Traveling Blues

Traveling alone always puts me in this melancholy state. It is the vastness of landscapes viewed from above: red mesas that rise out of deserts and then spill upward into snow-covered mountain ranges--all of it through the feathery mist of clouds.

It is the dizzying array of humanity--the sensation that grows out of it: myself as a tiny fleck of color on a massive canvas where faces and even names are disappearing and reappearing every minute, ever defying what I know of life, of art, of time.

It is the sense of being unmoored--at sea or on air and floating, floating along, embraced only by my anonymity, my traveling silence.

It is watching everyone doing the best that they can to move from point A to point B--how they must inevitably brush up against the other and then go on, never betraying the fear that has risen in their gorge and then dissipated, leaving the way it came.

It is the incongruity of discreetly stretching my body near a pillar--yoga in knee-high boots amid a thousand traveling strangers, all bouncing off of one another like pinballs.

It is airplanes lined up along a row of plate glass windows like horses to a trough. Someone is sprawled and sleeping on the airport carpet, half a hot dog in her open hand. Someone is calling what must be words into a P.A. system, and I am nowhere, I am in between, I am no one to anyone here. No thing of consequence in this vast place. None of us is, except perhaps for the little knots of family who travel together--or the lovers. I haven't the heart to tell them that they, too, are alone.

It is moving through time zones in dream time, the darkness falling at odd hours to my static heart. Shades of grey slipping like curtains, like veils, between me and the planet I was just on.

It is the single steel wing that cuts through clouds like butter. The thousand shimmering diamonds on my pillbox window at this elevation, the sunlight refracting through them every which way. They grow and connect like islands in a translucent sea.

It is the inconsolable infant whose new mother didn't know to have him drink during takeoff, so that now the pressure of our entire journey builds itself relentlessly in his tiny eardrum.

It is Sissy Spacek, old now, on a miniature screen, her blue eyes as bright as they ever were.

It is how my heart swells and feels as if even in all this wild space it can never really be accommodated.

Lover

I am standing in line at the Boston Logan airport, waiting to board my flight for California, when I glance out the plate glass window and catch sight of light on water. Unexpectedly: the bay. The sea, after all. It is like a secret there amid the vertical array of buildings and bridges, the whispered intimation of that expansiveness that fills my ribcage and swells in my marine heart. I will fly toward the Pacific today, oceanic home of mine, and for the first time in three months, my feet will touch her grey sand, my head will receive her aquatic kiss.

Lullaby

The lull of history between wars--there used to be times like that, I think. When there was really no war to speak of. But we are utterly engaged at any given moment, it seems, in an armed conflict of some sort. By "we" I mean Americans, by "we" I mean humanity. Of course. Of course. Why blame? It is what ails us all--not any one group: fear. Fear of the other, of losing power or control, of being subverted in some way. Of being less than what we are...but isn't it our acts of violence that diminish us? Make us ultimately smaller and less as humans? Why must we continually violate ourselves by striking out against the other? Violence can only give rise to more violence, and in this engenderment: more and more fear. How to soothe ourselves? What lullaby to beguile the senses, silence the alarm that rises along our spines and explodes in our ears? Oh. Is there no melody that can teach the heart to be still and pray to what is universal and holy?

Lucidity

How we run, how we grow, how we pray to the gods of our waking dreams, how the screams of our stories permeate the present, make us tremble in our sleep. How we look and touch and begin again the quest for the real, try to hold it in our hands--like sand, warm under our feet but unwieldy. We fill our pockets: ballast for the unbearably insubstantial. Oh. This is how we grow, this is how it goes, I sing the song again that simmers in my heart, nourishes every dream I have warming there. These are the days of complete lucidity--body pure and light, opening itself to mind to spirit--personal trinity turned inside out and spilling, spilling across a finite horizon.

Invitations

It is the day before 9/11. Every year it is the same for me, the recollection of that morning, dragging the TV to the cable outlet because the radio's disjointed tones tell us something is terribly wrong. It is six in the morning, and we are in Hawaii, as far from New York City as we can be and this by choice. There is fear in the strained tones of the announcer and in the repetition of images on the screen: an airplane, inexplicably, planting itself in the side of a tower. The World Trade Center collapsing into itself like a magic trick. Oh.

We know there may be students with family members affected, so we begin to move like ghosts, me with Taiaroa on my hip, knocking on dormitory doors. Wake up, dear ones. Something has happened. Something has happened.

Nine years later it is still happening, and I am invited to burn a Koran. How a seed of blame can grow in a decade. How we nurture our hate, braid our fear into a new thing that neither resembles truth nor serves any purpose but to annihilate. The other. The self.

What was said to urge this leap from one violence to another, its new victim strangely like ourselves? What did we tell ourselves to be able to point to one bewildered group of people and say You? Why are we so comforted by wholesale blame? Absolute culpability--so neat and clean. Easy. Can we really reduce ourselves, our response to a tragedy, to this?

I am invited then by my Jewish writer friend to read a Koran on this terrible day of remembering, and I am able to take a tiny breath. It is an act that means not forgiveness (how narrow, how presumptuous) but that we try to understand. The other. The shadowy figure of the unknown. It means we try to close a chasm that is filled with our ignorance and surely with our fear. It means that what we seek, after all, is not division but divine connection. Linguistic proof of shared holiness. Hidden in our humanity. It is a way to say I am not afraid and I don't need your culpability to free me from my grief.

Thank you, David, for your invitation. It saves me from the many others that have whirled around our ears over the last nine years. On this day we remember--and we express our infinite hope, because how else can we live another year, another moment, with our imperfect selves?

Rock Star

Fresh-faced boys smile at me from beneath the sweaty rims of their skate helmets. They are finally home and they know it. They teach me this with the ease of their gait, the way they breathe this air, lift faces to clouds swollen with sunset light.

Vermont is this beautiful in part because they are in it, but I cannot deny something inherently and profoundly lovely in this place. Something perfectly familiar and true.

To have built this nest from afar, woven the twigs and leaves of our two-year struggle into the coracle of our eastward migration--I feel like a complete rock star.

It is perhaps my greatest achievement.

Wings

for Basia

The crisp lines of the three volcanoes

against sky—these speak of the clarity

that shakes down at the end of this magical,

terrible time. It is time, Pele chides,

to doff the cloak of suffering and step

into the golden light that suffuses this land

and beckons, without fanfare, for you

to join it. It’s not about place, it turns out,

and you are indeed free.

Pele laughs because you have always

been free—she released you the moment

you were born to this Island.

And yet, your earnest heart bound you

to it—for a time. For a time. As the static

picture of your life on these four acres

dissolves into a slow fade, remember

what you learned here. About yourself,

what you are capable of.

And do not criticize yourself

when the lessons of these years emerge

nebulous or without clear definition—

it is the job of time to distill them

under your eye. Move forward, released

from the inertia that was never yours

but which you willingly entered—

and now willingly depart. Be as gentle

with your soul as you are with your palms.

All is well, sister. I promise.

And for your kindness, for your compassion

and generosity, there is exponential return

as the new picture takes shape. It will come

into focus—for now, rest easy, knowing that

the colors are right, the shapes inviting and soft.

Know that there is love all around you. Ours

is but a filament in the tapestry of love and light

that you lay over your life each night for sleep.

We thank you. This land thanks you.

Like a magical fairy you have tended it

these many years. Tended the people

who have arrived here, in need of your

soothing gifts. Remember your wings, love.

They have always been there.