45 Mills Meta

This is a collaboration I'm doing with a dance MFA grad student, so it loses something without the dance. But it says a lot of what I've been trying to say these last two years about my school and Oakland and my own obligations to both.

 

 

Intro

Over to the left we have the children's school, which moved from its original location in the Vera Long building in the early 1970s. The children's school is a laboratory school. Mills students with children estimate that it would cost 65,000 dollars to attend Mills and have childcare on campus. The eucalyptus trees on campus are over a hundred years old. Mills had the first computer science major for women west of the Mississippi. For forty years, Mills owned a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. I am only providing context.

 

Here we have cyrus mills.

 

Please, don't pay too much attention. Cyrus knows about the two fourteen year old boys who were shot on the streetcorner on the first day of classes, but we don't want you to know about that. That's beyond us, its out there, outside the gates. So don't worry, don't stop walking, don't look. What you can look at are the roses, do you see the rose, aren't the roses pretty? He brought them from Ceylon, never mind the revolution in Ceylon Cyrus, just think about the roses, alright?

Cyrus, cryus, don't worry so much. We've got all the natives on reservations, they died in mining camps, the land's clear for the college. Sleep safe at night Cyrus. The girls are fine, but sad. You worry that their bodies, falling like snow betrothed for another landscape will catch in your rose trellis. They don't, don't worry.

And you. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on? Cyrus isn't telling anything, caught in that splendid abstraction called history, but Cyrus, I've gotta ask you some questions. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on?

 

Dance of Ivory Ignorance

 

So you won't tell me anything? Frankly, I doubt you knew anything, anymore, ever. Because what I'm trying to say to you Cyrus, is that I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the kind of disasters that result in snapped necks and bloody mouths, but I'm also afraid of the slow kind of disaster, the kind that take place in children's lungs as they walk to school and result in thinks like asthma and chronic pneumonia. Do you know what I'm talking about Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

But Cyrus, listen! I'm afraid that what I've learned at college is that murals are only there to cover bullet holes. I'm afraid of my own fear that dogs my heels as men approach me at the bus stop. I'm afraid I'm becoming more like you everyday Cyrus. You saw brown people as things that ought to be educated and a burden you cared for abstractly, in Beatitudes and rice, and I worry that we think of Mills as a kind of mission outpost, the relic of New England's and Spain's good intentions in beautiful, brokedown Oakland. Am I right, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Are you sure? Because the first night I was here, I mistook fireworks for gunshots. I'm terrified because I'm not terrified. The boys who died on the streetcorner behind my back are not my boys. My someday daughter will never be shot in her sleep, because I'm majoring in something sensible and getting out of here. All the same, all this eats at my heart like disease. Do you understand what I'm saying, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Do we even know each other? I'm awake and listening, I'm paying attention, but you won't let me know what's going on. You must've had some kind of intelligence that rested in your bones saying marry this woman. she knows where she's going.

I'm supposed to be your granddaughter, I walk the garden paths you paved, I am smelling your roses, but you leave me locked out. I am looking for an education, and a kind of understanding of the hardest things, but you were so ignorant that I worry you have nothing to teach me. You, you and your roses.

 

 

 

Situation

I have talked to you as I am. Sophmore, brokenhearted, young and afraid. But sometimes, I just get so tired of trepidation. I want to talk like someone who always knew what was going on, understood the loops and patterns of history, for better or worse. Somehow, when I imagine that voice, I imagine Susan speaking to Cyrus in the rose garden called time. I imagine this is what she would say to him:

Yes, your roses are beautiful.

Yes, you were part of this thing that made history, you made the books, even as a blundering footnote.

But darling, things are moving, awake and alive. You're still here, still repeating, still caught in this loop called history.

Maybe we run out of money in ten years and close down to rot and rust. Maybe the gates come down, and little girls from Seminary come and sleep on our lawn.

And sometimes, I want that voice to speak to me, I want it to say to me this:

Let them know who you are and what you represent. Make what you represent a thing to be proud of. Work at it.

Don't be so afraid. Stay awake. Listen. Look around. There is work to be done, and you are the ones to do it.

44?

Because my family was always lovely to me about the gay.

A Family Romance

When Roger brought Lewis home, we did not approve. Roger is our baby, our sweet boy smiling through all the changes in hairstyle and height in all the photo albums. Even when we no longer all wore matching sailor suits and started to have our photos taken in Notre Dame graduation robes and Episcopalian wedding chapel, he always hung back a little, beagleish in his eagerness to please. We had hoped he would grow up to be something interesting that we could tell our friends about at cocktail parties, but tax law had thrilled him in undergraduate and the family always had our taxes done by February, so we left him to his small sensible pleasures.

 

Roger's mild fagginess was as much a part of our family as the story of Ann driving the motorboat too close to the lake's shore when Dad was waterskiing and the memory of the sling he wore for the rest of that summer vacation. You have to love a boy who collects leaf rubbings and ceramic dog figurines. We did.

 

And when Roger emailed us to ask if he could bring a friend to our traditional Thursday soup night (uninterrupted for seventeen years, except for summer, when it turns into barbeque night), we hoped that he could swap Eddie Bauer khakis with and who would dote on his gently overweight black lab. Mom speculated that spring weddings were still very popular and more than one of us googled his and his tuxedo sets and group rates at bed and breakfasts in Massachusetts.

 

However, Lewis in the flesh was not up to family standards. The story goes that Mom twisted her ankle at the university she and Dad attended. Dad had a huge crush on her. So, when she wasn't paying attention in chemistry lecture, he threw her crutches out the window and gallantly offered to escort her around campus all day. What they told us this story meant is: someone who loves you should work for it. What it also means is: marry someone with at least a bachelors.

 

Lewis did not look like he had his bachelor's degree. Lewis looked like he had dropped out of community college to pursue other interests. Lewis scuffed his steel toe shitkickers on the hardwood as we looked at him. He looked back at us from under extravagant, almost effeminate eyelashes with puppy soft brown eyes. His trousers were studded with patches proclaiming "Slavery ended in 1864", with a picture of a cow and "Stop Police Brutality", with a picture of a pig. Condor wings peered out from the collar of his tshirt, entangled with tendrils of fire and snakes rendered on his skin, suggesting familiarity with a kind of apocalypse and break down that our family is unfamiliar with.

 

We watched him pick peas out of Mom's beloved minestrone soup and the way he ate only the soft gut out of the home baked bread, discarding the crust on the butter plate. We watched his restless legs and wondered if that might indicate a failure of ability to be constant to just one mouth. We imagine him drunk on Seagrams at a bonfire proclaiming alliance with love, not lovers.

 

And while, we were watching Lewis, Roger was watching us. He was still our sweet boy. He would probably abide by the family's judgment. We wondered how he had ever worked himself up enough to bring home this wheatpaste and drumroll creature. How did they ever meet? Do vegan anarchist collectives need their taxes done?

 

But still. There was something in beautiful in their asymmetry. As they sat on Dad's couch from his first apartment, we could watch the flicker of history between them. A slideshow of the rabbit they adopted together and how it snuggled with their old lab. Fights as subtle as paper cuts that were resolved in shouting and snuggling. Roger's inability to put the toothpaste cap back on, Lewis' fear of loading the dishwasher. The time they got lost in Chicago. Cascades of coffee that kept them up at night, wandering somnolently though their apartment until their exhausted bodies collided and wound together like puppies. Roger standing in the crowd as Lewis shouted from the stage, because I'm a wreck and I love you, because I like what you laugh at, because you welcome me to a new kind of church, because I would leave all this and follow you to Guam, Gaza, Greater Uzbekistan, because my heart's chaos and your head's order, because this time I'll be bulletproof, because if you were infirm I would feed you, because I love you like a thing that does not even know it loves another thing-

 

We passed Lewis the cookie plate and asked after his family.

 

whooohooo

Like Pomona is getting published! This is only my...third time? And I've made literally five dollars from my writing. But its a start.

44

This was a fun one to read out loud.

Said the Sun to the Earth

 

    Said the sun to the earth, you seem very beautiful to me. Said the earth to the sun, but my Sun, have you seen my dirt? The sun kissed the earth with waves of photons that undulate through space like seaweed and murmured, I don't know what dirt is. I know what light is, and I understand darkness, but I don't know what dirt is. To me, you are the solution to the darkness that surrounds me, and also the antithesis to the fire that burns me. Basking, the earth said, but you don't understand. The way your hydrogen burns is so pure, so self convicted and determined to devour itself. I am afraid, he sighed, you would not understand things like dirt. The sun, she bathed him in her heat (and all of us who are alive understand that heat. it is also called desire, also, truth and hope) and asked, try.

 

    -Alright. What you need to understand is that even the dirt loves the foot that stamps on it, just as the antelope loves the lion as it tears out it's throat. Life loves life. I feel across my body the hope within decaying logs. They will feed those who are yet to come with their own bodies, like cannibalism, like true love.

    What I think you understand, my sun, is that decay is a form of love. The Brazilian family, with their bellies full of hookworms and their women pregnant and silent, that is a form of decay and I love them for it. Their struggle still feels wonderful. I feel them writing about themselves (and when they write, they never write we are writing we are writing, but, the virgin mary has come to me and she has asked of me to marry soccorro, despite her bastard child) and about cities that never existed except for one tubercular man in a garret in London during the Blitz and about passions that never transpired except for a moment's glance between a man and a woman who never met again. And I am bewildered that they don't spend sunrise to sunset sitting on the dirt watching the million different chemical reactions called life. I love life for it's inability to reach equilibrium. I love all of them for their restlessness to be more than cells, learn how to grow horns, hair, fins, fingers, learn how to fuck and fight, leave gifts for no reason at one anothers dwellings.

    I love the child with smallpox. I love smallpox. I love the forest fire and the genocide and I love them all for being alive and unwilling to settle. I dread stillness. Dear sun, you are still yourself and you would not understand the desirability of the unstable. Do you even understand what it is to have moment? asked the earth to the sun. The sun felt her hydrogen catalyze into small explosions that rippled across her skin and nodded. The living on the earth understood it as an eclipse.

    I love the living for telling me that if I am stranded somewhere, and exhausted, love is an Arabian horse. I feel stranded and exhausted, but I am waiting for the Arabian horse and I envy the living for their ability to be rescued. I love the living for inventing angels so vividly I feel battered by their pinion feathers. If you're wondering, my Sun, it feels exactly like when the flamingos take flight off Lake Victoria.

I love the living for a girl I remember from what they call 1985, what I remember as old and tired, but that's most years these years, who descended out of a bright August sky in the Columbia River Gorge, wearing a wet red tshirt. I love her for her beauty on the descent and her beauty as her neck snapped and her beauty as the blood trickled from her ear into the river. I love permafrost. I love mammoth corpses doomed and frozen from the moment they wandered from the herd. I love viruses and lemurs, nervous systems and potato blights, struggle and collapse, hands and wet hair, magnets and penguin chicks, dance and Colt pistols and blood clots and do you understand what I mean when I say I love dirt?-

 

The sun reached into its clean burning heart and thought it could find a dark greasy smudge of something like understanding.

-

 

43

Less joyful than it usually is.

 

The Goodness of the World, And the Sweetness

        

    There is no sorrow but loss. I lose nothing. I am no longer broke down by sorrow. I am afraid of goodbye, because goodbye is losing. And nothing comes back, anymore. I have perfected the art of loosing things. The cathedral in Prague. I no longer miss it. My mother. She is dead and I will not get her back. The night they burned my Bible and the ashes fell like snow. It burned for nine minutes and was done. I am learning to want this state called nothing. Loss is sorrow. I am learning this like a liturgy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing.

 

    I need you to believe that lack nothing. Do you hear? My world is made of this gravel path. The weeping mud, the thoughtless stones. Even though these solely are my world alone, I don't need them. There loss is nothing. If tomorrow I step shivering into the fog and this path has been replaced by the mouldering canals in Amsterdam or waist deep mud and shit, I won't mind. I have stopped minding.

 

    Please. Don't ask me to desire again. I used to understand yearning. Yearning is what one feels in the mountains in Austria, praying for the fire called Holy Ghost to descend on one. Yearning is what one feels for the warmth of your girls shoulder when she is out of the city on a university outing and one knows she'll be back on Sunday. There is none of that.

Desire is not the root of all evil. I have come to know at least that.

 

    When people are gone. I am learning not to mind. I used to believe that we were all essential cogs in some whirring productive machine called the world and also life. I had thought we together turned out loaves of crusty bread, babies, the curl of maple on the cradle my grandfather carved for me, potato dumplings, the ability to play chess. Now. I know this machine can run itself without any of us. I am not sure what it makes. We are no loss. The other day, I saw a man break another mans's ribcage by stepping casually on it, as easily as one climbs the stairs to go to church.

 

    Notice also means almost lost, or about to be. To notice is to take inventory of what exists without preparing oneself to lose it all. What exists in the world is nothing. A gravel path. Not even that. Once a thing exists, it leaves. Please don't ask me about the others. I want for nothing.

 

Forty Two makes me think of mr winkley

I'm alive and functioning and I feel okay. This means that I will write oversexed new gayer Greek myths

Like Pomona

What I really mean is that while you come to me like Vertumnus, in costumes to catch me, I am not so sure about the Pomona part (i'm irish, not greek). You wear nude Cuban stockings with black keyholes that lick your legs laviciously as you swagger towards me in the garden. I pretend I am interested in pruning the plum trees. I'm not. I imagine the ferny curlicules of hair between your legs beckoning, but something about the your pencil skirt and cocked hip makes me want to teach you something about hard work and responsibility and the kissing cousin closeness of delay and desire.

The next day, you try again. I'm in the vegetable patch where the smooth skin of the summer squash reminds me of eight year old golden Guatemalan girls, lined up neatly for chocolates outside the corner store. You present yourself in full femme array, your garter all steelgun gray and silk and snaps. The black patent leather of your heels is as slick as industry as the spikes sink gently into the compost. And, yes, I know I know I know you are the one I want to sleep under the earth with (even thought you drove me sleepless above it). I want our bones to moulder and the next gardener not to be able to tell whose fat feed these tomatoes. And I know I want to brush my fingertips across your cervix with the same prayerful intensity I feel for the first valiant asparagus of spring. But this, my sunshine, my springtime, my delight and my humus, darling blackberry bramble in my side, this will not do. You depart in a huff. You have a clump of horse manure on your right heel.

The leeks are almost grown before you try again. This time, you present yourself to me as some splendid hipster city nymph, artfully slouching on my seven hundred year old olive tree. The olives themselves are still as green as absinthe, a comparison I want to share with you, but I don't. The dragonfly wings behind your ears are a nice touch, as is the horseshoe branded into your neck with the vagueness of healed flesh and scars. It's turned upwards to catch all the luck and all the breaks, as you always do. The sides of your head are shaved and through the peach fuzz I can see FEM rendered in Sailor Jerry script. Maybe, maybe closer I think, but you are so caught up in lighting your cigarette in that way that illuminates all the studious hollows of your face (and while I sometimes think about watching you smoke in cafes in places that have cobblestone and cable and capitalism), I stick around just long enough to make sure you don't ash in the eggplant and split.

Beautiful, breakdown, best arrangement of carbon and hope and arrogance I've yet met- you need to try a little harder. You've left marks on me the same way baby pumpkins will take fingerprints in their flesh and grow them into portraits rendered through the body itself. My heart is not elusive. It is unsophisticated and greedy. Enough of this artifice. What I would really like to do is chain you to my body and sing for days and days and days.

So I will wait while you try again. You give me strapping Israeli solider in a camo bikini with boots I assume you got some skinny subby girl to black, Carmen in black lace and merengue ( I appreciate the lapdance, but the carrots need to come out of the ground so I leave) big girl butch in grey wool trousers and matching vest, Lolita in ankle socks and pennyloafers and before you flounce off, you make sure I notice you are not wearing any panties under your bubble skirt. You are about as subtle as an earthquake.

Finally, come one dying September sunset, you get it. I am pulling the last of the leeks when suddenly, here you are. You have finally understood the power of you nakedness, radiant trusting as a sapling. The hair between your legs is as downy as dill, and I imagine, just as soft. The bruises on the corona of your hipbones, the silvery stretchmarks between your legs, red spots, broken veins, I want to run my tongue over all of it. You are the fruit from an orchard that flooded last spring, a redwood cathedral in a forest that could build itself only after fire

You tell me: i want you on every hill in Lebanon, under every tree

How this telling of the story ends. Afterwards I leave your hands tied to the headboard Penelope grew for me out of willow. You are stretched long and languorous, a garden of delights on display. Your paleness on the river green moss. I feed you slices of mango. You take them from my fingers with great tenderness and care. The ripeness runs in rivulets and when I lick you clean, cannot tell one sweetness from the other.

I want this to be number 41

So I'll say it is.

The Consequences of New Albion

1.
We built between us a city.
You built the bridges that spanned me, the river that we both named Safety.
I want you to remember, delightful,
that I did not lay these cobblestones alone. You were beside me,
you were the one who suggested brick. You
taught me to lay grout by taking my fingers in yours
and running them down that smooth slick groove.
The pleasure gardens, as well, were yours.

2.
"To walk the city of New Albion was to understand what want will look like, after its been satiated. The couches at crosswalks, the small clean bathing pools in the lobby of every hotel and on the roof of every apartment building; the city made me want to rest in it. New Albion has always made me want to go home, where ever that is. I was born in Lancaster Maine, was schooled in Zaire, I've bought a house in Quebec, but New Albion, while it stood, was the only place I've ever been that made me fall asleep curled around building corners. It was that protected and settled and warm. You never needed sweaters, not in New Albion."

-"Disappeared Cities of the West Coast" By Samuel Marks

3.
Now.
I wake to walk alone.
The trees come apart in splinters when I touch them.
I should fix that.
Buildings calve like glaciers.
When I pick up the phone, I hear only a rustling of dried cicada shells.
The memory of this city's glory eats me in small, tender bites.