"...and she feeds me tea and oranges that came all the way from China, and just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, she gets you on her wavelength, and she lets the river answer....that you've always been her lover, and you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind..."
Tod Noletto said we should eat tea and oranges, and I thought back to Judy Collins but you said Leonard Cohen. The thought warmed.
I've been eating grapefruit since I found out about the fetal child inside me. I've been stocking up on sunshine despite the greyness and three feet of snow like the july born baby desires it. Joseph buys them for me in twos threes and fours and I cut them into halves and tick myself around their clock always counterclockwise. And when I am done I squeeze and drink the rest.
I have been drinking black tea, reconnecting with the hill we used to climb as children to build fires and brew tea and I return periodically to the bittersort of feeling that my parents have never thought to call me since I left home. It was never their practice to muddle about in childrearing. They would be constructed meticulously of wheat germ and brewer's yeast and then they would fall out of her apron, and she never minded setting them loose on the dirty floor.
My mother brought Alpaca socks and sweaters and hats and came down with them on her Pro Life March Annual this January. I made Thyme Lamb and Sundried Tomato Soup from scratch and we drank cider with my brothers and sister. The tea has the feeling of comfort beyond insanity. It was one of the only things that I have always counted on.
I am feeling a seeping in at the edges of well being. Pregnancy. The flavors of vomit and cookies. Wine and Duck, and the swirl from contented to weary beyond words. New torments come to stretch me in the form of the law and the people who torment me are like hellhounds or time's bitch-angels perhaps, who are clawing a strip of white into my curls. I am bones and flesh and a magnet of electric anxiety and hate. It tore anger into my body in headache and migraine for days until finally the demons manifested in my inbox in the form of a Cause: documents.
Documents of intention to take. It was the Law. Outside I was pounced and handed a second summons. I looked inward with strange desperation and humour at the happenings which we cannot always understand. There justice sits looking at me with eyes the color of electronics. I take her gaze in. I take the plaintiff's hatred and folly in. I take the world of unfairness in, and my Ideals are like snow melting outside. The thought that Republicans gathering to ignore the world, or other people plotting to take or steal; the thought that they are somehow truly evil is always a big white circle of hay covered in blue red and yellow and black concentric circles. I can aim my arrow. I can hate. But no, I refuse to believe people are so cruel. Deep in the heart of all trouble are beliefs and opinions and foolish people who cannot differentiate the nightmare from the dream over long swooping epochs. They somehow laughed at Kant's categorical imperative and laughed at the Samaritan, and laughed at pacifists and then at the bottom of some thought, turned to climb the pile of turtles to be a sorry king of their sorry pond. In the interim they are noxious and caustic energies to some, and solace to others. This storm of soul despair rains on the tin drum ceiling of my thoughts. I curl into myself and try not to let it ruin my horn of flame. I am a filter for a tiny spark of wonder. It wavers and rolls in my insides. I cry on the floor and at the table. I light sage and clutch the blue lighter. Your hands are warm on my back.
My baby moves inside. I smile. My mother's polish china cup with the re-glued handle sits on a paper towel with raw sugar crystals in the bottom.
"And Jesus was a sailor When he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching From his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him He said "All men will be sailors then Until the sea shall free them" But he himself was broken Long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone ""-Leonard Cohen
