Ghosts The nightmares that rise like North Atlantic winter waves of thunderheads drumming pulsing through tranquil moorings howling pictures in silent rooms. In the dream the pier to Bear Mountain creaks again; the pilings bumpered with black tires smelling of seaweed and swirling oil groans like a cellar door, as the ferry, blind, drunk, staggers into dock. It is night. Her father is the ferryman. She can see his profile in the yellow light of the pilothouse. A curio really in the night light. Over her shoulder the city seems on fire She can feel its heat like a man’s hand on her nape. Her hair, spread like a shawl she floats upon the sea like a stretcher. At 13 she wrote of the girl with melon-colored hair and red mittens picking dandelions, snapdragons, blackeyed susans sprinting into the wooded tree castles a small back dog at her heels; and of the young woman returning to her childhood cave by the sea finding graffiti on the walls; then wading thigh high off the dark fringe of the beach spreading out, like her skirt on the water ashes of her father heavy with a child herself. She sang the the same off-key lullaby for six weeks playing piano over the wooden keys of the window sill post partum blue, blue under her eyes, fingertip blue. Sticky tense nights she sees again the uncle’s chiseled face pressing through the cedar lid of the coffin offering with seaman’s hands crazy gifts from foreign ports hands that curl about the young girl’s waist; like toothpaste and prayer, the nightly hug before sleep. An imported anthurium in a winter subway a deep, glossy, vermilion red among thick overcoats, shoes, and damp umbrellas sprouts from a plastic bag against her thigh drawing every starving eye. Foreseeing her own mugging, at 73 in her own apartment building the loosening and fall of silver hair shutting the lid to the mailbox, the door to the vestibule the elevator, the corridor like a falcon thanking god she was not harmed, as her daughter had torn like the pink lace of Sunset Beach unable to utter the language of her own country. The borrowed words, her cousin’s question locked, like a serpent, in her rice-paper diary: Is that Princess Grace kneeling by the curb where frayed asphalt shows cobblestones? There was mythical blood everywhere on the sheets, the bureau, the sink in her brother’s footprints across the floor. She looked at her hands. Then lay passive, calm, on the park bench as the man in sneakers and khaki pants took her. She stared into his eyes, fierce stars in the summer night brightest like beautiful Jupiter. Scrubbing toilets through cycles of wash and greasy pans desiring earrings, flowers, new shoes to be lifted aloft in great cradling arms rocked, rocked, rocked in a bath of lightness, in the bath of air, in the bath of warmth as the quiet bell of her heart swayed above the earth her face serene on that sun-white day she was married. She hears his voice, the future warrior’s the 10-year-old knight at the margin of the house battling dragons in the backyard crushing craniums with his bare hands hurling their bodies like sacks of potatoes into the storm shelter. “Lie there foul creatures of the underworld and visit us no more!” she hears, she knows pausing mid slice fingering the grain of the wet cutting board.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 06:14:59 +0000
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