james dean. part 2

i got home later than i expected to, and my head was pounding with the necessity of running. i had left as soon as i could, reluctant to make even civil goodbyes, because i feared that if i didn't do it now i might lose my nerve and not do it at all.

i remembered that i spent one year of the recent past conducting my romantic life along those same lines. that urgency is a good basis for something unequivocally good for you, like cardiovascular exercise. i can't speak for the effects being equally salutatory when you apply it to love.

i barely felt my legs under me tonight, as i ran, and i barely heard the music in my headphones--i didn't need it to lend my pulse a rhythm. unusual. amazing. incredible. the evenness of my stride, the steadiness of my heart rate. i opened my arms and let them pump up and down balletically, as if they were wings, wishing they were wings, feeling as if they were wings. someday i will fly. someday i will run up the side of the black mountain preserve and into the green open valley that rolls between here and the coast, and my legs will carry me on the strength of my steady hummingbird heart all the way down to where the hillside drops off into the plate expanse of the pacific ocean.

climbing a hill, i thought, as i often do, of dancing to the music i was hearing. that happens when my heart needs a little help to keep its joy in motion. and, as i often do, i thought of him--he is james dean, he is marlon brando, he is elvis presley, he is all the wrong things i love so much and never hope to find again. he's the man i want to marry and know that i never will. by the time i got to the top of the hill, i was thinking gleefully of the one time i stood him up--i didn't mean to but i'm eternally glad that i did. by the time i came down from the crest of the hill, i was thinking of the one time i punched him in the jaw, and wishing to God i could do it again. i was thinking, as my legs threw the miles behind me, of how unequivocally sweet it would be to have the opportunity to press my palm into his face, my fingers into his eyes, and screw his mug away from me with a challenging twist of my wrist. blood pulsed through my biceps as i thought of throwing my fists into his hollow cheeks, his mouth and his neck, pummeling him with the abandon of an eight-year-old on the playground, until others would have to hold me back, and i thought of how i would fight against their restraint to get another punch in.

of course if it ever happened he wouldn't let me get more than one--he'd probably stop my fist in mid-air and twist my arm behind my back and hiss in my ear. odds are equally good that he'd punch me back, or just slap me to the ground...if he did that i would get back up. i'd fight him so hard, so hopelessly, that they would have to drag me off to keep me from getting hurt.

he never lied, he never cheated. he just didn't love me, and i loved him and i broke my heart on his self-absorption, and it breaks almost every day still, because i never got or gave a final word.

it was a surge of testosterone, i guess, or maybe it was the adrenaline of getting over the hill, or the qi powering my forward motion. maybe it was my real feelings enjoying an unwonted escape from the restraint i impose on them. the next song i heard had a rolling guitar strum on a descending chord progression, the musical language of a road trip, and it was very soothing until i heard the lyric "good-bye, old friend, i can't make you stay/i can't spend another ten years wishing you would, anyway.../even i'm getting tired of useless desires."

well, i am getting tired of apropos song lyrics. i've been trying not to notice them in connection with this james dean for nearly three years. i think you'll agree that that is way too much time to spend on a relationship that was only acknowledged for about three weeks.

if only he'd do something for which i could fight him. maybe then we could be friends.

turning wheels

Today went to La Plaine, on the Atlantic side. (as opposed to the Caribbean side) Sandra did her Baha’i thing with Veronica, and I played with the two kids, Kayvon and JJ. La Plaine is a village like any other, but Veronica is Carib and her house is Carib style, a two-room hut with crepe paper party streamers on the door, and a separate kitchen hut. I was playing catch with the boys outside, and then Kayvon looks up and so did I, and there is this hugely muscled rasta man in sleeveless grey coveralls walking over. He barely gave me the time of day…maybe he don’t like white girls, or maybe he just felt my intimidation. Anyway, turns out that he is JJ’s father, but not Kayvon’s. Veronica, further turns out, is like the Samaritan woman at the well—any number of husbands and at least six kids, starting at age 18 and going down to JJ. She is the sister of Francilia, the Carib lady whose kid, Dylan, I played with last week.

They had all kinds of trees in their yard, as Kayvon showed me when I asked him—cacao and mango and what I think was guava. The cacao pods are big and gnarly and purpley-brown. The mangos, alas, were not ripe. We played catch for about a hundred years, then Kayvon found a stick and switched to cricket. The rasta father worked on his car and smelled up the yard.

Sandra told me all sorts of interesting stories on the way. Apparently in the sixties there was an uprising of the rastas against the very few whites that were around. Ted Honeychurch tried to befriend them and defend their cause, and they kidnapped him and I think she said they killed him eventually. They killed some other people, too, so all the whites fled. She told me about a friend of hers who left her husband and two kids to go and live in a tree with a rasta who called himself “Mango.” But after a couple of years she visited Sandra and warned her to get out of Dominica, saying that she was fleeing, as well. Then there was the story about the Geneva plantation, which was huge and fruitful but got burned up and some of the family killed and now it’s a cricket field and “bits of this, that and the other.” Then there was a story of a friend of hers who was white but pretty native in his style of dressing and hygiene; he was working up on a telephone pole and a bunch of black rasta types started yelling at him to get off their island, and he yelled back, “Your island? Who do you think brought you here?”

She also told me about my Chinese astrology sign—I’m a water dog, it turns out.

Tay wrote to me today…how nice. I’m horribly tired and my neck hurts and I’m all bloated, probably all from dehydration. Funny that I don’t feel it, and drinking water only makes it feel worse. I don’t want to go back to the old mill anymore—I’m too tired and it doesn’t feel worth it. Still, what else am I going to do?

There’s this inner level that native people here don’t seem to have, or work with. I can only call it “examination”—they don’t seem to realize the sub-par level of, for example, their dance workshops, or their written publications, any of that. Or the possibility of a person’s skill having levels—if I say I’ve worked on magazines before, they hand over the job of editing and designing fully to me. If I say I’m interested in dance, I’m a dancer and qualified to teach a class. If I say I have experience in a choir, I’m qualified to critique a performance. The idea of amateur doesn’t seem to exist. If you can, you’re an expert. For some people I guess it would be nice—for me, who came here to learn more, being called upon to teach is not nice.

don't make me move

A girl walks
By tossing her angel hair
With rosewood chopsticks;

The twilit wind makes her
Skirt swish. It is time, I say, for
Revelry and exhaustion in the waterways,
But everyone is leaving, and frantic
They seem to know
Where or, at least, to extract
The last from the last.

The redbud lights seem
To have gone out,
But the moon reflects on the metal
Plate embedded in the tree,
And people are going home for the summer,
Just as the nights are growing longer,
And the weather ripening for youth.
It is time for workers to think of holiday,
But all the youth are thinking now of work.

st. pius x

his lips are the sort i have always wanted for myself.  they are blushing and soft, a little too large for his delicate face, they hang like petals unfurling too early, self-consciously, as if he didn't know quite what to do with their largess of sensuality.  that is the way of people blessed by birth.  his face, as i said, is delicate, his cheekbones broad but vertiginously triangular, his chin a round, perilous point of anchor.  your palm would have barely to open if you were to take his face in your hand...it would be more uncomfortable for you to hold your hand in such a position than for him to endure it.  his eyes are large, as they must be to fit proportionally in his wide brow, and they are crystalline grey, like woodland pools under a twilit sky, and his dark hair grows also with the generosity of some wild vernal plant springing eagerly from the ground and covering stones and the limbs of trees.  

fortunately, he is immensely intelligent--not in the smug way of most of upper-class boys that show any predilection for reading, but in the true socratic way, intently questioning, possessed of a round perspective, an idealistic vision and a pragmatic method, open and wondering as a child.  i say fortunately, because his constant interrogation affords me excuse for looking at him often, and closely, as i admit i have done.  God bless him.  

the other boys might be expected to give him a hellish time, but instead they seem to like him.  he shows an average ability in sports, along with an eager submissiveness for direction--which may be another exercise of his intelligence.  on the field he falls rather short of the platonic ideal--he does not run or leap with any beauty.  his coltish body leans forward at an ungainly angle and his hair covers his head like a mop.  it is in the sports competitions that i am most keenly reminded that he is a boy, just a boy.  i never watch for long.  

a lesson learned from a brief stint as prom queen

Being the different one makes you constantly wonder—is it because I’m white? Or American? Or just a new person? Wondering what impossible thing you could change about yourself to make the experience less awkward while knowing that it’s probably all these things together. It doesn’t matter whether you’re getting treated well or badly on account of being different. Sometimes getting treated badly is almost better, because you can ignore it. Getting treated nicely for it makes you feel guilty and then makes you feel contempt for the people doing it, for their ignorance of how ordinary you actually are.

The thing is I, and maybe many people, while we want to be known as someone “special” and “unique”, don’t want to be treated any differently as a rule. Much as you wouldn’t like to be the only one in your group that no one talked to, you wouldn’t like to be the only one whose birthday was ever celebrated, would you? Or the only one anyone ever said anything nice about?

Either way of special treatment is an incomplete recognition of who we are as people. We want others to recognize that we have strengths, because we need our confidence bolstered for it to carry on. We want others to recognize that we have weaknesses, because we need to know that we don’t have to forfeit our confidence on their account. Do you see what I mean? Recognition of both things makes us feel a right to the confidence we need to function.

Here is my inspirational thought for the day—do your heroes the favor of recognizing that they are all big screw-ups, while treating them no differently than you used to. And to those you pity or kind of despise, go on doing what you’re probably already trying to do. Recognize that in both cases, you’re only treating a whole human being like half of one.

(from march of 2007 in roseau, dominica)

the effects of violence on television

Following a suggestion
made by a poignant memoirist (who,
shall remain nameless, if we are lucky)
I came home from the library, the hairdresser’s,
and the grocery store, took up a rolling
pin and whacked it against the television.

A long crack striped the screen,
much more assertive than those uncertain
grey worms of static that
buzz, begging you to wait.

My brother left his baseball bat, again,
in the hall. I wielded it experimentally.

The practice swings were
successful. I lodged his
ball in the VCR, which feat is not mean.

Accompanying myself with a sharp
nasal hum, I reenacted
Norman Bates’ famed obsession,
then ululated like the savage,
square-jawed princess of the afternoon, taming
the mythic world in aluminum underpinnings.
I am glad no one was there to see.

As I cut swaths against
the coiled tubes, slicing
them as for a tea sandwich,
the colored wires stood out like nettles
in an unkept field. I vacuumed the shards of glass.

I hate that memoirist for her
good-looking success.

I suppose I saw
through her narcissan pool and found a murky
bottom, the fiendish
delight of beating rerun shows
to death, the joyous effect of violence
on television.