5 July 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. A helicopter stitches the mountain, disappearing into its creases, emerging through mist. A round headlight flickers on and off. We can hear it, though we don't know its errand: errant hiker, downed line, plant survey. If you see someone hanging from a cable, you know. Power cables mimic the mountain's lines in cloud. My dog tries to play with a gap-toothed gardener who reaches in thick gloves for his rake. When I say I want to be a Buddhist chaplain, my kids tell me I'm too angry. The tv keeps me ginned up, even as gin pins me to the couch. Trump's private audience with Putin is planned without interpreter or notes. Nothing there! When I write that I admire Adnan's meditations, Norman responds that no American could hold such a large view. To make one's world small is characteristic of men who've been abused as children; getting out in the world is what spurs anxiety, chaotic word spill, nerve drills. She has to move her neck when she plays soccer, the blood flow is so strong. But that's something else. It's all something else, this sewing of lines or limes—Marthe makes mother into lime and, while her ending doesn't quite work, the acid image does. My mother Martha hated herself for hating her mother screaming hysterically in the dark, as I screamed after my father's heart attack. We try so hard to forgive the dead, to love ourselves as mothers. Trauma travels generations, a friend says, his son's great grandfather an opium addict, his son a bit lost. Another grandfather watched his sleeping grandson through the window--and that was the least of it. 

--5 July 2018