Her Ascension in a Dancing Dress

Her Ascension in a Dancing Dress

She appeared in the paper after her death, and from that, I learned things about my grandmother.  For before an Easter Sunday heart attack which began the eleven month countdown to her expiration date, my recollections are scenic, stuck – they are extant objects without time:

her favorite overstuffed chair in which as a child I liked to spin and in which, while her lifelong husband made her breakfast, she quietly died, the blue linoleum suitcases in my parents’ bedroom every Christmas, the number of candles on a white birthday cake, her commentary on men with pierced ears (they just want to be girls).

But when I read the paper, she existed beyond these snapshots – a gymnast to the end, she, in that final year, apparently did a split in front of a group of my second cousins right on the living room floor, oxygen mask and all.

My education continued at end of the service, next to a crying cousin whose emotions I could not comprehend, when the man at the funeral home noted to the unsuspecting audience that Dorothy loved to polka, so it was only appropriate that we listen to a song from one of her favorite cassettes.

And as the tuba began its two-step fanfare, I remember wanting to smile, not knowing if I could, wanting to find this somewhat funny, not knowing if I would be judged or hastily smitten.

And I wondered if anyone felt in that moment out of place, askew from that which was.

Finding no answers, I shrugged, continued the solemn hanging of my head, my downcast eyes staring at the laces of my new dress shoes, kept my confusion to myself and imagined her dancing towards the gates, dressed in pink and green and patterned lace.

While She Waited

While She Waited

When were you first licensed, the woman asks
as I try to get an insurance quote.
And then I remember the April that was
the springtime of my junior year in the
corridors of my high school, just having
the previous month completed my first one-
year anniversary with a girl who
would in her time reveal herself to be
anti-Semitic and mildly racist,
with a bit of a drinking problem to
round it all out.  As I knew her back then,
though, she was the object of my teenage
love, the subject of my stumbling verse,
the cause of a deteriorating
relationship with my mother.  April,
my junior year in high school, when sex was
new, pure and the source of irrational
action, of police tapping on her mot-
-her’s car, of fights and confessional con-
-versations, admitting fault, guilt, fault, flaws.

Bear with me, I plead, still trying to re-
call the year in which all of this happened,
when I would start driving the two of us
to her house, where, if time before I left for
work and time before her mother got home
permitted, we would, all of it quickly,
de-robe, deflower, entice, enjoy, and
then listen for the garage door’s gears to
start their turning, allowing her mother’s
car, whose windows had last week been rapped by
an officer, to pull in, to release
a smiling woman who would insist
I eat something before I went to work.

I’m twenty-three, it’s 2007,
I continue to calculate as the
woman chuckles, I hope still patiently,
so 2000, then, I guess, on April
seventeenth, triumphantly delivered,
I exhale and I listen to her typing.

The Eiffel Bridge

The Eiffel Bridge

The man has to his name a lesser creation,
a bridge in the small city of Oporto,
a place he knows not, beyond the width
of the river that his model, upon completion,
stood and stands.

The bridge, it seems, serves more than its
intended purpose, as UNESCO, bridled body
that it is, has noted it and thus the world has, too.
Beyond the cars that cross and the photos that span
the pages of glossy books, much to the
dead architect’s potential, pointless chagrin,
the metallic intersections of the bridge’s entrails
apparently serve as a most convenient starting point
for youthful suicides, with taught ropes
moaning to the river in an attempt to
clear their names of responsibility.

And if not ropes, then a drunken jump, a teary
and isolated farewell, with eyes focusing as they
turn on the black and shimmering surface
whose dimensions and reality become ever
more appreciated as the heavenly body
and the body in motion swallow, surrender,
respectively, with respect.

Allahna on the Map – Part II

Allahna on the Map – Part II

It wasn’t supposed to look like she came to visit because of a breakup, but the timing wasn’t up to us.  My girlfriend of two and a half years, the day prior, had ended the relationship by way of the telephone (things seemed tense when you came to visit, London’s so far, two years is so long; Jeff, I was just a sophomore when we started dating).  I didn’t cry, but I thought about it.  Instead, I called a friend within minutes, and we did laundry at my apartment while we drinking heavily.

Allahna showed up the next night; we met outside the McDonald’s in town the one landmark that in the late evening hours, when most guests tend to arrive at my apartment, isn’t easily missed, thereby sparing me disparaging phone calls (“What’s this shit about a rotary, Jeff?”).

We got out of our respective cars, hugged.

“That bitch,” she said.

“Now, now.”

“Good to see you, honey.”

“Good to see you, too.”

Having parked back at my apartment, a converted funeral home, we gathered up her things to bring in.

“I’ve been living out of my car.”

“I can see that.”

We tossed her bags into the bedroom, and, after showing her around the place, we got down to business.

“I brought my friend Jack,” she laughed, as she poured herself some bourbon and located the ice tray.

“Hope it’s okay that Rich and Mike are coming,” I said.  It was originally going to be just the two of us for the weekend, but the breakup’s gravitational pull apparently stretched to Boston, bringing two close college friends up to make sure that, along with the smoldering ruins of my relationship, that we also concurrently buried out sobrieties with near constancy throughout the weekend.

The intent, despite what might be suggested, was not sexual; it was to tackle the writing we had been wanting to do for months, in which I wrote the stories of her experiences.  The outlook, however, given the events in the twenty four hours prior to her arrival, was now quite different, much less serious, and a good deal more wobbly.

“It’s fine, hon,” bringing her glass over and toasting my martini.

By the time Rich and Mike made it to Vermont, we were already a few drinks in.

“How many have you had?” Mike asked.

“Eh,” I replied.

“Jeesh, good to see you,” he said, hugging me, complete with manly slap on the back, Rich following as soon as he slammed the door to his minivan shut.

As the two of them came in behind me, I introduced them to one another, and then began shuffling bags and furniture around, and went in search of a sleeping bag, which, statistically speaking, would probably be necessary.

I was pawing through my closet while Rich and Mike made drinks, and Allahna announced that she was going to change, and headed toward the bedroom.  Rich commented that that wasn’t where the bathroom was.

“It’s okay; Jeff’s seen it already,” she said, entering the room, as I pushed fallen items back into place after recovering the sleeping bag that had brought me there in the first place.

Then, briefly, I saw what I had already seen.

“Told you,” she said, to me, referencing her weight loss not affecting certain parts of her body.

“Hm.”

*

The next afternoon, while still in the process of rehydrating, Allahna sifted through some pictures, garnering opinions on which one or ones she should send to her de facto fiancé, Ryan.  We rifled through them, narrowing the selection down; I remember being a bit stunned with the sheer quantity of printed pictures that she had of herself.  One of the rejected photos she pinned to the refrigerator corkboard, where it still remains, her hips cocked out to the side and her tongue sticking out, escaping the smiling lips behind it.

I was struck most by the fact that the photos getting jostled all out of order and more than a few potentially getting fingerprint smudges on them did not cause her distress.

She took a moment to pause when we came across a picture of her with her face painted and glittered to resemble a butterfly.

“Remember the story I was telling you when we were having sex, and right in the fucking middle of it, Ryan jumped up and said ‘Baby, I need to take your picture like that?’  That’s the picture, right there,” she divulged, putting her finger on her naked shoulders in the picture for emphasis.

“Ah,” I said, remembering, and, looking at the picture, wanting briefly to fuck someone with face paint on.

*

Over dinner, to the three males at the table, Allahna recounted portions of her time deployed in Germany as a staff sergeant for the Army’s military police.  She taught us the proper way to hold an imaginary handgun (the ‘teacup’), the way that she, given her small hands, had to grip it, how to breathe when firing a handgun, and that you only draw your weapon if your intent is to kill.

“All that talk about ’shoot to maim’ is bullshit.  If you draw, it’s because your life is in danger, and you need to neutralize whatever’s threatening you immediately.”

I tried to think of an instance where I found myself in this situation; after a brief moment, I’d found one.

Inevitably:  “So, did you ever have to?”

“Once, at a bar; this drunk guy started threatening us, and pulled a knife.  I pulled a gun, but my buddies tackled him before I had to use it.”

We all nodded our heads.

Incidentally, the one time my life was legitimately threatened involved a knife as well; instead of having buddies save the day, however, I voluntarily lost my cell phone and cash, and watched as the mugger ran off and the cloud of my inebriation quickly dissipated into the gray of the Parisian night sky.

Our reactions to this story was similar to the one we had in the afternoon when discussing the various forms of martial arts that she, all five feet of her, knew:  we were in awe.

On the drive home, we were all quiet, weary from last night, resting before we had to rally again, to make me forget the fact that I was less that one week single, and less than twenty four hours sober.

As it was, however, once night two of our two night bender began to take off, Allahna turned in early (headache, maybe migraine), leaving the rest of use to raze our senses on our own, a task to which we too easily rose.

*

And then it was late morning, and after a breakfast which featured Mike flailing his arms in an impromptu game of charades (“What’s that animal, you know, that one that, um, does this”), and me identifying the amorphous creature as a platypus (“How the fuck did you get that?”), they were all quickly packed and ready to go.

So I stood at her car, imagining her life inside that four-wheeled home.  Her, then, to me:  “I do want to sit down at some point and do this writing thing.  I read what you sent me.”

“Okay.”

“Good; we’ll talk soon,” she said.

“Yup,” I agreed, knowing with some sadness that if past performance were any indicator, it wouldn’t be the commonly held notion of soon.

And then she was gone, driving back to Connecticut, speeding into another breakup, and, for the next few months, waning unintentionally out of my life, forgetting her flip flops as she headed south.

Swingset Mathematics

Swingset Mathematics

Upon reaching the swingset, trailing far behind those children, those beautiful little creatures, screaming with delight at not having fallen and scraped their knees, who had already discovered how to be fiercely competitive and narrowing the range of possible career paths (consulting, investment banking, insurance, home-making, cocaine), a small group of my friends gathered around the two swings which we were able to obtain owing to their sufficiently fast legs and somewhat established standing amongst the fairer ones, enjoying their metaphysical places at the tables of their juvenile Olympus.

Two swinging children with a small gathering surrounding them, the lot of us taking turns so that the aspiring ones such as myself could enjoy pendular flight for a few minutes and feel the joy of ascent afforded with such constancy to the others.  Beyond the expected conversation of Star Wars, teachers, soccer, girls (gross), and singing the televisions commercial jingles we recalled from the previous week, somehow on this particular spring afternoon, with me in bad early nineties children fashion, back on the ground at this point, we began to discuss the various measures by which the world measures time.

With some degree of estimated, inherited accuracy, we were able to identify, enumerate and roughly define the basic units, me refraining after the measurement ‘year,’ allowing the others to stroke their puerile egos while shouting with pride Decade! Century!  Millennium! before pausing.  So what comes after Millennium? asked one of us, possibly me, although I am dubious.  And then one of us, a maladjusted boy from England answered with such convincing certainty a generation that we found ourselves hushed, spell-bound, our eyes whirling, tracing his motion, him pumping his legs and his large, large head, commanding our unequivocal reverence.

I cannot remember when or how quickly this error was revealed to me, nor by whom, but I do recall those woodchips upon which we stood, processing what it meant to span one thousand years, and how radical it must be to exceed even that humungous lump of imprecision; this precocious wonder then oozed slowly over to a tear-welling and tear-suppressed realization of the fact that my swinging friends, our strange ritualistic circle, and myself would all be dead by the time a generation had whooshed imperceptibly past.

The recess bell rang, and we lined back up, good students that we were, to go continue inventing countries for Mrs. Foley.

The Saint-Georges Renovations

The Saint-Georges Renovations

I first mistook the men for squatters,
working amidst the yellow block party lighting;
the dust and their lack of face masks
with no sign of ventilation
lending me to believe that they were there
by mistake,
walking like the exiled from a war long gone.

And every time the train would skip,
going from Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
directly to Pigalle (for eleven months home),
it would slow down, like a trolley in a zoo,
wanting to ensure that we could find those
hard-to-spot creatures in their natural habitat,
to see them feeding, congregating, widening
an entryway, laying down new tiles.

They sealed off the arches with a playground fence,
annulling the aesthetic of white porcelain gaps,
this one of two hundred and fifty renovations
falling slightly short of its intended goal of
un métro plus clair, un métro plus beau –

One cannot blame the architects, though;
it cannot be their fault that that space was a
departure point for the residents of a city
which produced the first sociological analysis
of suicide to launch themselves with swiftness
onto the tracks and into subsequent statistical studies.

When the station re-opened, I still didn’t need it,
as my own stop was one away;
I did find it once, however, when lost
on a run aborted by my nicotine trends,
I came across the melted metal green,
blocks from my flat and months into my year,
acknowledged the consequence of
my lacking curiosity, and then ventured on,
striding, and gasping, before happening
upon a part of town that I had
been advised against entering.

Hands Around Mugs and Subtitled Discusssions

Hands Around Mugs and Subtitled Discussions

Lovely day for coffee –
rain, clouds, hints of sun.
This café is new, and so is the context,
never before has this happened to us
at this time, place, way.

So we start with easy topics, your flight
to trace Joyce back to where he roamed the earth,
and to snap your daughter’s synapses with
things that I have not known either.

Then to what brought me here in the general sense,
the state, the job – what do I do, who is she,
I know it isn’t easy – but then of course the question
why here stricto senso, this coffee shop, you,
this revelation that we have stories, and that
when in other places, our candor surprises even ourselves.

I was just napping in my car, you know,
just resting up before, well, this.

Postcard Coaster

Postcard Coaster

In handwriting worse than normal, she
scrawled down a few sentences hastily conceived,
hastily transcribed, hesitantly dropped into a
mailbox I probably know.

As I open my own, numbered fourteen,
the key jamming as it normally does, the
current created by my swinging the door
catches the card and causes its fall, onto
the cement, sand from last winter still resident
in its cracks.

I read the address, the sentences, and
by the time I reach my apartment door, a
wave has resided, and it’s dead ink on paper,
I try to think to myself, knowing that that
is not yet true, that this is still a thing
to grasp, to which to cling, to read
word by word, letter by letter, pen stroke
by pen stroke, breath by breath by
heavy breath.

It isn’t until the whisky is watered down
that I note what the postcard depicts:
a waterfall which together we’d seen twice
and by the side of which, despite my
suggestion, we did not make love.

Marie Most Temperate

Marie Most Temperate

“I’ve never heard her swear,” said my mother of her mother, while the latter’s second husband constructed a deck onto the back of our house.  This was her mark of distinction, in my young head, from my other grandparents:  the purity of tongue.

Hardship free her life was not:  her first husband leaving for years before reappearing just as mysteriously, only to die of a third heard attack (“The third one, they say, is always the one that gets you,” my mother said, years ago, on I-84, passing the hospital at which her mother volunteered), raising my mother alone, colon cancer, and a mental breakdown (the Baptist Church).

It was the rheumatoid arthritis, though, that slowed her enough for the creeping beast called Alzheimer’s to sink its teeth into her kind-hearted grey matter (“Of course, they can’t know that’s what it is until the autopsy”).

The antics, manifestations, were rightly tragic, but we had to laugh as she was found carrying blue blankets, lost in a hospital corridor, to sigh as she sat in a car, having snuck out of our sight and into the seat, waiting to go see someone more progressed in dying than she, and to bite our lips when she talked of the current administration, led by Gerald Ford.

My mother cried often, my father huffed in his non-discriminating frustration with the world.  And as for me, I was most nearly brought to tears when in the nursing home, with its chemical smell and sterile walls (and a thermostat set to very high), my grandmother, who indeed had never cussed, had now forgotten how to speak, her side of the conversation sustained by slight nods and her Christian smile, and then the faintest, whispered ‘Good-bye,’ dribbling down her chin as I turned to leave, both of us knowing what would next be lost.

The Lost Glove Tragedies

The Lost Glove Tragedies

Photographed at the intersection of Avenue Philippe Auguste and Rue de Charonne, 11th arrondissement, Paris, on 1 February 2003.

In noting one, I noted many,
strung about the streets of Paris: single
gloves, missing their mates, lying on the
sidewalk, skewered on a fleur-de-lis,
placed upon a handlebar.

There was one I photographed, navy,
forced around the small orb of
a post in the eleventh, to the delight
of someone who loved me at the time,
although we couldn’t use the word.

Generally, though, I thought about the owner’s
discovery, getting home to his or her flat
five minutes from the nearest station, fishing
through pockets and finding keys,
phone, lighter, receipts and shopping lists,
cigarettes and something else,
but not the accompaniment to the floppy hand
lying on the kitchen table, staring back
and laughing.

Soon after the accidental
outset of my notations,
she became a fellow spotter, a detective
of singular loss (pointing: Mira, ¡un de tus perdidos!),
and as would happen, we
had trouble leaving work at work,
and found ourselves in spring, still looking,
still searching for a knitted glove,
a better way to make things fit,
a brief respite from that which was,
an avenue by which we might stop
all the yelling and the sex.