just before sleep

Just before I fell asleep
Two women I had seen on t.v. earlier
Had a fight on the backlit screen of my closed eyes

Tearing and ripping
Almost to the point of feathers flying
The light from the streetlamp pushing
Red and black bolts mashing and slashing

While a dog barked outside
Yipping yapping
at something from the yard

they were fighting about this:

we should not fight to show how smart we are

(from a day of me thinking: I can’t spend my life poured
over books and blank screens trying to prove some thing to some one

It must be a non thought.

But of course that is true
I must not think)

And one said yes
And one said no

the world is wide
and fits on a map on my wall

i can't believe i still miss india

I was just twenty

I don’t remember my birthday that year. There wasn’t a party or anything. Too much else had been happening to stop and eat cake.

And I was in the Himalayas
Sitting five to a seat in a jeep taxi
Barreling up and down mountain roads muddy from the monsoons
Horns and lights blaring around corners
Because the breaks had lost reliability years ago
The tires with layers of re-treading like rings on an oak

And like a scene in that movie about the girl who finds herself in India

I was standing there alone
On a dirt road
In India
Facing a driveway that led
To the monastery

dinner with an old friend/ 14 year old kiss

I had dinner tonight with
The only boy
I was ever a first kiss for

And he still smells the same
Even from 3 feet away

The way he did when we were fourteen and
Wearing Halloween costumes
That last year we could go
Trick or treating
Before it was considered
cheating

I remember we were holding hands
And it happened
Like that

In different places and different times
We might have been married

And maybe I wouldn’t even notice that smell
That is so distinctive to me
And for some reason
Reminds me of holed out cardboard
The way I imagine it would
Taste on my tongue

today i am missing trains

Today I am not myself

I do not recognize you self
With your weepy eyes and
Pressed in heart

This is not the girl I know
Who has already learned to love

***************************

I miss trains she says to me
I miss India and
Paris

I miss Morocco and I have never been there
Some day
I long to miss Tunisia
Desert places

I miss who I am on trains
She writes
Endless trains
She writes
Endless trains

When you came home from India there was something so strong about you
He had said
In that coffee shop in Manhattan
And now you have lost it
It has worn off
Scared little girl has
Returned

Now three years later
Still feeling my hands on that paper coffee cup
Scratching to find something that was lost

Now three years later
Eighteen months since the last big train trip
The wanderer
The romantic
The exiled
The hungry
One beneath the skin
Is still breathing deep notice me breaths

Older
Wiser
And still
Loved
Loved
Loved
(three different ways)
And
Still
with feet on the ground
And map in hand
Lost
Lost
Lost

love

I long for a miracle maker in the family
Some woman
Who
Did not cede her power
Some woman
Who knows
Who
She is
And why she is
Here.
(to have you
my mother said once
and i wanted more as i filled out the college applications
what more could i want even now as i write this
more than love?)

They don’t exist
Here
At Christmas
This odd holiday
That has nothing to do with me

I would rather
Make my own
Rather than
pay homage to
This prophet
I don’t think was any more a prophet
Than

Than
I don’t know any prophets

This is what the graffiti on the power box says:
This war for oil only
Makes blood boil

Oil from the prophet’s land
Happy birthday jesus
I don’t know you
And never did

But i don't buy the father story
And i don't know you because
The women taught me to love
beyond all things
although i was never dressed in my sunday best
i learned in spite of some dark rules
past letters and grids and wheat
vast oppressions
(however slight, however much i want to roll my eyes at this, i must admit- yes! we overcome)
past the reconsecration of goddesses to saints
past the slavery and the witch hunts and the strip clubs
past all those filters that were made
to make it possible that no national holiday is held solely in celebration of a woman
that
love
love that great glue of the closest kind
cannot be changed by any church book story
love is a mother
love was
is
will be
a woman