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.
