Melting Shadows

The paintings on the wall of the Clay Center are small but powerful. I have come to them in a deepened and worried frame of mind. I call to Emma to wait, look at the picture, what does it say to you, which one is your favorite? Emma is consumed in the thin presence of Now, and doesn't know what answers I want. She merely tugs at her friend's sleeve, and then embraces her, which would be so awkward if she were grown and her friend was grown. I think to myself, we don't greet each other like that, as adults. I am cut off from the others, keeping Emma in my sight, because I am so unlike them. The good moms. The moms that bake cookies and put bows in their daughters' hair. Emma tucks her hair behind a protruding ear, and I almost audibly gasp at her naivety. Someday she will know she is different. She doesn't see it now, but someday she will exist there on the fringes where the population is spread out like the sheen of butter on a piece of bread. But now, she points to a painting of dots, dots of different colors and sizes. Whose borders, though, are perfectly curved in never ending lines. No paint bleeds outside the dots and their definity. The dots line up like soldiers readying for battle, in perfect formation. There is no room for me, a mom whose imperfection leaves prints in the wooden gallery floor. My dot would be oval, or shaped like an amoeba, blue paint spilling from its irregular shape. One painting is called "Melting Shadows", a modern looking thing of a painting, and I think of black-gray streaks on a unclean window. Emma is ready to go.

dissolving descending
in rivulets on the
dirty side of the window
I have forgotten the sun
where do these thin
streams of obscurity
originate out of the
bleak underbelly of the
gray sky I pull back
the rock of the day
dormant for too long
and reveal a tender
place that has no air
to heal light has
shriveled like the skin
of a hand held in water
too long the outside is
melting a candle that
cannot hold its shape
and loses itself over
a silver candelabra
I have become fluid the
tension of the surface
formed by gravity and
the laws of physics which
appears as the only things
that make sense

Eve of the Recital

she dances with grass stains on her tights
and demands that I twist her hair at the
nape of her neck into a tornado fastened
with brown bobby pins I watch her wave
her arms like weeping willow branches as
her bit of bangs falls to the corner of her
hazel eyes so unlike anyone and her
shirt brandishes peace signs as she
arabesques at her teacher’s command
slow movements like she is under water
I gaze at her stopping time to be in
awe of this fleck of a girl straight hair
ribs protruding under her clothes she bends
to tuck a loose ballet slipper lace away
and returns to first position so delicate
her fingers meet an invisible barrier but
carry the weight in a figurative basket of
air and grace so serious is she her pink
tutu bounces as she travels to center on
the toes of her tatty slippers they
must do until recital and I wonder what
flowers to bring to her that day as she
exits at curtain one I believe her favorites
are pink carnations as long as the wrapping is
pretty she completes her dance christened
Tiny Cakes and she is grave in the last turn
clock wise and on toes she proceeds
off stage I gather my things in my mind flowers
an offering to the performer I seek her in the
dancer’s dressing room filled with mottled colors
of tulle and tiny girls just learning to twirl

Small Things

It may seem strange how we used to wait for letters to arrive;
But what's stranger still is how something so small can keep you alive.
-- Arcade Fire


it is the small things a pearl of a thing
tucked into a memory folded over in a
crease of time I see them embedded
in the haze of a star a million light years
away they are weary these travelers
these little things a breath inaudible
a wind on the back of my neck what
tiny things I tighten my fingers around
them my knuckles turn white trying
to cleave to them this ant of a thing
that breaks at a touch melting in the
heat of my palm I open up the flesh
of my hand to divulge a splintering
of my life line such a miniature
of a thing dancing in the white specks
descending in the liquid of a souvenir
store snow globe what a diminishing of
things falling away into a crevasse of
remembrance where I hide when I need to
subsist I make ends meet on these things
I know are you

An End

I have taken up my nightly running habit again. The first night, I believe it was by the grace of God I ran without fail for an hour. I needed it. I needed the feeling I got from it. I felt Him around me. I felt Him pressing down on me, not oppressively, but to bind me up in a tight comfort. I have felt a drying up in me for awhile. I felt a jolt of something, running, that this wasn't the end, but a beginning. When I woke up in the morning, my legs were a mess of sore discomfort. To go down the stairs was a bit of a trial. But it was good, the reminders of an awakening.

I listen to lots of different music when I run. I detest songs with cellophane lyrics; my husband will tell me how he likes a song, and I will say, "But what is it about?" Anyway, some certain lines in songs call to me, and something blossoms from them. Sometimes it something happy, sometimes it is strange and lonesome, but it is definite parts of something that comes from a source that isn't all dried up after all.

"This can't be the bitter end." - Silversun Pickups

the end it marks
the last of the
movie reel when the
stiff film noisily flicks
about the projector
rousing drunkards from
a thin sleep and young
loves from touching anxious
fingers in moments of pulsing
light it is the end a dark
mark of punctuation that
a forlorn student strikes
away with an eraser drowned
in saliva it is a concentration
a close of an era a mark
on the wall of time
staccato a caveman drawing
a rough human figure and then
becoming extinct this end
this termination a pink slip in
the pocket of a listless
man this conclusion of
events the children file
off stage at the end of
their pageant and mothers
crane their necks to see
their children in the
spotlight just one more time
when youth drains away and leaves
a brittle shell of skin overlaying
bone a taut drum that
beats beats beats
as the sun descends into
the mouth of a bleeding horizon
is it the end a pulling up of events
into a tiny place
a dot on the slide
of a microscope something
to marvel at an oddity that
only exists frozen on a
pane of glass

Dictionary

There are so many ways
to define worn. I can
count them off for you;
one: showing affects of wear,
like a grandfatherly sofa, with a
red fringe the cat toys with.
Or, second: weakened and
frayed by use; like dollars sewn
together with seams of tape
in hopes of passing them off
as legitimate. Or three,
my personal favorite:
worn, hackneyed, to be used so
much as to have lost meaning,
cliché, a trite experiment in
permanence, a crumpled
bit of refuse under the cushion
of a couch, a bill falling
apart at the joints fabricated
from all the folding in and
out and in and just fading
like a pop culture phenomenon,
an idea that evokes hysteria
then dies out so quickly it
is as if the idea never
existed.

Before Christmas

It is near Christmas. Two days away. In winter, in the mountains of West Virginia, there is always snow. And cold. And most days are accompanied by an endless gray sky punctuated only by the bare fingers of trees old enough to hold their limbs up that high. I am itching to be done with work; I have just this one building to take care of, these few people to tend to, then my time will be mine again.

In the office, I glance over my patient list, and plan the most efficient use of time and quickest path to different rooms. Outside, the snow is falling. And I have a long trip home. I begin; a few patients tolerate my presence. Betty, in particular, rolls her wheelchair along in a rather fast pace, and grabs me and begs me fretfully to take her home, surely I know where that is, now she will miss them, her family, they are coming, don't I hear her? I point to the window and try to draw her attention to the persistent snow.

"It's so cold out", I console. Her knotted fingers curl tightly around my forearm. "We have a place for you here, a nice warm bed, and your family would rather you stay here for the night."

Her fingers relax a little, and she releases my arm, looks at me through her glasses. The lenses are thick and covered in finger prints. Then they know I'm here, my family, Betty reasons, and then glances into the doorway of her room, now her home, and tries to make her deteriorating mind believe this is her place. Her hospital bed is spread over by a quilt, its stitches all hand done and small. I glance over at her hands, at the knuckles swollen with arthritis, nails cut short, and the thin skin housing the bones and ropes of tendons sprinkled with dark spots. Perhaps they once made these tiny stitches, once when the fingers were limber and slim.

"Betty, did you make this?" I question, running my hand along the quilt, the stitches like Braille on my palm. Betty looks at me and tries to register. She tries hard to recall, but she begs me again. Honey, take me home.

There are other patients; in the changing world of health care, I see all kinds of patients. I see a woman only 2 years older than me, who depends on a tracheostomy tube to breathe. I see a man in his 60s who smoked too much and barely has breath enough to generate a voice. I see a few more patients, like Betty, with dementia. I try to help them make sense of a world that their brains simply no longer have the ability to make sense of.

And then there is Ruth, 99, if she lives to see February she will be 100, and I sit with her and aid her with lunch. She is a slip of a women crowned with a tussle of grey hair. She wears the obligatory red sweatshirt that everyone buys their grandmothers this time of year, the Christmas one with snow birds embroidered around the collar. I need to comment on her slippers, with flicks of gold thread running through the fabric of them. The toes are frayed with wear.

I ask Ruth how she is, and her eyes dance as she tells me her age. "I had a wonderful mother, she was English," she says, "Oh, Honey, she was wonderful. And she died when I was nine, Honey, when I was just nine years old." Ruth talks about how her mother opened a banking account for her and her sister, how her mother never wasted. She mentions again that her mother was English. And she asks me, Honey, did I tell you my mother died when I was just nine?

At 99, her mother's death pours from her mind and into my lap. She compliments the food on her plate, and then mentions her English mother. She asks me where I am from, and then refers to her English mother. She talks about the Lord, and attributes her faith to her English mother.

"I am 99," Ruth says, tapping a finger on the table, "I have been rolled over and over by life. But the Lord gets me through. The Lord gets me through."

When Ruth is finished eating, we walk to her room. We pass windows, and the snow falls. It is so close to Christmas, almost a century of Christmases for Ruth, and she still smiles on the memory of her mother and praises the work of God. I take my time with her. She puts an impression on me and slows me down. She is a slice of time and love and memory dressed in a red sweatshirt and glittery slippers. I realize I have been blessed by her. By her loyalty to her mother and her praise of God. I know my work is important and not to rush, despite the gathering snow.

I leave her alone in her room, sitting on the side of her little hospital bed. She smiles to no one. I walk back into the hall, and notice Betty fretting to a nurse.

I go to her, and bend down, and tell her.

Betty. It's ok. The snow is coming and your family knows you are safe here.

December

Take away the color of the sky
the field the wash of water in the
river there is nothing here but
variations of absence my bones
break and the marrow opens up
to the cold permeating splitting
like lean ice overlaying the thicket
of evergreen take it all away the
bitter air the swath of dirty white
rimming the shoulder of the road
breath freezes in pale clouds that
ascend as the snow tumbles like
ashen thoughts collecting in drifts
at the feet of the mountains I
turn my wheel navigating the
turnpike watching the monochrome
landscape fall apart between me
and the salt smeared glass of the
windshield