May Ends With Heat and Grief
The body keeps the score, film recommendations, and of course motherhood
May ends with heat and grief. The summer beginning its long tease. I write a new poem. I finish Jarett Kobek’s The Future Won’t Be Long. I make a deadline. I think about the past. I think about the body. I go to the movies and see Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, it’s imperfections making me gasp. The slicing of a pineapple, the buttering of toast. The way the audience and the lead mishear How far have you gone?the beautiful boy and girl’s bare shoulders touching. Language my favorite landmine. And I wish my husband had been able to come with me. I wished my friend Jack had been in town. My girlfriend at pilates. I bother everybody with the screenshots I can find of the movie online. The colors a feast for the eyes. I go to a screening of my own film, and when the programmer asks How do you do it? All I can think about is what is missing, but I can also for the first time see what is there. That the movie is a hand creeping up to the throat, and letting its fingers linger. That when he says I have no notes! I try not to disagree. Answering I believe in emotional story telling and also I watch a lot of movies. Celine Sciamma’s Tomboy, Andrea Arnold’s Fishtank, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, Alice Rorwacher’s Corpo Celeste. I laugh that nothing is American. I notice and share that I was not a mother when I made the film, that I only became a mother after, and watching it from this standpoint, I realize how much of the mother is missing. How the movie after this movie I have to finish writing is about that. The mother. How important this is, to not forget. That I think often how I carried half of my daughter my whole life, and how my mother also carried her, and my grandmother, and my great grandmother, and and and.
Historically in June I have always begun some sort of new life, and the body remembers. 15 years ago I was in love and then I got sober. 14 years ago I stood on a train platform and saw your body for the last time, a piece of my heart still in your mouth. I overheard my old best friend say He doesn’t trust her and you say I don’t know if I would either your hand grazing my waist. Our armor once scattered all over the floor. And the body remembers lightning. A bed made up in Maine. 8 years ago I decided not to stay in Wyoming and 9 years ago I made my first film. 5 years ago I got lost, fire ants making a home in my body, the smell of chaparral and coyote sage following me around. I found myself again in the desert, barefoot in the heat hearing God. 3 years ago my daughter was born. This morning holding up a 50 millimeter lens to her face and bringing her into focus, takes my breathe away.