Whispering Pines

We are having such crystal clear days here, cold and bright and wintry. We are getting rain, too, and earlier this evening there were reports of snow and hail in Malibu. I don't feel clear, though. I feel as if I'm moving around, doing stuff but only half-way, my mind divorced from my body, and I'm hard put to describe the dissociation. I've got the lines to the Band's "Whispering Pines" in my head, the if you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream, inside my lonely room, there is no in-between and whispering pines. Whispering. That's what it feels like. My mind and body, whispering. I had a dream the other night that I lay on a crowded city street with people crouched over me, around me. I was being administered some kind of intravenous fluids, yet I felt no pain nor panic but only this insistent loneliness exacerbated by the presence off-screen, off-dream, in one of those city towers of Carl's old girlfriend (!) who was somehow involved in the ministering to me. Yeah. I woke from this dream and felt it like a hangover for hours, the vague, unsettling head fatigue and nausea of it.

Whispering Pines is a song for old love, from an old love, long love, early love, lost love, gone love, forever love and lovers.




Loneliness.




Need, like an echo.




Echo.







An angel came today and did Reiki with Sophie.

Whispering Pines

Do you know that song, a Richard Manuel/The Band plaintive cry? If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream --

I hear that song in my head today as I scurry about, mailing packages, filling out forms, going to the grocery store, diapering and dressing Sophie, fixing her hair and putting her in the backyard swing where she'll sit just for a minute, while I write, I said, and I gave her, it, the swing, a shove, told the dog to stop barking and ran up the back steps into my room, inside my room, my lonely room, there is no in-between. What else comes to me but songs from other lives, that other life, that I penned in small spiral notebooks, in tinier script, even a poem in French that I picked out of a stack the other day, opened and read, remembered.

Pour la premiere fois
j'ai vu la Saturne
et je pense a toi
deux lunes autour d'une
lumiere brilliante.

I spent two weeks hiking in the wilderness of the Adirondacks one summer between my junior and senior years. I had Pascal in my head, read St. Augustine on a bus with a big girl named Cheryl, wrote character notes about moon-faced women and boys tripping on LSD, camp lantern lighting the page. Our instructor was bald and stooped, a leprauchan who knew the names of all the trees and plants, the rocky paths, the peaks. I came back thin, so thin, from twenty mile hikes, seventy, eighty miles in, a sixty-five pound backpack wrapped on my already small frame. I wore a blue cashmere sweater with cables, thin in spots, and when we climbed down and dispersed, I spent the night alone in a hotel room in Syracuse. I shaved my legs in a porcelain tub and sank, deep, into hot water. I ordered steak and a potato, had it delivered to my room and devoured it like a beast. The next day I flew back to school, was met at the airport, I think, by a boy, but I can't be sure. I can feel you standing there, but I don't see you anywhere -- I will wait until it all goes 'round -- With you in sight, the lost are found --

Monday memory

That plaintive cry, asphodel, that greeny flower, a hotel in Hartford, the seventh floor and when I opened the door, my hair wet the years began. We fell through woods and into a musty theater, the skinny boy in the chicken house screamed and I woke up in the bathtub of a motel, the water falling your arm smooth and hairless, a Cheshire cat smile, the open road, paper-thin letters, onanistic and back to the north, our bed a swaying single boat with oars that rested still

Standing by the well,
wishing for the rain,
Reaching to the clouds,
For nothing else remains.


Drifting in a daze when evening will be done
Try looking through a haze
At an empty house in the cold, cold sun


I will wait until it all goes round,
With you in sight the lost are found.