Thursday, March 7, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Wash and Dry
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Stark dawn oozes into gray haze this early Sunday morning.
The ritual of wash and drive, the precarious tumble of loose clothing after a
long nights toss and turn, winter’s brittle pieces beginning to crack and fade,
stiff melting into something soft and tender, flowing with the intense
brooded-over relief, warm-blooded fools like me ache for, a Goldilocks locked
into a cycle of too hot or two cold when always desperate for just right.
I am not alone in being alone (as the old song says) as this
stretch of Kennedy Boulevard yawns with emptiness, the usual gush of traffic
caught in desperately needed sleep, me, waking early from a middle of the night
sweat to shiver and make my way into the world of routine – wash and dry,
tumble and roll, arms and legs entwined in a paid-for warmth I can’t access
only watch from the outside, envious of the shirt or skirt that tumbles from
one cycle to another, aching for the heat they exchange, forced to wait that
painful last moment until the tumbling halts and the participants fumble with
button and zipper, or the hook of the brazier caught in the mechanism,
reminding me of the 16-year-old usher I once was in that theater balcony
struggling to undo the same contraption, though the reward for this
accomplishment won’t live up to the same expectation now as it did then, wash
and rive, fold, then wander back to the street where the sleep deprived
stumbling along the sidewalks as if from a scene out of the Night of the Living
Dead.
Wash and dry, bags over my shoulder as I make my was to the
next stop in this Station of the Cross, this Passion play full of lashes and
crowns of thorns.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Rubbing things green
Saturday, March 02, 2013
Fog swirls over Newark Bay like shreds of silk, cook kill
against my moist cheek this chilly morning in March, shreds strewn over the
water in vaporous streams like thin hair, the serrated tips of stones poking
through.
Drips of rain or dew lingers on the lips of sticks that
pierce this fog, or run down the long brown leggy tree trunks, spread wide,
gaping before me as I stand near the shores, aching for spring to explde in and
around them, aching for warmer kinds of fingers to rumb them green, twig
fingers rubbed raw over the long season trying to revive what has died.
The wind makes these limbs groan in the mists, slow moaning
that makes something inside me ache, pieces of something pushed and pulled
inside my heart, shredded inside of me even as I breathe deep these wisps, even
as I sign out something I did not know grew inside of me, adding new fingers to
the rubbing limbs, hoping that if I rub hard enough, I might revive life inside
me, too, or at least something like it.
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