Snippet - for Avi

The birds couldn’t plan their meetings by the time – at least not the time Aurelia had learned from her books, which gonged loudly from the church tower in the valley below. The sun’s position decided their schedule, so she had to adjust her excuses as it moved. For the first weeks it took little effort; their calls would come during court, when no one noticed her or expected her to appear, and when in fact most preferred she were invisible. When the bottom of the sun’s arc just kissed the upper boughs of the great beech tree beyond the courtyard walls, Aurelia would hurry through the corridors and up the winding stair to the turret.

In those first days she met the heavy wooden door with hesitance, certain that she would find nothing on the other side, that she had dreamed them or that they would tire of her and abruptly cease their visits. But each time she turned the latch and shoved it open, she would be greeted by the flickering wind of a hundred wings and the barely stifled chatter of avian voices; and so each day she gained faith in their friendship and confidence in their promises.

Soon the sun began to race the clock, dropping more quickly into place above the beech while the hands of human time remained constant and slow. She feigned stomach aches to excuse herself from tea, hunching slowly out of the kitchen until she was out of sight, then straightening brightly and making her hasty way up the stair. When that became suspicious she misbehaved, chattered incessantly about inane, silly things, repeated herself constantly – all things she knew Marie couldn’t bear for long. This plan worked wonderfully most of the time, for Marie would begin to roll her eyes and slump in her chair until finally she would ask Aurelia if there wasn’t something else she’d rather be doing and send her skipping happily out, triumphant, into the halls.

Those were lovely days – Aurelia would shove sweet rolls into her pockets and bound up the stair to the turret, not even slowing at the top but bursting out the door and breaking into a run, feeling the fluttering of feathers on her wrists and face as she sprinted across the stones and leapt gleefully into the empty air, and when she just began to feel the fall of gravity in her stomach, their claws would close and lift her, bursting with joyful laughter, out over the castle walls and into the open sky beyond.

Seek and Find

I’m told I'll find God in scripture,

And I've looked,

Squinting into the dusty dark;

The walls there are covered with runes.

I wish to look elsewhere,

In the pressure of the water’s surface broken by my naked foot,

In the dirt beneath my fingernails,

The ant that walks unmolested across the table

And the ant I crush unthinking with my thumb.

I look for God in my quiet weeping place in the woods,

In the beauty that comforts me,

And in the loss that laid me low;

In the unopened jar

The beloved scent rationed from within,

The hat hanging on the bedpost;

In mingled cries of ecstasy

In bedrooms and tents and the back seats of cars,

I look for God in screaming mouths, in blood.

I look for God in cursed, blessed hope,

A glance of supplication never answered;

In the fast, and the euphoria that follows,

In the terrifying openness of children;

In the wall I built to fortify my soul

And the thief standing tiptoe to scale it.

I look for God in the silence

Of your eyes looking intently into mine.

God is there.

A Clearing

We who believed pain was wickedness: How wrong we have been.
Love and truth are the sharpest virtues.
They will tear your soul when you embrace them.
Embrace them.
Don't let go, though your blood runs steady down your sides.
You have not loved until you see it pooling red around your feet.
You have not been true until truth's sharp edges strike the bone.
Pain is not a curse.
It is a clearing in the woods.
God is there, and every human life surrounds it.

Contact

If you manage to reach out and make contact with a person, hold tight. You can’t wait to love them until you know whether they’re the type of person you love. You can’t ask yourself whether they deserve it. None of us deserves it. We are all petulant and stupid and impossible in all our varied ways. If a person touches you, none of that matters. You just grab their hand and love the hell out of them.

Heal

To keep a wound open

Intentionally

Not to nurse the pain

But to remember it

To respect it

Requires the strength to tear the scab -

To refuse to grow over it

But to prune yourself around it instead

Using it as a reservoir

To set your roots in.

If you have the strength to keep a wound open

The moss will grow on its banks

Before long. Eventually.

And your branches will spread above it

And throw sun-dappled shadows into its chasms.

A wound can be beautiful,

If you have the strength to tear the scab.

You are strong enough.

You are strong enough.

You are strong enough.

Inspiration

To sit very still and want the world. To yearn. To long to launch invisibly into the joy that hangs just above our heads. To desire oneness, wholeness, with unbearable desire. To feel the body reaching inexorably toward untouchable things. These are the moments just before.

Skin

Can I borrow your skin or must I sew my own
To slide over my shoulders and head
To slip my naked feet into?
Let me stitch up the sides around my soul,
Complacent, my lazy soul that will not keep its shape.

A Snippet

The sound of paper tearing, over and over, awakens Penny. The tendrils of her dreams unwind, infecting her room with elements of unreality – there is a constellation shining through the ceiling, there the floor is water, and there Sara stands by the window on skinny legs with stork wings spread around her. A few sticky blinks and the wings are the gauzy yellow curtains, the legs attach themselves to the tray table that stands between them.

Sara in a long tee now sits cross-legged on the floor, lit in blue from the fading bulb in the streetlight up the block, and resumes tearing newspaper. A careless pile of thin strips already overflows from her lap onto the floor. Her hands throw fluttering shadows onto her chest and legs as she works, moving with unquestioning, pristine intent.

Penny is awake now but silent. Even her breath, she thinks, would intrude, would break the circuit of energy running from Sara’s mind to her hands. So holding her breath Penny watches greedily as the genesis unfolds, the first few strikes of lightning in the storm that will culminate in the freezing of time that is Sara’s art.

When the newspapers are all torn, Sara sits rigid. Her bare legs are now buried in newspaper strips. She bends forward and gathers them to her with wide sweeps of her arms, her chin nearly touching the floor as she reaches for a few stray pieces that have tumbled forward in the breeze from the broken window. The curve of her back could be carved in marble.

Then as Sara stands with her arms full of paper strips to carry them away, she stumbles and glances over her shoulder at Penny, who shuts her eyes and tucks all these images away like a thief.

Being God

How is writing characters godlike? Today, in this way: My Sara -- I feel responsible for her; I love her as I love myself, which is to say, not well enough and a bit too much. I could make her do what I want, but I refuse. I could force her to make a decision that is unnatural to her, but she will be spoiled if I do. I will not love her if I force her to be what she is not. I will love her better in ruins, broken and torn of her own poor volition, than I will love her in an imaginary heaven of my creation.

Fact and Fiction

Avi says again that the moon does not shine. She has been quizzing me. Do I know what the moon is made of? Do I know why we say the moon shines when it doesn't? It is simply the easier way of talking about the moon, she responds to herself.
And I think, How static we are, even as we advance. That we know, as fact, that the moon does not shine with its own light. It does not shine. And yet we look up on a clear night and say, How bright the moonlight! We know it does not shine, but we look and we see through the eyes of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, through the eyes of settlers and tent dwellers and tribespeople. We see the moon as it appears in fairy tale picture books, captioned in rhymes that dance and laugh just beyond the reach of logic.
It does not shine. And yet we look up and there it hangs, shining.
We learn and learn, and our fictions persist. Perhaps it is because science and storytelling share a goal -- to explain, to make sense. We imagine fact and fiction as opposites, but they are sisters, conjoined twins forever inhabiting the same space. For what is fact, when it can be proven and not seen? That is, what is fact, when I have not been to the moon? And what is fiction, when the moon hangs shining impossibly in the air?

An update of sorts.

So so so so so ...
It's been about a year and a month since I quit doing paid work and made my writing my job. I suppose that merits a belated annual report.
It's a novel, and I love it and hate it on alternate days. Sometimes in alternate hours. I have never tunneled as deeply into myself or opened my eyes as fully as I have while writing it. I've never worked so hard to make my writing communicate. It's glorious and terrifying. I cry a lot. I mean, a lot for me.
Part of what's terrifying is the feeling that I'm picking myself over like a vulture, and that when this story is finished I'll never be able to pull another new thought out of the husk that's left.
The other part is the knowledge that all this burrowing, all this weeping tearing out of hair, public brooding writerly mess that I do -- if when it's all over I fail, all of that will become ... what? Pretension? Drama? Fraud?
I'm not even sure what failure would look like. I hope it will be hard for me to fail, since I'm not writing to please any given audience, and since I don't even expect to publish it. When it is readable, which is bound to happen eventually, I'm fairly certain it isn't going to gain me a fan club. But if I can look back on it and call it honest, I think I'll be satisfied with that.