Oceans' sharks and river nymphs are extraordinary. They undulate underneath the bluest waves and flash teeth or simple,
crumbling
magic tricks.
I've held language in its fluidity but I can only recite its flames backwards. This all came after. When the sunshine hadn't yet been tucked beneath plaid curtains. Tucked. Safely. By all the specialists bidden by mother's tongue.
Sunshine hadn't always been rationed.
Rationed out were the candy bars we got when the freckles began multiplying down my cheeks, in trickles, onto my shoulders, until only a few crumbs reached the lower back I never covered when we played. when we swung. When the sand our sandals threw were the stars that stung back at us after too little water reached our drying eyes in the desert of my smallest summer with him. That summer was so small I patched it behind my ear where I still hear screeching seagull cries and crushing heavy wind propelled forward by thousands of years of water. I patch it the way druglords in Africa patch up diamonds or cocaine baggies underneath goats' skins. The sting is loud and I've torn tiny shreds away. All that's left are the echoes that haunt my lovely neck in winter. My neck is the loneliest cave where incandescent fish swim under the clearest blue waters.
Mamma was fair but she was born in New Mexico to a ranch sir and his mistress, Madalena. Madalena loved the horses because their blood was the same hot fury. I don't call her grandma because she died young, mangled and angry like a lustful Lady Macbeth. I remember grandpa cuz when Mamma was small he took pity on her hungry eyes and orphaned future. But that's later. Madalena danced with horses, she saved poisonous frogs and made coffee with hot chocolate for grandpa after he fucked her behind the henhouse. She let her black hair flow down and touch the white rags she'd bleach over and over and wear like the whitened Cleopatra she wasn't born to be. Daddy says some humans are dogs who bear all of our blood in their veins and need the grave earlier. He used to smoke camels and narrate this to me while I trimmed his hair for job interviews. After the toy factory fiasco. Mamma laughed and called him Socrates. She isn't half the woman Madalena was.
When Madalena was given to the ranch by her starved parents, she was thirteen. My family from her side are like the weathered rocks that weren't initiated into our world through language. Their memories died with them and were ground up in the New Mexican dust. Horses play on my dead ones' stories and when the siesta comes and the sand settles in the high sun I bathe in my own history. Shudders go down my spine and I try to find scorpions under rocks to forget the pull, the roaring lull, the thundering beckoning that urges me to lay down my clothes, find a strong man and build a house. Mamma told me I was meant to write stories, not make them. Mamma cursed me before Madalena lay down her clothes and looked up with hunger.
At first she cleaned rooms and filled wash basins and fed the doomed chickens.
- I go to the fridge, I look for apples. I'm tired of my story.
Cuz I light my cigs with matches. I took everything I would've when I was twelve and ran from home to hide out at Katie's just down the street. I have table manners cuz daddy taught me everything I needed to know from Faulkner's genius to how to properly eat from them caviar cans. Everything in Jackson is canned. Georgia's Jackson, not its reflected counterpart down in Cali. I used to draw the states on Bobby's back before bed-time bludgeoned our imagination into sleep. And when his breathing steadied and I could see his Irish freckles glow with the fireflies, I'd trek the distance. I'd trek with my small fingers. All the way from Jackson to Jackson. His mama called my folks and by the time daddy''s truck pulled up, I'd be sitting on the sofa having tea with all of Mrs. Joyce's porcelain madames.
Daddy was tall, cuz God only builds us tall and fair south of the border. At high noon, our shadows feed only our egos and I eat mine up right before supper's prayers. He ran a watch repair's shop beside the main cookery from morning till seven at night.]]]
__implied author ends.
I begin (watch me begin) : edit out watch repair shop; too much sound and the fury already. put in *toy factory. cookery sounds too hick. edit: diner.
*
I was thinking out new material:
I flip my journal upside down and turn to the first page.
In the well of thought, in the absolutely timeless space between your eyes - those glaciers -
I remember why we love. i remember for you.
I have walked by these thoughts before. I have picked up my sadness before, I remember its
weight, I remember its form - its velvet in contra posto, its suffocating warmth, its pitiful
dizzying war against my soul. The breath I wake up to is my own and I am finally alone. Unafraid, the only hurt I feel is my tired body.
The ball of nerves that lived in my stomach is not there anymore. Its weight, similar to Pluto's, has been displaced. It rests on the Moon now, or has fallen asleep in the sewers somewhere. I'm ecstatic. I'm electric. My smiles burn around the edges. --
The prof is still speaking. Reading diaries in class. Horrid. Cliche. "Now you must understand the difference between possessed and possessive authors. Let not Faulkner's thorough examination of his Yoknapatawpha County surprise you: he was possessed. By alcohol. By Caddy. Caddy began running through his mind's drawers...pardon the pun everyone."
I left the class and went for a smoke.
Yeah. Pears for fucking everyone. Literature is the bitch we tame every night before masturbating quietly under the sheets. With the lamp on. Underneath copies of Balzac.
I fogged up my glass in the dorm room and was planning on sketching out pigeon patterns.
1910
Grandfather's ranch in New Mexico held 100 horses, 500 cattle, 20 sheep dogs, an adopted wolf and the tiniest rooster. Aside from the 5 maids, 2 gardeners, 10 helping hands and 2 cooks, the Sterns have always had two governesses per generation. A happy plight to be lonely among so many. The curse of the Sterns since leaving Britain, forgetting their King, and embarking in 1820 with rotten teeth, dirty fingernails on the St. Lucille for the New World. I am half savage, half beloved. Madalena, my grandmother, was a wretch and I take her blood, hair and eyes. But I thirst for words, I want to know my lineage, I imagine the Navajo
The mansion was built since before we were American. Before the North fought the South, when the blood that ran down the dusty sands was Spanish and Native.
---
1818
London is written with fine quills but scribbled over with charcoal.
The Sterns took their tea with care. The matron, Lady Marguerite Brandon Stern, was born to drink Earl Grey. Through the prism of morning light that shone in the thick glass conservatory windows, her trembling lips touched the cup's mouth with the quietest grace. It was a planned encounter and it mattered. She was of some French ancenstry and so she knew that when the porcelain mouth touched her own, she would have to oblige. She would have to drink with pious aristocracy.
My grandfather, her grandson, was a darkened child with scribbled expressions of malevolence and mischief. He once crushed pigeon hatchlings in their nest. Upon questioning, he suffered a rehearsed apology. First, he addressed Christ and apologized. Then he addressed his headmaster and cried. Lastly, he wrung the pigeon mother's neck. Beautiful filth. It really is what the British do best. Their house, a fine investment, caught light and restructured it in a pleasant manner. Pleasant. Screaming orchards tore their leaves out outside the grand windows and the talk of the day was, of course, Rousseau. Marguerite disagreed with the second discourse. Her husband, an erased creature of heavy nobility, nodded on and off about the grandeur of Locke instead. Sometimes he mentioned helpful footnotes relating the folly of translation from English to French.
"Thought is fleshed speech. One can't but wonder at the translated word, but the gap between what can never be recovered between two disparate langauges", he would say at dinner between brandy matches with family from Sussex.
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