May 25, 2010

I lost my female angelfish yesterday. A few days before, she began staying by herself in one corner of the tank. Her mate would come near her, but none of the others did. Then he swam away too. For a while she would rally and take food. One day she swam toward my hand over the tank, the way she always did, but she seemed to lose interest, and let the other fish gobble the descending meal. The next day she was dead, and I threw her body on the garden. It was the human-ness of it that haunted me, the separation that fish and man both know before the final adventure, the pulling away, the isolation, not imposed, but sought. I have never feared anthropomorphizing. I say she was gathering her last thoughts.

Brian started some moonflower seedlings and gave me one. Today I painted, planted the moonflower, nursed the aching muscles left over from yesterday. I must never before have exercised the insides of my elbows.

On You Tube, watching Bono sing “With or Without You” again and again. Dear God, he was so beautiful.

Thinking of my mother tonight. Don’t even know why. She appears in the corner of my eye. I know I must have sucked the air from the room. I must have taken all the fire for myself, hoarding it in my bosom to pay out in poetry years later. I had no idea I was doing, how I knew to do it, what the consequence would be. I was the only thing in the house that was not quiet. When I think of you now you are a slight figure in white emerging from a sick room, taking the tentative steps of one who has not been part of the world for a long time. You don’t know who I am. I know you are my mother, but what does that mean? She who was gone. You are waiting for me to say something, to do something, but I don’t know what. I don’t read the signs right. I am too little, and then it is too late. I never heard you say “I love you,” and when I said it to you, you were embarrassed, as though I had learned lines from an old movie and was using them wrong. And that was exactly the case. I have to change things in memory. I have to take away the things that robbed you of your life. I have to take away my father’s cruelty. I have to take away my tempestuous heedlessness, my secretive spirit which, once rebuked, never showed its face again. I have to pretend I was the son your handsome cousins back in the green mountains had prepared you for. I have to see you as you were in the photos, a girl of sixteen, carefree and happy, a flirt, an American teenager in the great war when everything was a golden and heroic greatness. I have go back to the place where all turned wrong and turn it again. But I don’t know where that was. You smile in the shade under the trees, but reveal nothing. How could you talk to me? Even then the word was a sword in my hand, flame and whirlwind. I understand why you wanted silence. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I think if you had told me, I would have done it. I was so eager. I was so hungry to do what was wanted of me. I am older than you ever were, and nothing is reconciled, nothing is laid to rest. I remember being in Syracuse the year after you died, on the anniversary. I had class that night, but I didn’t go. I walked through the dark streets with the snow flying around me. Howling. Dark. I was the darkest spirit that there ever was. The light has never entirely come back. I have a picture somewhere. It is the old apartment on Pond View, my first home. You are leaning over me, smiling, lighting the single candle on a birthday cake. It is my face you look at, though. I am so happy. I am so happy.