Elysian Fields Forever

Once I was made out of sugar, then sand, then glass.

The more people touched me, the more the sugar turned to sand, then glass, and the glass ground down, sand-blasted, until it didn't feel right under anyone's fingers any more and people stopped. They asked me if I was alright. I said yes, just tired. When bees died on my window sill, I left them there. Anything I had to say that didn't get said fogged up inside me, and what I did say came out like smoke. Sometimes people thought I was a bong, but I wasn't.

I watched videos of Japanese farmers on the internet and thought about internment camps and their names - Heart Mountain, Topaz, Gila River. I stole other people's stories, pretended I was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, that we had gone to the beach together, and that she had brought something preserved for us to eat, and wore a swimsuit with a skirt and had a better body than anyone expected. I tried to imagine her telling me about Franklin, and what she said to him about the camps, and how nothing worked. I gave the story back because I didn't know what she would have called him, talking to me, and looking it up would only be cheating, and that would have been too much, after all the stealing.

I listened to the kinds of records that made you think that maybe there was something wrong with your record player. They were disorienting, like looking at something glass through something glass.

I planted cane berries and wore mittens made of grey glittering yarn that looked snowed on. The glass I was made of was thicker than you imagine, and not as clear. I turned amber, and matte, and looked jaundiced maybe, but not inhuman. Wearing zippers made me sound like a maraca.

Eleanor Roosevelt told me that we can only keep our own basic freedoms if we grant to others the freedom that we wish for ourselves. There really was something wrong with the record player. I wished for skin, and wore grey linen and started a new story set on the banks of the river Lethe.

not our customary rejection: recent lessons from the black hole

Have you noticed that you can’t do anything lately without being asked to fill out a survey? Everybody wants feedback. The car dealership appears interested in what I thought of my recent oil change experience. United wants to know how my flight went. The car rental company is concerned with my thoughts on their service, as is the hotel where I stay every time I take that same business trip. (Still happy? What did you think this time?) That website I visited, the utility company I phoned, my doctor’s office — all deeply concerned with getting helpful feedback.

Sure, the flight attendant was friendly enough. Eight out of ten for answering my call in a reasonable time frame. I give. So why can’t I expect just a little feedback for myself when it comes to my writing?

But no. Here’s how it goes with writing:

You do the hard work. You poke your muse, scramble your heart, wrestle the alphabet and craft a story that feels worth telling. You fight to make it art. You rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again until finally you call it ready. And then you send it out. Because now that you are done writing, you want someone to read it. So out it goes into the black hole of mystery into which we writers deposit our work.

Then one day, many weeks or months later, you go for the mail and see your own handwriting on the famous SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope) and can pretty much be assured of rejection. Odds are against you. Especially if you happen to write short stories in a category known as literary fiction. Hundreds, maybe thousands of other writers have cast their stories out to that same publication, hoping to claim one of the dozen or so slots in the small literary journal that publishes maybe twice a year. Quarterly if you’re lucky.

Inside that envelope that you so carefully (hopefully!) addressed to yourself back in a headier time is a slip of paper. It has been copied at an angle from a master print out. That apologetic half-slip (why waste valuable paper with such a tiny budget?) contains some version of the standard, “Thanks for the opportunity to read…We receive hundreds of submissions…Not possible to reply…Regret… your work does not fit our needs at this time.” There are subtle variations, but that’s the gist of the typical form.

So you look for the meager signs of hope we writers cling to. Hand signed (an imprint of humanity). Or a sentence fragment (nice work) in nearly illegible scrawl that suggests they actually read it and maybe a real person even enjoyed it. Or best of all, a note, a note saying please submit again. (They did like it and it really just doesn’t fit this time. They wouldn’t encourage more submissions if they didn’t really want to read more. Be still my heart.) The rarest of all is an actual note or email (all of this has its electronic version, the form email) remarking on some actual element of the story, something that hints at why it was not chosen or almost was.

There is often room in the envelope for an additional slip of paper inviting you to please send in some money to become a subscriber to their fine publication or perhaps support their non-profit mission. (All good. All something I believe in. But somehow it feels like a bit of a slap in the face under the circumstances.)

I was a reader for a literary magazine myself for a few years. As a code, I dedicated myself to reading every manuscript at least three pages in before deciding for or against it (what if it had a rough opening, but turned brilliant; it could be edited) and usually read the whole thing. I always wrote at least a sentence on the form letter unless I really believed the person should not be in any way encouraged (rare). It was my personal act of honor for all of our sakes.

My husband is a painter and he gets feedback all the time. This is what frustrates me about writing vs. other arts. Musicians can play for people, even if it's a small crowd, and people either dig it or they don't, and you can pretty much tell without asking. People download your new song and tell their friends. You play a street festival. More people show up.

A painter can begin with a small show and people come up and tell you what they think and then maybe a bigger show and then maybe a gallery. Maybe someone buys a print a takes it home. Someone else sees it and says, “Who did that?” A sculptor can place a piece in the yard and hear what the neighbors have to say.

But we writers send our envelopes or pixels floating out into the unknown and wait. Six weeks, a few months, half a year — sometimes even longer.

Although I am a published writer, lately I can't seem to make it past the nice note stage and mostly it's that pathetic form letter. So I was recently delighted to receive the better-than-average form letter pictured here. Hooray! A small note and the form itself declaring that it was not their typical form letter. This must be the extra special form letter reserved for those above the riff raff of regular rejectees. I must admit I grabbed that branch.

The hard part for me is not knowing if my story got discussed, had a fan along the way or got tossed immediately. Was I a contender? I realize that the places I try for get a ton of submissions. But was I in the top 100 of the thousands or rejected immediately with the first to go? It's a mystery. One answer suggests keep trying and the right editor will finally connect with the work. That it really wasn’t the right fit right now. Another answer says work harder at my day job because this ain't ever gonna happen. It's difficult not knowing where I fit in that continuum. Not knowing how I stacked up. The guy who changes my oil knows. Not me.

Recently I was fortunate to get a glimpse behind the curtain. A writer I know heard the scuttlebutt at a journal where I submitted. Knows that I came close. That I got past the early rounds. That good things were said about my work. Still, I wouldn’t have known that without her generosity, because what I heard back was the standard form letter. Not even a note. It meant a lot to hear anything from the black hole. We writers don’t need all that much to take heart. We can feed on very little.

What you also don’t hear is what fell short. The things that you could work on to make it better, to improve your chances of finding readers. Because there isn’t time. I won’t go into that here — all the reasons why. The overworked volunteer staff, “The State of Literary Fiction in America Today” or all the ways that writing and reading can be reinvented and taken into our own hands, self-publishing, eReaders. This isn’t about that.

This is about the huge act of faith it takes to believe in your own work day after day. To work alone and work hard. To stuff your hand down your throat and feel around for your heart and hand it to someone. To hear essentially nothing in response. To file that nothing away in whatever folder you keep your rejections in and then decide to do it again.

I have a suggestion. Maybe there is a new form letter and it has 5 stars like my restaurant app. Or maybe a scale from one to ten like my car dealer. And the person returning the SASEs can just color in the corresponding star or check the appropriate box that shows where that manuscript falls among the world of possibilities. That tiny gesture would be so much more feedback than we can expect today. Maybe even enough to keep going.

That which will not habituate

From the top I can see the entire Bay.  Angel Island.  The Bay Bridge.  The impossibly bright Golden Gate.  The TransAmerica building rises up from the San Francisco skyline, the unblinking eye above it only visible to me. In the opposite direction I can see all the way to Rodeo Beach, unless there is a fog, which slyly wraps and hushes everything between.  If it is early, my shoes are often wet and the back of my neck is chilled rather than cooled by sweat. Sometimes I have company.  A raven.  A hawk.  A ladybug.  Twice a coyote who kept a polite distance as we both surveyed the vivid blue below.  No one taught me to do this.  Once the interplay between the fog and the sun created a circle outlined in the colors of a faint, thin rainbow, like a projection onto a giant screen.  I found my shadow in the center.  Arms raised I rivaled the height of the mountains.


Very early in the morning, my dog will ask to get up on the bed.  Her methods are both insistent and polite.  If I have left her collar on, she will shake it, until I turn on my side and hold out my hand to touch her nose and invite her to jump up.  If the collar is off she will utter what can only be described as a whisper bark until the hand is offered, the invitation made.  Sliding between my husband and I she will lean her back against one of us and push her feet off the other.  If she is leaning against me, I will sometimes take her paw from underneath, the way I held my mother's hand in church.  After she has fallen back asleep I know the dreaming  has started when her paw begins to twitch rhythmically, as if reading Braille from my skin.

A day in the city

A week before there had been fighting.  Not fighting that had happened a week ago, fighting that had happened for an entire week.  The kind of fighting where anything you say sets the other person off and vice versa so that passions run high over whether or not the water filter is expired or how tucked in the bottom of the sheet should be or how the shoes should be organized in the downstairs closet or who is a better parallel parker (me).

That Sunday we were both tired, not yet ready to admit it, but no longer actively looking for reasons to be pissed off.  It seemed a fine idea to ride the ferry into the city.

The day was clear and cold but we had dressed warmly. We stood outside on the top deck and the wind whipped my hair into my lipgloss and then tossed the little sticky points back against my cheeks.  A mother opened her backpack and doled out snacks to her two children, a tween-ish boy and girl, who systematically refused the sliced apples, granola bars, carrot sticks and string cheese.  The mother tugged on the father's jacket sleeve.  He looked down at his sleeve until she opened her hand.  The father went inside and the kids followed.  They all returned with bags of Cheetos and cans of Coke.  The mother opened a package of string cheese, ripped it lengthwise and threw it overboard in small pieces until we arrived.

The ferry building was a frenetic rush of Sunday traffic, something that neither of us had taken into account when making our plan.  Both haters of crowds, this became a point of bonding.  We moved along like cattle, glancing at all the stands wholly devoted to one amazing kind of food: cheese, mushrooms, pork, vegan donuts.  We took refuge in the least crowded place in the building - the bookstore - where D bought me a copy of the biography of Rin Tin Tin, accidentally calling it an autobiography, which gave us our first shared laugh in over a week.

Laughing led to hand holding, which lead to a boozy lunch of blistered shishito peppers, organic duck confit salad and shellfish cioppino at MarketBar where we found a sunny spot on the patio and ate and drank until the sun fell behind the clouds and our fingers began to tingle with the cold.  We talked about safe things at first, which consisted of anything about the dog, until we felt more sure of each other.  Then we began to remember aloud some of the best decisions we had made together and got excited about our upcoming trip overseas and did not spoil the moment with half-hearted apologies for being an asshole without really being able to explain why.

When we got back to the ferry D realized he had lost his return ticket.  He began to berate himself, likely in anticipation of me berating him. In that moment the whole day felt fragile, like we could end up remembering it a completely different way, the blistered shishito peppers and Rin Tin Tin eclipsed by the lost ticket and its aftermath.  I jogged to the machine and purchased another one, quickly pulled him down the gangplank and presented it with mine to the ticket taker.

Once on board he continued to ruminate about where the ticket might have been lost but the game was on and we found a spot inside with a perfect view of the screen.  The 49ers were ahead and our good mood soon returned.

In the seats just in front of us, a threesome sat.  A man, a woman and a boy of about thirteen.  The man was tall and husky wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt under a leather vest with worn Levis.  He had on thick-soled workbooks and a knit cap pulled low over his brow.  The stubble of his beard ran across his cheeks and down his neck unevenly. The woman, by contrast, was festively dressed in a sparkly tight pink sweater, black miniskirt and patterned tights that disappeared into black booties with stiletto heels and shiny gold zippers at odd angles that did not look to have a functional purpose.  She kept absently petting her long, dark hair the way that women who have committed substantial time straightening it into submission often do.  The boy was slight, dressed as a mini version of his father, which only made him seem more vulnerable.  I imagined that his voice had not yet reached the cracking stage but soon would.

The woman snapped a constant stream of photos of both of them with her iPhone, which they patiently and enthusiastically mugged for again and again, competing for her giggles.  Though they were making somewhat of a scene on a crowded boat, the moment felt private and I ignored a strong urge to look away.

D's attention was fully absorbed by the game though sometimes he and the man would absently trade observations in the manner of hardcore football fans who seem to always know each other's position in the room.

The woman eventually bored of her iPhone photo shoot and the man went to the snack bar to get a beer, squeezing the woman's knee and planting a kiss on her cheek before he rose from his seat and lumbered off.  She and the boy both shook their heads "no" when asked if they wanted anything.

The man was now watching the TV above the snack bar, his back to the woman and the boy, debating the merits of the 49ers offensive strategy with the cashier.

The boy and the woman sat thigh to thigh while she playfully pulled his cap on and off his head.  She grazed the edges of his ear with her long pink nails and I saw him shiver.  She leaned in even closer, whispering in his ear now.  The boy held himself very, very still.  When she was done she pulled back a bit and held his chin in her hand, delicately pressing her lips against his cheek, her eyes closed.  Once, then once more. With her thumb she slowly rubbed the sparkly pink gloss into his skin, then held her phone out in front of them to snap a photo.  The boy leaned his head into her neck and let his hand rest on her leg. She pressed her thighs together and his fingers disappeared.  The man began to make his way back and the boy stood up. When the man sat back down, the woman laughed and grabbed his beer, handing it to the boy.  For a moment the boy lifted it toward his lips.  He and the man held each other's eyes until the woman retrieved the bottle and playfully slapped the boy's wrist.  A shout went up as David Akers kicked a field goal in overtime tie-ing the game 24 all.

D and the man shrugged their shoulders at each other and shook their heads, their collective comments about the game communicated in one look.  I turned my attention to Angel Island and the orange and pink streaked sky that framed its highest peak.  Once I won a race there.  I focused my mind on that. The boat slowed as it began to make its way into Sausalito Harbor.

D stood and helped me to my feet.  Let's forget, he said. Forget the entire previous week.  I nodded in agreement.  But this day, he added, let's remember this.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the three of them rise.  The woman tugged her skirt back down over her thighs and the man gave her bottom a gentle swat.  The boy was out of view and with a sense of relief I noted that I was unable to picture his face.

As we moved into the crowd headed toward the exit, I felt a tug on my elbow.  That's a good book, the boy said, pointing at the copy of Rin Tin Tin I cradled in my arm.  His voice was deeper than I had imagined.  He smiled at me as the light from the window hit his face and danced across the pink sparkles that still dusted his cheek.

Again

The doctor delivers two kinds of news.  The good news is that the patient is doing better.  Anti-nausea drugs have stopped the vomiting and an IV bag has brought electrolyte levels back to normal.  Another one will be administered before discharge, just for good measure.  The bad news is they don't know what caused the vomiting.

"Are you sure there haven't been any internal injuries?  Perhaps a fall you didn't witness?"

The woman next to me, her face drawn and tear-streaked, shakes her head no.  "She has been with me the whole time.  I don't leave the house without her."

"Well," the doctor notes something on his chart, "Sometimes they can grab something off the ground when you're not looking."

I know the woman does not believe this, feels she has been beyond diligent, but it seems pointless to argue or speculate further.  He says it will be about another half hour, then slips behind the counter and disappears into the back.

I pat the woman's hand reassuringly.  We have looked at all the magazines, asked all of the polite small talk questions one feels comfortable asking of strangers.  It is well past one o'clock in the morning now.   My husband has wandered over to the vending machines but has yet to purchase something.

The dog is woozy when they bring her out and the fluid beneath her skin makes it look as if she is wearing football pads.  A veterinary assistant helps my husband lift her into the back of the woman's car, her daughter's car, and closes the hatchback.  I look through the window and study her outline against the upholstery, so dark her edges blend in, a shadow of a dog.  Her size and weight are similar to Ava's but the tail is wrong, it is bushy and curves in an arc toward the dog's back, a German Shepherd tail.  Ava was all inky black sleekness, shiny like a seal, with a long thin tail that thumped against the ground like a heartbeat.

Later in the week we see the woman and the dog out walking.  They both strike me as a little frail, stepping slowly and carefully over the cracks and blisters in the sidewalk created by tree roots well over a hundred years old.  The woman waves and I raise my coffee cup in response.  She gestures toward the dog with a "ta da" sort of flourish and smiles.  My husband nods and claps his hands.

A few days later a young woman knocks on my door and immediately I see the resemblance.  She introduces herself, apologizing that we haven't met sooner, and holds out a bottle of red wine with a card attached.  Her gratitude makes her stammer and brings a flush to her cheeks.   "I didn't seriously consider the stairs," she says, almost to herself.  "She couldn't have lifted a 70 pound dog if something went wrong...what was I thinking?"

I reach for the wine and wave her in.  "How was your trip?  Your first time in Europe, your mother told us. How exciting!"  My voice sounds shrill.  I have never been at ease with new people.

Standing in my entryway she still seems a bit lost in thought, her eyes taking in the living room, kitchen, scanning the floors, her cap of dark hair swinging down into her face.  "You don't have a dog," she observes.

"You sound surprised."

"Really, I'm just realizing how much I'm at work and not home or I would have known that.  My husband knows it, I'm sure."  She smiles and rubs the back of her neck absently.  "I mean that you would help a stranger with a sick dog like that...its just beyond decent."

She is standing there, looking at me and I know I should ask her to sit.  We could open the wine and discuss her trip or the late Indian Summer or the home that just sold across the street but instead I start telling her about Ava.

We got her for the kids, the way people do, but of course they quickly lost interest and then it was all up to me.  With three boys running around it felt like one more set of feet tromping around in the house would put me over the edge. We had a nice big yard and a doghouse and she lived outside. She was always excited when the kids came home but she wasn't a barker or really any trouble that way, just thumped her tail.  My husband walked her early on but then he changed jobs and was traveling all the time.  I had the kids to contend with and the yard seemed plenty big enough, room to run around whenever she wanted.  I had been the one to name her.  Something about her dark, dark fur and the way the bones in her face were angled made me think of Ava Gardner.  Although she was big she could be very dainty. When she took a nap she would cross her front paws and place her chin on them just so.

Sometimes I wonder if the boys didn't take to her as much because she had such a girly name.  Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should make a difference and probably it didn't.  They were just more seriously into sports by that time.  The oldest one was always in a game or tournament somewhere and the other two followed soon enough.  Most of my weekends were spent sitting in a beach chair on the edge of a field watching one or more of them chase after balls of various colors and shapes.  With the post-game pizza parties and carpools we were rarely home before dark.  I'd call Ava to come get her food and she would meet me in front of her doghouse.  Sometimes I noticed she got up from same spot she'd been in when we left.

After our youngest son graduated my husband and I moved to a fixer.  With the money from the other house we planned to upgrade and flip this new one.  We both had a passion for remodeling that we hadn't indulged since I became pregnant with our first child and he had taken a new job that kept him off the road.  The house also needed serious landscaping and with the garage full to the rafters with tiles, loose boards and other supplies, for a few weeks Ava lived inside.  I blocked off a section of the kitchen with baby gates I picked up at Home Depot, brought her bed and bowls in and told her it was her space.  At first she just stared at me, keeping her feet planted firmly outside the threshold.   I got closer to the floor and spoke very sweetly and even tried to ply her with a piece of leftover chicken.  She raised one paw and put it back down, maybe four or five times, but still would not cross.  Finally, I got her leash, clipped it to her collar and just pulled her in.  She went directly to her bed and sat down.  It seemed like her hind legs shook a bit. She must have been around ten then and had started to get a little arthritic. The whole time the yard was being dug up she stayed on that bed and only got up to eat and when we took her out front to relieve herself.  After the yard was complete we moved her back outside but a few times when I thought it was too damp or cold I called her in.  She went to that same section of the kitchen and plopped down until it was time to go out again.  No baby gates necessary. She died at twelve, a normal lifespan for a Lab I'm told.  No long illnesses or incontinence or drama that some people deal with.  One morning she just didn't get up.

"It sounds like she had a good life," my neighbor says but it is phrased more like a question.   Or perhaps I am reading too much into it, which my husband says I tend to do.

After she died, I gathered up her bed and bowls and leftover food and brought it to the local animal shelter.  The man behind the front desk accepted my items with more gratitude than I thought they warranted.  "Unfortunately," he told me, "Most toys we can't take.  Its too easy to pass germs so we only keep a handful that we can easily disinfect, and those stay outside."

"I don't have any toys," I told him.

"If I had it to do again, it would be different," I tell my neighbor.

She gives a little shake to her head, "Not every time in life is ideal to have a pet, especially a dog.  They're a lot of work," she adds with a smile. She says "work" the way people do who comment that maintaining their beautiful home or planning their dream vacation was a lot of work.

After she leaves I open the wine and settle onto the couch with a glass.  For a long time I was angry at my husband, for his incessant travel, for leaving me alone to raise the boys, for the family life that never  quite lived up to the promise of the house.  I think about our old yard.  Level and rectangular with lush grass, mature oaks that gave plenty of shade and a tire swing.  There was a long wooden picnic table and a double-decker BBQ and strings of outdoor lights shaped like chili peppers.  There was drip irrigation and flower beds and late summer tomatoes.  There was a dog house and a dog.

Letter to Ryan

It was icy here this morning in the NW. I woke up to the news of a fully engulfed bus fire on I-5 at 85th - even on the traffic cams the freeway overpasses looked like they had been dipped in egg white, then sugared. Except for the flare of yellow where the bus was.

In the morning, I take the dog out first thing, careful on the ramp Tom built for her, frosted in the morning sometimes, sometimes just wet from rain and the bad gutters on the house. She moves slowly, stands and looks at the yard, seems to forget what she's doing there. When we come back into the house, I bend down and rub her soft ears, tell her she's a good dog, every day. She wanders back into the bedroom and I close her in with Tom for a few more hours of sleep. I shower, make tea, toast, pull things together and go out to chip the frost off my car for the long drive to work.

It feels like I'm traveling a lot these days, though it's the same 59.9 miles back and forth all the time. It's ten days into January and not a good month, already. When RGIII wrecked his already-injured knee last weekend, someone said "There are no grown-ups down there on the sidelines during NFL games", meaning someone should have benched him, but no one did. I'm being bounced against all the hard edges of adulthood every day these days, getting good at things no one wants to be good at, telling people they didn't get the job, and worse. Some times people tell me "I would hate to have your job" and I think Yeah me too, but I give a shit about there being good grown-ups in the world, and it's ok with me if I have to try to be one. Not that I succeed all the time, there are still those bad gutters on the house, after all, but sometimes people know to come to me to ask for things, to ask for help, and often I can. That doesn't make every day good but it makes the whole life good, I think.

I don't picture you on the internet much these days, and I wish I could send a letter, handwriting, paper, an envelope, some amount of stamps that I would have to look up to get right. We haven't known each other long enough for you to decipher my handwriting all that well, but we have to start somewhere, and even if you understood every individual letter, who is to say that we ever understand all the words that anyone else writes to us anyway? They are all subject to misinterpretation, like my ill-defined Rs or lazy Gs. You'd get most of it, I think, anyway.

I do picture you getting this message, reading it, and thinking, did she mean to write this to me? And yes, I did, Ryan, who used to always smell surprisingly like soap, in spite of that dirty hair. I meant to send it to my white t-shirt-wearing two-step partner, with the good eyes that are often kind of somewhere else, until they're not, and then there's that singular, unforgettable focus. We talk about that, behind your back, and love you for it.

When I woke up this morning, it was from a long dream you were in. You were back from a faraway trip, as you would be if you were here. You had brought a girl with you, someone I knew, and things weren't quite right between you. You were staying in a loft, clothes hung on pipes strung up with rope, and she had filled the pipe/rod with bathing suits, a vintage style, all one piece and embellished, some with halter necks that would criss-cross in an X over collarbones, some embroidered with small dust-colored flowers. That part was too much for you, all those bathing suits filling up the one place to hang clothes.

You and I went into town, a small one where the restaurants were all close together, so that with their doors open it was almost like they were all rooms in a house. You knew the Japanese man who ran a French restaurant, had worked for him before. We walked through the kitchen where the orders were piling up, ready to be taken out and served, but no servers were around anywhere, just the owner. For fun, you took plates out and served them for him while I waited.

Sometimes there isn't much of a point to what you write to someone else, except to say, this is where I am, somewhere always slightly unimaginable no matter how familiar a place it might be. You might remember a little what the house where I live looks like, and that tells you one thing, but you know so much more when I tell you I keep stubbing my toe on the hard furniture of being grown-up and my foot fucking hurts but sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the night in the dark to take the dog out, and if you love that dog and know she won't last forever, even that one little painful duty is a kind of honor and something you'll miss when she's gone.

That is to say, life back here is hard and sweet and you and I had a funny friendship that existed in a space so undefined and out of place that it seems right to send you something random, because also, you are on the road, and who knows what you will see next, there is always surprise and I hope for that for you always.

Love to you,
H

Xmas Xercise

There was a time when I challenged myself to write a poem every Christmas, to take a new perspective on the Christmas story as my prompt.  I thought it might be the season to post a few of those old poems. Here's one about Joseph.

Joseph's Betrayal

Who said it wasn't dirty?

Even rock will break down

faced with the insistent growing thing.

It wasn't the amazing light

but something in the darkness that changed.

People talked. I'm no fool.

Can I forgive her — God —

for doing this to me?

Without messengers, would I fold the betrayal

and set it aside?

Not only me — but all of us —

expecting so much more.

Do we settle now for this dirty salvation.

After all this history, our beautiful myths

turned inside out to reveal a pulpy core,

the ugly seed.

Do we run to the arms of another god

or start over in a stable,

nursing this difficult aching

with careless hope.

I do not understand the rushing presence in the night

that asks me to believe.

Believe this, now — after everything?

She was perfection

simple true,

like the precious promise.

Now the circle closes and I stand outside.

Who has been duped?

What place is there for me here?

If I can't forgive, I can rescue appearances.

They need me to clean things up.

It is not done.

So far, we have only uncovered

the ugly seed and dirtied our hands.

If angels sing perhaps it is an accident.

Who knows what we do in our sleep?