(If you want to be happy be yourself)

I put on the Grateful Dead and read for a little while and start to feel a little better. Earlier I felt scared, partly because I made the mistake of reading House of Leaves while home alone and partly because I have not had free time in so long that I have forgotten what I like to do, how I like to think, what it is to have room to breathe. Tonight I sit on the brink of two whole wide-open days and I am ecstatic with relief and anticipation at the same time that I want to hide under my covers or in front of reruns on the tiny TV.




A mouse has taken to sporadic wanderings through the apartment. The first time I saw him, he ran underneath the futon where I was sitting. I stood up on the hard thin mattress and said, firmly and with conviction, "Get out mouse. Mouse, get out." Pretty soon I got sick of standing, so I sat back down cross-legged on the mattress. A few minutes later he left. Another time I got home from work and sat on the futon for nearly two hours before he scooted out from beneath my legs and headed nonchalantly for the kitchen. We have named him Donny.


A week ago it was a veritable menagerie in here, what with Donny and the caterpillar, chowing down then slowly metamorphosing. He slid from his chrysalis and bled blood. He tested his wings for sixteen hours before he flew. I raised him then he left. Daddy daddy where have you gone.


Not long ago I detested butterflies. What may have been months ago I painted tulips growing out of onions and dark shadows. Many months before that I painted two neon-blue cala lilies, intertwined.


I shower, looking at my body in the window's reflection. I am in love with my collarbones. I come and gasp, then realize I've forgotten my towel. I tiptoe fast across wooden floors to the back of the apartment, wrap myself in damp navy blue cotton that belonged, once, to my mother. I stare at my reflection again, this time in another window. I look through the slats in the blinds and see lights turned on across the alley. I wonder what my neighbors are thinking to themselves. I am less concerned with what they do.


If you want to be happy be yourself. If you want to be yourself do what makes you happy. Also, don't listen to self-help advice, except when it's helpful.

The trouble with writing anything nonfictional is that everything changes, even in the time it takes to write it! Still there is virtue, I suppose, in one sentence being true.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." 

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

(you are eating an orange.)

You are eating an orange.
Your fingers are sticky.

You are listening to a song for the memories it brings.

You remember her hair, dark. Ukuleles. People singing.

You remember dirt beneath your fingernails, baked into the creases on the backs of your hands. Eight days' worth of sweat gathers like layers of sediment beneath your breasts, in the folds of your armpits, behind your ears.  

You pee beside a tree then peel off your clothes, like unwrapping maple candy in summer. Sticky.

You walk into the center of the river, to its deepest. It's only a few feet but it'll do. You press your elbows into a rock and stretch your legs-- hairy, strong-- across the eddies to another boulder. Prop your feet up. Tilt your head back. Close your eyes. Stay there.

The water pools around and then crests over you, tickling, making you laugh. It is cold, ever-changing, clean.

(Things to Think)

THINGS TO THINK
by Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(here is how the world is changed)

Define me! Define me! Define me!

I swoon. come to in a pig sty black eye blackening. the cat hugs the piglet walks away on its hind paws. check the stopwatch return to the pumpkin patch three hours prior. we must not be seen.

uncle twists scratchy rope round the basket and tosses it over the bridge. Caddy is screaming. years later children hunt golf balls in the creek. the earwig burrows deeper.

here is how the world is changed: grip the sun. swirl your fingers through thick stripes of color. brush your hair, touch your jaw bone, finger the half-scarf black at his neck. take off your clothes.

I am naked from the waist down. my elbows are a rainbow. the guitar sits in its case on the floor. play me.

(we're swimming in it!)

you are what you read.

I am beginning to accept that I will continually reinvent myself for the rest of my life.

oh, heaven is the lakes and trails of maine and pennsylvania, and maybe licking an ice cream cone in a small town in vermont. the shores of lake george, purple lightning tap-tap-tapping the tops of trees. touching my lips to the soft creases of a horse's nose. my face pressed into the steady breath of a dreaming dog's stomach. the rise and, equally, falling.

I am a big fish I am a big fish I am a big fish ain't nobody got time for jokes about the sea. we're swimming in it!

yesterday Claudine asked me if I was happy. I said who the fuck are you Claudine I just made you up in my head. then I walked down 52nd street, turned a corner, and disappeared

(I am a prophetesse with my eyes open)

I am a prophetesse with my eyes open. I do not tell him who I am so I may continue to be a prophetesse. I wear a long flowing gown. Caesar quivers on hard gray stones. I open my lips to speak.

A brown swallow dashes from between my teeth. In one fist-grab he is feathers and bones.

My hair smells of coconut. My earrings hang from a navy blue placemat tacked into the wall. I choose my prepositions carefully.

Down down down we go under the water where the current drags and the chains run deep. The ship pulls hard against its sails. Brown boards and rotten planks, a knife clasped between my teeth as I hang from the bowsprit hauling at lines. How I wanted to be a seawoman.

I eat the grapefruit section by section, like my old lover taught me. All is diagrams and Latin names.

sunflowers burst from the darkness. water kneads my dimples like jelly. relax the backs of your thighs.


Yesterday I was a bowl full of water. we drank four quarts of liquid and still we got sick. still we managed to dig the trenches, diversions for floods and the safety of wolves.

arthritic fingers turn rust-red wheels in a begrudging neocortex. to write exactly what you are feeling!

I am a prophetesse with my eyes open. I open to the world in sleep.