{my topography}

I’m sitting outdoors with a bevy of chickens clucking at my elbow. Across from me the cat is licking himself, fur soaking up warmth. Next to me Bean digs a big hole in an empty flower bed. The grass is wet from rain, and the sun is warm on the black rubber of my boots.

I just spent the weekend with a good friend I’ve known since I was fourteen. He’s an creative, free-spirited atheist. Invariably we always have at least one argument about faith. He sees no need for it–the opiate of the people and all that. I’m on the other side, but less articulate. I don’t keep a drawer of knife sharp words to define the shape of what I know. Tautology. Ignorance. Deism. How do you use the scientific method to argue the depth or scope of spiritual faith? How do you use logic as the basis for accepting or denying that which you cannot know about the movement of another person’s heart?

So now I really want to know:

What do you believe? Do you have faith, or do you live outside it? How do you rationalize your fundamental view of the world? Can logic define it, or is something lost in translation?

Swallows swoop in at the barn door
and their feathers, bones filled with air,
brush up against the corrugated metal roof.

The air is rife with musk and hay
and the hot piss of sheep
pressing against each other
in woolly urgent nearness.

The sky bends down closer to the earth now;
blue tucking the edges of the vermilion mountains in;

and every vine heavy with wild grapes
bittersweet.

Because his small hand fits into my palm still,
I hold my breath and feel the gills of my heart
pummel inside my chest.

There is no way for keeping this;
like stacking bags of sand
against the jetty,
crumbling
no way to keep back his tide of growing up.

“I’m you’re a little bit big boy,” he whispers
against my cheek in the dark
then moon gets caught in the branches on the hill

and I’m begging that this filament
these slender fish bones of love
and the flotsam of our days
will keep us
when he is taller than my head,

and turns to walk the other way.

The sun falls in broken rectangles on the floor
shards of yellow plates
we gather in our pockets,
for the winter ahead.
Our skin bare to the wind, the grass tattoos
our arms with zig zags and clover
while the moments grow steady
and the verdant humming
of summer dwindles
into the big-moon nights and stillness.

Sometimes there are other things. Mornings of sleeping in an extra half hour instead of getting up and dragging myself to the keyboard in the pre-dawn chill, because my days already feel like the fragile worn fabric of a quilt. The first flu of the season has me bleary eyed and achy. I’d whimper, but the afternoons with skies all blue and full of tatters, make me too happy.

The weather has been perfect. The leaves falling, every day more, until the ground has become a kaleidoscope of red and yellow. Days are filled with small things that make me be right here. Pomegranates are in season. The wood is stacked, cords deep, and our new wood stove arrived; fire-engine red, tucked into a corner in the dining room. Apples are tangy and sweet now, and on the tree beyond the kitchen window they look like the burnished red beads on some old woman’s necklace. The air’s still sweet and noisy with the end of summer: crickets at night, and the last cut of hay, but there is a bite to the mornings.

Sometimes I want fragments. Short phrases. Words in the loop of a poem; the dangling thought of an elipsis; the wanton lust of the run-on. Sometimes I can’t say things all the way, the way they are. Instead, the feeling is simply there, welling up. Like woodsmoke in the air, or the red streak of the tanager. This week I want to return to something I did last September. A poem a day. A morning poem. Whatever words come to mind to paint the colored arc of soul and dreams across the page. Tomorrow, first thing, with a steaming mug and the fog rising, I’ll scatter careless armfuls of words like autumn leaves. Will you join me?

In the Pacific ocean, 1996.

This afternoon I sat among boxes in my studio and dug through relics (an attempt at organizing, gone very far tangent.) I found pictures of high school boyfriends; letters; collages. All small fragments of who I was then, different, yet still me, in ridiculous cut-off shorts and too-large plaid shirts (thank you Nirvana.)

It felt so funny looking back—feeling the way time arcs like electricity, fast and slow between now and then. It seems so impossible to me sometimes, that we can only go forwards. That we can only live today and maybe tomorrow, but never yesterday again. Those romances, back then when I wore converse high tops and baggy jeans were so sweet and achingly awkward. They were all good guys, and I still know most of them. Some, I’m still close friends with, which says a lot about the both of us, I think. But even though we’re friends, and we talk and share pancakes when they come to visit my little family here up on our hill, we can still only go one-way: always towards the future. We’ll never be able to slip back into the skin of our past selves—there on the rocky coast, posing for the camera on self-timer in wind-rumpled blue parkas; or there on the cobbled streets of Florence, in hiking boots and backpacks.

Riffling through the box of artifacts I felt myself slip up above like a helium balloon on a string. Suddenly with a birds-eye-view: there I am, in the middle of my life. That is how it has all turned out. That man. That small boy. That house. And not those other men, despite their earnest efforts, and big hearts. It felt like time travel, seeing my name, printed out on numerous envelopes. My maiden name. Those consonants now grown unfamiliar on my tongue.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Startled, for a brief moment, or surprised, to find yourself right where you are? Not that it could be any different, or that I would want it to. Simply that time moves on, and that on a rare instant I see how I am enmeshed in its shimmering net, the tide pulling steadily forwards, and regardless of my loves and my discrepancies, and I arrive each day, a little further on.

Every minute of the day was allocated for something. Gah! Do you ever have days like that? I’m still getting the hang of it, and mostly I suck.

If left to my own devices I’d be the haphazard, spontaneous, bohemian Aquarius that I am, to the core. I’d forget to eat, and then have pancakes for dinner; I’d write for hours on end and skip washing my hair; I’d sit in cafés to people watch past 10pm, and loose count swimming laps at the pool. But because I am not left to my own devices, I sometimes struggle to stay afloat of the waves of laundry, the books that need reading, the posts that need writing, the drafts that need revising, the kids that need shoe tying, and the small boy who needs smooching. Not to mention the big one. Who I feel like I’ve barely seen this week. I hate crossing paths, barely. I hate when we only sink into each other’s arms in bed. When the entire day is parceled out.

Not all days are like this, but Tuesdays for some reason often are.

What was your Tuesday like? And also, what would you be like if left to your own devices?

For DH’s birthday: I woke up to make pancakes and pick fresh flowers before heading out the door for work. In the evening we went out for dinner at an lovely little Italian place. Good wine. Excellent food: smoked/grilled fresh mozzarella with eggplant; pumpkin ravioli with duck; veal saltimbocca. Bean was a delight. A perfect example of manners and peaceable dining. He noshed on the pumpkin ravioli and daintily pretended the breadsticks were chopsticks. A perfect evening.

DH’s birthday comes two days after our anniversary—not our wedding anniversary, but our first-got-together one. Eight years. Pretty cool to know someone for nearly a decade, and to feel like time has flown.

Is this what it feels like forever? Time speeding up exponentially with each rotation of earth around sun? Until decades tumble down upon each other, and thus is a life? Is this really how it goes? Each moment so full, so poignant, so messy and rich and joyous, that it all seems like yesterday. I look at Bean, our shiny-eyed rascal of a boy, and I can’t see a baby in him any more. He’s all little boy. Rough and tumble and sweet. It makes me catch my breath.

We spend so much time looking forward to things, and then, so much time looking back. The moments in between, before the fruit is picked, before the seeds are spit. Sheer present; so hard to hold.

Several of you made me promise I’d tell you when my piece hit newstands in Mothering Magazine. The editor says nice things about it here.

And also–I need your help: Dh’s b-day is this weekend. Any fun ideas?