Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Funny Eyes

I've had them all my life. They are set wrong, like salt and pepper shakers that want to season each other instead of the food. At the optometry school where the exams should be cheap but are instead pricey and long, they make me a curiosity, a case study. And so I place one hand over my left eye, one hand over the right. Over and over I place and remove demonstrating the rapidity of the jump, how I compensate, accomodate. How accomodating I am. I am tired and my vision is bleary and it frustrates me to say, again, I can't see the two crosses at once. I do not have strong binocular vision and I'll never see the magic eyes. I don't want to be a lab rat any more. And this is all before, long before, the health center. Where unasked for prescriptions are filled and my history is taken by a frowning woman with cold, demeaning eyes.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Kicks

I own pink sneakers now. Sorry, Moose, didn't go for the Roos. But they're cute and you'd like them. The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Wednesday Night at the Harmony School Gymnasium

Contra-dancers all over the country are the same. The same grey-haired boomers with ponytails and shirts with ponies or lizards or sunsets on them, the same elderly men with small visible injuries tottering around too slow for the cadence, the same eco-friendly young-uns with gypsy skirts and bounce like they're listening to Phish, the same engineer-types who grit their teeth through the dances as though they're planning to socialize if it kills them. I get just as dizzy in Bloomington, though I miss Holman's afterwards with Extreme Television and absurd dialogue. It was nice, though, to find that after two years away, it came back easy as pie. That a man said, "I saw that gentlemen giving you directions, but you don't dance like you needed them!" For some reason tonight everyone asked if I sang or played music. Perhaps it's that the community here is so much smaller that people tend to immerse themselves in all aspects of the scene. I sort of got the feeling people were recruiting me. I never know what to say when anyone asks if I sing. Yes, all the time, in my bathtub, in my car, at karaoke, with friends. But not in a chorus, not out, not anymore. Someday I'll buy that concertina and be the sea-shanty queen. But jeez, I'm getting tired of pipe dreams.

too many nights out

The bag is full of underwear and the sweater song is on the player in the warm car. I am remembering the way my friends dance, bending my torso into those shapes, the shimmies and hip thrusts of tall slender women. The double wide gay bar is empty, relaxed, but the Vid is hopping, comfortable if sceny. Will I dream tonight? Old men haunt the crack between my pillows. Days I spend on the internet pricking those who have injured me. I am going to try on my bag full of underwear. The girls ride off in their cars to contact the boys and we string something that looks like love between our hearts like fishing wire.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

seasonal change

Upped the weights today. We are all officially gym rats, what with the trash talking by the squat barbells. My arms are sore and it's pleasant and I got all the recycling out so there is that little bit of accomplishment. If only I didn't have the insomnia that makes you uncover pictures of your high school crushes and listen to "Crash" by the Cure over and over like you haven't in ten years. Rather, I should take out Vlad or Ernest or even Marjani, tuck into bed. But the house is so empty with Mary gone. It sings, this emptiness. So that I have to wheedle the ladies into dinner on the pretext of fragility in order to not be alone in it. Summer is a funny time here, full of new discoveries. In the kitchen some sort of rose is falling open fragrantly, reminding me of a moment of attention. There is room for strangers now, for library books and six days a week of workouts and drives down to the lake where billboards of eagles glow eerily in the mist. I saw a heron by the river yesterday. They are, I was told, "our largest bird."

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Memorials

Last night the party was lovely, tomato plants in the windows, fragrant. So Portland what with the salvage wood houses and the full bar, the punk rock anarchist kids and the bike art. Bloomington is shrinking. The same people are everywhere, the nighttime people popping up during the day at the library or the coffee shop; the nighttime people look hazy in the light of day, not quite fully rendered. I must look like that as well, though the backs of my pants drag through puddles and the day thumps solidly around in my heart.

My aunt died today. Mother's Day of all days, proving the studies my mother oft cites about how people hang around for the big events: birthdays, Christmas. Her daughters were by her bedside. I remember the photograph of her in the faux fur and the red-tinted sunglasses walking along the Charles beside my far-less-glamorous mother. The diary en francais she sent me special for my birthday in the fourth grade, just after she had become an expatriate. The accent, muddled and continental, that my family mocked for years until I came to understand it, just this year, how she could forget she came from Chicago, Kansas, lands of flat and arid syllables. The scarf I gave her rich against her skin, festive over the purple pajamas. Her feet like a monkey's, little groping things. The separation of spirit and physicality so pronounced, her sharp mind a moving thing within a wizening body. How she was a writer and how important that always was to me. How it seemed to connect us at the end.

It's so cold and rainy out. This midwestern landscape she left behind. I feel very alone today in it. And I wonder again why they all scattered, those siblings, to nest in different parts of the world. What was so much more vital than kin? They're all hearing the news now. In California, Oregon, Georgia. In Connecticut my mother is alone in her little house in the Colonial woods. It just pains me, that solitude. And the solitude it begets.

I went to a cemetary today and read the names to myself. The gravestones without flowers. The old ones, the forgotten ones. It's comforting to me to think that someone is visiting my grandmother that way, her gravestone with the wheat etchings in Santa Cruz where none of her children live anymore. My grandfather in his mausuleum in Chicago -- someone will walk by and peep in and wonder who is buried there, what the stained glass means, who the flag was for. They're scattering my aunt's ashes in the channel. Between homelands, just like she always was.