RAIN

(Excerpted from Dance Marathon)

The rain falls on old men with beards in a place I don’t recognize.

The rain falls like memories on a thing shapeless and wandering that never existed in the first place.

I love to watch women in the rain. For the most part, men don’t seem to care, but women who have

forgotten their umbrella are spectacularly beautiful. Especially if they have somewhere to

be and think they aren’t going to be presentable if they get wet. They duck their heads as

the water trickles through their hair and nestles against their scalp. A perfect, useless

hand comes up to protect the delicate powder that has long since disappeared from their

glistening face, the other hand gripping a bag that contains all the secrets of their

existence.

The rains pummel the ground and whip through fences, tattering leaves and bending

branches. Thunder crashes through the sky in warning, slick bodies run by the door

laughing.

Things can still be made right.

And then, just like that, it’s gone.

Tiny droplets fall from the awning and the owner jokes that he should charge admission.

But of course it’s just a joke. That’s okay we have been absolved.

I love the rain.

Tomorrow we will dash to catch the subway having left some important thing or another

at home on the counter amidst the unread pointless magazines. The dirty dishes and old

newspapers sit like a pebble in our already crowded psyche. The eight a.m. subway ride

will be an onslaught of mild inhumanity. The screaming brakes, the shoving through fast

closing doors, but mostly it’s the standing so close. The pressing tightly into smells both

unpleasant and … very pleasant. This unexpected arousal has no place in my day. It is so

early to be putting up walls.

These tiny concessions add up, you know.

Last night I dreamed of Victoria again.

Feel Your Weight Girl!

Her rhythm game was playing against the falling water on the fire escape.

Weight has always eluded me.

Mostly I am like a skipping stone on the surface of a lake, I flit from one thing to the next

until finally, I sink. Unnoticed.

The fatigue opens the door to a deeper place and I glance inside

and hope that some day soon after this or that, I will have the time to go down and visit

this exotic land of questions without answers and swollen memories poured from bottles

like centuries old wine served at a feast for the best of friends and ideas without end.

The rains fall on junkies in doorways and businessmen in suits, their bold black outlines

smudge and I imagine them as Coco would draw them.

The rain falls like roses and blesses us with mercy.

The end was swift but not painless.

She was 32 with two young children, went to the doctor with a headache, and drove home

with a bottle of Tylenol. Lost her sight the next day and two days later she couldn’t hear.

It wasn’t a headache for Tylenol. The panic was lost behind the pain. ‘Mommy, can you

hear me?’ billowing into the empty wind. Little hands, fingers reaching up to wipe the

tears from mommy’s frightened face, and she holding onto their tiny bodies, letting her

fingers twirl through their perfect soft curls as her fear spiraled off into the night. The

cancer was cruel, tugging at her like a lost dog on a choke collar. Then at 6 pm on

Thursday, the body slackened and the head rolled to the side. The twins awoke with a

start, leaped onto the body, clutched at her breast, and cried like wolves. Tiny tears

soaking through the threadbare nightgown she had been wearing since they were born

only three years before. Mommy was gone and the babies were left like birds with no

feathers fallen onto the wet grass.

Pale blue beginnings of a sky hover over the still sleeping buildings and

the cars on the rain-slicked street make the sound of bread bags being opened.

Raining kids sleeping hot coffee, embers of another life

hidden alleys and works in progress,

the alleys of Montreal are the veins of the city and ghosts and memories are its invisible

tumbleweed.

Mildew fertility.

For someone who grew up on a farm milking goats, I know shockingly little about the

way of things in nature.

Whenever Elijah is over, he’ll ask like, ‘do you know how they harvest pine nuts?’ Or ‘

do you know why Greece is so rocky? Did you know that figs are the way they are

because bugs have lived in them?’

No, I didn’t know.

The nicest thing about New York in the rain was always sleep. Slumber, I love that word.

It has weight while simultaneously managing to be irreverent – not able to care too much

or do anything because you’re in a slumber. Slumbering? Doesn’t work as well as a verb

– it’s a rounded container of your efforts - alchemy turning trying into tossing up and

throwing away.

It feels like it is about to rain, the air is cool blowing in off the fire escape. I can hear

Millie downstairs hustling kids across the street and greeting the moms, ‘morning lady,’

she says with a smile and a hint of sarcasm. She is attractive and I can imagine her in

shorts walking on a boardwalk in the summer, although I have never seen her in anything

other than her dark blue NYC crossing guard uniform. She is overweight and I imagine

the extreme weather that comes to New York is a lot for her to bear.

The questions spill out of your little Clara Bow mouth like diamonds and your whole face

is a soft rabbit skin purse that my grandmother gave me when I was little, it is my first

vacation and your eyes are twinkling stars on that camping trip and roasting

marshmallows and what it was to have family before it all, fell apart.

I separate my life into what I think is interesting and what I think is boring and

sometimes I think I’m wrong and that I’m missing the beautiful moments.

Lily has her MRI today, Dennis started a website for her.

I think I know why they make you sit in an empty hotel room before primal scream

therapy, because there is just nothing but you.

Wood. Cement. You. Empty ashtray. You. Lukewarm coffee. You. 1000 channels. You.

When she cries it’s like looking through rain on the windshield wipers

I am eight years old again and she and I are the same, we meld together like a frog

slipping beneath the surface of a pond.

Her little being just needs to be against me and I just need to be against her.

Sometimes she is faking it though and can stop on a dime if you mention chocolate cake

or riding her new pink bike with the strawberry on the basket.

Yesterday we took our summer clothes out of bags. She held up a halter-top, ‘what is

this?’ She asked. I explained that a halter was sort of like a bathing suit top. She promptly

tied it around her head like an Indian. Indian equals princess. Indian equals cool.

I am reading a book right now that Sonya gave me called The Female Brain. It’s written

by a woman. Well, of course it’s written by a woman, what man is going to write a book

called The Female Brain? Her premise is that neuroscientists never use female monkeys

to run their tests because the hormones screw up the data too much.

Isn’t that kind of important to consider?

She goes on to compare the female brain to a boat, navigating its way through a sea of

hormones, a sea of hormones. We’re like a bunch of sailors trying not to fall overboard.

Adolescence, menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, child bearing, child rearing,

menopause, peri-menopause –and then … well, and then you’re dead. So when I’m upset

and you tell me not to put too much stock in it, as in, ‘you’re just hormonal, it’ll pass.’

I’d like you to tell me when that’s going to be because I’m getting pretty fucking tired of

apologizing to you for my ‘wild, unpredictable’ behavior. How about you just accept that

THIS IS ME and then it’s your problem.

She comes running into my darkened bedroom soaked to the core ‘Mommy! Mommy! It

is raining like cr-r-r-azy out there! I can indeed hear massive drops pelting the skylight in

the hall. She gives a big loud laugh and starts yanking off her sopping wet dress – she

drops it to the floor and looks at me for about, a second. She runs out of the room.

‘Daddy!’ I am no fun right now and she doesn’t even bother. The baby is still sleeping

beside me, the bed is the softest thing I have ever felt. I try to call back my bones, my

muscles. I sit. Nothing.

Vertical is so difficult.

But I should be up, I should be playing with her I haven’t seen her all week. The sleepdeprived

body is in self-protection mode. It has grabbed a handful of sleep and doesn’t

want to spill any as it is yanked back to standing. I pull myself as far as the living room

couch where I collapse again. ‘Mommy, you’re the octopus and I’m the owner, you

squeeze through this opening when it’s time to be fed, this is the feeding station. OK?

OK?’ OK, sure. ‘Did you know that an octopus has two hearts to keep it warm in the cold

water? Did you know that an octopus can squeeze down to be this small?’ She makes her

hands about the size of a bunny. I try to imagine even though I think she might be

exaggerating. ‘Daddy and I saw an octopus eat a shark!’

I think I need to go back to bed.

It doesn’t feel like a Sunday, spring riding in on a wing falling gently over the still

sleeping city. So clever how it manages to sneak in at night and just be there in the

morning as if it were always there hiding behind winter’s frigid veils.

And just like that the world unfolds like a blanket I didn’t know I had, a spider’s web

hanging on to bits of rain.