Skuleton - Eric Shaffer

PART OF LOVE STORY IN CAEN

They have become too habituated to one another, this always waiting for the next, and her never. Three days ago they stumbled into this big brick rebuild. Post-war, the walls are all different shades of pastel. Plates are in the cupboard. Leopard skin chairs. Meals made dish by dish. Chocolates made by hand.

It’s not often that she’s in places like this, so each time it happens she feels stuck. There is someone who runs the vacuum cleaner. There is someone who restocks the wine.

We buy to create equilibrium, she thinks, and when we buy in haste, our lofts become the poetic mirrors of a lifetime’s passing thoughts. Our possessions reflect us at our weakest.

There is someone who goes to the sea to buy crab. When he returns, the whole family sits breaking shell.

She thinks, there is someone who has bought all the vases, on all those afternoons and in all those towns. A thought was economized: beauty of vase times pleasure of ownership, divided by weight of all the money on your back. The more that sticks around the more the equilibrium is carved, solid, visual, ready. No? Only the young believe joy can subsist on the purposeless destruction of the material.

The walls are different shades of pastel. The secrets are all hidden. A lifetime’s grabbing and keeping close. A family. No?

We love to create equilibrium, she thinks, and when we love in haste—

Look how solid we stand, they say. Yet, she doesn’t want to see them fall. She doesn’t want to want. She doesn’t want propping up.

She, feeling not terribly loved, brushes the railing as she walks downstairs. She sits and waits until he returns, and he diffuses her shame and her scorn before she can describe them. Like the day diffuses dreams before they can be described.

Claire Wagenseil

 

WHY THE MIND'S EYE CAN'T HOLD A FACE

This morning my daughter and I
chill on the couch at my house
our right feet gently shaking
in a rhythm our ancestors started.

When she’s not with me, memory’s a movie
of words, blurred images:
her first minutes breathing on my chest
in a room bluer than the color; her first smile;
six thousand days of the sleepy look on her face when I woke her up
for school; the shock of a wet towel for being late;
the Mother’s day mirror in her small hand
that says “I love you, Mama.”

Some days it’s easy to see her hands,
more suited to the raps and flows of her day,
than the smooth steps and lyrics of the Temptations.

Often, I try to imagine the shape of her face, the way
her pocket eyes say daddy, the way her smile
quicksilvers like mine, the shade of brown her skin is in winter,
in the high heeled heat of summer.

But instead of an image, these words come
like small, unexpected gifts and I’m left
wondering why minds hear words,
why I can’t carry pictures of my loved ones
inside like heart shaped lockets.

Mary Weems

 

MAPLESS

The car in front of me was waiting at a yield traffic sign watching air pass by. While watching the young mother with baby stuff I remembered when I drove home from the hospital with my son and wife for the first time. The car couldn’t go any faster than 25 mph. When I tried to go on the freeway the car steered itself down side streets all the way home. I was no longer in control of anything. This little ten pound creature was in my car, in my house, but bigger than a universe of uncertainty. He stared up at me, eyes blinking sincerely like he knew me. Anyway that’s what I thought when I saw the baby stuff in the car in front of me waiting for air to pass by.

As I drove away I thought of how few maps there are for being a parent or being a baby for that matter and all, the roads that didn’t exist then that do now and how so many new homes have been built but there are fewer and fewer jobs. Soon my son and daughter will graduate and need one and time passes so quickly.

I wasn’t really scared driving home with my daughter but it was pretty neat to see my son hold his sister in his arms when she was eight hours old and I am taking a picture of it. There was no fear caught in the picture but it was constantly hiding the map I really needed and then I would get that gut tightening feeling combined with a how did this all happen to me, to them, without a map?

I wonder who has time to read maps anyway? I mean I am tryin’ to get from Point A to Point 33 and I can’t even remember where the damn map is which would be pointless anyway because fear will hide the flippin thing and by then I would be in a new neighborhood that hasn’t even been visited by a cartographer so there aren’t any maps for where I am anyhow… so why bother looking for one?

I am driving to an art show where expressions will be hanging on the wall and sculpted visions will be displayed. And I think of that young mother and her baby who could end up with a drawing or picture there and how do you find a map for that?

Steve Thomas