Marisa C. Regante
Between the
Clouds
Maybe a thousand miles in the sky, there are messages between the clouds. They tell each other the secrets that we want to hear. Night and day. Day and night. The clouds are not good at hiding, and so the words fall from them like rain. They are soaked with meaning, and we are glued to the sound of them. The sound is like a wheel that churns and makes the colors go. And our young eyes and young fingers all are pressed into the screen and waiting for the stories to electrocute us. Our mother is a photograph. She is a picture on top of the box, and she cannot speak. She has been burnt and replaced with an ivory white smile. But there is no elephant. There's only the memory of the circus tent and the popcorn and the lights that flashed like sirens. There’s only the rush of acrobats racing to the sky. Will they hear the clouds speak? Will they fly that high? I watch a woman who is almost naked climb up a rope that disappears into the gloom. She twists the rope around her ankle the way my mother used to twist her hair around her thumb. Absent-mindedly and without care. The acrobat repeats herself as well. She does one trick and another, but isn't it actually the same trick? I am amused of course because this is amazing, but I note the differences between this woman and my mother. The woman is nearly naked. Even at my age I enjoy her curves and her muscles and the flash of her tanned flat stomach. In the summertime my mother could get so very tan. It seemed like her one talent. We would drive with the top down from the pool to our home, and she would park the car mostly irresponsibly, too close to the curb for my father's taste. But the tan gave her a kind of confidence that I don't think she had in winter. After all, it was winter when she fell. It was winter that took her from us. Took her from me. And it was in the winter that I first realized that if I looked hard enough at the television I could see my mother in every woman who came and went. I could feel the tears she cried from the hospital bed when tears were the only things she seemed capable of moving. I watched her sink into the pillows that the nurses kept replacing because she filled them with her tears. She cried for us. Each fresh pillow was a cloud that held a whisper. It was my whisper as I pressed my face against hers, and I pretended she could feel me and see me and hear me. But the only one that heard me was the pillow or the clouds that carried my message to heaven with her.
The Death of
Stars
When you walk the garden late at night, the flowers might as well be a chest of drawers or the door handle to the closet. There is no brilliant display of color or life. If you're lucky the moon will show you the lilies, but they only mark the dead. The day is dead. So you walk until you find the places that look familiar even in the dark. You pretend to imagine that the sun is out and the flowers are singing. These are your dreams. They are often the same. They involve wandering and walking and trembling. You often wind up on the ground in your dreams. You stare up at the night sky and wonder how many of the stars are already dead. Because the death of stars is a common theme in your dreams. They are so far away that it's difficult to mourn them. You know their death is a convulsion. It is a catastrophic experience. And if there were planets surrounding the star, then they would have died as well. Because when the star dies so many other things go with it. You think of the people in your life who have died. Nothing went with them. They died and everyone mourned, but nothing stopped the dreaming. Nothing interrupted the night time garden walks. You continued on being and breathing and watching the death of stars. Because even in your dreams the dead are still dead. The garden is still dark. And the lilies glow in the moonlight just to remind you that nothing lasts forever.
Different
Beds
Different beds mean different things. At each stage, they gave him a different bed. The beds had different functions. They sat in a different corner or against a different wall. And the rooms were different too. Some rooms were small and weren't meant to be quite so prominent. Other rooms had crosses or cabinets. One room was his nightmare. He was trapped in it with another but inside of him there were so many more. They were locked in his head. They had different voices, and they spoke to him sometimes all at once. It was difficult for him to interpret what each one had to say. All he knew was that nobody was happy. Everyone was mad. He was mad. His body told him to sit still, but his mind told him to go. And that's what he did. All of the attendants and all of the colorful scrubs wanted him to sit still, but that wasn't his self-diagnosis. The same voices who had visited him and revisited him over the past 85 years were now unsympathetic to his prostate cancer. They wanted him to go to the places that they liked to go. But they did not know that the roads were closed. The places that they loved to be like the race track or the strip clubs no longer had a pathway. There was no longer a car to take them there, anyway. You see, his body was too sick to be insane. And yet he was. Because as long as his brain was not stricken with the cancer, it would be what it had always been. It would be a carnival. And even as the team of doctors tried to tell the story of his disease, it took every last bit of his concentration to decipher each voice on the midway so that he might figure out which games of chance he wanted to play.
I Have
Risen
We started summer like it was a house on fire. That's not to say that I rushed in to save the lives of the people in it. That's to say that I stood there looking at it as it burned in glory. The things that once were so familiar to me now looked quite different, all mutilated and disfigured by the flames. It certainly was something new after having been so tedious and damp. I wanted to see the spring and the winter and even the fall melt into each other. I wanted to see everything that I had just lived become something that was no longer alive. I would stifle the laugh. It wasn't appropriate, of course. But still inside I wanted it. Because here I was, untouched by the crucible. Because now I had on trunks. Now I was naked everywhere but sex. I could feel how the sun would abuse the stones, and I looked through the spectacle of the pool. It's remarkable how water can distort your sense of time and distance. It seems like it would be nothing to swim from one end of the pool to the other, but it's longer than it looks. I wanted my year-to-date to die because I wanted to be reborn. Not in the Christian sense but like the old bird. The Phoenix. But that bird is wearisome. I wanted to soar into the summer sky with my hair and my arms and my chest on fire. I wanted to come back from the ashes. This past year was charred and mort. Time had murdered me until I was ashes. But then I felt the story inside of me as the calendar and the kitchen were ablaze. Everything melted, and suddenly I was free. I don't know how it happened. I don't know how today became a cauldron. Or how this season became my soul. But I have risen. I am reborn. And even though everything I know was destroyed in the inferno, I am still here with my pale blue bathing suit and a towel that's already too wet to make me dry.
Compass
Needle
We are like compass points, painted onto this table. And the needle tells us where to go. The giant magnet that is buried somewhere in the north is sending us messages with orders on where to go next. We are sitting around the table, and we are stuck because everything we have and everything we do is piled up so high that I cannot see where the needle is pointing. I can feel the pull of the pole, but I don't know which way to turn. I look at you all, and you have always been here. I don't know who is east or who is west. It doesn't matter. We are everything at once, and yet we are nothing. Because what good is a compass if you can't read it? What's the purpose of a compass if you're never going to move? I can tell by the way you sit in your chairs that moving is not actually something you all are interested in doing. In fact it feels like this family is going nowhere. Now I have never been one to idle the car, but I do feel like sitting in the driveway with the radio blasting songs from the summer of my teenage years with the map sitting open across the dashboard. These were the days when we used maps. Even if they weren't, I would still want one. I would still want to sit down with the red pen and the AAA guides and all of you calling out the places where you'd like to visit. Because at the beginning of this family we used to travel. A compass mattered. The roads were wide open. But then one of us left and all of us lost the desire. The fever was gone because we had lost the head of the family. His roadways closed up on him and he fell over and couldn't move anymore. And so that happened to all of you. It happened to us. When his heart stopped, so did ours. It wasn't something that we thought would ever happen. We never thought that we would lose the letter N. Now, how are we supposed to feel the magnet without the sharp tip of the arrow that used to drive us through the streets all over America.
Only
Child
I think the last time I shared anything was when I shared myself with you. There wasn't much difference between us, but there was enough that I felt like it wasn't good to be more than an arm's length away from you. And that's what I did. I kept you close. There were too many others and sometimes our mother could not be the bear for you. But I could. And I put my paws around you and pulled you tight. I protected you from things that weren't dangerous, and I guided you down roads that were. But always I made you my shadow. I would drag you along from one drama to another. You looked up to me until we were the same height, and for some reason you never saw that I was savage. Maybe your eyes were so full of love that they didn't see a damn thing, but all I know is that if there was trouble you were there to find it with me. All these years later, if I wanted to hold your hand I couldn't. Because there is no hand. It's gone. The people who made you theirs made sure of that because they turned you into ashes. So there isn't even a stone where I can go to pile up my tiny pebbles. There's not a place for me to plant the flowers that I would have given you when you were alive. I took you through the heavy sheets of linen that hung in the backyard every spring and summer. We would crouch together, and I would unlock my evil and share it with you. And later when I struggled with the monsters that nearly killed me you, found your own monster. He attacked you from the inside. There were no sober days for you. You could not choose your tormentor the way I could. Because I could put down my monster, but your killer buried his hand inside of you. He was hollowing you out like a pumpkin. And when you were almost empty, I came to you and I held your hand again. It was like we were where we were when we were first friends. When we were made into friends because I was born before you. I put my eyes on you and I never stopped looking. You never knew what it was like not to have a big sister. But now I will spend the rest of my days being an only child.