into the shower, into the car, into the office, into the small, frantic world of
clients and deadlines and doing what needs doing.
There are days I wish I had no heart.
That I were only a ball of curiosity, a polite blank sheet, neutral and rational
and inert. And there are days I wish I didn’t think. To, as the Shins whine,
“grab the yoke from the pilot and fly the whole mess into the sea.”
I will not make a good Buddhist, oh
no.
There are days I wish love would
fly from me and not return. There are days when I want to kiss every scab, scar,
puncture, misregistered DNA on my skin and tell them, it’s all right, it doesn’t
hurt to be there. There are days when I can only stare at surfaces and not
desire to see what they conceal. There are days when the world is too tight and
my feet too flat. There are days when sadness is all I own. There are days of
more hours than I know what to do with. There are days when my hands worship
their own gods. There are days when I pop balloons and frighten myself. There
are days, and days, and days, and more like them, and I am waiting for that one
day, that day when I catch myself just in time, when love will not spell grief,
when grief will be kind, when the weight on my back will only be
wings.
From “Summer Night,” by Tony
Hoagland:
“Sometimes when she cries I
think how
cigarettes and ice cream are
part
of the chemical composition of her
tears,
sometimes I think about her mom
and dad,
her catastrophic history with men
–
And I can feel the roots of my
heart
convulse, yanking themselves up,
wanting to
walk over there and hold
her.
We sit in our wooden
chairs,
convinced that we have ruined
everything
while through the open
window
comes the smell of
flowers.”