8.28.23

How much of this, this place between here and there, the slippery sensation of wanting and not having, how much I must have loved, when love arrived and I wasn't there to greet it. I heard love knocking and instead of answering it, I turned around in my bed and went back to sleep until it stopped for good. Looking out my window I saw only my father's childhood, spread out in front of me like a good dream he had once, and then never again. Is the price of one man's dream an entire generation of daughters, hungry for what might have been afforded to a son? This kind of simple thing means we were not better than the dirt they believe we came from. I can only speak of mythologies, those half finished stories, because of language. Even what I say to my father sounds like legend, and my disbelief in his humanity making the telling unreal. Isn't all of inheritance a fairytale? Long, long ago there was somebody born. They lived and died, wanting all the things they did till the very end. Here they are again, looking at you in the mirror, unable to recognize themselves or the land they've been brought to. 

I looked out from my window as if I was my grandmother who once was beautiful, and still is. They tell me I look like her but she looks through me and to her grandsons, who stand bashful, slouched over and uncertain by her side. Was it my job to become a girl? To fruit, to blossom, and to give fruit? 

In the mirror: which life is this? Waiting for your call, your response, I must have lived many life times. This uncertain fate, which is every fate. Is that sound of you now? It's true in this story you love somebody else. It's true that I do too (myself). Ah this. What belief, which river. We come from ocean people, believing in a hundred sea gods, accepting their gifts of fish, crab, snake, slug, shell. I was born loving you and I will die the same. Your clay is my clay, from the silt of the river. Mountain and forest, pear and orange. Love is bigger than forgiveness, that delta where the world meets the mouth of this town, hungry, steaming, tongue hanging out of its mouth. Can you imagine this kind of history of touch? This easy grace? I'll go where you go, I'll tell whichever story that will satisfy you. This landscape, and this journey into it, stumbling over our words, trying to understand you. 

And, in your language, how do you say: tree? how do you say: child? and when we must, how do we give each other something in a way only we can understand?