Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Even on a day that saps breath, beat
remains.
Night, home, a high whine
sears the deep ear. When veering toward bed
or bread or any
webbed polyfil
to muffle
the last throb of momentum, habit
is the last hope.
Turn towards
Calabria, thud and sway
into currents
already in motion,
churn flesh inside
out. Turn up
here like sleepwalking
to Messina, like emerging
at the first dawn.
—
Now let’s stop all this talking, and let it fill our ears
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ32Jw4S9Oo
 
So were you happy? I was happy. You still happy? Yes, and you?
Then more kisses! Why’d we stop them, when a million seemed so few?
– Kris Delmhorst, “Galuppi Baldessare” on Strange Conversation
He won’t stop talking about them. “In Animal Jam, my daddy plays on his laptop too and I made another pet who is just like the fox, and there were these phantoms I put in a crate, and. . .” The mere possibility of more screen time before bed reveals this unrecognizable boy who:
“Yes!” he shouts as he jets across the living room. “Twenty minutes!” He plops himself down before the the growling, pinging machine and goes from dervish to droid in half a blink.
Seven years, and I finally gave in. Video games now live on the computer and my boy has a hand-held tablet at his disposal. It was only supposed to be weekends. Or maybe it was only supposed to be in exchange for reading. Or maybe on a timer-measured budget. Whatever model-parent solution I meant to try, we ended up here. The boy deliberates vocally about his moves while we’re dressing. Plans strategies in the car. Describes in excrutiating detail what he likes about the characters as we eat waffles. Lists the games he wants next and outlines their endless benefits as I brush his hair.
He talks. And talks. And TALKS about video games.
We keep the gaming down to little pit stops along the winding adventure of our days. We go ponk a tennis ball around a court or ice skate or visit friends. We slop around a trail or bake cakes or scoot around the block. We blare music and read joke books and draw. Then and only then does is Bug free to travel to pixel world. I hate seeing his turbo-charged engine idling to a stall as he hunches over his latest visual fixation. This kind of play may require cognitive engagement and it sure beats TV and cheetos, but here is what gaming isn’t:
Motion. Friends. Planting. Body. Magic.
Pulse.
Seeking.
Song.
Yet for all it is not, Bug’s new diversions prey on his attention even in their absence. Especially in their absence. Their sirens call. He talks and talks more until I finally bark,
“Enough. For every minute you talk about video games, you lose one minute of playing them.”
Which is unfair and childish, but oh, how badly I wanted a home free of that electronic static. I wanted no static. All dynamic. All flesh and soil and story. But this is not my home. It is our home, Bug’s and mine. My son will have his loves. Some will baffle me. Others will make my skin itch. In any event, this kid should be free to feel his way and free to talk about the shape his desires take.
Still. I don’t take back the threat. Not yet.
In bed, we have finished books (one about Hieronymous Bosch, for god’s sake) when Bug turns and says, “One day, I’ll have a house with nothing but video games. Computers and ipads and video games.”
“Yeah?” I look at him. “One day, I’m going to have a house with 37-foot ceilings and a giant swing hanging right in the middle. And a three-story treehouse bed you have to climb a winding ladder to get into. Do you know what will be at the end of the bed?”
“What?”
“Big jars full of paint. So you can paint right on the ceiling above the bed what you want to see when you are dreaming. And my house will have an ice cream factory right inside with all the stuff for any flavor anyone wants to make. And a trampoline floor. And above the trampoline, a trapeze.”
“A bunch of trapezes,” he says. “So you can go down, and bounce up again, and swing.” He is arcing his stuffed polar bear through the air. “And go down and up and down and up and. . .”
“And a basketball court. And I’ll be able to make it really cold and turn it into a ice rink with flashing lights.”
“And 38 dogs,” he adds.
“Right. And a pool with a glass bottom so you can go under and see all the people swimming with all the dogs, and it’ll be just like the water-bowl-cam on Puppy Bowl.”
“And we’ll have the kitty halftime show.”
“And a whole room full of musical instruments. Anything you want to play, anywhere.”
“Except when you’re pooping,” he says.
“Are you kidding? Especially then. We’ll have a violin right there next to the toilet.”
“Not when you’re playing basketball.”
“Why not? I’ll put bells on everyone’s ankles so when they’re playing it’ll be like ching-ching-da-ding SWOOSH!”
“Is that someone making a basket?” He asks.
“Yep, and all the other players will be all jumping and jingling when you score the 3-pointer, it’ll be all jing-ding-a-ding-jing, like jazz.”
“What’s jazz?” Bug asks.
I explain that jazz is an American musical form rooted in the. . .
“No, how does it go?”
I attempt to bop-hmm through the opening bars of Charles Mingus’ Prayer for Passive Resistance. “Sorta like that.”
From who-knows-where, he asks, “What’s the blues?”
I turn and face him.
Well I woke up this morning. I reached across the bed. I went to hug my baby but I hugged a cold teddy bear instead.
I give his bear a limp squeeze. Bug is looking a little sideways at me. I kick it up.
Oh, I got so hungry for a sweet pickle but there’s none left in the jar, my baby got up in the night, ate the last pickle and drove off in my car.
Where the hell is this coming from? I belt it out before my mind can catch it.
Oh, I know she done left me because I’ve been gettin’ home late, I ain’t helped with the dishes and I left old cheese stuck to my plate. O-o-oh I got the blues. I got the empty bed, no pickle, teddy bear blues.
Bug bounces his polar bear and grins. I tell him the blues are usually about someone leaving.
“Like what?”
“Like. . . ”
I woke up this morning.
“The blues are always starting when you wake up.”
Looked for my panting dog. Ain’t no fuzzy tail a-thumping and the house is cold as a fallen log. I got the blues. I got the dog-gone-to-leprechaun-heaven blues.
“No, she didn’t go to leprechaun heaven.” He looks at me then tucks his head and sorta-smiles. Our pooch died on St. Patrick’s day. “That’s right. I forgot. Okay. Sing more.”
I reached for my furry lop-eared girl but she’s not there to warm my hands. Ain’t got no one to wake me up or lick bacon grease off the pan.
“I could do it,” Bug volunteers.
Oh, we got the blues. I wrap both boy and polar bear in a squeeze. The no Fenway in the morning, fallen-log, dog-gone, teddy bear blu-u-ues.
“Look,” Bug says. He pulls a tangle of Fenway’s black fur from his polar bear’s coat. “She left this.” He hands it to me and I rub the little remnant of our dopey girl between my fingers. Bug turns and curls around the bear. I tuck the fluff into my back pocket and curl around him.
Mama’s feeling good. For the moment, her boy’s absorbed in something. It’s raw and sweet hits the blue notes. And it sure won’t fit on a screen. Not even this one.
Well the first days are the hardest days
don’t you worry anymore
When you’re sixteen and you pick up lice from camping out at a Dead show, you and your girlfriend walk by the People’s drug store on the way home from school. You set up chairs out on the porch in the afternoon sun, pop a bootleg in the boom box, and gossip as you comb nits from each other’s hair.
‘Cause when life looks like Easy Street
there is danger at your door
When you’re forty and you pick up lice from your son’s first grade classroom, you leave two dozen unchecked emails in your inbox, cut out of work early (again), speed over to the CVS, and race to catch the train then the bus. On the way, you send messages to your son’s dad about all the things he needs to do to treat his place. You ignore the afternoon sun and rush into your condo, making a mental note of all the places your boy had his head during the past five nights he spent with you.
You strip beds, pull coats from hooks, peel covers from the sofa, corral a menagerie of stuffed animals. You curse the dollhouse washer/dryer that reaches capacity at three pillowcases. You wheel the vacuum around the mountain of fabric and upholstery and giant fluffy penguins now climbing towards the ceiling.
You bag up all the pillows. You push two loads through. You boil water to sanitize the hairbrush.
Then you storm through the living room
and stop
Goddamn, well I declare,
have you seen the like?
by the sliding glass door.
The dog stirs and glances up. You look out for the first time at the fading light. It is daylight savings time. The day has hung on for you. Just barely, though. You have 30 minutes left to fling yourself out and grab her before her fingers slip free.
Anybody’s choice
I can hear your voice
You lash your lice-infested tresses into a lice-infested elastic, put on the lice-infested hoodie you wore last night, and go run three hard miles with the setting sun at a heel on your left flank.
You come panting back inside. The dog pushes up against you as overjoyed as she has been every time you’ve walked in that door for the whole eight years of her existence. She doesn’t know you have lice and wouldn’t care even she did.
Now, you can see.
Again.
Finally.
Like the morning sun you come
and like the wind you go
How your son is in the best hands now because his father is the same man who used to sit and brush your hair with such gentle strokes, you felt like you’d been carried off on a magic carpet ride. How your water pours hot from the new heater you just installed. How the juice surges from every outlet to lamp, dryer, vacuum, stove. How the bed is soft and the sleep is sound and the lock is solid and the mortgage is covered and the shelves in CVS and kitchen alike are stocked with everything you could ever need and more than you ever will.
How you and your son’s dad and called each other and spoke easily about how to tackle a shared concern.
How your Mister got on the horn and told you to tell your boy that Thomas Jefferson had lice.
Come on along or go alone
You notice how very rare and undeserved this abundance of resource for this small a problem.
He’s come to take his children home.
When you’re here today and you pick up lice from a spot on this teeming planet, you strip down to your skivvies, squirt eye-watering insecticide shampoo into your hair, crank up Daddy Yankee and boogie as you comb the nits from your hair.
—
Butchered lyrics are from the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.”
He is asleep
I think until he lifts
his shoulder
into my chin and says keep singing
so I turn
my voice to the first verse
of the second tune
of the triology
that has scored four years
of nights
like this
but also not
at all this
one
The credits run and he starts to bounce. “Let’s have a dance party, Mommy!” Without a movie to glaze his eyes and glue his backside, he clambers up onto the back of the couch. I groan. Bedtime has outrun us again. We haven’t even brushed teeth.
“I don’t know, Buddy. It’s late.”
“But –“
“But you know I can’t resist a dance party. Just a few minutes though.”
My little boy high-steps across the cushions. Crazy witching-hour light spirals in his eyes. I find a Fios station sizzling with Latin hip hop and feel a roundness start to pull at my hips. Bug leaps off the couch and hurls his full mass at me. I step back and bend down to face him. “I don’t want you throwing yourself into me. Please keep your body to yourself.”
“Okay okay okay,” he says. He jumps across the room and turns several lurching circles. I wave my arms in the air and he waves his. He’s grinning so big. He starts towards me again.
“Let me go under you like when I was swimming,” he says. I make my legs into a bridge. “Okay, go!” I laugh. He squeezes himself small and pushes halfway through. Then, like Pooh and the honey pot, he gets stuck. He grabs at my knees pretending he can’t get out, arching his spine up, trying to lift and topple me.
“Baby!” I laugh. “Please don’t grab! Go through. Can you. . . um. . .” I shake myself off and step over him. Anything to keep him interested? Anything competitive? “Can you turn ten circles without falling down?”
He ignores me. He has outgrown these diversionary tactics. “Spin me around!” He cries. “Please? Spin me!”
“Buddy, can’t you just dance? Watch Mommy.” The beat is right on top, plain and simple. “See? I listen to the ba-ba-ba there, like that. And it makes my feet go –“
“Please just spin me?” He backs into me and presses his shoulders into my belly.
My boy knows rhythm. We have been moving to these beats since he was floating fetal in me. It has never stopped. When he was two, three, four, we draped ourselves in scarves and sequins. The living room was Pagan bonfire. Castle ball. Disco. Catwalk. He knows dance.
He chooses clash.
“How about this,” I try one last time. “Saturday night fever!” For a moment, he copies me. In one Kumbia half-step, he’s turned the diagonal disco arm into a gun. He shoots. Showers me with bullets. Then he’s after me again, skewering me with the bayonet.
“Wow.” I stop and marvel at him surging against any exposed inch of me. “You are so intense.” I grab him and flip him around so he’s facing out. He shrieks in delight. “There’s this thing called DANCING,” I say, jamming my forearms under his armpits and gripping my hands together across his chest. “Dancing is this really nice thing people do sometimes. It doesn’t involve head-on collisions!” I lift him, turning around and around, trying to make sure his feet clear the coffee table. He is breathless with giggles. My muscles shudder with the effort.
I put him down suddenly. “Oh my gosh,” I say.
“What?” He breathes hard, face bright. He is yanking on my wrists, his body begging for more.
“I’m totally wrong. There is a dance made just for you.”
“What is it?”
“Let me show you.” I fire up YouTube. In seconds, a grainy recording of Bad Brains at some now-defunct DC club pipes sweaty kids into our living room. Artillery fire vocals, distorted guitars, and slamming flesh.
“That right there? That’s a mosh pit.” I tell Bug. “I bet that’s exactly where you are going to end up.” He watches for a second then starts to bend and arch. I click onward, finding Fugazi and a shirtless Ian MacKaye cracking his voice against a roomful of ricochet and roar. Bug is thrumming now. A moment later, I land on “London Calling” but it is just a music video. I start to click to find another live recording but Bug tells me to stop. “Leave it on! I like this song,” he says.
“You do?”
And I don’t have to hear an answer to know. He is in my grasp again, fastening my arms over his shoulders like a harness. He grips my biceps and tightens the hold, rocking from foot to foot to the bass. Then my boy is swinging left, right, a metronome on 184. “More!” he cries. “Faster!”
“More what?” I shout.
“More this! This! More. . . woah,” He propels the swing further over, velocity from the balls of his feet, our shared force pulling out from my rooted center.
“Never shake a baby!” I laugh. Joe Strummer predicts the apocalypse as my kid hollers, “Harder, Mommy! Faster!” My legs quiver. The coil of my spine groans but complies as I launch this charged weight back and forth, catching the full impact and returning with equal power.
The Clash spools out and my body buckles as the pendulum runs aground. Bug tries to jump-start the engine by yanking against my shoulders.
“Enough,” I say.
“Not enough!” he says. “More!”
Of course. Too much is never enough. I grab him in a rough hug and wrestle him to the ground. He shrieks and pushes against me. Feral and ferocious, my child is growl. He is drive. He will find his pack and bang out a strange tattoo upon the earth. Lyric, dance, screech, clash. Each is his reject or claim, to rip out the chords and re-assemble to a beat he chooses as his own.
Tulips bend to paint a corner of Washington
Circle with candy tongues
tied, twisted police tape slaps at a strutting
breeze, a whir of wheels, skin and spandex sheathing
viscera pulsing femur tibia and tucked wing of
earthbound flight. A checkered cap tops
the pile on a table by an escalator
ringing like a miscalibrated telephone, unheeded
warning every third or fifth body rushing
up to open air, no one turning. Back
after back in suit jacket, wilting and shedding
finally revealing damp shoulder, furred forearm
freed from cuff. Lime-green
chrome and finned convertible
on oversized whitewalls takes the corner,
watering eyes and turning heads.
Delayed train, detour, an extra mile
on foot west, sundog flares against the curved city
bus merging with a hiss. I thought I knew
the way, thought I’d thought of every
contingency but I never imagined him
in the everything
grazing the tips of my fingers, him
in the everything holding me fast
To these teeming streets. Nothing to compare
to this belay. No metaphor, no halo
of light, no vapor trail threading sky
is anything like the music
making me skate an inch
at least above the skin of the planet
and so it should come as no surprise
(except that’s exactly what it does) to find
I learn to fly
the instant I give up
trying.
And the dirt was in the hole
And the hole was in the ground
And the green grass grows all around, all around
And the green grass grows all around.
Trouble comes around. It always does. The ol’ noggin is not a very reliable companion when the bad things kick your feet out from under you. The imagination flees. Instead of heading for the safety of open light, it usually panics and takes you further down the rabbit hole. You know the one I’m talking about. The walls crumble and you lose your grip. Nests of dark things gather at the edges. Through the tunnel, wrong voices howl.
Up and is an open field, low sun and a place on this earth where you belong exactly as you are. You have to plunge your hands in. Grab the root of something bigger than you. Climb.
This is how I feel my way back up towards that tiny circle of light. Because it is dark down there, I memorized the steps. One for each finger of each hand (or for each toe when the hands won’t still themselves) Five things by mid-day. Five more before nightfall. This mnemonic map gets me there every time, one inch at a time. It helps me seek purchase. Catch my breath. Return to the vast sanctuary of the living.
GREEN
Giggle. Doesn’t matter how. Bad stand up comedy, a goofball friend, or potty humor. Force a laugh up through that body and cast the demons out.
Rest. Find it again. Work naps in. Create order in the night: no screen time before bedtime, ease down the lights, arrange a nest of pillows. No talking allowed. No thinking either. For that, move on to the next step:
Exit. Literally: Go outside. Find air, art, body. Move over the skin of the earth. Figuratively: Every time your thoughts return to Trouble, picture turning your back and walking away. Every time. Even the 472nd time in an hour. Notice that you have looped back. Smile and say goodbye again. Turn around and leave it behind.
Eyes Up. Ten degree above the horizon. Notice something, anything, up and out of yourself. Take in the streak of the light across the roofs. Learn the name of one single tree. List all the synonyms you can think of for “free” and “flight.”
Nourish. Find the luscious, immerse in the extraordinary. Treat each one of your five senses to a decadence that you rarely allow. Take a bath in water scented with tea and chocolate. Press your cheek to the flank of a horse then get up and ride. Sit near a window and eat a heap of jewels – beets and rare greens and shavings of ginger – as you track the setting sun.
GRASS
Give. Find someone or something needing care. Provide it. Offer a gift. Your time, your strong back, your cookies, your hug. Your well is not empty. Fill someone else’s and you will replenish your own.
Reach. Keep on giving shape to the life you want. Name it, scratch a blueprint of it into the walls, build the scaffolding from old take-out chopsticks and unpaid bills. Work the flesh over it one patch at a time until it is whole. You have more than enough lung capacity to breathe it to life.
Assemble. Troops, allies, cheerleaders. Find your friends and loved ones. Don’t be afraid that you have been too absent to draw them back in. The ones who will help you heal will show up, and others you have not met yet will join your army.
Sweat. Don’t wait until you feel like it. Don’t give yourself one second to think. Get up and get moving. Right there on the living room floor if necessary. Move. Jump. Run. Let your endorphins do the work all the self-talk can’t.
Sing. Out loud, in the shower, on the street. Push the volume past 10. Flood your ears with music. Rumi offers this:
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it does not matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
Let it penetrate every crack in your shattered being. Let song knit you back together.
And in that dirt
There was some roots,
The prettiest little roots
That you ever did see.
Oh, the roots was in the dirt and the dirt was in the hole
and the hole was in the ground,And the green grass grows all around, all around
And the green grass grows all around.
—
Here, See Louis Jordan and the Tympany 5 do a jump-blues version sometime in the 1940’s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoBWy72t2gA
See Coleman Barks’ interpretation of Rumi’s poem, “Everything is Music,” here.
We are a little late getting to bed. Bug has just returned from a long New Year’s winter family camp weekend at the Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. His dad reported that Bug actually sang a Justin Bieber song at Karaoke in the dining hall in front of everyone. This, in addition to rocket-making and going down the tubing hill 13 or so times.
When my kid returns from these camp weekends, he has adopted funny new mannerisms. Tonight, he makes a little tchk with his cheek and cocks his head while he chatters at me. While he builds legos, he sings, “We are never, ever, ever, getting back together” under his breath. Also, his face is smeared with blue, his hands are purple, and he smells. Hygiene is not a top priority at camp.
After bath and jammies, we settle into his bed together. I finish the last book and set it on the floor. Bug is deep into his drawing of some complex set of ladders and pulleys again. I rub his back and start to sing. I don’t get one line into “Baby Beluga” before Bug stops me.
“Don’t sing, please.”
I stop rubbing. This is new. “Do you want a different one?”
“No.” He is coloring hard with dark blue marker. The work of our bath is quickly being reversed. “No songs. Just cuddles.”
I stoke his back again with a little more care. He colors in silence.
Is that it? Did it just happen? Did my little boy cross over? Someone once said that you will never know when read your child Goodnight Moon for the last time. We step blindly over milestones as if they are just cracks in the sidewalk.
I think back to our Christmas week together in Texas. On the first evening there, we sang from our caroling songbook. The second night, Bug asked me not to sing. I thought this was some combination of the laryngitis making me sound like a geriatric goose and the general overstimulation of our lodgings. The final three nights of our visit, he asked me not to sing. This was fine with me because even speaking had become a burden.
Are we finished with bedtime songs? Was it over the night before Christmas? Surely, it can’t happen like this. Boom, a kid enters a new stage and there is no looking back? Doesn’t he understand how momentous and heartbreaking this is?
“No songs at all?” I venture. “Not even ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’?”
“No, thanks,” he says.
I watch him add an extra ladder. Adapt or die, as they say.
“What are you drawing?”
“Guess,” he says.
If I can’t sing, I can at least have a conversation with him. In the split second it takes him to enter adolescence, he may well become more irritated by my existence than indulgent of it. I suppose I better get with the program. I look at his drawing more closely. He inks a line from the ladder to a platform where a smiling person stands.
“A zipline?”
“Yep,” he says. “It’s a high ropes course.”
We talk about this for a few moments. He points out what is what. Our exchange is pretty spotty because he is still focused on his composition. The side of his hand and the wristband of his new digger-truck jammies are smeared gray-blue.
“Alright, Bud. I’m going to get everything ready for school tomorrow. Finish up the picture and lights out in just a minute, okay?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He starts on the higher element at the top of the page. The Flying Squirrel? The Postman’s Walk? He doesn’t give. I kiss his head and go downstairs to finish the dishes. I have almost finished loading the dishwasher when I hear the plaintive cry from the landing. “Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
“Yes, baby?”
“You forgot to put the cool water by my bed.”
I grin and come upstairs. “We are out of practice after a few days away, huh? I filled it up when you were brushing your teeth but we both forgot to take it to your room. Here.” I help him find the cup. He has not stayed in this house for eleven nights. I have to remember that these transitions take some adjustment. He gulps deeply and crawls back into bed, picking up an orange marker on the way. I stroke his head. “You need to finish up so you can get some sleep for tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
I lumber back downstairs to finish packing snack and putting away laundry.
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
I walk to the landing with a sigh. “Yes, buddy?”
“I need to go potty.”
“So, go potty.” He smiles big, wrapping his arm around my shoulder as I climb the stairs. “Let me guess. You took a nap in the car on the way home from camp today, didn’t you?”
He bounces into the bathroom. “What do you think I’m going to say?”
“I think you’re going to say, ‘yes’.”
He makes a silly face then nods. We goof with our faces going from stern to giggles. “Do you want to come in and see what I drew after I go potty?”
“Sure, baby. Then it’s bedtime.”
He digs out a pile of sketches that he has produced in the few minutes I was downstairs. This one shows an elaborate series of ladders and several emergency vehicles including two medi-vac helicopters. “It’s an underground hospital,” he tells me. “That’s blood. All full of blood. And that’s the thing with the wheels they take the people out of the helicopter on.”
“A stretcher?”
“Yep. And this is an ambulance. And here is the X-Ray machine.”
“Baby, it is so far past your bedtime, it’s not even funny.”
“Okay.”
I go downstairs to make copies of his paperwork to start the new before-school program.
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
I take a deep breath, round the foyer, and mount the stairs. “Bedtime,” I say quietly. “No more coloring.”
“But why aren’t you in bed?”
“Because I can’t finish my chores with someone calling me upstairs every seventeen seconds. Here. Hop into bed. We’re done.” I take away the clipboard and set it on the floor and put the sack of markers in the drawer. He pulls the blanket up.
Gently, gently, I make the offer. “How about a song to help you get to sleep?”
He nods and wiggles down under the blanket. “Okay. Will you lay down with me?”
“You bet.”
“And maybe do all three songs?”
“Sure thing, buddy.”
He smiles his dozy, droop-eyed smile and presses up against me. As the tune leaves my lips, I hear every word of every verse much more clearly than I have in years.
Tonight is probably not the last page of this chapter, but how could I know if it were? We just never know how close we are to the end. There is no way to flip ahead to see. I sing him the whole of each song well past his bedtime and deep into slumber. I add a free fourth tune for good measure just to make up for all the ones I will never hum into his drowsy neck again once he says goodbye to the lullaby for good.
Let’s not talk about fare-the-wells now
The night is a starry dome.
As long as this moment lasts, I sing my boy to sleep.
—
From Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” off the forever twilight album, Blue.
I stumble into the house, dump the groceries, take note of the dishes in the sink, and walk the dog. I tell myself, “After I fill her water bowl, I can relax.” I fill the water bowl. “As soon as I’ve put away the groceries, I can sit down.” I put away the groceries. “I’ll just start the laundry and then I’ll read the paper.” I start the laundry. “I could just do the dishes quick.”
Before crossing the kitchen, I turn on the radio. Bug’s favorite station is programmed: 94.7, all pop, all the time. I stop halfway to the sink. The music comes at me in a crash, sweeping me off my feet more completely than a riptide. There is no staying put on this shifting shore.I don’t even know the song even though I have heard it a dozen times. It doesn’t matter.
I dance.
The cat is yowling to go out. The dishes are waiting. The suitcases are not unpacked and there are five unanswered voice messages on the phone. Every bit of it tips off the edge of the earth and churns to the splintering deep. I ride the black and starlit crest of a wave.
I dance.
Through one song. Then another. My eyes are closed as I move there on the kitchen tile, wedged between the table and the counters. Still in my coat, I lift my arms and let the rhythm move my spine, swerve my hips, and turn me in small revolutions on this swelling stage. The undertow carries me further towards that misted moon.
I dance.
Three songs. Part of a fourth. Then, I feel sand beneath my feet. I tumble to dry land. I come back to earth. I stand there in the empty house and notice that the contents of the place have all come back to where they were before, yet they are somehow off by the slightest degree. They exist just beyond my immediate grasp. Everything has landed where it happens to be and not one bit of it needs me.
Forget the dishes. Forget the messages. I go upstairs and put on my comfiest sweats. The rest of the evening is for a soft couch and love songs. The rest, just for me.
Shannon E. Williams 