This one should be relatively easy. It seems like Paris in the rain in early evening with wet brick and thin cross streets. The cobbled alleys are still there with a gutter of bricks in the center in which you can ride your bike and vocalize like sounding into a window fan on a lazy school vacation day.
Around the edges of the iron fences and shrubs are faces so startled by being seen that they peek out and don't dare say anything except we are here and alarmed. My mother would leave them food or water or blankets along the same time of her life when she collected money for her friend with AIDS when AIDS was just named.
A misplanted Paris was perfect for her because she was a pirate and intuitively, i'm sure, could speak French if she needed to. she taught me cursive one Saturday, for example.
I am left as an orphan in this Paris in the rain. I have not forgotten that fact on any day of humid suffering, nor when spirits blow across chimney pots still standing tall as I watch from under the eaves for what comes next to this little girl who has not grown much, despite roaming the world on the inside and out.
People think it strange that i cannot remember the date of my mother's death. I don't because she did not leave on the day they pronounced her gone nor for a great many days and months after. I call her mama when i speak to her now, but she has since left her close orbit, pulled to another responsibility far from here. i wonder how well she likes it. the last time i saw her in spirit, she was happy. It was during a long afternoon nap when time had doubled in on itself, and i was living in the thin air of suspended routine where real life actually is.
she was swinging keys and smiling to herself about her fine and finished job. that was the end of her playing with the lamps in my room to amuse me and to keep her promise of communicating from the spirit world if it were possible. you will have to not be afraid, she said, or it won't work. I wasn't.
She also came in to rest beside me, commanding my eyes remain closed as i grieved her passing in those early months. one time she was the great mother jaguar in my dream and i learned to gather the council of elders in my mind because they did not live there, but the tunnel to their underworld did.
her soul was the companion of mine for some lifetimes, and lately the most significant soul. we both knew that this life was the crossing over between who cared for the child and who was the child. we blended the roles in our last life together and i remember telling her the stories of my other home and other family and the last time we were born...did she remember then, too? no, she said, i don't remember, i see what happens next.
her mysticism was deep and wide, incensed and fused into gregorian chants. my father suggested novels and she thought poetry--Whitman or Dickinson or yes, cummings if you insist
I married John Whitman once. we read the poetry of billions of stars and became teary once thinking only one volume existed, but then time and space was borrowed and stretched into the meadow of suspended summer, and his one volume now contains all the stars that ever were or ever will be, amen.
I jumped rope to Dickinson. I have never shared that, be gracious. It is tender self-disclosure.
I liked her life and thought it would be fine to live in our house and never come out. She laughed a lot and wrote for no one but her trunk.
I am not quite Emilyan although she preferred upstairs as I do and it is with a great deal of such buffering from the world that I have always lived thanks to my father for that. in other respects, he threw me in before i knew about anything like water.
i have, however, in my play with emily's spirit, concocted parties in which i was present on the stairs. sometimes you cannot go down for danger of ruining the moment.
I feel him closer than she will ever be again now. He lives many orbits in to earth, still grinding away his obligation to the prisoners of this planet like me. We were so very similar, burdened by the need of others. i am letting it go, having finished my work at this level and the next shall be from a similar bungalow of cool shade and archives like his now. He has earned some weatlh and peacefulness though remains encumbered by the spirits of multitudes in his world where wealth is rarification and nothing any less.
He lives in me far more than he ever intended--a detached man of great gregariousness and a tendency to let you make your own way in the world. He'd give a sentence here and there, mostly from behind as I was seated at the ever present desk. why i needed my desk i have never been sure, but it was there where i would, as i do now, sit down upon first awakening to any day. i expect i will die not too very far away, or no discernable distance at all from an instrument of its and my mind.
i forgive him for who and what he was and wasn't although i maybe would have liked to not bear his mind or the brain which bore it along through this world as I have. there have been a great many things of my time that have been far larger than me and perched so tentatively on the edge of the sea, at night in a blustering wind that I knew nothing about, having never had to manage it. I attribute them to him.
I watched him drive those wild horses as was said over the wild hills I say, so as to steal and twist a most glorious string of words.
I rock myself at the keyboard as if i were creating music and the words pour so effortlessly you only have to speak them though fingers that tap dance during the moon, when all the world is mine, and i am the happiest of all my life, living this one moment that has never broken since i became.
I walked one brisk morning to the trash and deposited there, in the bluster by the sea, whatever had held me close in a strange recklessness and miles into my body's disease...just inches from the dumping ground of a man like the men my father hunted and shot like game.
he called me in the night time and wanted to speak intimately, sexually and called himself my future lover. he knew me and my name. i began to load my weapon and fall asleep watching it in the clock's glow as i would inevitably fall asleep without wanting to. my father was dead but i asked him for guidance and he told me to always carry my weapon, that a killer was inches away and several women were calling out for their names to be known in the sweet seaside town where the Gulf was really my knowing and my emotion. it was, he said from the clock's light, to difficult to handle a shotgun when first awakening.
Photo:
My Town, Marie Monroe
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