August sun

A moment from last year, from a land dedicated for the past 47 years to women.

Bare skin, hot sun, blue

sky, surrounded by

(no walls)

open meadow, trees

the snow-capped mountain

to the east, snatches of women's talking

and singing.

I didn't mind, for the first time,

the shower's cold.

No hollering or hurrying

needed for me to bear it,

warm as I was

from the work of packing up camp

under the midday sun --

conscious as I was of

the nearness of farewells

I wanted to leave that land with traces

of her water on my skin

still, in my drying hair.

I scrubbed myself to a glisten in

that warm sun, that soft breeze

with oil and sugar (gifts left by another woman)

assiduously

meticulously

feeling something of a ritual in it

feeling the air and the sun and the land all

intent on me, and

I intent on them.

All tumble of apples

wind bells

high yellow grass

and laughter.

Collection

Recently I bid farewell to most of my collection of thrifted purple dresses. It's been a long time since the days when I wore dresses and skirts seven days out of the week, and in some ways I miss them. Those days, I mean.

Last light, 2015

My friend Odessa and I met up for tea/coffee in Japantown yesterday and then drove to Land's End to watch the last sunset of 2015.

I chose to ring in the New Year with a late-night yoga class. Notes: dark studio, the streetlights outside + battery-powered "candles" for light. I hadn't been to yoga in about two years. The instructor murmured, "And happy new year..." at the end of the set of instructions she happened to be giving when the clock struck midnight.

 My sad tired mantra these last few weeks has been "What would winter be without struggle?" but part of the opening quotation for the class was: "Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration."

Notes

• This sweater smells like my dear one. I just got it in a secondhand store a few days ago and I haven't bothered to wash it yet, and it smells like her now and this is lining my entire night with happiness.

• Hungry. If I make some mac and cheese, will one or two of you please come help me eat it up?*

• I turn off the lights and raise the blinds on all of my windows and sit in bed facing them, looking out on the street lights, the night, the Berkeley hills. Sometimes I feel like this is not real, like I am still catching up with all that has happened in my life in the past year.

• My regular cafe closed early tonight, which interrupted my workflow — by which I mean, my ability to handwrite the same thirty words another seventy-five times tonight.

• I love this time of year. The light is changing and autumn is in the wind and I feel free. I live in a wonderful place, and I have family to visit when I please, and a person solid and lovely as the earth to belong to and with. And I have work that allows me to buy groceries and eat in cafes and get enough sleep and pay my own rent and spend time outside on my bike, and that is pretty great even if the actual work ("work") is pretty unimpressive and unfulfilling.

• Realization: my affection for/preoccupation with the past has more than a little to do with the fact that in retrospect, unlike in the present, I know what is going on.

*edit: I can't wait for pasta right now, or you. Slicing cheddar off the block instead.

Hours and arms

Gusting 40mph

ah

anger

it's you —

i shiver.

Hi.

First summer morning, Sydney

Nights with my darling Aussie sister and her boy are too precious for angst, and no one should drink sparkling wine unhappily, but so it was. Too much wine with too much sadness. I cried so hard and long that the neighbors complained. Upon waking (full of shame, empty of energy), I reached for my phone to see via camera what the state of the previous day's eyeliner was —



December 2012.

A word on the birth of the year

I love New Year's Eve. A night of magic and goodwill and finery and hope. My favorite holiday in the whole year. What better way to spend the last few hours of 2012 and the first few of 2013 than with laughter and music and marching around my darkened city dressed to the nines and with a new accomplice's hand in mine? Fireworks above the bay, seen from the sidewalk, all kinds of gifts tangible and intangible from strangers. I begin 2013 feeling simply: at home. Because this is my city, and my life. For the past six weeks or so I've had the worst anxiety I've ever had, but still somehow I feel confident. This is my life. It delights me. It is going to delight me.

Fretful

"I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut."
– Anna Kamienska

Lately I spend too much of the night chasing myself in panicky laps around the inside of my head. The idea of opening my journal frustrates me for some reason on such nights, so when I'm fed up with lying in bed I rise and fill loose pages with the things that I can't yet make my peace with, and pretend they're going somewhere in the mail, perhaps to my freshman-year roommate's mailbox in Massachusetts. I don't know, maybe they are.

And I have rewritten each page so many times, just to change the telling slightly and see if it will make more sense this way, or that way... I put on that Antlers song ("Two") for the relief of hearing him sing the line near the end, "Two ways to tell the story." The multiplicity of ways to truthfully relate a single event is fascinating and kind of obsessing me.

Disjunction

Suddenly it's winter and the sun is setting three hours earlier than it was a week ago and it's my childhood bed I sleep in rather than various borrowed beds and bare floors in foreign cities on the other side of the ocean...

I'm tired. Did all that really happen? It doesn't feel like it now that I'm back in this country/city/house.

I don't particularly want to be here, but I don't have much money left.

I need to get my life going.

Homecoming in changed vowels

So I'm back in the U.S.

When I went through customs, the officer who took my declaration form and passport said to me, "Your accent has changed."

Yes. My California accent had softened into something less conspicuous. Fewer rhotics, tidier vowels. I have a good ear and I'm suggestible in that way. (In addition to not liking to be involuntarily conspicuous. Oh, I felt so self-conscious the first couple weeks whenever I had to speak to a cashier or bus driver...)

I wanted to cry when he said that. I don't want to lose this; I don't want to lose any of it. I want to hold these last three months and know that I can keep them, can keep who I was there and how I felt and what I saw and knew, and I'm not sure yet how else to do that but on my tongue.

Last days in Sydney / Rilke

I'm sleeping on the floor in my fictive sister's shoebox of an apartment. My fictive sister and my newly adopted fictive brother.

Rilke's words are circling in my head.

"Es leben so viele und wollen nichts." / There are so many who are alive and yet desire nothing.

I have spent the last few years so afraid of my own weakness and wrongness that somehow I ended up convincing myself that I didn't want any of what I knew I did.

Which has been awful. To look at your own life stretching out ahead is very dreary when you believe that even permanent employment and moving out of your parents' house are too much to ask for, let alone the really delicious things, the love and magic and fulfillment.

But I am beginning to believe lately, for minutes at a time, that I might be able to have what I want.

"Noch bist du nicht kalt, und es ist nicht zu spät." / You are not dead yet, and it is not too late.

A moment (smoke, moon)

I have always liked candlelight and never liked the smell of an extinguished candle. Lately, stepping outside to blow my candle out in the fresh air, just before I get in bed for the night, has become a favorite moment of many nights. Even with the dark and chill off the sea, I can't resist the stars, must pilgrimage down the steps and to the edge of the yard, cupping my lit votive, to greet the stars and moon in the noise of the passing traffic. I feel like a high priestess or a young pagan nun at such times  — and full of wonder, full of solemnity, myself familiar (just a very little bit) to the night sky.

Here

I am.

A postcard from last winter

Morning / Black tea and self-questions

The water in  the kettle was still hot, but I boiled it fresh and let the tea steep for precisely five minutes, with honey swirling in the bottom of the mug. (My enormous blue bowl-mug, eighteen ounces, a gift made to me on my twenty-first birthday, one of countless nights sitting on the floor in my friends' dorm room under the sloping ceilings of the fourth floor...)

I considered the oolong, subtle and on its recommended second brewing, and Hannah's green jasmine, but I decided in favor of the black. It is my favorite, a distinctive tea called lapsang souchong which smells like a wood fire on account of its leaves having been smoked during the drying process.

I drink it to feel strong.

What would I do today if I had woken absolutely full of peace and joy and certainty?

I would reply with my résumé to that HR woman. I would contact my ex-employers. I would walk to the far library, the one by the ocean, and write some letters.

I would put my feet on this floor and stand up, and I would pin my hair back.

I did not wake up today full of peace and joy and certainty. I woke up today, and I stood up and pinned my hair back.

Second winter

It used to be hard for me to understand how a single being could contain both happiness and sadness. I learned that it's not a paradox.

The paradox now is doubting with faith. Or doubting faithfully.

/

Considering: Perth, Berlin, Munich, Sydney, Santa Fe. The next two years.

/

"What was it I was going to ask you?....Oh yeah. Are you a—" "Lesbian?" "No—" "Oh." "A pothead."

A couple different people have called me chill this year. I like it because it really surprises me.

/

Having graduated, there is a fantastic spaciousness to my life, something I would dance around in yelling "sixty years, sixty years, free free free anything I want, anywhere" but even that wouldn't really communicate to you how I feel. There is just so much time! I mean, what can't you do, with that amount of time? I've never been one to talk about "life" or "the real world" as something distinct from life-before-college-graduation, but at the moment it really does feel like the beginning of something truly mine.

I've been sick for the past week and a half, but it's pretty great to be alive/me/here.

There is no season like winter in San Francisco.

Designer drugs

"I don't take drugs; I am drugs." – Salvador Dali

Two a.m. showers in the dark are my favorite now. In the dark means, by the light that comes in the bathroom window from the suburban night sky (a hazy pinkish-gray).

As my hair is drying I open an umbrella the color of that sky and pad barefoot out to the middle of the backyard lawn. From above, no one would be able to see me.

A thin November rain throughout the night, so I keep my windows open to the cold for the sake of its sound on the remaining leaves. (Are the yellow ones always the last to fall? Plastering the pavement, striking in the streetlights...)

I smell like incense.

Without

"The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body."

a cool floodlit night. deep enough for birdsong.

if i set my hands at my ribcage and take a measure of
breath, (strength and woman-self,)
then hope is something about
the fit of my palms
about my ribcage. a
spell of as-
certainment.

"The cultural project of reducing the female person to an objectified body has resulted in a disembodiment of the female person and a depersonalization of the female body. Parallel to this separation from the body runs a consequent separation from agentive possibility."

being this strength and breath,
both breathless and yet inimitably solid.
what does the span of my palms
here at my ribcage
contain?
there is nothing insubstantial about the weight of my stride
across this earth.

i sleeping peaceful-bellied under a close ceiling of goose-down.
and body i am entirely.