The sky was blue on April 16 at one minute before noon . It was to be my debut onto Avenue Magdalena , one street over from Clover Drive , the pale blue singing me into life , a life we are all born to die , the blue pushing me through onto earths keyboard , the blue stealing my heart , the blue separating the land and the sea by only a membrane . I’ve been watching , always watching , looking into a hued haze of violet swirling my days in New Mexico now , vast this country , nostalgic , old , fragile , faint with dark blue veins connecting canyons , cottonwood , cattle , antelope , crevices , plateau , juniper , tumbleweed and the breath of sage sighing like dust clouds , moving ghosts over dry land , land the color of my body . Nothing is hidden here , here where melodies of wind bring forth imagination as if tears dropping from blue , drop compassion upon these hills of ivory skulls and bones .
I have been alive for sixty-five years today , today with the blue sky a circle . Those holes blue , drawn by the clouds becoming navels , the dark purple of the night are my east and west , the rising and falling of my nipples erect and exposed , the north and the south are my womb and stomach swallowed by the moon . I wish I could have another baby . I wish I could dance the flamingo . I wish I could hold onto my mother once more or play the accordion ( the green one I always write about ) or live at an ashram or walk the Camino de Santiago or fly like birds do . But I am a ” poem painter “. I was born in the bosom of Mother Earth , in a place beyond the horizon , a place whose residents have an inclination for precipitating miracles , a place under the bright blue sky of 1951 . Who stole my heart ? I’m always looking so far for it . I wish I could have back the round black mole that was once burned off my cheek bone . It came with me , an onyx from somewhere before , the day the sky was blue .
I sat watching on the sheepskin rug , watching as the desert invaded the room , invading my body becoming like the hollows of the rotating earth . I am tired . The houses gaze at each other with beige pueblo faces . I watch the wide sky , the soft ending lavender of it all . I was once married to a Christian , and once to an artist dead now , and once to a carpenter.
What is that boy doing pulling a skull along the street with a string ? Watching , there appears a light of pale pink from the moon so far away . And in that blush glow I hear my youngest son say , ” I sometimes miss my father “. How do you explain God to his own son ? It’s too much for me . I look down at my drooping breasts , the dark purple nipples he once suckled and the scent of crushed juniper berries passes into my memory , a memory of his father , his fathers paint and ink stained clothes , the very look of him , his gentleness , his father and I walking , walking as he takes the garden shears , clearing a way thru the woods , showing me the birds , the wildflowers , the sun . He hums a song by Jim Morrison , it was to be the last song I ever heard him sing . There was that place of his contentment surrounding his studio , a place now faceless , that place I cry about . It’s been twenty two years . He held my hand so tight before he left and I wanted to lay down on the ground and smell the mud in my nose . You were only five years old sleeping with batman on the wall over your bed .
I sat watching from a room in Santa Fe , watching the night invade my life . I am tired . Your older brother hung himself on a stove pipe a year later , his body growing plump and rotten like palm wine before anyone found him alone in Brooklyn , alone on the Road of Perpetual Tears .
The old paint on the canvas became transparent , when ? A tree appeared , when ? A tree inside the interior of the room , when ? And a dress with no one in it , when , floaters in a landscape , when ?
The narrator :
A repetition is seen , a repetition of a motif in different places , places where the lines suddenly possess music expressing a beautiful idea , ideas that sometimes become changed , replaced , painted over , the earlier ones disappearing , disappearing from view like all the questions Jack never asked Francie . And sometimes , sometimes the ghostly presence of older possibilities reemerge , a phantom code from an earlier universe , emerging like the voices of gods , ” you have a spirit inside of you “.
Francies diary :
I didn’t love you well enough . Listening from across the street , I watched a man with a broom sweep the snow off his driveway , the sound strange . I thought of the ” umbrella girl ” selling trinkets while shuffling along the beach of Sayulita . The sound of her feet on the sand , sand drowned in the sun , the sun where the horizon was just an illusion . Those trinkets of silver , bangles , old keepsakes lost and strings with bells attached , attached to my mind like a fine portrait on the wall in a fine museum . And then I remembered all the doors of my life even the place where I saw people standing on a shore but not able to see what they were doing . They appeared so very tall , tall like a row of skyscrapers , tall like Seraphim , the fiery burning ones worshipping continually . I was exhilarated and terrified , that sound like the sound of snow and sand , terrified that my dead mother could now be one of them, one of the Seraphim , and that she was calling to take me to God . Tonight , as I write , a hymn now fills the sky , a hymn so clear and sweet , why didn’t you know that I loved you ?
Jack :
You , I saw you today for only a moment . You didn’t see me . You , standing alone in a parking lot near the drugstore . You , you standing in the almost frozen rain , the rain seeming to fall only on you . I felt the water come straight into my arms . It was raining you . You drove off very fast in your car when you once took only a slow path lasting one year . You I loved . I loved you .
Narrator :
There is a drawing on white paper she left for me . A drawing of lines , curvy lines so small and naked in their expression . A self portrait with her wrist watch turned upside down . When , when did she do it , when ?
There she was , yes . Her choices were different , yes . The sky was grey and pink , yes . She saw out her window , hills that had eyes , yes . Eyes so brown that their softness created a city , yes . A city for only poets , yes . There she was , yes . She had become her own inspiration , yes .
Once upon the earth lived a man , a man tender who she loved . She laid in the quiet not sleeping . The night was to be the last with him . She remembered Amsterdam where tulips die so beautifully and she thought of northern Michigan where tragedy had happened one year ago , a tragedy in the forest , a storms destruction . And she hoped the forest would take care of itself , hoping for mossy growth on the fallen bark to return , hoping she could shove off into the snowy woods down a hill and slide into heaven . Hoping he could too . She planned her escape during those midnight hours , of laying so still while his sleep of anxiety and sweat created a smell that had always intoxicated her , a lingering scent whose memory saddened her now . With the haziness of dawn approaching , without speaking before he left for work , she dressed into her clothes of yesterday . She pulled the curtains down as if disassembling a nomads tent from an oasis. She did everything methodically , packing her clothes , blankets and rugs , paintings , her writing desktop , dishes from Mexico , her green accordion . She carried it all outside , placing them in a pile , waiting for her brother to come , the wall of belongings looking like a carved facade , carved like the Lost City of Petra . Feeling a desert in her heart , hot , she raised her hand to touch the bones of her face damp , damp as she stepped through the door .
Days before he had taken her to dinner , I know as I was sitting alone , watching them from the dark corner table . Looking across Main Street from where they were sitting , I saw her black eyes become transfixed on the upper windows of the long term , newly renovated Studio Hotel . Something in her life was ending and another thing was beginning , she wasn’t sure what but she knew she was letting it happen . She told him a story about her soul , how it was like an intimate plot of moist , warm , well cultivated earth with the sun dazzling hot on it and how the appeals of that small heap of earth were unremitting if anything righteous was to grow , righteous of its quality and how this soul needed so much care . She told him it would be very difficult for her to live if it were destroyed again just now .
The night after her escape , alone , she felt lightening hovering courageously . And out her brothers window the trees were moaning like the lover she left , the shadows like wild animal tracks in the abyss of the winter , the winter of 2016 .
It was beautiful inside the cage , yes . But it was still a cage , yes . He would always be touching her , yes , even when he could not reach her , yes . All the days are holy , yes . The sky was pink and blue , yes . The sky was unfinished , yes .
Credits : last photo by Denise Thomasin photography
Farewell until February my dear blogging family . A journey from the northern Great Lake Michigan to the far Pacific coast is calling me into new territories of poetry and song , of order and chaos , mystery and redemption and always love .
