Sometimes I Am Short On Words
covid and every day beauty, plus this incredible Saul Leiter photograph
Covid finally comes for us, and I start thinking of myself as an exoskeleton, all my bones aching. I start thinking of my insides as receptors.
On Saturday morning it had struck me, as if it were a rumbling premonition, that we had all been well for weeks, a month even, an incredible feat since the start of the school year. I thought how odd. I thought oh no. Getting ready for a pool party. That strange sensation that has followed me post birth, of being more than one woman. And each one clamoring before me, depending on the weather. How impossible it is for me to dress appropriately when summer’s on the scene, and just the hint of heat drives me wild. Pulling my denim cut offs out of the closet, my wedge sandals. I switch out a bikini for a one piece, peeling a bathing suit off in the hallway of someone else’s home and for one moment, that delicious prickle of wet skin and air, before pulling a dress on. Taking my daughter home, covered in watermelon juice and smelling like sunscreen. Summer, my favorite season.
And at first, I thought I was sick from the heat that had burned the leaves off the young Magnolia tree in front of my office, and turned my friend’s lettuce out in the valley to ash, tasting the warm blueberry he handed me from beneath the netting. Staying out way past my bedtime.
As the news gets worse both here and over the ocean, we spend more time in the garden. We release lady bugs after the heat has gone, the sun beginning to go down, the Elegant Clarkia taking my breathe away. The poppies, the lupine, the ole blue eyes, threading themselves all around the hillside, making me think of my friends who are in the ground. One morning, while brushing my teeth, I could smell sage, and I missed my friend Mary and the prairie desperately, all before 7 am. They way we would bundle the wildflowers and stick them in small water glasses. The way we would talk about the people we had fallen in love with there. One still standing in the river. Both of our hearts buried beneath that wide sky.
I spend a few days locked in my office finishing up a project, that delicious feeling of losing track of time, of being in and out of the world, of building something, of going in in the morning and coming out surprised that it is dinner time. I begin working on two new poems that need more time and space, but I am excited about them. One of them moving in my old clipped way, the other stretching out, opening it’s mouth, trying to cram the whole world in it.
Some news:
In case you missed it I have three poems published in this month’s Book of Matches you can find here. (Grief Turns My Eyes Green, Postpartum, I Wanted To Be An Offering Something That Fit In Your Mouth)
My short film The Hideaway will be screening in Los Angeles in a week. More details to come.
"How impossible it is for me to dress appropriately when summer’s on the scene, and just the hint of heat drives me wild."