the familiarity I abandoned for a foreign entity
bubbles like carbonation at the top of my glass
as I cross my legs over that beer-colored carpet
(it wasn't by accident)
and sip its liquid partner,
burning pleasantly,
like nostalgia
in my belly.
I listen to your voice,
sometimes off-key
but always on
and you strum anxiously
like you're trying
to resuscitate a heart
to its healthy rhythm.
You pick up speed and frequency and,
by god,
I am alive again
in your living room,
living with plenty of room---
comfortable and comforted that
there are things that don't erode by time
(those stains surely don't)

I press my toes in the slight shag
and think
this is my subsitute for a lawn, and
I've found quite a new playground,
your couch is our swingset.
When will we run out
of m o m e n t u m,
and tire of kicking our legs?
It's sunset
and the parents are calling,
we have to go
to our real homes now.
Maybe we'll find out tomorrow
under a new sun
and a new set of rules
to obey or not obey.

Thoreau-ish thoughts formed while escaping a family reunion...

It's reassuring to know that there are places like this everywhere, because nature is literally everywhere.

We lock ourselves in human nature, lose the key, and forget there's a back door. Through it there are grasses that tickle your feet like spreading laughter and a pond carrying the locked-in magic of the universe when it forms ripples as though caused by rain, but there's only the suggestion of precipitation in the sky's stoic face. (I'm sure it would win a game of poker, that sky).

I can hear a bird whose name I'll never know chirping, and the tall ferns grate and grace each other like the shuffling of cards. Cars wheeze down a highway I can't see---it's been swallowed by the trees like an artist's paint splotches on thin crooked limbs.

That I connect what I perceive to their artificial parodies saddens me, but I guess I have to use what I know to describe what I don't---and I know products, I know consumerism, I know people.

I don't know how the wind makes ripples like slackened cellophane or the local fauna or how to tell which trees are simply dying or already dead and why either situation is the case.

Nature has no assembly instructions, manuals, or guides (at least from a respectable source). It still has a process, a story, a past, a present, and a future. We don't respect that.

And I will explore you, too

[waking, beside you,
infinitesimal fraction
between life and death]


...
I'm a pioneer, exploring a new world between sleeping and dreaming, an infinitesimal fraction between life and death. Whether I blink my eyes open or blink my eyes shut, I see your lazy body outstretched like a cat sunning herself in the light afforded by an unshaded window. The image is on either side of my own window shades, my iris-shades, like when you stare at some complex geometric riddle in black and white. It's an optical illusion, and you are told to hold your gaze before shifting it to a blank wall. In the moments after your deep concentration, the image transposes and burns even more intensely for a time, dazzling you in dreamlike colors you never expected before it fades into nothingness.

There's an uneven level of cognition to my dream life and my awake life, like steep concrete steps in a parking garage you must climb if you ever want to get to your car, if you ever want to rejoin the realm of humans. Between the hours of midnight and 7:30, or 1 and 7:30, or later depending on the time we've had---but always ending at 7:30---, however, the level balances out, at least in one respect: I know that you are there. Awake or asleep, it makes a world of difference. Iris-shades drawn or open, I sense you. You are a topical illusion, and your image transposes and burns on my blank wall of a life in dreamlike colors.

I am just as dazzled, and just as puzzled.

So during this sliver called sleep, you dream your dream, and I dream mine, all the while knowing what the other is doing (as much as you know that your heart is still beating). When we wake, we make up for lost time in our separate Lost Times, kiss, and roll over. We share this particular dream before we return to our different dreams. But you're always tingeing the edges, burning that braided brainbender onto my blank wall in your radiant colors. You don't slip away when the sleep does, and you don't disappear when the ocular deceit does. You simply never fade.

Subterranean Faith-Check

Natalie Goldberg, an author of Zen-writing practice, suggests in her "Writing Down the Bones" that whenever you get stuck and do not know what to write about, you should begin with "I remember..." or "I do not remember..." and fill in the blanks for at least ten minutes. My sister told me last night that she hit a writing wall and opted for the latter solution. The first thing she did not remember was when she actually, wholeheartedly, and without reservation, believed in God. This confession called to mind the rare and evanescent memories of when I wasn't yet touched by prurient hands, schemers, cognitive dissonance, heartbreak, puberty, or death. It was when I was all belief. I don't remember consciously walking around, oozing with faith or anything; I was no Russian pilgrim repeating a simple mantra. My unmitigated belief in God is or was inextricably linked to memories of my old house's basement, and only my basement.

As with most children, the basement represented something sinister for me. It was darker down there. Subterranean, away from where people walked and smiled and held hands and carried on business. It was attached to the garage, an even danker gutted cave of concrete. There was a large pipe running through the plaster-pockmarked ceiling into the cement that made demonic hissing sounds when it rushed with the kind of waterfall you'd never cool off under every time the upstairs toilet flushed. Millipedes and centipedes silently stampeded and I knew it was more their house than mine. Cobwebbed corners and monstrous metal cabinets crowded the room with things I didn't understand. Photo albums of people I'd never know, liquor locked up with stamp collections and antique coins, giant dumbbells, and bungee cords and bike pumps...When you don't understand things, they frighten you. Especially if you're in the 5-7 years-old range, which I was. The basement scared me.

So, my "I do not remember" begins with an "I remember." I remember one particular day I went down to the basement to get tennis rackets. We hung them on the wall by the washer and stationary tub. No one else was home--my mom had just left to "go to the store" because moms are always leaving to go to the store. She had also apparently put in a load of wash into the dryer before leaving. I descended the stairs slowly and began my typical meditation of "Stop being stupid, Sarah. Nothing's gonna happen to you down there. It's just the basement." It's just the basement, right. I could only hear my heartbeat and the creaks of the stairs and the vague vibrations of the dryer. I started to think about death and dying and what I'd do if Mom never came back and what if monsters exist, and what if they live in my basement? When I was really starting to lose it, just when I was about to convince myself I didn't want to get the tennis rackets out to get Katie to play a game when she got home because she'd probably be tired anyway and maybe I'd just go to the park...there was a sudden, horror movie scale shattering of glass, like someone had struck out all the windows and was about to kick the last splinters in, climb down, and take me. I froze and waited the kind of ten minutes that proves time is arbitrary, and subjective, because it was probably only around 2. When no one crept out, shining dagger in hand, when no animal scurried through to wreak havoc, when no monster manifested itself, when no other sound was heard and the dryer buzzed instilling an even deeper stillness...I steeled myself and decided to go in there and find out just what the hell happened. The basement was partitioned into two sections, a livable one, and a not livable one. Of course the laundry, the rackets, the furnace (fuck "Home Alone" for knowing my fear so well) and the fear were in the room not visible from the bottom of the stairs, so there was still room to turn back.

And this is about the last time I remember believing in God. Shivering at the foot of the stairs, alone and in the age of single digits, convincing myself to prove I wasn't crazy, that glass did break, that something happened, and that I wasn't afraid. How did I convince myself to go in there? I thought of God, that elusive loving character I was learning about in school, in Sunday school, and over supper. He would not let anything hurt me, I honestly thought. My reasoning was that yeah, there might be something super scary in there, but God would be there too. And He would make it okay. I pictured Him with a graying beard and avuncular smile and flowing garb, as he was drawn in my easy-to-read mini Bible. He'd protect me.

I went in. The muddled charcoal ground was covered in splinters of glass and a thin layer of some clear liquid. I tiptoed through the strange, centimetric pond and around the glass and realized what happened, the wrinkled wet label told me. Mom had left a 6-pack of Seagrams tonic water on the dryer. The vibrations of the dryer slowly nudged those quivering glass bottles towards the edge until they broke right when I was nearing my own breaking point. I cleaned up the mess and wondered why the hell Mom bought tonic water anyway. I still don't know how I feel about tonic water, and I still don't know how I feel about God. I do know how I feel about the basement, though. Some things don't change.