Fifteen Selfies (& small change)

                    

                                  The memories of plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin
                                  of autobiography . . . and it’s wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.
                                                                                            – Janet Malcolm

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My eyes leap from skin smooth as moonlight to the closed-captioned dialogue.

(A series streamed on Netflix from Spain.)

Torn between desire for the bodies and desire for the story.

In Gomorrah, thrilled by the way blood sprays back of the head onto a wall.

This is Art, I think. The skin, the blood, details adored by the camera.

They’ve done the research, young actors slipping out of their clothes to rehearse (attended by intimacy coordinators); splatters on the wall behind the pig’s head in the lab.

•

Today’s small change:

Heather Gray is what I thought I ordered.

Gray with a hint of green is what I imagined.

The hoodie I unpacked the color of an expired campfire.

(No hint, of course, of the pinks and violets of the blooms.)

•

I’ve spoken to him a few times the last ten years. A pathetic plea for help. A heathen’s abased request to intercede from the hereafter.

Get this manuscript published. Float into the mind of the editor and help her see its worth.

This I learned to do from a writer friend who visited the grave of Paul Monette.

(Successfully, I might add.)

And so I abase myself now, reporting what no one needs to hear.

And then those times I think I can bring him back—or he can bring me back (as in get me off).

The fantasies that worked so well when Morgan was alive. 

Impossible, those fantasies, especially at the end.

But when alive, even in the ICU, immobilized after transplant, potent.

•

The Russians—well, Putin—conscripting boys and sending them un-provisioned to the front.

Mended uniforms came to mind, antique pistols with a handful of bullets, a sack lunch.

Reading further, flak jackets and medical kits are what they must provide for themselves.

Expired campfire. Impossible fantasies. Flack jackets.

(The coherence of the self, wrote poet William Stafford in ‘A Way of Writing,’ an essay remembered from college. Trust it. Just put one thing after another.)

I imagined how they’d be found, their bodies charred, limbs in disarray, along the cratered streets of Kherson, after the Ukrainians march in.

(Typing ‘Ukrainians,’ the charm of a mirror—ai / ia—competing with the imagined horror.)

•

When we mourn, I read in a memoir, we taste our own ending.

Turning from the page I remember: Tonight, my partner Gary and I will stream Boy Toy, a title with all the gravitas of bubblegum.

The coherence of the self.

•

Stung by a sentence, I pause Homeland to dictate into the iPhone:

It’s the curse of old men to know that in the end (here, Saul Berenson, acting CIA Director, is silent for a beat) . . . we control nothing.

(Meaningless to me, barely sixty, when the series first aired.)

To which the captured Iranian National Guard official, who’s known Saul since they were young, scoffs.

•

Today’s small change:

Socrates: the name sewn into the shirt of the Discount Tire clerk who recommended a set of Michelin Defenders.

Say no to Socrates?

Googling for the urtext of Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15, I click on a link to Walmart, where I order from the bright blue page.

•

In the dream I’m one of two young men preparing for their wedding.

I look nothing like myself; my fiancé is no one I’ve ever known. That we are both so handsome pleases me.

Wandering store to store, my intended selects dresses from the racks.

Nothing about this dream while in it strikes me as odd.

•

In our hotel beds after Thanksgiving at my niece’s, I read to Gary from Gail Collins’ New York Times holiday quiz:

Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate candidate in New Hampshire and a longtime opponent of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, claimed during the campaign that public schools . . .
     A.  Have been giving litter boxes to kids who identify as cats.
     B.  Should require teachers to apologize if they have opposite sex partners.
     C.  Need to include a lot more stories about happily married presidents in their history classes.

Correct answer: A.

(We laugh; we both get it right.)

•

Today’s small change:

December. For weeks not so much as a Sparrow at the birdbath. Why bother changing the water?

Then two dusk-gray Mourning Doves grip the yellow ceramic edge to drink, one hopping in to bathe, fluttering, bobbing duck-like, before hopping out so the other can have a turn.

Minutes before the first rain in months.

•

In Novosibirsk, Russia, police arrest a man for holding up a blank white page.

A page that says nothing. A page that says it all.

In Shanghai eight months later, citizens hold up blank white pages for the authorities (and cameras) to see. 

A white paper revolution.

Anyone can read the truth of the words.

Acts of courage—and desperation—that bring me to tears.

•

Today’s small change:

A headline announces: ‘Goblin mode,’ the Oxford Dictionary word of 2022.

Goblin mode? I say aloud, a term I’ve never heard.

The overwhelming choice, winning 93% of the votes in the online survey.

I’m half concerned, half gratified to be so out of it.

•

Morgan, not a hybrid—part him, part stranger—who so often visits in dreams, but Morgan.

The two of us bathed without touching in an atmosphere of tenderness, of intimacy we never achieved in life.

A velvet euphoria.

Awakened at 3:00 AM to this sensation, I can’t decide: Should I try to sleep again?

•

I can sense your hesitation, writes a friend, like a girl scooching away from a date on Friday night. I won’t be pissed if you don’t go.

After what I thought were casual email asides about rising Covid rates in Tucson. (He planned to drive a hundred miles to attend a U. of Arizona basketball game with me.)

I am that girl, I respond.

As charmed by his talent for metaphor as grateful for his understanding.

•

Today’s small change:

Hello, puppy.

The voice, high (a woman’s) but firm, rising from a swirl of blankets on the pavement.

On a morning walk in the dark with Cloe, my elderly poodle.

A dot for an instant glows bright. Want a cigarette?

The smoke—that’s why Cloe stands back.

No, but thank you, I say, regretful, not wanting to refuse her generosity.

Then call Cloe to move along.

•

Later, I say, let me think of what to write. 

A friend has asked that I sign her copy of my new book.

Not confessing that since the first one over thirty years ago, signing books feels like I’m defacing them.

As if scrawling my name on something written by someone else.

•

Today’s small change:

Our first hike of the New Year—in the lush saguaro forest of Tucson Mountain Park.

Movement high on a hill, obscured by undergrowth.

A mountain lion, Gary guesses. No, a mule deer. Then, Oh, it’s a coyote.

Fumbling to aim my binoculars, I focus on the venerable beast, hunched to take a dump.

•

Poet Charles Simic is dead at age 84, the NPR reporter announced.

A poet whose wry, spare poems thrilled me.

(I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh, he once said in an interview.)

Then, From complications of dementia.

A thin cold blade lodged in my abdomen.

Simic had lost his words.

As I do nouns, I thought next, in a panic.

Can opener. Stroller.

Is the comparison unforgivable?

Does Gary notice the gaps?

How was the . . . Santa . . . ?

Cruz, the Santa Cruz, he says (The river he biked along this morning.)

He notices.

•

A young man, shirtless in the Rec Center locker room, turning side to side before the full-length mirror.

Admiring? Judging?

How often I see them before this mirror.  Like young gods, I think, in their perfection.

Unselfconscious, as others dress nearby, or undress, or pass on their way to the showers.

As much as thinning gray hair or puffy features, my discomfort each time at such public self-regard dates me.

•

Today’s small change:

The rhythmic clatter of a skateboard on the sidewalk.

Cloe and I both turn—and see nothing.

Looking up, it’s the flags above the downtown police station, flapping frantically in the brisk morning wind.

•

Life’s narratives are not full; often there is no story, or an inadequate story, not covering the gaps.

So writes a concert pianist about the stops and starts of Schubert’s B-Flat Major Sonata, composed during the last months of his life.

The gaps, the hesitations—I think of them as human footprints.

At some point, a pattern will emerge—at some point, all of it will make sense, writes a poet about the anger, the punishments in childhood by her father.

The poem proves it’s not true; it’s the not-knowing that made the poem.

 

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Boyer Rickel

 

 

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