I am still stuck on the gods and goddesses...

The goddess asked, why do you suffer?

I am not eternal, he said.

Mortal, would you like to live forever in the sky?

Yes.

Would you place your soul in my hands and close your eyes?

Yes.

Close your eyes.

For a moment he felt emotion ripple through him. Life surged.

As his rapid heart slowed, he waited for his goddess to give new orders.

He waited, and soon chilly air pushed the sun away and he was just another shadow.

He opened his eyes and saw solitude. His goddess and his soul were gone.

Placing his hands together as the goddess had, he bent his head to hide his face.

A banged-up haiku for spring:

Petals spread wider

awash in secret hollows

where blown-glass life blooms

We'll buy anything if we're standing in front of it. Really. When crap is crowding us out of our homes we'll have tag sales. As much as I love tag sales, I have enough junk of my own, unless you have something that I don't…

My April 11 horoscope reads, You're energetic enough to tackle almost anything right now, so get down to business with that one big project you have been putting off for far too long. You surprise everyone, including yourself!

So hopeful and vague and perfect for a nation filled with Wal*Mart shoppers…Just go in those doors. You can have almost anything right now, so get down to business. Surprise everyone, including yourself!

Only the imagination makes horoscopes come true. Read all of the horoscopes and pick the one you like best, then cast the spell by digging around in your treasure of hopes and ambition. What's in your heart? Success? Or LoveMoneyHappinessHealth?

Horoscopes are juggling with flaming blades, because often we bleed or burn when we see our wishes come true.

Look at this: In college all I wanted was for T. to stay with me. Sadly, I realized weeks later after T. had moved out, that reality is not waiting around for your dreams and prayers to come true. Reality is a new face for every occasion. Reality was me, and I was drunk and standing in a strange neighborhood tapping lightly at T's bedroom window after 2 am. No answer. I saw my sad, milky face reflecting back from a dark raised ranch window, and went home. Had he stayed with me I would have continued my daily pout, wondering why he would go off with friends or forget to tell me he would be out late. During a heavy snowstorm he was more than an hour late getting home. Even accounting for snowy Long Island roads, I didn't think a five-mile drive would have kept him so long. I called work. He is gone, they told me.

His small red sports car was in a ditch, I decided, so I went out looking. I eventually found his red car parked at a bar. He was just having a good time and didn't think of me. I understand now that this is the way things go when someone doesn't love you anymore. Did I really want him to stay with me?

At the bar J. unzipped his leather jacket and reached inside saying, I have something for you.

I said, It's not a small dog, is it?

The last time J. had something in his jacket, a small long-haired head and snout quivered and turned, looking at all the strange smiling faces staring back.

Yesterday he had a daffodil.

So, in summary, horoscopes are crap. Take the daffodils when you can get them.

Lily just flew through the doggy door and is growling at the night.

Dreams linger like chocolate. Staining my thoughts momentarily, their secrets come apart like cotton candy.

Today before I woke: a jackrabbit with tall white ears appears in Ann's backyard as I step out of her rundown cottage. I argued with her sons and their families crowding the living room with jutting elbows and knees. They are greedy. Through gossamer strands of sugar-scented pink, I wake.

In reality you need a gas mask to enter the squalor at Ann's. At 80-something years old last year, she finally left in an ambulance at 4 am after falling outside. She had rolled onto her back, arms and legs wriggling in the air. She didn't like Nig-ras, and swore wild dogs stampeded through the yard. She hated the neighbors, those $unsabitches.

She left messages. Kendra. Kendra. You there! Call me. Can you call me? Kendra? Listening to the recording I heard the phone clatter down. Shit! Ann said.

On her front stoop less than a minute later I knocked. Her TV was loud enough to feel with my feet out on the porch. I went in.

Can you hear that! she said.

4 am waiting for the ambulance: She had used an apron to tie a straw gardening hat over her head. She covered her cold hands in socks. She looked like Mother Hubbard, The Turtle. I crouched behind her and waited for police to make the walk up her drive, their flashlights washing rutted stone left to right.

In a few hours I would be going to my grandmother's funeral. I shivered as my hair twisted in a chilly breeze and got stuck in Ann's gnarled grip.

My son is stuck in the car, she insisted.

Ann, your son is safe and fine. He is not stuck here. Her son(s) are nearly 50 and living who knew where.

No! Check my bedroom, it's warm where he was sleeping. I can feel it on the bed. Then he was out in the car...

Are you cold Ann? Can I sit you up a little more?

I squeezed behind her on the ground and propped her sitting up. I stuck my legs behind her and she fell back. Her straw brim hit my knees and knocked the strange apron/ turban off her head.

Policemen stood by with flashlights.

We called for an ambulance.

OK. I asked them, should we do anything?

Nope. You're doing fine.

Soon, paramedics pulled on latex gloves and turned to Ann.

How are you?

Skin hanging off her bones and folds catching shadows, Ann asked, what are you doing here?

We're going to help you.

Get out, she said. I felt muscles tighten somewhere in her back.

I said, Ann, it's OK to go with them. They can help.

Minutes later I watched red strobe lights slip through bare trees as the ambulance moved away. The police came closer. What was my name? Where did I live? Thank you so much ma'am.

I crawled back to bed next-door and shoved cold feet beside Jerry. I smelled like an 80-year-old woman, and would say goodbye to my grandmother as soon as the sun was up.

Ann writes me letters I can't really read. Both her sight and her ability to swing a pen around are gone. She lives with a daughter in Florida now, and I live here beside an empty cottage full of a strange past.

I'll write back. She is just a poor old woman waiting for a letter and her eyesight to return.

If I wanted normal life, I wouldn't be watching TV...

Around age 19 I really needed a heavy dose of some other reality, but I still refused TV.

Actually, the only TV in the rental cottage I shared belonged to Pam and Vinny. -- Class A assholes. I would rather be reading about what the vultures did to their carcasses, but I will have to settle for memories.

While I sat in my room at night watching shadows move on the walls, missing the guy that left me for someone with long red hair and proper New York accent, I often wondered if my slow-leaking tire would be flat in the morning. Every week I found myself rolling the stupid thing to the corner station for air. Generally I remembered to fill it while I got gas, but on occasions when a friend is puking streaks of colorful vomit along the side of the dented up Tercel, I just wanted to get home.

Pam and Vinny and I shared a wall between our bedrooms. On their side of the wall was the beloved color television. On the other side was me. Across their room, they slept with heads propped toward the beautiful television with its volume jacked to reach over a whining air conditioner. Loud infomercials blared about the wonders of things, just inches from my head.

I prayed for their death or an act of God. Making my rounds for something new that would be the cure for sadness, I regularly hunted through thrift shops. They were also the only stores I could afford. Something in the back of my head must have been whittling away at solutions for Pam and Vinny. On a shelf disturbing the dust was a wind-up alarm clock that had not been there the week before. That's the answer. I wound it and set it. A few hours later I adjusted its speed so it kept perfect time.

I plunked my little Big Ben on the floor by my bed and waited. As the Pam and Vinny TV ran into infomercial crap, I knew they were out.

Creeping to the circuit panel in the hall, I started flipping breakers until I heard the damn TV shut off.

They awoke in a frenzy. They were, hot, sticky, and late for work. Poor bastards.

I am a sour bitch with a pen like a knife like a wound and I want to feel and hurt and learn.

Words burst and fade and I chase them, cutting and killing. It was an accident. I sliced some vital thing into little ribbons that soaked into a greedy earth.

Daydreams are so clear, but when I look for timid things that crept through my head on the way to work, they are already dead.

Walking across the cracked pavement with a fat lip and low hopes Friday, I went to work repeating the stuff in my head. Waiting for the page were words like kids with scissors. I had just a few seconds before everything was wrecked by time and the glum routine of following my feet upstairs.

Writing is not the right words in the right order. Anyone can shuffle magnetic letters on the refrigerator, or swallow a P, like a friend had said his baby did. They were taking x-rays and things, looking for it. Writing is a lump of clay with a few of my fingerprints already beginning to shape it. Just one poke into the soft stuff and I am obligated. If I don't shape this thing right it's gonna sag and fall apart. It's gonna be confusing. I need a precise thought. I need symmetry, beauty, and a reader.

Waking full of shortcomings, I looked down as my feet dangled. Everything felt impossibly huge. I was a little kid again and I could not see over the steering wheel toward life, running naked and stupid, but never getting out of the way. Until my feet touched the floor I had no idea that not everything was possible, and not everyday was happy.

Somewhere between little kid and middle school kid, when I realized while trapped on the bus that I had forgotten to do the math homework, the little spurts of emotion that made up my carefree mood had rotted. Ants crawling over green fuzz. It was dead. Next to it was happy. Happy had a hole in its head, and fun was also skewered by age. At 14 it just had no place in a world where homework, or not, meant the difference between falling asleep and staring at shadows all night as stress whispered to me.

I started falling asleep in school. No one poked me or cleared their throat or wrote a note to my mother. Either no one cared or no one found it interesting, but I doubt they were not looking.

Before I reached middle school I was already crying that I did not want to go to school. I couldn't sleep and I would be tired and I would stress, cry, fling the covers aside and burst across the hall in my bubble-gum pink nightgown and wake my parents. I CAN'T SLEEP…

I stay up much too late now chasing thought across the keyboard, trying to pick the weight of words off my shoulders. As I drive to work, the words start. Often at night, they're burned and gone and I stare inward, waiting.

Today's crocuses wrapped their arms over their heads as an overcast sky pressed down. Just days ago they flung their petals wide beneath sunshine.

Lily and I have been on the street, alternately lunging and not lunging at cars. We run through the woods with Hershey and dwindling time and stress chasing us. Where the hell is Bandit? I leave Ozzy home if I go far. He's got that Short Leg Syndrome.

Will her words really bind them? The justice of the peace talks, turning pages with coral colored nails. Will vows wrap around their hearts and keep them together? Jerry's sister married Joe this weekend as I watched from behind my camera.

A single white rose in Joe's lapel splashed like a star against his dark suit. Colleen's gauzy white embroidery shimmered in a veil behind a cluster of deep purple and hot pink flowers. In every photo she is smiling except for the one conspiratorial talk I catch. She and Joe lean together, their voices too low to hear. I rely on the image alone and decide they were telling secrets. Married less than an hour and they are already sharing things meant for no one else. They have begun weaving an exclusive place in the world that only their words and gestured can enter.

March 29. Orion is losing his height in the sky and slipping away as spring comes. Scorpio is behind him. Orion flees as the myth unfurls. A scorpion battled and killed him. The gods tossed the memories into the sky.

J. gave me a clear, pale stone with many angles and crags. It's a special stone, he said. I have kept it, but it was asking for you, he told me. Someone special gave it to me to keep, but you should take it now. Keep it, and when you are ready, pass it to someone else who needs it or deserves it.

So I have the stone and each time my fingers bump against it in its tiny, quiet hiding place, I remember J. as he leaned toward me with his hands gently wrapped around something. He was still and his face relaxed. I have something for you, he had said. I understand his expression now. It was relief and sadness.

Into my hands he placed the stone he must have used to soak up his emotion for someone in his past. Someone I won't ever know. Somehow ascribed to the pale stone is strength that grows from the weight of an ordinary thing to something growing heavier with secrets, longing, emotion, and a final confession. Inflated with so much the stone was too heavy, then unbearable, like a soul. Treasure it, love it, believe in it, and give it away.

Orion was too boastful and other gods turned to stare. Goddess Artemis and mother Leto heard his secret: he would banish all wild animals from earth. Wrung from the gossamer stuff of heavens and myth, they would send a Scorpion to defeat him. The Scorpion either killed him, or he escaped, and the god Zeus either raised the deadly creature to a place in the night sky, or saw that Orion had started to swim away. He should not escape. Calling for Artemis, Zeus pointed across the water to a speck on the horizon. She was terrific with an arrow. Zeus asked, can you hit that?

Later retrieving her kill she found Orion with her arrow in his head. Her gifts became too heavy to carry. Her heart was a stone. Orion was a better shot, but given the chance, he would say that the better aim was always hers.

She begged for Zeus to restore Orion, but love was not enough. She had to give Orion away. By herself she threw him against the stars to hold his place all winter long.

If Lily is not an obedient girl by the time my buddleia blooms, please send in the scorpions.

All the myth makes me think of tattoos -- astronomy and the zodiac spilling in a milky way across my skin.