Dispatch From the Edge of the Continent

-

Some nights--oh, most nights if I'm honest--I hold whole poems or essays in my head but cannot bring myself to write them. Here, or in a draft, or in my little composition notebook. I feel like I haven't written in months, feel utterly estranged from that part of my life. Am I writer? who is she? I drive through 

the city on the way to rehearsal, rain pummeling my windshield, downtown Portland flickering across the river. I sing, I put on my costume, I come home exhausted, unable to sleep. J. continues to figure out his young-adult life. I drive through the wet city, uncertain where to turn and on the wrong bridge. Is the Steel 

Bridge north or south of the Burnside Bridge? Does Naito Parkway go all the way up or? Am I in the bike lane or am I in the right lane? I read my tarot. I listen to a colleague talk about another colleague's recovery from COVID--a miracle. I tear up as she explains it. Am I an atheist? Do I believe in any god? I 

see every fellow Leftist take a side, stridently, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I grew up in a Jewish town where my friends' grandparents, many of them, escaped the Holocaust. Where do Jews have to go? I come home each evening to my home on colonized land. I have never lived anywhere else but colonized 

land. I have never lived in the homeplace of my people, whoever they are. Americans have amnesia. Here on the western edge of the North American continent, my boy makes the Hard Decision. I spend each night at opera rehearsal and am filled with momentary joy at the simple hope that is community theater. 

When I first moved to Portland, the husband of an old friend of R.'s said you know, the thing I love about Portland is that no one asks what you do for work. Instead, they ask so, you knit? R. and I have been married ten years. I come home from rehearsal and he puts his hand on my knee as we sit on the couch 

and hate watch terribly written television; he curls around me at night. In the morning, I press my lips into his shoulder, the pre-dawn bedroom dark and whisper I love you before I get up, get dressed, drive to work. I struggle with body dysmorphia all day, unable to look in mirrors in the college bathrooms, 

conscious of every place my clothes touch my flesh. I catch a glimpse of myself in the theater mirrors and want to weep. I run through the rain. I try to count the calories of everything I've eaten and simultaneously tell myself to be kind. Stop it. I light candles. I collect eggs from the chickens, I let the smell of 

woodsmoke and rain seep through the cracked window in my office. Oh bird, time moves more quickly than you'd think, I say to my boy. Rain patters on the attic roof, he wraps his arm around my shoulders. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more