Sweeten My Body

a memory river

San Juan Island, Washington, 2017

I guess it’s the Harvest Moon, a golden disk sitting right between the forked branches of the tree in my front yard. After the evening routine, the breathing treatments, the suctioning, the meds, the formula and g-tube, and the rising irritation (sorrow masked) so much so that I lay my head in Sophie’s lap and pray to the spirits of the healers — Viola, Anna, the Virgin Mary, Jesus — for it all to stop, please. I push Sophie out the front door, and we sit and look at it, the moon. Later, a coyote crosses the yard, whippet thin. Now I’m re-membering — the full moon picking party in some field outside of Nashville where I lived in the eighties.

And memory is a river.

... flow river flow
let your waters wash down
take me from this road
to some other town

This is how memory works.*

I'm driving to the airport with my teenage son who is traveling alone across the country. I'm listening to Dire Straits, but it's random because I don't own any Dire Straits, and the hills are brown on either side of me and the sky is stretching out, seeped in haze. I am driving then to a drugstore on the other end of a country road where I live on the top floor of a farmhouse with a boy I love. Loved. Still love. Still loved. Which is it, was it? It’s nearly October, apple chill, chapel hill. I climb up stairs to reach my apartment, up the stairs past the door of the couple studying Derrida, the man and woman who make love so loudly that I and the boy I love wonder what it is because, let's face it, deconstruction. He lies down sometimes, to make me laugh, his ear pressed to the floor, his mouth wide, eyes green.

Years before, a single bed, a scrap of paper left on a pillow, spidery writing: In the Carolinas, the white iris beautifies me. 

Now it's a memory of a memory, but that is how memory works. A prayer, a harvest moon, Ballad of Easy Rider, a river, Dire Straits. A country road. A drugstore. Cough syrup. Coupling. The howling of love.












And this:

In the Carolinas

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mothers,
How is it that your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body
The white iris beautifies me. 

Wallace Stevens

* a re-working of an old piece, inspired by the Harvest Moon and a writing prompt: “Rivers”