Tawny

Thick storm white framed windows, lattice a crisscross shield against winter, fit carefully into eighteen windows twenty years or more ago, picture and bay and widow and wide –when spring comes these painted shut safeguards stay put.

Upon snow melted, I throw open front and back door to welcome fresh air and neighbourhood cats and sometimes the daughter from down the street with the Dora backpack and the thick rimmed glasses too wide for small eyes who stands in the doorway and yells: Oh hi, are you there, hi, hello?

On days when rain comes to grow grass green and on days when I fight that same earache, I watch a VHS about vinyl and think about dark things that roll in with clouds: the mortality of my parents, your missed call because you crashed the car on the way home from work, taxes not filed, being alone, alone, the cat and I late in life when wrinkled, unrealized dreams trapped in expired lotion bottles on dresser top to look as though I take careful time primping for the great date, dreary dreams drenched.

Breaking late, sun cracks grey sky bringing bright glow, pieces of orange glass broken and sprawled across scratched hardwood creaking, the light scares away shadows of thought leaving emptiness like stomach starving.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

The Starry Night Balancing Act

High and low, no middle between, I saw him on the street shuffling feet without steps to cross back and forth across the cross walk blinking red hand stop, blinking green man go, blinking be happy, be normal, be a functioning part of society, please.

Small animal eyes, feral black mud puddles sucking blinking light, sucking life light, sucking recognition, he said: hi girl; girl, I know you, girl. How you been, girl?

Skittish hands offering trembling shake palm to palm, nervous to calm, he said: I’m not good, girl. I’m not me, girl.

Intersection dissection of sticky situations, standing 82^nd to 109 and thinking: help, call, money?, food, shelter, need.

The basics.

Taken for granted after a tummy-filling meal and a bottle of wine, the walk home interrupted by a familiar face wearing unfamiliar panic, to me he said: Not okay, girl. Not me, not here. I was there, in Grey Nuns wearing gown, taking meds, talking, talking, talking ‘bout my problems, saying nothing, saying everything. Hey, you talk to my kids, girl? You tell them I like this, girl?

Head shake no, my steady elbow taking him to steady concrete corner, his shoulders caved like weak mountain rocks, landslide to rubble, he shrunk there on the street – smaller and smaller and smaller –, a faction of the man who used to, with toothy clown smile, blow balloon animals and make magic tricks happen.

Be gone now, girl. Gotta go, girl. Staying with a friend ‘round here, girl. Maybe see you again? Maybe not.

Shuffle side step steady pace into the crowd and then gone.

Bewildered, world moving slowly, motion blurring through tears welling over makeup’d eyes leaking sorries all over street corners, I cried for crossed wires in cross walks causing overdoses of anxiousness, sadness, madness, tiredness, those ‘nesses better treated with medications than conversations.

Hey man, I yelled. I’m thinking about you, man.

xoxo,

M. L. H’art

Conversations with Dad (Canto III)

“It was the reason they quit the band you know?” Cracked fingernail rimmed with engine oil black flipping dog-eared liner notes.

Sand paper scratch pack-a-day laugh: “they left 10cc to record that triple threat concept album.”

Scanning the track list, a shaking hand ups the needle, drops it expertly onto “Save a Mountain for Me,” no record scratch-skip or two bar too late entrance, just perfect hiss-pop slide into opening note.

“You know the one, what was it called? Consequences. The gizmo – no shit, that’s what it was really called! – let them create this real orchestral sound with just a small box on the guitar bridge. Wild, man. Just wild.”

One finger boogey, a side to side head nod, big trucker man feet too tired to move too fast, singing: “It sounds like a choir when the chain gangs shout, save me a mountain for when I get out!”

We don’t talk about the fact he can’t leave the country without pardon. Possession or trafficking or just plain tax evasion: he won’t admit what.

Pale blue eyes sparkling, memories of The el Mo and that time he almost saw the Stones (you know, when they billed themselves as opening act The Cockroaches and April Wine was slated to headline), or the time he really saw Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with Dylan and Baez.

Memory a lock-safe of the indulgent decade: cover art and guitar licks and long-past lyrics as religion replacing hard-pewed Catholic upbringing and alter service and Hail Mary’s.

“The Police, Duran Duran, Frankie goes to Hollywood. Those boys had their teeth into everything.”

We don’t talk about the fact his teeth are falling out, all but three on the top shelf, cracked like spring-soft lake ice, nicotine died fissures topographic tears in hard enamel, lonely soldiers choking on bile breath.

“Now this one!” Loud voice, like yelling over basement hertz pounded out by jacked subs, even though the empty living room’s the venue stage.

Singing again, louder to cover up the volume knob now on nine: “My body the car, slowly burning out the rubber and stripping the gears,” head tipped back showing soft gullet folds bouncing over blissed-out vocal chords.

I wait for the refrain, for the part that goes: “She’s leaking oil, my body the car, the color of blood.”

He doesn’t talk about the diabetes or the sleep apnea or the high blood pressure pills he pops twice a day, replacing the speed he used to shake or the weed he used to smoke or the coke he used to snort.

He don’t need to, not when Godley and Crème are singing.

xoxo,
M.L. H’art

Μεταβολή

Sinew-knotted hands cupping ample double-d’s dropping to the floor, she says: no one tells you how your body will change. Puffing up sternum to present barely-there-a’s protected under piles of foam and wire, ribcage dominant, I nod.  

Tucking damp tissue see-through with snot under the band of her long-stopped silver watch, she says: getting old, it takes courage! Watching her struggle up out of the faded green corduroy reading chair with the precious doily slip cover, her joints wired shut and held stiff, I nod, bending fluently at the waist to offer her an arm up.

You just can’t lose it like you used to, thirty-something belly jiggle laugh at mirror image, bicep shake a wave goodbye to ripened body and trim days gone past. Staring at soft belly and Jello thighs refracted in bathtub light, velocities interrupted by soap bubbles, I sigh in anticipation.

You’ll notice a change, once you’re healed and well, the surgeon says, wrinkle-soft hands running the raised length of scar. Swallowing hard, imagining unpredictable physical transformation, I nod.

But it’s not the sagging tits or sore connecting joints or relaxing skin or mending scar; it’s the way I get hungry or the way I feel hormones or the way I burp or the way I can’t predict the way I am that changes most. Outward: slow, a gradual gaining of lines and growing gray hairs. Inward: tumbling, an uncanny upheaval of surity and stirred sense of understanding.

They call this an adjustment period, like when you got your period for the first time and you thought: now I’m a woman. The adjustment period, what no one likes to say about the change, is that it never ends.  

xoxo,
M.L. H’art