[NOVEMBER 2022.]
Autumn dried back out, leaves paper the ground and everything makes so much noise when it moves, me included. Did something happen to my hearing in the portal? Late morning, windless, I stop in the woods behind the Tibetan temple and the wingbeats of finches thump from the canopy like an overhead heart… towhees scratch in the litter, squirrels crash through, a pair of woodpeckers knock angles into mossy bark with the precision of billiard players. When a squirrel climbs too close they mob it, flashing red caps and barred primaries.
A smoky gray cat winds up the path. It’s friendly; I find the collar snug around its neck. You leave everyone else alone, I say, and it pretends to get the joke... I’m not here to give orders.
Portal
Ein Traum, was sonst?
I fell asleep in Portland. “You’re still so young” was the last thing I’d been told on that worst night. Rain in the drainpipes
woke in a bright place. Sounds of machines scrubbing the air. A constraint about the head, my mind shied from it, it might be pain. In motion, a companion under each arm holding me upright. Clean bright floor. Moving
a place of passage. Dimness. No windows no weather. Sound of a running fountain on loop. Beatrice helped me fall upward into the raised bed. How’s your pain? They wanted a number. Patches were stuck to me. Have a sip of water. My hands were enormous, too big to move the cup around my face. A splint on my nose, bumped it, no feeling in the lower lip. It will be like that for a couple months. How’s your pain? Pain was the constraint about my head, I knew it. Do you want to try a pill
ingenious, the rigid ring that held the plastic bag open while I vomited, water ran over my chin, I couldn’t feel it. Virgil was holding me upright. I don’t think that Tramadol was your friend. We’re going to put you on a drip. Here’s your phone if you want it
phone face down, the world was there and I couldn’t look into it. The false fountain ran along my hearing. Beatrice sat at the foot of the bed, Virgil stood at my elbow and fed the IV. This is for pain. This is an antibiotic. This is for nausea. We’re going to keep you on the drip for now, since you had emesis. I was propped against a headrest pillowed with ice packs. It’s like trying to fall asleep on an airplane. They didn’t understand me. I reached for the water cup, sipped, rain soaked the dead planet of my mouth. But I had to keep my mouth open to breathe. I shut my eyes and woke dry. The stitches inside your mouth will dissolve in a few weeks
three things before you’re discharged, you have to walk, you have to urinate, you have to drink water. Can we go for a walk? Long corridor, quiet, Virgil gone and a new Beatrice at my elbow. What time is it? No windows no weather. My gown was coming loose in back, she refastened it for me. Do you want to try using the bathroom? I was left alone with a catchment dish in the toilet bowl. A burn where the catheter had been. I stood and went to the sink, bent my nearsighted gaze to the mirror and saw the splint and plaster cast, tape holding it in place and around it no, wrong
a phrase from Faulkner, a balloon face slick and distended
not human. But if human then a woman. But not human, not here. Don’t look. This is the wrong place to look. Walk and urinate and drink water. I washed my hands with soap, dried them on a paper towel and dropped the towel in the wastebasket, surprised that I could still do these things
back along the corridor. How’s your pain now? The medicines were keeping the door locked against pain, forcing it to wait outside. Virgil was back with more. This is an antibiotic. This is for nausea. Fall upward into bed, headrest and ice packs, rain in the mouth. I shut my eyes and woke dry. Beatrice and Virgil were discussing the nurses’ strikes in low voices, I wanted to say something in solidarity
phone face down with the world inside it, not yet, the running fountain
a balloon face slick and distended
place of passage. I had fallen asleep in Portland
A lei stessa
November 20, 2003
Dear guy at metameat,
I need to write to you now, at your worst, because this is the moment when you’re most in need of it. The good news first: you’re not the horror you think you are. The bad news is that you’re also not as important as you think you are, not by a mile; and knowing you as I do, you’ll take this to mean that you’ve gone up against the world and been defeated. Maybe so. But you don’t even know what this world is that you think you’re fighting, and you haven’t come round to understand that no one, really no one, is totting up these victories and defeats other than you.
I’m not here to chastise! I feel tender for you tonight, walking the wet streets of Portland in your tent of a black coat. Reading the taped-up neon flyers with everyone else’s happenings, readings, meetups, shows; halting on the sidewalk outside a corner bungalow because you hear OK Computer playing inside; offering your arm to the ghost of Elliott Smith every time you pass one of the streets, Alameda or Division, that he named in his songs; yourself haunting the door of the café where once, during rain, a girl shared your table, you exchanged two sentences about the novels you were reading and never met again; letting go your last dollars on someone’s new novel, a Sibelius LP, a cup of Stumptown because those transactions are the only connections you know how to make. I wish I could take you out for that cup of coffee. I know what a gift you’d find it just to be taken out for an hour, especially by a woman. By another woman, I ought to say, but you’re in no place to receive that. With these latest happenings that you think of as defeats, you’re not allowing yourself even to dream of it, and won’t for decades. You poor, touchy, proud, envious ball of need. Someone needs to undo your knots.
Gifts are coming to you. I’d like this message, which you can’t receive, to herald another message you’ll receive very soon, that you half understand you built this blog in order to receive. Read her carefully when she writes, and don’t outsmart yourself when you answer. You have no idea how much you’ll learn from her, nor how much you need to learn it. It’s a little painful to read what you’re putting on your blog right now, because you’re not yet writing well, and it’s obvious that you think you’re writing well, that under the raw pain you still pride yourself on knowing the way of the world, when you don’t even own an atlas. A couple years from now, around 2005, that will change. Your phrasing will start to settle into something recognizable as style, sometimes even recognizable as thought. But you’re not there now, and that really is another chapter. I need to show you the gift that will be deferred the longest.
Tomorrow I’m going to change your face. More than anything else that’s happened, this feels like it’s going to sever a connection with you; and I’m sorry I have to do it now, just as that connection is coming back to light. When I tunnel into the dark backward and abysm of time, it’s you, at this your worst moment, that I keep uncovering; because although you will get smarter, although you’ll put in the work to learn your discipline and craft and bring up some treasure from it, although you’re going to learn your existence is not a range of endless solitude, right now you are alive, and part of that life in you is about to go to sleep. At the same time that you clear the woods to make your own dwelling in a little corner of the world, something you never thought could be yours, you’ll enter into a slow path of abandoning your body. You’ll get heavier, shaggier and grayer, and you’ll tell yourself it makes no difference, that anything you’ve lost was never worth having. You’ll give yourself over to a stoicism of duty and compromise, something that you want to call Dante’s Paradiso but is really just the fate that was always threatening, that of Henry James nodding off under endless layers of misdirection, a head full of imagined scenes and a life unlived. And yet—I need you to know—despite all your years on that path, it will never narrow to a point, and in the worst crisis it will widen again. When I look back per angustam viam, through the whole span traveled, and see you there, it won’t be unthinkable to claim you for the addled girl you didn’t know you were. It’s not wrong for you to have hope.
When I tell you that someone is about to grind down your mandible and brow with power tools, cut a saucer out of your frontal bone and staple it at a new tilt, shift your hairline and crop your nose and whittle your chin and fillet the masseter muscle till you’re hardly recognizable, you’ll think that I mean to destroy you. Just now you’d probably welcome it; I know there’s a lot in you that wants to be destroyed. But that’s not the thing at all. It’s not sophistry or false consolation to say that I’m doing this to make you whole, to bring up what is suffering latent in you. That the end of this exploring is for you to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time. That there’s no wholeness this side of Eden and still it’s the limit toward which our twinned arc tends, hand in hand.
Dear girl at metameat, noli timere. I’m holding you.
