Subtitles Come In Handy

I forgot
I forgot how much I sleep once the sun starts setting before 7:00.

Things that give parents pause
You're in the bedroom folding laundry or plucking eyebrow hair. You hear your three-year-old in the next room, singing a little made-up song. As her voice gets closer, you hear the words: "It used to be a banana, but now it isn't. It used to be a banana, but now it isn't." You hear her steps enter the bathroom, and you hear a thunk in the trashcan.

Alight
Twelve feet up on scaffodling like hatches of a calligrapher's brush, men lay bricks in the chill morning. Some men squat or kneel; some have worked faster than others and they stand to lay their red rows higher. The white and yellow helmets they wear are dusty but still catch the sunlight like the undersides of the wings of the birds that rise above them, turning as a flock toward an invisible beacon, a future rest.

An art installation of 130 hand-built ceramic cubes, etched with labyrinthine designs on five sides, glazed and arranged on a bed of sand
Is art obsession?
Are artists possessed?
Can one become an artist without being possessed?

The Sound of Yellow Leaves

Autumn is running through its inventory of days. This morning we had mist, the kind that makes colors luminescent, more intense for not having to compete with the sky.

The air was charged with energy. A man walked down the sidewalk so briskly that when he stopped at the street as I drove past, his right leg kept going, flinging itself out over the curb. I could see his whole body stop and lean to bring his leg back.

*

I went to the gathering of protestors outside the George Allen event at which George Bush was to make an appearance. I didn't want to chant anything, yell anything or even hold any signs. I just wanted my body to be there in silent protest. It's hard to be quiet amid noise and feel like one is in league with the noisemakers.

Pat

Standing in the aisle at Party City, waiting for 1 to decide that she doesn't want any of the costumes, I look at the fishnet stockings. Astonishingly, I consider buying a pair. Red? Black? Purple? Wait a minute! Why would I want these things? I feel all right about my aging body in an abstract kind of way, but fishnet stockings are far too concrete. Someone might actually look at my legs.

My husband and I may go to a Halloween party. That is, he will go and I may go too. There will likely be many people there whose names I am supposed to know, since I played soccer with them all summer, but they're almost all men. Male names are very hard to remember, so frequently monsyllabic and gutteral.

If I can remember their names, I'd rather spend a social evening with men than women, I think. I'm not sure why I have more fun with men my age than women; sometimes I think that I must be an attention-hungry flirt; other times I think I'm more "male" than most women. Neither answer makes me 'specially happy. Good thing I like spending lots of time alone.

Maybe I'll go as an earthworm.

The Clock Strikes Mid-October

Little brown birds and leaves dart through this fall air. The yellow leaves on the sidewalk please me with their randomness. A slug moves in circles over the chilling bricks. When I pick the spent blooms from the petunia, the stickiness coats my fingertips but seems to dissipate before I get up the front steps to our door.

I used to not like fall, never gave a thought to the possibility of liking fall until one day in Kansas. C- walked beside me, visiting from out of state, at some intermediate stage of our confused relationship, and said fall was his favorite season. Was dumbfounded that I disagreed so avidly.

Since then, fall is C-'s season in my mind. The more I like it, the older I feel. Old enough to be looking backward; old enough to want shorter days for a while.

*
Finished "The Other Side of the Bridge" by Mary Lawson. A very autumnal book. Lots of nice bridge metaphors can be made; complaints about a gratuitous death at the end can be lodged--yet I liked it all. I'm a sucker for a good clean sentence. I'd quote one, but I've already loaned the book out.

Rooftop Ephemeron

July, 1993. Kansas. I'm living on the top floor of a shambly, student-filled house with two friends. We have no kitchen, just a hot plate and a fridge which must have grown up out of the floor boards because it seems impossible that it should have been carted up the narrow, angled staircase. We wash our dishes in the claw-foot bathtub.

The fire escape is a rope tied to a steel loop bolted into the floor beside our front window. It's great for party entertainment--rappelling down the front of the house and over the porch roof into the bushes below. I mention this only because it should not be forgotten.

J- and I eat so much garlic in an attempt to repel mosquitoes naturally that when we lay down to sleep, we can smell the hot scent of garlic breathing up through the skin on our arms. We take afternoon naps in order to have more dreams.

D- shaves his head so he can save money on shampoo and stays up until 7 in the morning playing Sim City. He disappears for stretches of time to work on mysterious projects and do laundry at his parents' house. He has hung a Russian flag from our front window with antagonistic hopes of fetching a hostile response from town residents.

I'm working odd hours at the college cafeteria, cutting apples in half and spooning corn into little white bowls. Once, the manager walks by as I'm working and snaps, exasperatedly but not unkindly, "Use both hands!"

I spend hours in the library, half-heartedly attempting to make headway on my poorly defined senior thesis. I have one more semester of college, and no idea what to do next. (That fall, my advisor--a woman I admire so deeply I'm not even aware of it--will tell me, "You don't seem to be suited for the sort of research required in graduate school. You should get an MFA and teach poetry at a ju-co." This is "junior college" in Midwestish.) As my summer wears on, I collect an assortment of disorganized notes on the backs of pages from the recycling bin, but no clearer sense of what original thing I can propose.

One day, I am alone in the apartment, trying to write thoughts or poems in a notebook. The air is thick and the sky glares grey with thin clouds. Suddenly I realize that I don't want to be alone, writing in a notebook.

I find some red poster paint and a brush and climb out the window, past the Russian flag and around the gable to the roof. The pitch is quite steep and there is another dormer window at right angles directly around the corner, but we've all done this before. Sitting on the ridge and forming capital letters upsidedown, I paint, "I don't want to write. I want to talk, and I want people to listen to me."

I'm a little choked up and weepy at first, but the effort of painting and balancing sobers me up. When I finish, I straddle the ridgepole and look at red letters and the mottled black roof and the close sky. I wonder if anyone can see the words from the street; I'm not sure if I want them to be seen or not, but it doesn't matter, since raindrops begin to fall. I slide back into the house as fast as I dare and get my camera.

Somehow, leaning out the window and hanging onto the frame, I get two shots. By now, I feel good, as if I had settled something.

When the pictures are developed, I put them in the notebook.

The next spring, I lose the whole book on the DC Metro. I call and leave a message at a Metro office. Nothing comes of it.

Sky-Blue and Empty

It was so beautiful outside today that I had a sappy grin on my face as I left the new coffee shop after a latte and some productive work. Then I heard Renee Fleming on the radio and got tears in my eyes, and I'm not even an opera fan. That's when I began feeling that something awful was bound to happen: I would either run over a child darting into the street, my boss would have been killed earlier that very morning, or I would get a call from the daycare with news that 2 was dreadfully ill.

In the office, under the fluorescent lights, shades mostly drawn, the giddy fear of pleasure faded.

My husband called--unusually--to tell me to check CNN for news of a fatal multiple shooting at an Amish school, perhaps not far from my relatives or friends of 1. So callous am I towards bad news that doesn't involve me--the school was not in the right town--that I didn't even think until many hours later that someone in Pennsylvania had her lovely-day premonition come true.