Little flowers on a forest floor:
Mother nature shapes secrets
with darkness, hunger, and cold
that struggle to life through mud and stone...
This verse means only that I staggered around trying to stay upright after avoiding little petals about a tenth of an inch wide and just an inch off the ground. The world's smallest flower grows in clusters as grass thickens toward summer.
I pictured scraps of paper dropped in clusters. Torn edges made shapes resembling nothing until I understood the frayed grays, blues, and white-rimmed reds.
My life is a mosaic of fuck-ups, I said. We sat in a dark bar after 2 am laughing at our horror stories. Confessions come out best in the hours before sleep, when we will dream and soon forget.
When I was five or six I thought that the 10-cent adjustable rings made of metal soft enough for my little fingers to bend was the most desirable thing at eye-level. As a kid the world exists in one-minute segments. Life is all about what is happening now. And now. Then now. I saw something pretty that I could reach, and fell in love. And just like real life, I would soon be sorry.
I looked at it long enough that my mother warned, put that back. Mothers are always a few steps ahead. I was stuck with the unfair disadvantage of never having been there before, while mom probably knew when we left that we would soon return to the department store.
I faked it. My sticky little kid's fingers hid that ring as we left the store.
Back in the car and on the way home, I lasted less than a mile before I said, the ring is in my pocket. Something like that. I know I did not say, hey, I jammed it in deep with the lint. I hoped to sound innocent.
A few minutes later we stood in the store. I saw the ring's empty slot staring at me.
Go give it back, my mother said.
Stuffing it in place was not enough. I had to hand the ring to the clerk.
I don't remember that part.
Lily would have just swallowed the thing. I was not yet old enough to be devious, while dogs are naturally collusive and slick. Good girl Lily.
Listening to Jerry tonight I hear, what did you do? What did you do? Hmm.
Jerry, are you talking to something that can answer you?
No. Ozzy is an asshole.
Ozzy had snuck in to finish off the cat food.
A couple years ago:
The noise started on Wednesday and blared for days. Finally, I knocked on Ann's door to ask her to turn down her TV.
I thought she might have been dead in there, but I saw her on the porch a day or so after the volume spiked. With her front door open the sound of infomercials and endless programming roared.
I called next-door, which was pointless.
You have to go over there, Jerry said. I had come home from work and found him clicking through TV stations with the remote. He would listen for a few seconds, then click. Click. Click.
What are you doing?
I am trying to find the channel Ann has on, he said.
Go listen to the answering machine, he said.
When Ann had finally had enough of something, we got the call. Kendra. KENDRA! It's Ann. I am not sure … it's Sunday. Are you there? Kendra?
I heard her phone fall and hit the coffee table. Shit, she said. I imagined her heaps of pointless notes and lists and envelopes in rubber bands crashing down. The table was dragged to the center of her shabby living room beside a couch where she slept, woke, ate, slept again, and lived.
You have to go over there, Jerry said.
Since our bedroom was far enough away from Ann's booming television, we were able to sleep, but as soon as we passed a window facing Ann, we heard commercials. We listened to romances, a comedy with its sharp cracks of laughter, and pauses just long enough to make us think the small electronic pieces inside her set had blown.
I walked up her rutted drive and skipped the rotted step to her porch. I tried knocking. I banged. I tapped the windows with my ring, thinking the sharp sound would carry through to her. I finally just opened her door. She was dressed, unlike the time I caught her naked and swaddled in loose skin dangling like a faded dress.
She asked, can you hear that!
I turned to her TV and started pushing up and down arrows. When the volume was normal again, I asked her why she left it on for so long and so loud. Summer heat glued itself to my skin and I went home. My life was lighter. Ann's life was a cluttered path to the TV.
I don't remember her answer. She is in Florida now with her daughter and the house sits next-door, staring at us.
Ann wrote a letter to me weeks ago, and I have still not answered.
How's that letter to Ann going? Jerry has asked me a hundred times, but I don't know why I am avoiding it.
Ann told me she thought her mother was in the house with her. If Ann was 80-something at the time, whatever poked her and nudged her while she slept was not her mother.
It's her, I know it, Ann once said. She is with me. She was trying to wake me up. Jesus, framed and dusted, hung on her wall watching the heavens as his halo added a warm hue of gold to his embossed profile. Does a devout woman also believe her mother has crawled back from beyond to kneel in the piles of filth in this room to poke her daughter?
Yesterday I was down on the ground with the rose bush and saw its misshapen growth. Road salt, winter boots, and a neighbor's plow had torn its limbs away. Looking at Ann's empty house on the hill next-door I pictured time like a string sewing the days together.
Lily would have been more practical and efficient. Lily would have bitten her.
Reaching down with burning fingers mother nature set fire to knotted buds. By noon pastel hues traced tree limbs where petals stretched under the first warm day of spring.
The season has been waiting, and already Lily and I have seen much of its early hints. Along stream banks and pooling shadows I see bloodroot and red trillium open. They are an early beauty, but brief. They are ephemeral, and die back to just their underground parts after a short bloom. Native oaks and tulip trees will never see the spotted reds and whites on the forest floor -- within their branches winter's dormant spell still lingers.
While the gods and goddesses write stories in the stars, warmth and light wipe away winter.
I prayed for rain.
Dropping to hot earth beside a wilting flower I begged the sky, while old trees snickered in the shade.
Looking at petals quivering in arid breezes, I could not decide if I should cut this little strained life short, or wait.
Sometimes the gods and goddesses are gone, the mystical constellations are asleep, and reality dances around me with a pitchfork, jabbing. Bastard, my illusions are gone.
So sorry Lily, I am no fun to play with today.
Waiting with limp fingers against the keys I realize the strain of a quiet mind.
Someone asked me, how do you think of things to write about?
I don't think of things to write about, I pray for them. Something in my brain spits images or pieces of a phrase at me and I start knitting…
I keep stray thoughts on paper hoping that the words will do more than keep track of where I plunk my wine glass.
I think I have somehow chopped the line tethering me to interest. It's all the same flavor, unless it's a dog.
Rain fell before sunrise to mirror a cold sky.
In African mythology the goddess of rain, the rainbow, and the harvest searched for a husband.
I imagined a carefree being with the power of life and death tangled in her imagination as she peeked behind mountains and beneath oceans. I saw dark, flowing hair slide against her arm as she reached to tip back a plateau of dormant winter fields waiting for spring. She found just shadows and a cool pocket of hard earth with nothing to offer. Seasons earlier a handsome farmer had walked the fields and stared at his stretching shadow scarring the ground. Like many of us, his dreams and hopes would reach out and die many times. When the goddess finally touched the earth where he had stood, he was gone.
I imagine her as invisible outside of imagination, and unaware that no husband hides waiting.
Across a dark bar J. asks, will you ever get married Kendra?
I don't think so.
Why?
Don't know. I just don't ever picture it or think about it.
Doesn't Jerry want to marry you?
I don't think so.
Jerry took his heart out once and put it on a satin pillow, then walked down the isle with a woman whose inner beauty faded more quickly than cut flowers.
