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There’s an elephant disguised as a tree outside my window It bends and waves its long trunk so enthusiastically there must be a whole herd of them coming in my direction It is a long way from Africa here in my bedroom where grey light plays games with the sun and dances like a safari wild jungle on my wall.
Red scarecrow girl/a slip of a thing/this hollow dried out twig of a thing,
blackbird eyes darting like a Don't Look Now vision/object of derision caught her on CCTV/this hint of a thing/shivering skin-and-bone stick of a thing rattling about in a size ten coat, ten sizes too big for her frame.
This man/this guard/this brick of a thing/this thick-skinned/hard-nosed prick of a thing, sausage pink fingers came right up behind her, grabbed her shoulder like porcelain china/such a fragile delicate chip of a thing.
The room where they took her/a pit of a thing/windowless/nowhere to sit of a thing, they poked and they prodded and picked at the girl/said they'd call the police and tell all the world what a low-down/uncivilised trick of a thing and she shook.
This creature/this bird/this wishbone-thin little flit of a thing/featherless/ fatherless spit of a thing she blanked all the voices and fingers and pointing she left them all there with their out-of-nose jointing and flew from the room through the back of her mind this practically invisible/wholly derisible/breakable/shakable/bit of a thing.
And the chatter … the chatter. It seems to be less and less important now to be where the action is.
I am more and more certain I am not missing anything, content to sit here above the party watching the stars.
The air is like glue and only the breeze squeezing through the open window makes it less thick tonight.
My baby’s breath rides in like waves. She is reminding me of her presence, close-knit, like a too tight jumper, we two in unison above the drunken conversation. I, stuck to my sheets and her, on her pillow.
The night is black; deathly still, yet oddly animated. Like death. An animal’s fur ruffles, a spider’s leg twitches and the air dances insanely in our room, wafting intoxication and the lively chatter, the chatter.
I. Muir Wood
The Park ranger said there’d be a storm by the weekend said that’s a good thing the creek will rise up and the Coho will return to spawn in freshwater. Three years of feasting
on Pacific fruits and they come back to starve in the red wooded shade of Sequoian giants - centenarians who measure life slowly in rings - and watch them return, fry to fingerling.
The fish are jumping. They rinse the salt from their scales forget the taste of the sea push upstream to riffle and then lie still in the same gravel bed of their infancy
each salmon death silver pink a new beginning.
II. You must remember this
You asked me for news. On Tuesday I cut his nails they had grown too long. If I was his mother I would have known to bite them off feeling gently with my
tongue for sharp edges protecting the soft pads of his fingertips shielding them with my teeth. I use these clippers clumsily but only once he winced. A kiss is just a kiss
and when I was finished, he smiled. I could never have done that alone, he said. The fundamental things apply. Once you watched your dying friend be washed and
shaved for the last time by his youngest brother. The tenderest act, you said and so it was with my father’s fingernails that will grow again and keep growing after everything else has stopped.
III. Opera Café
San Francisco is not my town, he said, as though that might explain his confusion being taken out on city streets where tail lights flash bright from red to white
wet rain falls gutters rise and conversation between strangers buzzes like a bulb that needs replacing. Where would you call home? I asked him, ordering Russian
cabbage soup thinking Pittsburgh and knowing that questions are no longer the thing that can be answered. The morning fog may chill the air I don’t care. He had no
appetite for cabbage which in any case was not like the one he remembered but when they brought the cake - chocolate with one candle - eight waiters in white aprons
and cummerbunds sang happy birthday with operatic grace and I salted the soup with my crying leaving that part of me there, washed by rainwater, soaked dry by sawdust,
still beating on the floor of Max’s Deli.
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