Socks

Here it is. That reminder. That little statue in the storm, palms pressed together or held up high, eyes empty or with pupils dug into the stone, but unmoving regardless of the pose. I pulled my feet into his socks, the grey ones, and the heels stuck out like Achilles wings, ready to fly. And I'm sitting here in the old man's footwear, thinking of his widowed wife on her couch with the reading glasses in her hand like always, my hands flickering over white-lettered keys, eyes darting like marine fish suddenly submerged in fresh water. There is NOWHERE written on the page. The clouds coming in, carrying water, wet the footpath for something to sink in.

Washing Dishes

I struggle when trying to describe the pine and hemlock in our woods layered with snow. Boughs stoop low, ready to spring at the tap of a walking stick, puffs of snow shimmering like shattered glass. In the morning after a heavy fall, when the snow is still fluffy and unpacked, the needled trees look as if they withstood a storm of soap bubbles blown from the kitchen sink. Globules and globes of froth coagulate on their limbs. I feel like washing my hands or leaping into a valley filled with bubble bath snow. But this description never fits the story I'm trying to write. The tone and imagery are acres away from the theme. What in my life can be connected to soap bubbles? I like this picture, though, and I continue walking.

Being There

School started. The mind that dislodged itself from its hard corner, grew loose and multifaceted as sand carrying seashells, became a lump of dry clay today. I sat under the unbearable blood of fluorescent lights, listened to deadlines and page lengths, smiled at the people who I neglected to remember despise my presence and finally washed myself away towards home. Migraine punching my right eye. Neck in a vice. Three hundred dollars worth of books by my side in a dirty blue book bag.

Two semesters left and I'm outta this joint and heading northeast for a state nestled in New England. Or perhaps I'll venture west, living in the shadows of old cowboys and purple mountains. It doesn't matter where I go, just so long as I go.

And then we drove to Sue's, a sweet old woman who's husband passed away three years ago, to pick up some clamps my dad purchased for a couple hundred bucks. As we carried them from the basement and out into the snow, I imagined the old man's hands easing two by fours through a whirring blade. I imagined the nails and hammers and wood glue. I imagined him building things, putting loose ends together. Sue's house smells like cinnamon cookies. When I walk inside, I feel as if I'm wrapped in a blanket.

"I think of you all the time," Sue said as we embraced. We spoke in the kitchen, decided to take a trip to Flo's in the near future for 10 cent coffee and blueberry pancakes.

"I'm glad I went," I said, plodding down the steps in my black, rubber boots after saying our goodbyes.

"That's what living's all about," Dad said, turning around in the snow, face drawn into a slight, sorrowful smile, eyes deep and covered in light shining from the bulb on the front porch. "It's about being there."

coffee

Slept two hours last night. That's a lie. Slept about six, but the point is that I've been writing furiously, tearing up paper like a rabid squirrel. This morning the sky glowed pink. Liquid cotton candy swelling into a big, sugary bubble. I had to settle my excitement with a sobering mug of bitter coffee. Half a dozen hours at work permits no time for writing, little time for creative thinking when I'm busy answering people's questions about Fiorocet and Viagra and Bisoprolol and Metformin and Atenolol and Levothyroxine and... Grab the faxes. Answer the phone. Smile at the red faced man huffing and puffing over the counter, ready to punch someone over his co-pay. Hurry to the window and stand in a blast of cold air while someone writes a check - slowly. Count dusty little pills by fives. Recount the narcotics. Scrape them along the green tray with a spatula into a little rubbery vial. Pause. Look at the vial. The vial the color of an amber stone. A honey-hued vessel. Yes, it reminds me of those canyons I wrote about last night. Those rusty-walled canyons cupping the rivers I left unfinished.

Tea Time

Morning is my favorite moment. I love waking to the idea that my dreams are real. The man with his bubble farting skunk and the woman with a million colorful scarves twirling on a barber shop chair come by my house once and a while to share a pot of tea. Flying through the loop of red stone is just another daily routine as I wonder what happened to that man who fell in love with the mermaid in that purple sea. Perhaps the scientist with the lion head growing from his shoulder knows. Once I blink my eyes a few times, I realize that I've just left a world that exists only in my mind. But it doesn't matter. I'll visit again.

I love the hour between swallowing down an orange thyroid pill and breakfast. It's the only time I explore the Internet, looking up acrylic paintings of the forest and checking my e-mail to see if Bayou finally returned my inquiry. Even if they didn't, I love looking out the upstairs window at the frosty cars sliding behind the snowbanks. Sometimes I know the person sitting as a silhouette in the front seat, and I wonder where they're going. Perhaps off to work. Hopefully to share the morning with a friend.

Then there's the meal. The heavy, round bowl of morning heaping with blueberries, banana, cereal and soy milk while dark roast coffee sputters from my basement bedroom. I read books. Poetry is the best side dish for breakfast. But sometimes I flip through issues of Isotope and read about birds and radiation and the man who fell in love with nature.

Only the hum of the refrigerator, the purr of a cat, a knocking at the top of the stairs as Elmer itches his floppy ear on his bed by the closet door echoes in an otherwise empty house. Morning is the moment that I truly love people. The drifts of snow arching up the glass door show their blue bellies, their little secrets, and suddenly something inside me, too, opens.

mud

i couldn't. i couldn't see Tuesday clearly without being swallowed by the fact that he was my child. i couldn't write about the blood trickling from his mouth with the sharp teeth the color of pearls. the way the course fur, the black-striped pattern circling over the color of slate on his back ticking in the wind was once soft and smelled woody like burning leaves. Those tiny, stiff paws resting on the asphalt once kneaded my chest in the early mornings when pink light spilled on the lace curtains. I tried to write about his body in the road and the golden yellow of his eyes fading, but the lump of guilt, of sorrow, of regret stuck in my throat like a pill. All that I could say was that I remember his grey and his yellow. His red. They came together for the first time. The road was a stony river rushing him away from me. The road was a stony river biting my ankles. The road was a stony river swallowing us both.

shelf

This new thought. It entered my mind after vegan chocolate chip cookies and a mug of soy milk for dinner. Two cups of tea. The sky coming down as snow. I'll collect people on the shelves of my heart. Building bookcases with wood gathered from the swollen rivers the beavers helped raise. The rivers they raise after collecting trees, dragging them to the trickle of water, packing them together with mud. The trees that gathered sunlight in the summer, leaves in the fall, snow in winter, the pungent white flowers in spring. Where they sprouted from the earth. The earth that gathered their ancestors, turned them back into soil. I'll gather the sturdy, chipped branches gnawed to points at the ends and hammer them over the edges of two by fours. Varnish. Let dry. Fill my shelf full of people and trees and small mammals changing geography. I'll thumb through their pages. Understand them. Never forget them. Collect the profound details scattered in their lives and make stories of my own. Put them in a book. Pass them on for others to read.

The First Word

All day I've been lounging in my pajamas reading poetry and novels, drinking tea, and pretending to chip away at the pile of scholarship applications sitting blank on my desk like a stone. I listened to music, washed away the bold lines of consciousness as I lost myself in others' lives. Pale light coming from the frosty outside bathed my body all day. I crept down to the darkness of my room and fell into a somber, waking dream.

Already 3:30 and the day is nearly done. I could write essays for scholarships, scribble down poetry, sneak away into the woods coagulated with snow and let adrenaline spark the cold wick of my creativity candle. If this will be my life as a professional writer - silent alarm clocks, a laptop blinking on a white desk with no one but myself encouraging me to open it - can I bear it? This loneliness?

I'm allowed to curl up in a little grey ball of coffee and chocolate and unwritten words and let a day drift by like smoke in a wind. It's beautiful. And even now I'm plucking the last few sweet crumbs of ambition from the ground.

Dad is snoring on the couch and our black cat Cletus is basking in his breath. The heater hums from the basement.

At least I've collected the papers, clipped them together, and placed the stack by my computer for another day's work. The pastel sky and clouds like a river of steam make me want to cry.
I've begun to gnaw at my lips and wonder if I really want to be a part of this world built of words.

I want chocolate.
I want lace.
I want that pattern from the sun when it slices through the blinds.
I want to crawl under the warm, dark covers filled with feathers and dream every last breath away. I have no favorite word now. Just sleep - like death - blooming in the back of my mind and my fingers digging into the cold, dark soil after a rain. I claw through the grass of this dream, cold and green glass glimmering in salty wetness. The earth will cover me and when the soft, churned soil hardens under the beat of rain, the heavy body of snow, the strange footsteps, I'll perish. I don't want a stone marking my grave. I want a tree. An oak or something fragile like birch. My skin will grow swarthy in the soil. Worms and the white, rumpled bodies of grubs will find tunnels and slits and rotted places where they can slip inside, begin to taste me, help my flesh decompose into my mother earth. Roots will wind around pale bones. Crush them. Squeeze them into powder. I will disperse after years have tumbled by like boulders set free. One great leap is death. One great leap and all these blue words will mean nothing when this language is reformed and replaced, reconstructed as dialects and cultures sweep their heavy arms over these delicate bits of language, like wind scrapping the shingles from a house.

They will be nothing. Just ink spilled onto paper in strange symbols.

But I won't give this up. I'm in love. And that's worth living for.

frozen rain

They are drifting down like dreams these snow speckled clouds veiling the star pointed sky, and we spoke over salad and lemonade-tinted water wishing we were wading through the clear, calm waters and black sand of an exotic beach. We were hoping to find something tonight, and we did as the snow clouds grew furious over our little world. We grew small in this big place. This frozen rain. This wind-bent world. This night.

the first step

begin. the hardest part of moving foward is the first step. all you have to do is begin.