everything is so much more
siginificant than we think it is.
food fills, the heat goes down,
out the window a neighbor
hurts her ankle and i pray my prayer
from earlier again.
december brings a singing, a sighing,
a lack of turtles.
December, 2005 Monthly archive
the dust mites revolted, the bosses have won:
it’s almost christmas now and we’ve been run
down so low, here we are, licking the fuzzed floor
and yelling at eachother over artificial walls.
my dreams are like a marathon i cough through
with strangers; when i wake i feel so tired.
and that odd unconsciousness keeps my restlessness
seeping through the down.
when the day rolls into evening now,
i leave you without a word, without a gesture.
this is cruel, and at night i grieve the cruelty,
as if i have allowed an innocent thing to stay injured
though i can’t say what between us has been broken
other than the static luminance that shines
a hale pale fire between your space and mine.
Chad is desert and
Muslim women gathering
firewood in fear.
When their strong faces
burn through photos with bright teeth
spread wide like clean bones
I think of domed skies,
trees, dust, mortar, the promise
of love and water.
My CEO went to Chad recently on a human rights trip to visit Sudanese refugees in camps along the border. Hearing about the trip makes me feel incredibly selfish for bitching about my utilities bill or my student loan payments. I mean, seriously. Here’s where Chad is in Africa, if you don’t already know.
Sad but true. I reviewed my bills, and D. reviewed our winter utilities, and we concluded that, aside from packing up and moving back to Roxbury or Dorchester, we can’t get through the season without subletting our extra room. Which is poopy, because I’m really enjoying just having one roommate — someone I’ve known for years. I don’t want a stranger in my house. But oh! How much more affordable it will be if we have a third person!
Therefore, if any of you know anyone else who’s looking to sublet a room for a little while, and you think they’re a decent person (read: not completely psychotic), please refer. The room doesn’t have its own closet, but there’s a smaller broom closet they can use. Anyway, the apartment’s really big. And we’re not too far from Harvard. $550 for room, including utilities. Pass it on. Danke.
“Your sweater smells like the subway.”
“Well, I had leant it to a friend. But it’s clean.”
“Well your friend smells like the subway.”
When I was six, the subway was a mystical place that represented my future urban existence; I loved it, but still recognized its smell as a fetid combination of must, metal, rat poop and stale urine, the delicious fragrance of a city. But I think my sweater smells fine. You can’t let six-year-olds get you down.
Tonight we saw a moth outside the kitchen window. It beat its wings imploringly against the glass, begging to enter. Nine-year-old I. started lamenting its fate. “Why can’t we let it in?” she asked me. “It’s cold and it’s going to die.”
“True,” I answered, “but if we let it in, it’ll eat all our sweaters.” (Though I guess it doesn’t matter much, since they apparently smell like the subway.) It was a Darwinist moment, though. Survival of the biggest? Survival of those who own sweaters? I felt genuinely terrible about leaving this moth outside to die. The worst part was how we watched it — beating, collapsing, beating, collapsing — and even took photos until we could no longer see its heart-shaped body through the glass.
This is not how life is, I wanted to explain. When life gets hard and we need help, there will be people who will help us. I truly believe this.
Instead I said nothing, and we ate ice cream and wrote stories about blue chocolate. The moth was dismissed, but not forgotten. I really have to stop interpreting every phenomenon of nature as a philosophical metaphor.
The way S. describes them makes me want to run back to Hawaii and spend my daylight hours painting flowers made of sea shells, or dig deeper into this Cambridge cavern for a hybernation I don’t know if we’ll ever come out of:
The color inside them is a deep, wet yellow, almost orange, like globules of honey or plasma. Their smell is thick and excessive and intimate.