The man who's pregnant with names

"Where's your camera?" asked the bolo head man with a white beard sticking from his chin. His grandchildren's names are tattooed on his arms (along with a heart that holds the words "Puerto Rican" in it). He pulls up his shirt over a big belly where the names of his children are inked. It's as if he's pregnant with names. He and his wife walk in Kahalu`u District Park in the mornings with their two dogs, a salmon colored pit bull named Kaimana, and a small white poodle with no name I can remember. (These days, I need a small notebook to jot down names, the places where I learned and then forgot them. Everyone remembers Lily. The woman remembered me as Sarah, which begins with an S.) Kaimana came from this park, a large grassy space with two football goals marking its near edges, a circular asphalt path behind which are woods and beyond that, Kahalu`u Stream where it opens up behind the Hygienic Store and flows into the ocean. There used to be a lot of stray dogs, the woman tells me, and people complained because they bit people.

 

I point to the area where Lilith and I found an encampment (a dirty sign about "dirty windows" squatting in the mud). "When the state came to sweep that area, they found piles of microwaves, mopeds, so much it took several truck loads to take it all away. They were in the woods tweaking," she said; "the stuff was all stolen." No one knows where they went, but the state comes more frequently now. The new guy who lives on a bench near the restrooms on the other side of the park is named Harry, she says. Always lying there asking for a cigarette. I tried to buy him a cup of coffee (yes to milk and sugar) yesterday at Creature Coffee Shop, but it was closed for Veterans Day, and besides, I'd left my money in the car. Only realized that later. The woman has no idea where he came from; she knows the others who stay near the restrooms with their dogs, and those who live closer to the Key Project, with theirs. As we talk, Kaimana and Lilith do a full protocol on each other, nose, ears, belly, butt, then separate. Lilith leads me where she wants to go.

from Startles

Mother 1 was a drinker of coffee (percolated, instant) until she lost interest in boiling water. Mother 2 always has a mug of tea (PG Tips, two Splenda packets, a dollop of honey, lots of milk). Now the Mothers drink Ensure together at the wooden table beside loopy vines in the window.  Mother 1 drinks from the bottle, while Mother 2 from a kids’ pink sippy cup a friend brought her the other day. Mother 1 has left breath’s frail envelope, while Mother 2 still abides there.

Anne says sometimes that she is not Anne, while Martha knows herself in a way we cannot. Names shed like layers of clothing. She wonders how Anne remembers she is not Anne, as that suggests she once owned that name. My name acquires the stiffness of molting skin. It exists as scraps on the ground, a wrinkled thing.

Anne calls Lilith “that thing” before saying “that animal” before the name “Lilith” emerges from the molt. To die is to discharge, dislocate, dissemble even, if one’s name is a truth we’ve lived by. Martha loved a dog with many names before her mother put him down. The remover was removed. (So was one sentence.)

Their conversation's brief, occurring in a space where words once sounded. Martha’s stories hang like baby clothes on a line, or like tiny mourning shrouds. Anne’s paintings scatter about the room, portraits of friends, animals, nightmares of political figures. See the white horse of the apocalypse beside the president’s bloated orange face? See the word NO screaming across a canvas?

I owe to one my words, to the other a less complicated kindness. The staccato of English, to being and not to being, the soft running of paint from a brush. Time chopped like vegetables on a wooden plank, or time lovingly rejoined. Mother 1 was melancholia; Mother 2 mourning, a simpler syntax. Essere is non essere; there's no question there.

 

from Startles: prelegy

Who’s who are you? she asks Horton the stuffed elephant as, from the couch, she turns him toward and away from dim light. You must think I’m two years old, she tells me in the bathroom. I parrot a zen teacher: we’re always all the ages we have been, and we’ve all been two; I might add at least once. Murphy’s become the white faced dog. When I asked what she was thinking, she smiled and said it was a secret.

The question of loath and loathe comes up. I am loath to turn down the AC, as the air is bad, but for now I write loathe. I loathe the bad air, my mother-in-law’s dying, the shooting in Delaware, the anxiety that squats in my lungs, the not-sleeping, the not-being-able-to-help, if help means to make better. Comparison like a stick shift without a working clutch. Roots hang from vines in the front window.

A cardinal (rare red one!) chitters on the other side of the window half-shadowed by heart-shaped leaves. The hearts of Hallmark cards, that is, without their anthurium red. They present best in black and white, like silhouettes of themselves at first light. I see sun rise in the back window’s partial reflection of the one in front. Ghost vines float.

Lilith lies beside her, her head back, mouth open to catch the bad air. White-faced dog is nowhere to be seen. Your dog is nicer to me than my dog. But old, tired, blind, near-deaf Murphy charmed Nurse Felicia. My husband would run away with you, she told him. Her mother made her come home every weekend from Maui so she wouldn’t get pregnant; but my boyfriend was on Oahu. She was the sixth child, her mother’s second wind of worrying.

Earth bereft of idea. I am bereaved. Not pre-grief but an on-going state of being stripped clean. Grieving almost for grieving itself, as it falls away like a horse-hair worm, dancing on a tree’s roots. Bobs, dances, nods its almost-head, bows and rests.

There was Mother one and Mother two, birth mother and adopted mother (in law). The frog on the bookshelves bears a sign, I squeak, on its chest. Eyes big, stuck out of the top of its head. Mother two likes Horton’s eyes, too, wide as if aware of their new task. Lilith oddly leaves Horton alone; the blind dog is still missing, AC hums an artificial meditation.

 

Hawai`i Biennial

I hope to see some of you there. My drowned flower made it in.

 https://www.downtownarthi.org/artistsofhawaii 

from Startles

     

She still has a sense of humor, but it’s about what she’s forgotten. Pills, tea, breakfast, dinner, dogs, where the blanket is. Dog takes her blanket; she takes her daughter’s. She wears aviator sunglasses while she sleeps. When we say we want now, we know we cannot have.

A walk in the museum, on the lane in Volcano, a dinner she makes for us, tug of war with my dog. On occasion, that happens, but less. Lessness is a moving state. The slots in Vegas clink; your memory is money, and it slips away, coin by coin by coin. What’s the fuss about Trader Joe’s, I wondered, when we drove there from the airport.

If you give me some words, I’ll give you back others. It’s called a conversation, and it no longer happens. Words become other words. The rest of us count cliches during the ballgame. She tries to read words on the screen, like corruption, but that’s too long.

Memory corrupts in the way orange plastic on a cone tears and fades. The cone still marks a space not to go beyond, or through, but its fading is a weariness. Stuck through the broken cone, I see a metal pole lodged at an odd angle, and grass. Beyond the cone, a van, two ankles and feet behind it. A good photo, albeit with a different lens.

My mother understood the shapes of stories, their set up, what they required to move ahead, the striking funny detail, and then the punch at the end. Not a line, perhaps, but a startle. Of course the man ran away when she showed up with the chaplain. Of course the pilot disappeared after his girlfriend gave him the wrong answer. Of course she governed the dinner table.

Take a small one out of the memory pen, leash it, and take it out to play. The small memory, the one you never thought to mark, wanders like a dog across the yard, aiming for the fences where the best smells are. Today, Lilith flushed a mongoose out of grass beneath a tree; her nose went in one way, mongoose ran around the back. She saw she’d missed it, and I saw that she saw, though I let her pull forward. The artificial hunt is what she’s permitted.

I tried to explain voluntary and involuntary memory to my Italian teacher in Italian. I hadn’t forgotten the words, for I never learned them. Not yet. But we parsed the difference between object and fact and the creation of a world out of mind and air. I remember some of Marcel’s memories, but not the actual plot. Hoku’s now in charge of putting down flags that mark each cemetery plot.

What if hope were located in the past? Would loss still devastate? What would we grieve, then? The future we no longer need? The gnome on an imagined car hood, shadowed in broken glass?

 

--on my mother's birthday, October 25.

More (Italian) attention to I and Eucalyptus

 In an eco-journal called ZEST.

 https://www.zestletteraturasostenibile.com/io-ed-eucalipto-intervista-schultz-piccolo-vezzali/ 

I especially like the responses by the translators. Though it's funny; they did translate what I thought a "Bronx cheer" meant. Turned out, I had it wrong, thinking it was a tongue sticking out. 

 

Lilith and I stop to talk to the mortician, Paul

"I'll go get Pops for you," said the young man who'd just shown me a photograph of his chihuahua terrier mix on his phone. I'd asked if Paul were around, the cemetery's mortician. After the man with the dog opened the door, Paul popped out of the low building next to the chapel, dressed in his scrubs. When I told him my own life seems full of death and dying now, he looked tender. He may have come across a friend of mine who died a couple of months ago. I went to Jason's viewing yesterday. My 95 year old mother-in-law isn't well. He's keeping an eye on his 94 year old mother in Jersey; a family friend died recently at 50. ("She's JW," he said, "but a strong member of the community, so there will be a large gathering.") His work doesn't bother him much because he figures they're all fine now. 

 

We started in on the difficulties of our time, and he indicated that he didn't need to say more. So many conversations happen that way now. You start talking about Trump, the climate (even next week's weather), the height of the grass, and you announce that you've already said enough. "I won't bother you with my diatribe," one woman said to me recently. "Oh, I have one, too," I said, and she replied she figured as much. Paul and his friends talk about the end-times, then realize they just saw them in the news. "Woah," they say to each other. At least the world will begin again, and there will be another chance to do it well, he adds. I tell him I think of us as tourists. We come here, we look around for a while, and then we leave. But maybe that analogy doesn't work so well in a place where hundreds of tourists come each day to see the Temple turned photo destination. Many of them don't even realize they're driving through a cemetery.