Immeasurable

My friend talks about vapors that we accidentally stumble into. She says it’s like a gray fog in a room filled with what was once there, or she says it could be a memory you weren’t even a part of, the creeps and coils into your arms until your bones ache like arthritis, and all you can do is blame yourself for getting lost. 

The wind blew mean through our ears last week and he said it so kind that we couldn’t let it blow our aura’s off

A cowboy gave me Patti Smith’s book and I lit a candle for the week. For all them days.

I listen to a book while I chop basil that tells of the four Buddhist immeasurables. 

“There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”

The moon is a brightness this week against the winter blue of an early sunset and I have decided to take up running again 

I haul my body above the still mountain fog and the air is so damn cold like 

stumbling into a good memory

and maybe it could all just be a mantra for keeping your aura on tight

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Ace of Wands

Cuban babies up well past eleven, sucking on bottles and music

Letting a small Italian woman with milky-blue eyes retell my life

The tarot cards speak of swords and fools and death. I understand more than I let on. Maybe that could be a superpower

My sister tells me in that old boat pub to not worry about giving my heart away. She says Jill you give the same amount of yourself to a stranger as you would to someone you love. She says don’t go changing but always remember that 4 quarters are better than 100 pennies in your purse

We greet the frayed parts of ourselves when we gather

My sister says it best that we’re our most us and I say it sideways when I say I feel too seen

We all know how to get there and we all know the way home

I stuff it in my pocket and let the nonna’s words fall into the seaweed

Understanding that I can write my own cards and still heed advice

We swap the love chore of collecting coffees in the morning and we share toothpaste, showers, birthday candles and cigars. We say we feel him everywhere but it means something different. My brother misses building forts in the woods. My mother misses being needed so borderline-badly. My sister and I miss knowing we had more time to right a path 

I watch humanity crawl the boardwalk at sunset and we all know the words to Bohemian Rhapsody in that way that only happens in the folds

Quiet superpowers with only the good quarters in my purse.

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We haul your sofa from Nambe and jump when spiders reach out from corners of the antiquities

Shag carpet hunting and navigating the thrill of the unknowns in the hardware store

We sleep hot in my sheets but I still reach to touch a foot, a back. In the morning we snooze to center and come back to the cuddle.

I miss you in the future lifetimes and I dream of things I had never compromised before

Babies and hard work and deep sleeps and the impossible joyful confusion of a happy marriage. Things I don’t know. But I know.

I pad around the floors and remember that I am always fine. I call my mom from the windy warm dog park and tell her things like yes I’ve been working hard and gosh it’ll be nice to be together again and I tell her I’m in love in sideways words and she knows. She always knows. I wonder how many times we are allowed to witness certain feeling stir up in the mud of the heart. A quotient allowance of joy. I wonder how many times the things we carve will taste good and I wonder if I will ever stop wanting to crawl into the sun and rest

I bike home from work to let my body crumple on the dusty brick floor where the sugar ants match and cry for the ones who pass and the collective loss of here. I let myself curl into the weight of grief. That non linear pavement that runs into the “maybe things will ease up” prayers fills the rooms and I can’t help but understand how much it stings. The stuckness of it all

I say goodbye and hello in the same breath these days because behind every full moon is the heavy slosh of moving forward.

Even in the impossible joy.

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Inspired  by John Taylor’s month away 

For once I’d much rather be me 

Tonight I drove past your street and I forgot to look. And finally ithe sky is cotton candy pink and blue again even the moon came out just a sliver sliver of hope the spring and the reminder that time marches on

What is a sliver of hope and the sky is clear blue again and the sun burns bright tonight and my friend smiles and we talk of goals and I edit words at the bar and I soak up the Wi-Fi and a smile from my best friends dimples that I’d missed and for once, I’d much rather be me.

marigolds

I want to call my dad and ask him what he’s been reading lately.  I want to tell him that I am trying to be good and I’d hear back, in an east coast staccato, “Can’t touch up the Mona Lisa, kid”

I want one of his clean-shaven cheek kisses in the morning and a giant squeeze of aftershave and toothpaste.

I want an Adirondack chair because he told he once that if you’ve got an Adirondack you’ve got your shit together

I want him to say ‘One two-three-four-five…what comes after five? Cocktails!”

All I really want to do is let this scream out that’s been building in my throat since I saw the edge.

Caught wanting to peel back these shrouds 

Weeping and laughing and shouting words that hold truth, without fancy fuckery

To drink a dirty martini with five hundred olives and dance in the desert in a skirt and smile

I’m tired of pastel graphics 

What will become of all of us once the internet burns?

Have we fled so far from the cave that we’ve forgotten how to make fire?

magical thinking

“Our breath is brief, and being so

Let’s make our heaven here below,

And lavish kindness as we go.”

― Robert Service

I carried one of his books back with me across the country. She stuffed it hurriedly and importantly into my bag. Pages swept with sea, torn and stained by a hurricane. I carried it to the desert and here it sits, on my old desk next to the marigold, importantly. I saved one of his masks from the old Ford. It fell into my lap as I pulled the visor down.

I’m having trouble being here. What is there to do that can be more important than sitting with a feeling? I am not certain that I am ever going to be the kind of person that I admire. Maybe it is best time to reckon with myself.

I would be a terrible bore to play chess against, because I am forever lingering. I’ve wanted to be the type of person that moves quickly and in a way that propels growth. Maybe I can be okay with the lingering. That could be enough for now. 

I just know that all I ever want to do is lie in bed and read dead poet’s words.  I want to sit in the soft sand and listen to seagulls fight over corn chips. I want to laugh with my aunt in the dewy grass and talk until memories feel real.. I want endless night hours, filled with slow dancing to Bruce Springsteen. To  slip between unknown meridians of time, because it doesn’t matter, really.

I want to sleep in my dad’s oversized old t-shirt until I feel better about waking up and making decisions that move me forward, away from here.

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I cannot look at the ocean through a window without wanting to touch it. I have always felt restless by the sea. It is the same way in this field. As I stare across the low land to the mountains that smack the sky, I want to lace up my tired shoes and run to the sun. The windows flood the day inside and my feverish head convinces my spine to stretch. The soup warms my belly and I wish to feel my body firm against fresh clothes. Instead I crawl under clean sheets and imagine it all washing over me anyway, in dreams. 

There is a theme this year already and I don’t know if I’m brave enough to understand that I am brave enough just yet.  I listen the the wind howl and an audiobook talks of morals. I wonder about the origins of the word Loss and think of the French name, Toulouse. I sip ginger bone broth and pad around the red cement floors, wondering which new drawer to fold my new identity into. I gaze across the gold fields at every hour these days and the skyline shifts but the mountains stand firm. Perhaps the dog understands why we’re here. Perhaps he even knows where we’re going, which is how he sleeps so gratefully. 

I tuck my shaky limbs under heavy blankets and imagine that if these walls ripped apart I’d be alone in this big white bed, this big golden field, still safe. Still whole. 

/She said losing love is like a window in your heart/everybody sees you’re blown apart/

The things I whisper aloud in the liminal dawn is kept close and the music finds me still on the long highways between obligations. I watch my face in all the mirrors, hoping that behind the familiar eyes there will be familiar comfort in change. I read of woolgathering and remember that to observe it all is always the only task.

To accept the new lonely for what it offers, to bow and gracefully heave it along through my new days, 

There might lie the theme.

So much. 

I find myself whispering those words in the small morning in half-awake dream before the world hears.

I don’t yet understand if it is something I’m asking for, or if offering as a gift. 

So much. 

I remember to lean in more and more lately. Remembering how it felt as a child to dive off a jetty. Remembering the thrill of tubing too fast over concrete waves and the blue smack of the water, of release. 

I think of all the hurt. I think of him in the bed, aching and hating. I think of all the things I could do, I could say, to be comfort; salve to his wounds. But perhaps I know so much more than before, that to do so would be to pull from a very foundation. To squeeze a hurt only keeps it from shifting. I do not yet know how to fix a broken bone. Nor a broken heart. The only truth I keep remembering is that you can only go forward with your love. There is only so much in salve. That it’s okay to need more. 

so much.

on holes

We stopped in a small town in Texas for gas and chips. Everywhere Trump signs, tractors, and those camo buffs that wouldn’t ever block a sneeze. The faucet was leaking in the women’s bathroom. I tightened the levers as hard as I could, but it kept drip-dripping.

I wished it well, walked out and we kept driving east

I read Bell Hooks and she talks of loving oneself radically, underneath the burden of a patriarchal design. She writes that women are taught they are better at loving, which is dangerously untrue. What they learn is that they are better at folding the laundry and compromising the definition.

 I see it and then I don’t, like the squiggly lines behind my eyes when I look at the sun. It is unwise to ingest everything as real, even things you know to be true.

My boss tells me that psychic empaths have holes inside of them where others can leak in

This makes sense to me in a perspicuous way

A woman used to make three different kinds of tuna salad each time she prepared it. 

One child liked onion no celery. 

Another liked celery no onion. 

The third liked both, plus mustard. 

She did this every time and when asked how she liked her own tuna salad, she didn’t know

What this all means is that there is foundation in understanding oneself enough to not take the leaking faucet personally.