March 4th, 2014

And how can there be any honesty then? When the way I FEEL is so far from the way I look? My eyes lie and not even on purpose. They are green today said the student three times. I thought of lovers who had created codes that they believed only they could break: your eyes are green when you are angry. Your eyes turn green when you are excited. My eyes turn green when I am facing my students whose backs are to the sun streaming through the window. My eyes turn green when I wear skin-toned eye shadows or green shirts. My eyes turn green when tears gather and catch light. I taught well. I was strict and organized and clear with my expectations. I ignored or bested disrespectful students. I comforted a child who had broken her heart and helped another organize the arguments in her paper. There is nothing wrong with this life. There is nothing wrong with this life. Except that it is like sleeping in a very good bed in which many people who are a very different shape from you have died. All the physical and psychic discomfort of that. All the twisting and groaning and sleeplessness of that. All the cascading fears and finities dripping from the strange still-life of fruit on the wall and you have turned out to be a very absorbent material. When did you wake up in this haunted house with other peoples' bills to pay and so many broken clay busts?

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I left "the cloud" in the dryer for three days in a row now and have slept in spite of its absence. it is beginning, this feeling of leaving the body and I am nervous. The computer is very far away, my torso has gained inches. My stomach growls, but I could live on this feeling alone for the length, at least, of any book by Camus. Melting clocks are good, and although I would change the name of the dadaists, I do believe the rows they make in the garden are, if not entirely planted with seeds that bear, at least fertile. What life have I failed to live within myself? What seed have I let die against my skin?  The insides of my veins feel like the blood is trying to get out. I woke to scratches like a claw across my left breast and one across my stomach, but I remember putting them there. Patterns emerge in the space between words. What is rain and sun together? She asked, and I heard my voice say from a long way off, as a recording, rainbow. I have wandered far beyond the no trespassing sign. Maybe they paused for that long moment, their skin the same color as the air, as the snow, as the clouds, to say: this will never be. I drowned in the two inches of water at the bottom of the tub as I poured epsom salt, lavender, and my own blood, into the bath I prepared for you. When I rose again I turned my back. Look through me, I am made of glass, and see what light you can.

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that night I got struck by lightning I wouldn't stop driving I wouldn't stop I couldn't because what if I stopped and I was suddenly hit again? the moving gave me a head start on the thing that was chasing me and I remember my mother, her voice tight and thin and concentrated into a pin's head of calm, trying to get my to pull over as my whole body shook and my teeth chattered and I explained to her again and again my theory of movement, until I knew how crazy I was and in the knowing didn't stop being crazy and so forced myself to the side of the road but wouldn't open the door when the cops came for fear conductivity. Imagine being frightened to the point of immobility by the sky and secret exchanges light. Upon telling someone years later of this, he looked at me with incredulity and concern and said do you feel the universe is out to get you? I should have hit him but instead I made apologies for my experience. These are the garments we women learn to wear: fear and instinct, and then layers and layers of apology and laughter and white teeth and red wine and cleavage, all the better if you laugh because you will appear agreeable, and you want, over all other things, to divert from those original animal skins of survival, because, it is the twenty first century, and now, now, she says laughing and adjusting and reapplying, we are liberated.