Flowers and Owls

Parthenogenesis in sharks, the pulse of the seahorse's belly as it gives birth to hundreds of young, the little deposit of sperm held in a detached arm offered by the male blanket octopus to the great female who is many thousands times his size. Today I once again contemplated saying in one way or another to someone I'd like to make love to that I'd like to make love to him, but once again I have not.  

 More than a year has elapsed since I last posted here. I'm pregnant, after losing my first go-round last year, quickly had and quickly lost and quickly had again. I am living somewhere else with the new and usual sort of ambivalence that comes of being in another place. I'm not exactly unhappy or exactly happy, but a bit disoriented in some interesting ways I am still afraid to articulate. Hoping I keep this bairn in me so I grow nice and round, though my mother didn't show hers very clearly, and I can't predict how full I might appear. No telling how my father's blood might bear on how I bear my womb. Still learning that my womb is a place, a true place. Time brings further revelation of my own body, my organs, my secrets, secrets that are mostly secret to other parts of myself. I am around more people than I have been since I was a child. I don't quite know how to be a thing which has friends, how to be friendly. Still stubborn, moody. Hope I don't lose this baby. Won't write about the father here now, too soft to touch with words in this place yet. Sending my love to the whole of language, which has provided this journal as one of its gifts.

I had the surgery, made it to the other side. I’ll never be venus-bellied again, unless there’s another form of Venus with little decorative scars, which, hey, why not. The wound is open, unsewn, it looks into darkness, a darkness I cannot bear to look into very deeply because it feels so wrong to have a hole on my body. But it’s supposed to heal up, close into itself. While I was in the hospital, one comrade had dreams of demons in the form of whirlwinds, and another comrade dreamt of my dead brother (who he has never met, and whose birthday is 13 days to the year before his), he said to my brother, “I know who you are,” and they both recognized a mutual strangeness between them. My brother’s birthday, and the anniversary of his death, is coming up in a few days.

I had a dream of hunger, and a dream of a river losing its water, exposing its silt, but that's all I remember of those dreams. I dreamt I was in California, night, in the decade before I was born, accompanied, we were outside a thick tangle of dwellings in a city, and I saw a tiger, I was startled, afraid it would eat me, it approached, sauntered past without acknowledgement, I found a head of Caesar and knew it had a specific name, Caesar erected in Persia where he reigned, his face was carved with finer features, a finer curl to his hair, something catlike in the eyes. Another dream, all I remember is a moment, a man who had been whipped across his back, naked to the waist, covered in blood, he was standing looking down at me where I sat, looking hard at me without breaking his gaze, oppressive, I felt bad, ashamed in some way, he looked at me as he began to dress himself in a white silk shirt of another era, and I could not bear to watch, the staining of the silk with blood, I looked away from his eyes.

Today I walked to the hospital to answer questions before my surgery date (I almost mistyped ‘fate’ but stopped at the f). I bared my chest for an EKG, I was told my pulse was high, asked if I was experiencing anxiety, and I explained I’d walked there at a fairly brisk pace, which was probably why. I was asked questions about anesthesia, there are the questions about one’s sleep, about whether one snores, about whether anyone has ever told you that you stop breathing in your sleep - the pleasure in this for me, the suggestion of intimacy, the question below the question, has someone slept close enough to you to notice these things. I was ordered an unexpected chest x-ray. I went into the chamber and the technician introduced himself, called himself ‘the man behind the curtain’ - I wanted to make a comment about the Wizard of Oz, but I missed the correct timing due to the stumbling effect of shyness. He had a waxed, curled moustache, and told me I’d need to take off my dress due to the intricate embroidery and put on a hospital gown. I also needed to put my braids to the side, and right after the last x-ray was taken and he told me to release my breath, he told me to come over, said he wanted to show me something. He showed me my braids in the x-ray, hanging by my arms, how distinctly they show up, I enjoyed the sight of the edges of my breasts, the taper of my waist, my bones. 

My primary pastime for the past week has been coughing. I spent days and days inside, wary of taxing my vulnerable immune system. I missed most of the shocking warm spell, though it’s forecast to have a few more days before the snows come. I finally ventured out yesterday, and then again today. Today I went to the used bookstore and got some back issues of Parabola magazine I’ve eyeballed for a while (Memory and Forgetting, Mask and Metaphor, Woman, War, Dreams and Seeing), a treat for myself if I’ll be inside recuperating from surgery if all goes to plan at the end of the month. And I went to the library, to get Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (which was not available at that branch), and Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami (which wasn’t on the shelf where the catalog said it’d be), and since my plans were thwarted I instead I got two impulse checkouts, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata (I didn’t remember seeing that on the shelf with the rest of his work before) and stories by Lu Hsun (an attractive edition printed in China, which I saw by chance, looking for something else - I had searched the catalog for him a good while ago, months, wanting to read A Madman’s Diary, but the catalog gave no results, I reckon I was spelling the name Xun, so I was pleased I chanced upon this volume). The boy saw the Lu Hsun stories when I came home and laughed, spoke of them being forced on students. He spoke of the literature, Chinese and Western, he learned on, and as I got up to begin cooking he mentioned Gu Cheng, and I was delighted by coincidence, because I had been looking at the two books of poetry by him on the shelf and considered getting them because I liked his photos. The boy spoke of the madness, chasing his wife with an ax, committing suicide, I spoke of the prevalence of madness, ill health, and suicide among poets, and went on to chop vegetables for supper. Going to read to try not to dread waking up early for the doctor on Thursday, literature fosters bravery, or something like it!

I dreamt my brother was alive. It seemed to me that I had to protect him from unhappy things, or he would kill himself, and this thought came to me after I found a stack of rifled-through old math tests of our other brother, and I thought the younger would be unfavorably comparing himself (though he was the one with better scores in life). At a table set outside in the dark, our other brother told the younger his fish was gone, my hope fell, I had been hiding this knowledge from him in the years he was away, but then the fish came back, a blue-green thing called Bubbles, as large as a Saint Bernard, that looked like a sea monster from an old map, and it could move around out of water, and was flopping and flapping with happiness at seeing my brother, I felt relief, he might not kill himself over this.

Most of the dream is worth forgetting. There was a boy with curly brown hair (when I woke up I thought of the song Do You Love an Apple), he and I were going to be sent to a sort of domestically-oriented labor camp, we had a night, we were in my mother’s house in the place she keeps old records, rolling around on the floor, I wanted to enjoy this night before a new, distressing environment, he wanted to wait, pleaded angrily with me to wait, to keep my hands away, it was too much for him, I caressed him, kissed the palm of his hand, the skin of his hand was coarser than I expected, the lines of the palm deep, feeling these lines with my lips, reading something inscrutable there, he grunted with an irritated animal urge, rolled me over and tried to fuck me, I shoved him off, I was annoyed he could not enjoy my affections without being stupidly roused to rut, he was annoyed by my attentions without culmination, I brought my face close to his, I brushed my eyelashes against his cheek, tangled my eyelashes with his, the room was silent as our eyelashes touched in this way.

I am not much of a thief, and it may not exactly be theft anyway, but "Stolen Postcards" sounds nice for a diary entry, doesn't it? If there is theft, it's gentle theft, of something that may not have been too much missed anyway.






Maybe a month or two ago I was at a used bookstore in this place I am staying now, and looking at the area where flyers for local events are kept, often advertisements for exhibits at the museums, sometimes musical shows or showings at art galleries, and there was a plastic bin with a stack of postcards in it, which I pulled out, trying to be discreet, and I liked them, and since no employees were chastising me, I reckoned odds were half as likely in favor that they weren't something being sold, maybe postcards found in the donated books and set aside there by the other bits of paper anyone could take if they're interested. Though I also reckoned odds were equally half that I was committing some small crime, but I wanted the postcards, and I took them, or the ones I liked, anyway. A mess of Klimt, a Monet and a Tissot, Mao is there, Calamity Jane is there, and there are travel cards for Heidelberg and Paris. 





At the free book bank I was flipping through a volume of poetry of Alexander Pope, and found Napoleon. I stole him, and left Pope. He's the patron saint of ostomies. I found the Water Lilies magnetic bookmark on the ground near the return box outside the public library. The two greeting cards came around Christmas from the Yale Center for British Art.







Tonight I returned to the scene of the crime, though not, I promise, with the intention of thieving again (though the secret potential for repeating my crimes lives always in my heart). Looking again for flyers, in the same plastic bin were more postcards, and I stole again. I was so elated at what I found, the first I looked upon was the Torso sculpture (from 1928, Dame Barbara Hepworth), and lately I have been extra fascinated with limbless sculptures, writing about these goddesses and faceless immobile unidentified women who are solid, centralized in the remnants of their bodies, I saw that postcard and knew I was being blessed, then I saw the others, ancient baked clay goddesses, from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Turkey, and the Pietà (the postcard, from Barcelona), more in the themes that are dear to me and that I am working with right now, these ancient mothers, and there's the Agony in the Garden, and the Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham fed by angels, and there's a painting from the Lascaux grotto, and all of these are perfect things for me to find and think about. Maybe I am a thief but I was called to theft and I claim my wickedness with joy!

Now that I’m spending quite a bit of time up north where there are actual proper winters with ice and snow, I’m enjoying the feeling of seasons shifting and filling into themselves, feeling like real, complete seasons, rather than mostly one long, extended summer with a few slightly chilly days passing for winter as it goes back home in the south. I’m going to participate in a couple of wintry reading challenges to enhance my enjoyment of the season, and get myself in the cozy, indoorsy mood I’m trying to cultivate.


  For January there’s the Winter’s Respite Readathon, which will be perfect for trying to get through some library books before the end of the month.