Little Weirds(32)
Then again, it was certainly its own zone, it was certainly disorienting, to do this process of tart to sweet, because when I came home I felt bananas. And just to see if I was onto something, I put on some music and I put on the oven and I threw some bananas into a batter.
I’m sure you can’t bake it all away, but you can transform the reality while still accepting the essential elements that make it what it is. You can make good smells in the place where you live, smells that are better than sitting around with stress breath and cigarette smoke. Who knows? Who knows how to do anything, but it’s not nothing that I know all my feelings and I have trust in their changeable nature and I am an expert at making treats out of tribulations.
It’s in the oven. The dog is asleep next to a large strawberry pillow that he likes as a friend. I will have the bread soon enough. I wonder what you will do with the picture you took of me. I wonder what you will do with the rest of the tart. I guess the trick of the treat is that I left it there for you because I had too much of the troublesome ingredient with me for so long and I needed to make it into something else and give it away. It is too much for one person, isn’t it? And if you eat it, maybe you will know how full of it I felt, but also how much sweetness I have been holding for you, inside of myself, in so many colors and forms.
Clothes Flying On/Day Flying Open
Hello, I am a woman and I have been awake for at least two hours, during which I have spoken on the telephone, fixed breakfast for the old dog, made strong coffee and put it in the white and blue coffee cup that is so delicate and short that it is really a teacup but is indeed for my coffee. I took many sips.
Hello, I have been up for a while and I stood in my nightgown on the front porch and sniffed the air like taking in wafers of just-born light and I haven’t even thought of brushing my teeth but I have actively and absentmindedly fussed over my new triangle haircut. I left my coffee on top of a china cabinet, next to a plant, and I will not see it again until I move it this afternoon and that has nothing to do with whether or not I am tidy. I am certainly tidy and that tidiness comes from deep inside of me because I know where everything is always, starting from inside of myself. Very tidy.
Hello, I changed from the white cotton nightgown with light blue embroidery on the collarbone into a very smart outfit for living in the day: a cream-colored skirt, with a grid of white, and pleats all the way around, an accordion of cotton. The pleated skirt is the color of tea with lots of cream. Traditionally speaking, it is the color of tea with too much cream and sugar in it. The skirt is the tone of a slightly warm dessert-drink hiding in a cup, a secret gentle creamy treat for me while everyone else drinks a darker, more serious, scalding thing.
Nobody knows how extra sweet it is in my cup. I hide my delights in plain sight—I turn the normal thing into a much tastier option.
But do you know this: The outfit went right onto me. The outfit flew onto me. I put my hands in the air and I stood there and it flew on. I stood with my hands over my head like a young bride in her new country and I felt the air hit the fine soft skin that stretches down the inside of my arm and into my warm armpit and down my rib cage, where there is the circle of my little breast just waking up. And I felt, I must get on with it! I must admit to my lust for knocking this morning into a full-on day!
Hello, I live in a constant state of growth and regeneration without being obsessed with the threat of decay.
Well, what? It’s my business how the heck I get dressed and how I remember it.
Something pushes me right out of the bedroom before I can turn around and reconsider almost everything about myself because that’s what I do: I tear everything down sometimes in a fit of rip-roaring instinct, because I’m a terrifying, wild little thing. And sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I’m trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith. And I went downstairs and I thought, Okay, here I go!
Hello, I sit at my desk in these clothes, in this body, and the sweater slips down my shoulder and I turn my head right away and give myself between nine and thirteen kisses on my bare skin, and my eyes flick up from these kisses and look out the window, and outside the window there is a squirrel drinking in my fountain, underneath a grapefruit tree.
I think about how we are both having our mornings and that they are equal. I do feel it all and then some. I have just been kissing my own skin but now I feel the wet water in the squirrel’s mouth. I feel the swollen grapefruit bear its heaviness, its tear-shaped pods of sweetness and tartness in one pink liquid, capsules surrounded by membrane, covered in a thick pinky orange rind. I put myself in everything that I see and I want it to put itself in me and watch that web of interaction spin out between us.
I am in contact with something and I accept something these days: I accept that somewhere there is the fastest animal and somewhere there is the brightest coral and all around are the energy streaks of lives of people who are now dead and somewhere is the most ripped up canyon and I can sense its depth and my very own heart jerks and shifts with all the waves going berserk in the ocean. The magnolia blooms are so beautiful, the flowers are like fish in a tree. Sometimes do you ever get jealous of the plants, that they only have to grow and not know about it, and they don’t take anything personally?
What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.