Two Small Stones

Polk Place, 1935, Wilson library in background: William Waters, IV

We stood on the steps of the old library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the fall of my sophomore year. We were on the top step, having emerged from the stacks blinking, blinded in the day's light. My backpack was heavy on my back. I was wearing a Mexican-inspired red ruffled skirt with desert boots, an ensemble that I imagined bohemian in otherwise preppy 1982. He put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his dry palm through the thin cotton of my shirt. The same bumps on my skin rose at his touch as do when I step into sunlight. The bare skin receives warmth and then, shocked, feels a chill, the goosebumps, then the warmth spreads to the tips of the fingers. A sun sneeze. His hand lay there, on my shoulder, so that I couldn't move. I heard his voice, low, in my ear, a whisper. If we lived in Cro-Magnon times, he said, you would never have survived. I would be the wild cat that ate you up. The steps under my feet were hard, wide and shallow. I was stuck under his hand and couldn't open my mouth. I felt his fingers on my throat, cool and dry. Blinded, I saw spots, little black dots and at the bottom of the steps, the world, bare and primitive, stripped.

Small Stone 21 and 22

An End

The week after Christmas, and the skies had reverted to gun-metal. It was cold, and when I said good-bye, he turned into a crowd of people and I watched his back and then his head, and then the crowd closed around him and he disappeared.

Small Stone 20

I walked down the hallway this morning, guiding Sophie to the front door and out, her feet splayed toes touching the walls, and when we got too near one of them I reached up to right a tilted photo hanging there and noticed that nearly every photo was tilted ever so slightly this way and that and when Sophie's head veered toward the right as it is wont to do I wondered whether the universe had turned  or tilted on its axis and the frames hadn't followed suit.

Small Stone 18

Parsley

I wish that parsley fresh plucked from a kitchen garden and placed in a blue vase would take me to the Italian countryside. But when I pinch a leaf and roll it between my fingers, the whiff of green and bits that stain is just parsley.

Small Stone 17

The sound of the springs

The sound of the springs on the new trampoline rise above even the screams. I don't like jumping, my stomach flies up, I lose the sense that my arms are connected to my shoulders, proprioception gone backward, and when the world appears at the top of the safety net it feels like only an edge. I prefer the ground going down deep and forever.

Small Stone 16

The Hum

Sophie, March 2006

Paying attention, it would crack me into a million pieces. Just for a moment, though, it hurts my lips, numbs my throat, catches my breath. Does she hum to shut out or to invite in? Raise a joyful noise unto the Lord runs through my head but there is no joy in the steady hum through years and years. Try it sometime, the vibration that makes one think of skull not head, a grate not tune, the constant reminder of I am here and I am not.


Small Stone 15

Love Letter

Lackawanna Steel Plant Complex, 1908

Elizabeth, Could I sing you a song if it was unpracticed. Could my heart weave its strands? The paper is thin, the shadow of my hand behind it, the letters pecked, back space and typed over in some previous lifetime, a woman by the well fetching water and not in the least concerned that it was a brutish day. Folded, unfolded, thirty years ago, the creases cut through words indolent and stupid licking its greasy ear the fear of industry the fear of the moral life the fear that all the dalliances were just that and placed at the end of the small spiral notebook that was closed and we both vanished for a moment from each others' sights which we thought took so long yet back again we were.


Small Stone 14

Glasses instead of Contacts

My eyes ache at the sharpness of the word on the page, the face coming toward me, the sign up ahead. There's a hollow behind the burning eyelid that looks only inward. When they fall down the soft slope of my nose and I look over them, I rest in blur.

Small Stone 13

Small Stone Memory

scene from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire

We met at someone's house on Lake Placid later that summer, you from Canada and me from Rhode Island. Lying in someone else's big bed, you noticed that my thighs were slightly bigger. You're generally too scrawny, you said, I like it this way.  I held onto the spindles, scratched a mosquito bite, made a cross with my nail to stop the itch.

Small Stone 12

Bless Their Hearts

photo: Charles Dharapak

The man is dull to me. He might as well be a corporation in bodily form. Corporation: A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. In bodily form, corporeal. The photo is, at first glance, dull, too, but if I pay attention and really look, I see the man, his hair so like hair, embrace his wife, so like his wife. I see the backs of the heads of five sons, FIVE SONS! and I don't know what archetype that might be -- FIVE SONS! hair so like hair, dullness in corporeal form.

Small Stone 11

The Beast in the Backyard

Take it, take it, take it now, he said, jumping, grinning, a blur.
The beast in the backyard didn't slouch toward us
but stood tall
and round
and high
You only have one childhood, she said.

Small Stone 10

Musing on a recent blogger quarrel --

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene II

Small Stone 9

Your long hair

This is the view at the curve of your street and when I jumped out of the car and snapped it, I wondered if you noticed it at all having lived here for so long. In the same moment I knew that you did having just exclaimed over a raspberry red fruit hanging low from a tree. You reached up and plucked it off, gave me a taste and then I exclaimed over your long brown hair.

Small Stone 8

Idling

I can hear the rumble through glass, legs covered in black leather, seam-splitting sides. Even in traffic, idling,  that time we almost got caught in the park, the thin skin of my inner thigh burning, your fault.

Small Stone 7

Epiphany

Chink chink chink. I am sitting in the alley, car idling and reading a snippet of Stevens as a janitor carefully taps the glass of an old window. Complacencies of the peignoir from Saturday Morning, quoted by another, through glass I watch the man break glass. When the cars start up, I turn on the engine, the sound of flapping wings, dappled sun on bougainvillea, dead branches on cement, blue sky. 


Small Stone 6

Cosmic Swirls

Galactic Spiral

via PostHumanBlues

Henry walked up to me this morning after he opened a new tube of toothpaste with the cap in his hand and said, Look at this, mom. I looked in the palm of his hand, just inside the white cap the tiniest swirl of pink and white that wound around and ended with a perfect tip. It's cool, right? he said, awed by the perfection and I, awed by the sense, the time, the mind to note it.

Small Stone 5

You Never Sit in the Front Seat

You never sit in the front seat because you like to throw your head to the right, and you'd bang it, over and over. But today, you rode in the front, and the world turned around. You saw the sky and the trees with their last, dripping leaves, and when I came out of the bank, you followed me and smiled.

Small Stone 4

Allowance

I spoon black-eyed peas of the new year into Sophie's mouth outside under the sun, and while she is perhaps too old, too big for spooning, the yin/yang curve of the bean allows me to hear a leaf drop next to her.

Small Stone 3 

What's left

The leaves were raked up not down, Jesus Christ you said, too early and angry I thought, too dry, too old, what's left.


Small Stone 2

The River of Stones

Yosemite, 2009

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite

William Blake

To begin this new year, I am joining A River of Stones for the month of January. Each day I will post my own small stone, a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully engaged moment. 

January 1 - Small Stone

From the corner chair this morning, the light streamed through glass, the back of the chair and down the table, illuminating porcelain, the curve of his cheek.