Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Honeysuckle Tag
Months after the last blossom
wilts and lets go, a tendril
of scent unfurls
among the parched weeds
and knotted shrubs edging
the broken road.
Only at night the perfume steals
out to stretch its cramped
wings and lean
into the hum
of cricket’s legs
and streetlamps. It will be gone
by sunrise, tucked
under winter straw
that falls in summer, swathing
thirst and throb in a jacket
of silence.
What they learned is that the jellyfish heal themselves by swimming. As a wounded jellyfish struggles to move through the water with its remaining limbs, its muscles contract and relax. This movement creates forces that push on the body’s elastic, jelly-like material, reshaping it until the limbs are once again evenly spaced.
– Nell Greenfield Boyce, National Public Radio, June 15, 2015
She began by cursing
the one who was sitting closest
when the ache came bristling up
like bull thistle invading the raw acre
of her name,
deaf to the suggestion
that correlation is insufficient grounds
for blame. It hurt
to move.
A doctor then
coached her in probing
the thorny soil
with her arms wrapped in sackcloth
and her feet dangling
several inches above
the earth. Digging stripped the music
from her fingers.
A quest then
beguiled her to scale
a cliff abrading with every grip
that gained her purchase
and she maybe saw the promised petroglyph
or was it northern lights
before the trail slipped off
the map. Blisters boiled over
each of the five senses
leaving scars.
A clan then
promised her walls to place
eyes and the bones behind them, to wake
to a face she’d recognize
anywhere so long as where falls within
the proper dimension. She splintered
her teeth
on the doorframe.
A child then
a fight then
a task then
a loss then
it hurt to move
Alchemy then
whispered the sorcery
of conversion and she listened and called it
work, animating metaphor and
fusing symbol to object
until the fetal wings she was sure were the source
of the ache finally split
wide her scapulae and unfurled
Lifting an eddy of sloughed skin,
pollen and fallen leaf
before slumping then
going limp.
It hurts to be
exactly this.
A turning then
lurches her
into the shape left by the pain
which happens to be the only one of her
that remains
happens to be all
she is.
What we learn is that the wounded heal themselves
by moving.
In this broken skin
we walk
eventually.
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.
– Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
The sun rides in on the back of a fierce wind. Even though the equinox is just days from now, this taste of spring will slip away again tomorrow. Thank goodness. Winter is much safer.
The inevitability of change is worrisome. Buds unfurl and something in us pushes open. That something undoubtedly lacks the social grace to wait for an invitation. Who knows what will shatter? What will bruise? All of this is in the service of “growth.” What seems so lovely when talking garden metaphors is brutal when ripping old scar tissue to realign poorly set bones. It’s all a matter of location and scope, and so much is out of our hands.
I step out onto the scoured mud of the battlefield. The gusts whip through my hair. They bend the dog’s leash into a bow that moans like a cello string. I did not expect this violence in the air. We walk anyway, all 5 1/2 miles of swamp and field, in the last of winter’s glare. The dog leaps after grasshoppers, burying her nose in crackling grass.
With every step into relentless headwinds, I make my plans, rehearse my lines, catalog the tasks undone. Each thought is a scrap of debris stuck to the walls of my skull. Eventually, I remember to let the rushing air scrub the hull clean. I have to remember this over and over again.
The dog trots ahead, snuffles in damp leaves, falls back, prances up onto a berm. With one a paw raised, she surveys the thrashing field, alert for predator or prey in the brush. Down in the low wet, peepers sing and sing.
The sun creeps across the celestial equator. Under the vast and rippled blue, I walk blind into the next churning eddy. My skin thrills at the prying insistence of those gusts. Light snakes in under collar, hairline, wrist.
I am not ready for what’s coming.
I stride towards it anyway.
I gulp it down.
I howl back in its face.
Now let’s stop all this talking, and let it fill our ears
 
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
Lunch is an hour. And it’s a break.
Sacred cows no more.
Lunch hour goes.
(Not the food part. I’m too fond of my fuel.)
—
Today the forecast was 47 degrees and wet. I trotted off to work in a thin sheath of a raincoat. At 5:30, I stepped out into wind that cut like knives. My neck shrieked. The puddles had turned to ice. Each dark step to the metro scoured my skin.
During the intervening 8-1/2 hours walled in by steel and focus, temperatures plummeted and dragged the sky down with them. I had no idea. Despite a window that can carry my gaze to where the National Cathedral rises on the hill, I didn’t see the dimming light. Despite a city outside my door where I can walk for miles through parks and neighborhoods, I didn’t feel the creeping frost.
This ignorance is the price of determination.
I shouldn’t be proud of giving up my lunch hour. An earlier me would have tsk-tsked today’s me for misplacing priorities and neglecting health. For the four years I’ve held this job, lunch hour meant walking, no matter the weather. My credenza drawer hides an iPod, running clothes, both sunhat and umbrella, both towel and soap (you never know). These feet memorized miles of concrete. Co-workers praised my dedication to fitness.
Truth is, lunch hour walks were my secret recipe for sanity.
All that walking was a way of holding on to my center while the world rushed and tilted around me. It’s easier to sprint across the wire, especially if you don’t look down. First was our imploding family and livelihood, then moving here, then divorce, then working and all that comes with doing that as a single mom trying to establish a home and a way forward. A leaden fear of financial and familial ruin saturated every moment. So I kept moving, walking, and peering anywhere but right here.
Meanwhile, something changed. Like that weather rolling in when I was facing the other way, the very world shifted into a new alignment.
The daily work — the professional this-and-that of making ends meet — began to propagate. Seeds I didn’t know had been germinating started to push through the surface.
Lunch hour used to be for air and breath and body. It was a standing date with my very own self.
Now lunch hour is for asking the next question.
(Which question, you ask? That one. The one dancing just out of reach. The one that barely has a shape yet.)
An opportunity emerged during a team meeting. My department needed someone to teach. I resisted until my Mister reminded me that I do, in fact, have most of what it takes and the resourcefulness to go find the stuff I don’t. So I agreed to it, and it ate up all my time, and I was exhausted, and the extra pay didn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.
I loved it, loved the exchange of ideas, loved making it up as we went.
Before the final class, an opportunity popped up on my voicemail. This one was even more impossible than the last. In a windowless classroom with a sputtering overhead projector — the kind that uses actual transparencies — someone had to guide the learning of 27 visiting faculty who could barely speak English.
With guidance from the dear ones, I agreed to it, and it ate up all my time, and I was exhausted, and the extra pay didn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.
I loved it, loved the students, loved the tangled and unmapped journey.
Before the final class, another opportunity strolled into my office. This was a role supporting our school’s search for a new dean. It would be a politically delicate, thankless, administrative nightmare on an accelerated timeline. I considered it, negotiating right up front with the school leadership while doing so.
I took it, or rather, it took me: It eats up all my time, and I’m exhausted, and the extra pay doesn’t even begin to cover the hours committed.
And I love it, insanity and all.
Something is growing here.
Maybe it’s just a calcification of the soul-jarring careerism that infects the Washington DC region. Maybe I’m turning into yet another stressed and stretched professional Director of (Insert Abstract Administrative Jargon Here) who’s just wearing the same grooves a little deeper into the city sidewalks.
Or maybe it’s the Powers That Be taking advantage of a semi-competent masochist with something to prove.
Secretly, though, I think it’s something else.
Whatever it is, it’s growing right here, in the place this woman inhabits.
Despite all my foolishness and self-inflicted handicaps, novel ways emerge to apply the skills I’ve been accumulating. Even though the tough spots make my head throb and my heart race, it’s thrilling to come upon a problem I simply cannot solve, yet I must solve it, and I somehow know I will solve it, even if it comes to jury-rigging a fix.
Every time I figure out some new mix of tools and techniques, new places to apply them appear. The marvel of this chapter in my too-much-of-a-life is that I keep bumbling into the outer limit of my talents and capabilities, only to find that it’s a membrane and I can push right through.
For the first time in years, I have more in my sights than just getting through the day upright.
Now I want to know what these hands can really do.
Lunch hour is a standing date with possibility.
Lunch hour is one more wide-open chance to ask the next question.
(What are the Things I Can?)
Where the unknown is unnamed, give it voice.
Where answers are missing, reach.
Follow the The Things I Can Adventure
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I was at a Dead show the first time I heard it. 16 years old. A circle formed at the edge of the stadium’s corridor during the drums-and-space jam. Undeterred by the revved-up traffic and whirling skirts, that circle was a solid, swaying knot. All twenty or so human links weaved in and around each other. I heard the voices in unison and asked a woman dancing nearby what they were saying. “Serenity Prayer,” she said. She repeated it for me.
Was it an invocation? Some kind of magic spell? It must have been if it managed to help a bunch of folks in recovery navigate the rainbow pharmacopeia that trailed the band in its transcontinental wanderings. Somewhere along the way, I memorized that prayer without intending to. It is now such a part of my cultural vocabulary that it’s as firmly planted as the opening of the Gettysburg Address and the entirety of Frost’s “Two Roads Diverged.” In fact, it barely registers anymore.
How deep do these lines run? Do they stay safely entombed or do they erode? It has to be a matter of practice.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of the right trigger. Continue reading “The Things I Can”
We belong to the conjurer. Separate and seamless, you in his left hand and me in his right. A twist, a clang, we slam into one. Solid chain, linked, as if made this way. As if always.
It’s jarring when they slip apart again. So smooth they go, and this time, without a sound.
We no longer speak in the dark. Promise has lost its voice. Nevertheless, we lean in as if we still believe. Look here, he says. He gives them a twirl around his wrist. We watch, knowing better. The price of admission includes a pass for enchantment.
Do we want them linked or free? Reasonable people would just get on with it. Decide and be done. If the man unbuttons his cape and hits the house lights, we’d know exactly what we’re working with.
Maybe impotence is a form of power. For a night, a year, for the backlit wish of a lifetime, magic is indulgence. Against better judgment, we hope he’ll never let us see under the hood.
When faith is in peril, keep the theater dim. Whisper the charm. Follow the gesture of the offered hand and pay no mind to his fingers. He may or may not wear a wedding band. Of all people, he knows how tenuous the link. He knows there are always invisible seams.
He’s mastered levitation and the suspension of doubt.
What happens to the discarded ring? Somehow, the story lingers. We refuse the god but ask the pastor to invoke him regardless. He is there still, or maybe it’s just an imprint of an aged spell. Hammered metal, more than an orderly arrangement of molecules in a chunk of deep earth. It is a thicket of notions, a fasting band, a crown of thorns.
You slept for a hundred years, after all, as did I.
Metal, dust, molecule, atom. Inside everything is the smaller fragment. What holds an object steady is just a set of conditions. What holds the intersection in alignment is just the proximity of sets. The stitching is evident if you look closely enough.
Incantation is both source and sustenance: the words, the whisper, the angle of light, and where you choose to place your hands.
We are not fixed by circumference. Every line we draw contains the space between component parts. Anything can escape.
Anything can stay.
One question concerns me: Was she was someone’s family pet before the smugglers took her? It’s likely. She climbs up onto any willing lap and folds her flanks into the knobs of her knees, tucking her nose under her tail. She burrows like a deer into this nest of her own bristle and bone. She stays, riding the chop even when the lap belongs to a shouting Pictionary player who is trying in vain to sketch a triceratops before the timer runs out.
—
My office is powered down for two full weeks. Bug is with his dad’s clan up north for half of winter break. This would have been a perfect time to go get a haircut. Assemble those shelves in the utility closet. Catch up with faraway friends. Sleep.
Our lives have no room for this. I can barely keep a philodendron alive. Nevertheless, Bug reminds me about the promise I made a few months after our pooch passed away last spring. “We can start thinking about it in September.”
In September, he asked, “When can we start talking about it?” I told him Thanksgiving.
At Thanksgiving, he asked, “When can we start looking?”
I don’t head into Petco’s December adoption event with the intention of adopting. I’m just checking things out, just starting a process that might take months. But there she is. She lays with her paws crossed and ears up, keeping a polite distance from the shrieking tumble of puppy-ness.
They tell me she is from Thailand. A rescue. Undoubtedly a dog of rough beginnings. Undoubtedly full of needs and fears and miswired circuitry that might make her a heap of trouble. The little boy from her foster family says she follows him around and curls up with him every time he sits down. He doesn’t seem to grasp what a nightmare she might be. He chatters on about what a cuddler she is, and how gentle, and what a good friend.
In the days after I submit an application (just an application, not a commitment), I learn more than I want to know. She slips free from her foster family and disappears into the sprawling suburbs. She is prone to flight. This is not surprising, given how she’s learned to survive. The illegal meat trade is a brutal teacher. In Thailand, smugglers lure both pets and strays off the streets and stuff them into crowded crates. They tear off to slaughterhouses in Vietnam or China to sell their wares.
Animal protection laws are lax at best. When merchants are caught, they may not even pay a fine. Rescued dogs land in safe but spartan shelters with hundreds if not thousands of other disoriented creatures. Inadequate funding and sparse veterinary care leave many of these dogs with grim futures. In Thailand, pet adoption is exceedingly rare.
A few organizations from around the world fly volunteers out to select one or two to ferry across the ocean to new homes.
She’s come this far only to make a break for it the first chance she gets. She has no idea that anything good — anyone good — is on the other side of trust. During the uncertain week when she is missing, they tell me she unlikely to make it back.
What they don’t know is that this little girl was born under a lucky star. Maybe a whole constellation.
With the help of professional trackers and an army of volunteers, someone finds her hiding in brambles on a side street in Chantilly. The vice president of the rescue organization decides to hold onto her for the time being. They call me up to tell me we can bring her home.
Home?
There’s no way we’re ready for this.
Of course, neither was that family in Thailand. More to the point, neither was she.
It isn’t possible to send them word. She has no records except the ones written in an unfamiliar alphabet and cobbled together before she boarded her flight. Even if we were certain she’d had a home, if we could find a town, a street, someone to ask, who would translate our inquiries?
Would a photo would be enough?
It is for Bug.
He loves her at one glance. “Look at those cute little eyes!” He fawns over her tiny snapshot on the smartphone.
Two days later, they meet in person. She whips her tail so hard she can barely keep her back legs on the floor. She tries to scale him to get to him face to lick lick lick. He squeals and laughs, petting her all the way down her wiry back.
Despite it all, she trusts him. Trusts us.
Foolish girl.
At home, she finds a lap. It’s far too small for her. No matter. She burrows in.
An earthquake, a tidal wave, a belly laugh. She isn’t going anywhere.
She claims her place.
We have no room for her.
Anyway, she stays.
—
“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
– James Baldwin
I’m not married to him now.
I remember these things.
He could weave string into bracelets. Yarn into pouches. He picked up discarded wrappers and curled them and knotted them and made them into chains.
When he asked me to marry him, he brought out the ring in a box he had made from paper tucked in on itself.
He is not my husband now. I remember these things.
The soil of my own life was restive in my hands. Its thrum vexed me. It was so pliable. So insistent. It offered no clues yet demanded everything of me. As if some larval creature moved through it, the contours kept changing. I would press my fingers in halfway but pull back, plugging the divot before it had a chance to drill open a corridor in me I was unprepared to claim. I could not – would not – choose a manner of shaping, let alone the shape itself.
My very own life in my very own hands. I was confounded.
Potter, sculptor, bricklayer, farmer. Technical skill is just the beginning, all hammers and season, chisels and heat. The other work is the inversion of craft. Abstruse. Intangible. Vision? Call? It is the sense of shape before shape. It is a moment of conception in stop-action. The mind must coil around the shimmer and foam and draw from-in-with it, frame by frame, a creation splitting into its own origin.
Here is art. Here is courage.
Skill marries imagination in a painstaking process. It requires coaxing that inner membrane out, out to reside within the material at hand. Slipping. Adjusting. Aptitude falling short. Hands seeking the next nuance, the next skill to call that thing into being. And the thing, the virtual life, when it meets tool and clay, shivers without permission into forms no one ever imagined. It slips into sync with the material world as much in spite of the artisan as because of her.
This was me, holding a pulsing handful of wing and seed and licorice root, warming the rank, luscious matter that cannot be created or destroyed but is always only changing form. This was me without any idea which of the six dozen flitting shapes in my mind it might take. This was me, seeking an instruction manual. A trail marker. A sorcerer for whom I could apprentice.
He offered me a tiny folded box. It fit in my palm.
I learned to knit while we were married. A bucket of bamboo needles. Yarn by the mile. A haberdashery of hats and scarves and ill-fitting slippers.
I squirmed on the sofa. I ignored the ache. I forced my gaze to zero in on the next stitch in the pattern.
This was me, making something with my hands.
At last. Something.
This was me, turning fairytale outside-in. Deaf to the clatter of limb against wall. Surrendering to threads biting fingers, ankles, throat. Hewing my own Gepetto out of fine-grained evasion and then feeding him my lines.
My son grew into the oversized hats then grew right out of them.
The man I married looped ribbon into lanyard. He did this, as all things, without haste.
I took up those strings. I practiced those boxes. I pulled and folded.
I pretended they were mine. I wanted them to be mine. His paper box fit in my hand. His cellophane chains fit my wrists.
My fingers ached. Below me, the fecund earth roiled. I stilled the urge to plunge.
In the winters, our house, whichever one in whichever time zone, was edged in white-gold lights. He laced every corner. He installed timers at the outlets. I walked through the dark mountain frost on those blue-black nights. Miles from any town, the only cloud brushing that carpet of stars was the one I alone breathed.
I followed the bend until our house appeared on the hill. My cloud found its kin. A fire there. Odd relief: the communion of breath with ash, the shared obscuring of depth.
A ribbon of smoke, a runway of light. A place to land. The home we made.
I imagined it was ours and that I was an equal part of the Us who created it.
Our marriage. Our son. Our Christmas. Our hearth.
A rectangle of lights framed the door. A square of lights outlined the window.
Strings of light made boxes of light made chains to grip in the direction of travel.
Always, the urge to plunge. Did I admit that it was almost as strong as the one that pulled me back? Almost. Not enough.
It could have been.
Down to the creek, the glassed stone, the trout slipping down low. A canopy of mist kissing the water’s quaking skin. Somewhere near, the bald eagle in its nest. A screech on the hillside. The towering stone, the natural bridge, the dirt road twisting down and away. Down from light. Away from the frame, the flame, that steady glow.
Almost.
My son in there. I went home. Always.
Until I couldn’t.
Now, I am making the Christmas that a good mom should. My son and I drape aquamarine garland from the doorframes. We follow lines scratched deep in the vinyl.
The sound is tinny. Grainy. There is dirt in the grooves. Weeds push up through the cracks. Seeds rupture. Their dogged tendrils erode the smooth edge.
Something unfurls in the air here. It is not pine. It is not mulling spices.
Carapace and decay. Bud and birth.
The Christmas I make is my penance.
Yet no one is demanding it. No one has handed me an invoice or called me before jury.
Peers don’t speak their judgments aloud. Not now. They have their own failings to answer for.
The man who was my husband is not holding a yardstick. He never was.
The box fit in my palm. The box fits all of him. Of course it does. It is his. It always was.
The man who is not my husband still has the Christmas stocking from his childhood and he takes it with him every year no matter where he ends up on December 24. He makes sure our son’s stocking is wherever our son will be on December 24. The stocking goes back and forth like a lunch box.
Like our son.
The tree twinkles. Gifts are piled in heaps that brush the low boughs. Cards wend their way around the globe.
The season squeezes. The strings pinch but no one is here to pull them. No one but me.
I find a spade. The dulled blade is still sharp enough to split threads. To crack floorboards. To pierce ice and soil and root.
In these moments when my son is with his father, I marinate in disquiet. I look around the home we are making and see the places where we spill from the corners. The dining room table is a hard-hat zone of paint and pennies and half-written poems in calligraphy ink. The empty floor of the living room yawns wide and pulls me to dance under low lights. I write. I pace. I wander out into the night with the dog and turn my bare face to winter sky.
Christmas is changing shape. Everything is.
The material comprising the ground under my own feet still puzzles me. Frightens me. Yet this terrain I inhabit, both alone and with my son, is all I’ve got.
This is me closing my eyes and seeking the shape preceding shape. I follow its source. I feel its beat and match my pulse to that throb.
I bend. I reach.
This is me.
Plunging.
When it all falls away (pretense, fantasy). When we run out of words. When he is just a hunched figure in cotton underwear standing at the sliding door talking to the dog. When we are rumbling bellies and sore feet. When the teasing from hungry lips gives way to dishes and air leaking from tires.
Then. Only then. Not even now. Not yet.
Here is what is then: He looks up at the path, nothing but bare trunk and brown leaf, and sees a single white light hovering there. He stops and stoops, gazing. A tiny spaceship dips, indecisive, at the skin of our alien planet. This one light arcs sideways now, streaking there all wrong across the early winter path.
Mesmerized. Our breath, caught like mothwings. Light on a strand of spider thread plunges into some impossible distance then reappears an inch from our noses.
This is what he sees. Then as now.
I trust this. He finds filament hidden among knob and stone. He plucks the string and calls up the first note. The chord, an atonal twisting of this day, this everyday day, into its converse.
This will be then. On our most trodden route, I am lost in what he finds.
Now, he asks why we are busier. Are we busier? This second asking, the shift in emphasis. What is truth? Not only what do we make of it, but what do we choose it to be made of?
Summer came. I bought a home. He coached and then didn’t. We lost one weekend then another. We are more purple. Less driven. More painted. Less rested. Better fed. Steadier. Scruffier. Here.
We lay together far too late into nights, those fleeting nights forever becoming mornings.
The dog panted when the rain began. I thought the roof had opened and the sky had found us at last. No. It was just ice on the skylight. The clouds tumbled in when we weren’t looking. They shed their weight.
Winter edges closer.
In the window of the train is the reflection of the opposite window and then the reflection of this window in the bus kiosk wall. This I see now.
This commute like every other. Unlike anything ever. He does not ride with me except he does.
I think of the woman in the prairie who fell asleep on a winter night and rose three times, restless in the pitch black. She lay awake for hours until finally giving up the fight. She tried to step outside. The door would not budge. Snow piled in drifts to the roof had trapped her. Digging up through a window, she found the sun was setting on the following afternoon, which was, in fact, the day now behind her.
We are so frightened when we hear of those who fall alone and lay dying, hours into days with no one coming. I wonder how terrible this would be. To finally, finally know yourself as you are: solitary, and maybe not a you at all. To suffer there with your absent god, the songs your mother sang, the terror, the surrender. All of it, your own and not yours at all, because you are not yours. Not really. The illusion finally bends. In the polished glass, a reflection of self and the door opposite. The glow you thought was distant and sacred is simply spider floss. A trick of light. So very near.
Blood and lung. Salt and water. It is all just evolution’s clever twist, the story arc in the leather-bound volume you’ve become. You never owned it. It is on loan. When the reaper arrives, he is not a hooded wraith or a thief after all. Just a librarian with an overdue slip and an open hand. Then the cover closes on your meager pages, your handful of lines. Threads slip loose as they always do. Some maybe even still drifting from the spine.
When we are bent to bones. If he stays and maybe even otherwise. This is then: He catches those filaments between fingers fine and silvered. No knots. No binding them to or into. He holds the strands up before me just long enough then blows them to sky like lashes. Like a wish.
Shannon E. Williams 