night, by the car, in the woods, calling up into the blackness with
the rest of us drowsing.

Last year I read in the local newspaper that
he was having his annual bird walk at Lake Banet. The entire top
half of the front page was dedicated to an interview with my
father. One would suppose it was a sizable event. So when he got
back that morning, I asked my father how it had gone. He said very
well. They had seen a flock of plovers, several sandpipers, a few
vireos, a thrush, plenty of geese and ducks, and a few rather
notable warblers. He explained about the birds for forty-five
minutes. When he seemed to be finished I asked how many people had
shown up as a result of such good advertisement by the article. And
my father said, “Oh, it was just me for the most part. Another
professor stopped by for a while, I guess." After all that no one
had come.

So what?

That's us. Our household. Summers, too.

Gen ripped and tore through Chopin,
Beethoven, Clementi, Shostakovich, Debussy, Mozart, Bartok, and
composers I wasn't ever aware of. Hours of music pouring out summer
doors. I heard it, we all heard it, while we played football and
baseball and ran through the Iroquois looking for crawdads. Strange
the culture we created at 803 Stewart Drive. All around us were the
generations of Hoosiers, but Mom and Dad, each from a different
city far away, burrowed their way into a life like the crosshatched
fields. Trying everything to pass the time. Dad drove all over the
state fighting for better education and looking for birds. Mom
played the piano, learned to paint, planted an organic garden in
the midst of chemically-treated lawns.

They were not hippies. Not by any means. Too
prickly, Mom would say. Or even antisocial. Not interested in
alcohol or drugs. Religious, perhaps. Dad was born in 1933 and Mom
in ’39. They were children of the fifties. Conservative, cautious,
and upstanding. Straitlaced.

And the rules applied to me. No long hair.
No perms. No fingernail polish. No denim skirts. No jean jackets.
No dyed hair. No pierced ears. No skirts above the knees. No
makeup. And by some tacit law this all meant no sex ever.

But in every other way I was free. Free to
do or not to do any and every thing. My sister chose to do her
homework. I chose not. She chose to read. I chose not. I chose
friends. She chose loneliness. And that was good enough for our
differences. In every other way I followed her. I was in summer
theater as she had been. I played bassoon when she had played oboe.
And although I never really was, I desperately wanted to be
studious and well-read. Even now I could read all the books in the
world and not ever believe I had read anything more than the
funnies compared to her.

For the most part it is always okay to be
different. That's what they say, those kindergarten teachers of the
world. But there were times, too, when sticking out was unbearable.
Sometimes there were no real reasons or at least ones people would
dare say. But other times when paychecks were small, Mom would come
home and swear and curse and scream about not being Catholic and
trying to do her job. We always had meatloaf those nights. Seemed
to help. Or Dad would disappear for a nap earlier than usual. Or
Gen would lock herself in her room and read. Or I would turn on the
TV and drift away into black-and-white Zenith-uncolored worlds for
a while.

Now Mom was Mom and there was no changing
it. When I said she had no friends, she filled the bathtub with ice
and invited the entire town. They all came, too. When everyone else
had turkey and family for Christmas the four of us sat alone and
ate duck à l’orange, cow's heart, mint lamb, or tongue. If a
well-balanced meal meant protein, fruit, and veggies we had cheese,
apple pie, and popcorn. There were extravagant shopping sprees at
Saks Fifth Avenue the same summer we couldn't possibly afford to
water the lawn. And most importantly, when all the sameness of the
world seemed forever for my friends and me, my mom would flip it
and jostle it and cut it and sprinkle it all over us and we would
believe again in fairy dust.

It was always a strength, I thought, the
differences. But then came the sickness. Gen's mostly. Then mine.
And through both an understanding of what Mom must have been
through. And I began to realize where the differences originated.
The differences of our family from others. Some came from the
disease itself. But these are few. Most are from the adaptation. It
is hard to live as the one who went crazy. And finding yourself
again can be impossible if you panic. So life is lived slowly and
thoroughly. No conventions are accepted until they are proven to be
of some value. The opinion of others is a welt numb with age. The
true knowledge that life, a conscious life, is more precious than
anything is a fact so furious that I have seen myself often inflict
it upon others who may or may not have cared to know.