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.

The sympathy card was signed by me and Lilith

Uncle John's little brother was laid to rest today, as they say. I attended the viewing so I could leave a sympathy card and give hugs to John and his other brother, Paul. The brothers stood at the front of the room next to the coffin in which Jason lay; the top of the coffin bore the logo of the Las Vegas Raiders. The body was not the man who rushed around in dreads only a couple of months before, on security detail. (Security was replaced by cameras and the security guys disappeared.) When I got to John, he was crying, as was Paul. I didn't stay for the funeral, but picked up a button and program at the back as I left. Members of the family wore teeshirts with his face on them; the woman in line behind me was crying, as were others who came back down the aisle from the coffin.

 

I only met Jason once or twice; he seemed a bit jumpy, not interested in the woman who wrote books about the cemetery. But after John texted me that he'd died (at 42), I found an interview with Jason on YouTube, by someone who traveled in the Pacific talking to people. Jason sat on a chair in the middle of a bare yard. He was sad. Sad about his preacher father's neglect of the family for his parishioners, sad that he wasn't Hawaiian enough (he was part African American), sad that he was having to raise his nephews. He wouldn't take drugs, though he drank beer and smoked weed, he said with a glint in his eye. There was something soft, vulnerable, thoughtful in that Jason. "He hasn't been like that in a couple of years," another cemetery employee said to me later.

 

And so he came to be buried in the cemetery that had employed, and then fired, him, the cemetery that had employed, and then fired his brother, John. When I left, Ola (at the gate) said, "I never see you without Lilith." Then: "at least he's being buried beside his father."

 

Another death on Waihee Road

"What's her name?" asked the maintenance guy seated on a rock wall at the Key Project, his head lowered, beside his trash can, broom, black bags, and other tools of the trade. He seemed preoccupied, so I wasn't going to approach him, but the dog did. "Lilith," I said, but you can also call her Lily. "No," he said firmly when I asked if I could take his photograph. (I will leave out a detailed description of the man, though I _am_ writing about him. Privacy has its issues.) "Did you take one when we were cutting down the tree near here?" he asked. "The guy I cut it with, Popeye--we called him Pop--just died. Tuesday. 55 years old. Lived right up the hill [on Waihee Road]." I said how sorry I was to this man whose heavy face now made sense. He gazed into the common area, where a breakfast for Kupuna was being held, past the woman with the tattoos and her baby who'd talked to us at Creature Coffee Shop. She'd let me take a photo of one tattoo, a saying about God that had faded over time.

 

I told him my friend Ruth had lived up the street, too, and that she died recently. And a young guy (42) at the cemetery. He said someone in his family (60) had died recently. It's a difficult time, we agreed. "I guess we have to return to the present," I said in my best Buddhist cliche. "Yep, in and out, in and out," he said, his head moving back and forth, like it was a slow ping pong game.

 

"What's your name?" he asked me. I told him. He told me his, then his Hawaiian name, but everyone calls him by the first one, short for the second one.