You have lost patience with all the ridiculous words. Depression. Sadness. Melancholy. Mental illness. Temperament. Genetics. Dysthymia. Medication. Sleep hygiene. Mood hygiene. Mood disorder. Complicated grief. Reactivity.

Not one conveys the tearing pain from that ugly meat hook imbedded deeply, just below your sternum. The curved, cold metal suspends you matter-of-factly above the ground, far above your own life. Your own weight is what hangs you. It doesn’t matter how the hook got there, how you find yourself in this predicament: up and away, yet sagging, the slow rending of your not-flesh in progress. Blame the hook all you want, but you are your own unwilling executioner. Too much movement on your hook, and your what-should-be-flesh (so it could be seen, believed) will finally give way completely. For some reason, this worries you the most.

The hook has been there for so long, it is difficult to inhale deeply. Your entrails are sympathetic and have grown around the hook piercing your gut, a lump of scar tissue. That explains the slipknot in your stomach, as you try passing for a normal soul, waving at passersby. You are hanging yourself without wanting to, your guts are tangled, but you still remember, most of the time, to buy juiceboxes, ant traps, cotton nightgowns, socks that mismatch and lose themselves before making it home from the store. You remember to bathe and vitamin and slather sunscreen on the marvelous lit-from-within ones that passed through you and into this world, before you became—for lack of a better word, always, a lack—ensnared.

Surely these remembrances and tiny acts of motion and caring are proof of miracles, but you resist any word that links you to the deadbeat God that slips into your room at night while you are sleeping. Your deadbeat God slides rough, dirty hands on you in the dark, claiming you for himself. He rifles through your underwear drawer, sniffing as he goes. Your deadbeat God pilfers your tiny greenhouse by the window, stealing your clumsily planted seedlings (packets promising bright hybrid blossoms of Happiness, Contentment, Future, Healing, Blithe Normalcy).

Each morning, you wake up wary and unrefreshed. You survey your room grimly. What has your God taken from you now? You are less victim than realist, simply too used to living in a rough neighborhood. You know you’ve been robbed, again, but at a certain point, you stopped filing police reports and gave up on keeping track of what’s missing. You have learned to expect less, keep things tidy and spare, leave notes on the window: really, there’s nothing more that you could want here, trust me.

It is understandable that someone would not want to be the Donald Hall to your Jane Kenyon. Your first Donald Hall left, as did the second. Yes, you can understand it. This is not the love story for everyone. It is also understandable still that someone might add—quickly, with care—that your sadness could not be that bad, could it? You know the expected answer, the hoped-for answer. You want to give it, lob it brilliantly and hard into the sun, out of sight.

Instead, you stammer, for a bit. You mumble, incoherently, as the fear pulls down, hard, on your ankles. When you find your voice (which goes missing constantly these days, roaming God-knows-where) you speak up: It is closer to that than you would like it to be, your sadness is closer to Kenyon’s, as you understand hers, than you wish to admit. You too are having it out with melancholy, every day, nearly every waking minute.

This was certainly never your plan. You still don’t know why you’re on the hook, if it is punishment or a lesson or, worse, nothing that matters. You want nothing less than to worry the ones you love, and yet, you wish for a life that is honest, authentic. You want to be loved for who you are, or left behind for who you are. You long for this kind of clarity, this unambiguity. If you were missing a leg, that fact would come clear to everyone, in time. That is all you want: to come clear, to come clean, to approach with palms up and thrust forward. Not as a supplicant, but as one with nothing to hide, and love and loyalty to offer. Occasionally, you can also offer warm rice avocado salad and your own brand of moxie, from your hook. You can offer warmth and your odd wit and a ready laugh and a soft hand, especially when you are feeling safe and heard. You bloom when there is gentleness, when there is listening, kindness. You will listen too; you listen well, you know it. You can be the one who stays, the one who is stronger somehow than expected, when given the chance to be the strong one.

You want very much to give these things. You want to shower these things upon those you love. Your heart is big and ungainly and bruised, a leaking too-ripe tomato. But it still works, oddly enough. You love in bulk, and there are still a few left who love you back, for what they see, not what they wish to see. You thank God for this, with all of your tomato heart.

You are doing all you can, at the speed of light. Of course, you are dangling from a hook, so speed of light is a funny way of expressing the velocity of your forward motion (you make a note to yourself: do not use speed of light in polite conversation). But you feel any motion keenly and painfully, on this hook, and what you do get done with your solar plexus on fire is impressive to you.

New post up at Single Mom at Work. Please stop by.

New post, about Miss Fanny dog, the unexpected, and coming to terms with the what-is. Clickie. Readie. Thank ye.

My round ass drops hard into the driver seat, surprising my crackling knees. Uh.

Right. Not my car, which I chose for its high-booty ways, after my green Sentra gave up the ghost. No, I am behind the wheel of a gold Toyota Corolla, a 1999, according to the tag on the key chain, the original from the dealer.

I wonder when the fuck the dates, the years, will no longer have meaning. I wonder how one procures a mind that snags on nothing, if it is too late to cultivate such a thing. I imagine it is. My mind snags on every detail it stumbles across. I can’t say this is a helpful way to live. There’s constant swatting, perpetual unhooking oneself from useless information.

1999: a marriage, mine. An elopement. I can revisit it all I like, and I still come back to the same thought: yes, yes, no way I could have seen ahead, no way I could have been more certain, then. I was completely sure. I was marrying not for life, but for death. I see now that there is a certain hubris in that, in believing you might be special enough for such a thing, for a forever.

2011: I reverse in the car that is not mine out of the driveway that is not mine onto a street that is not mine. These are matters for quibbling, and I always lose, when it comes to quibbling. The man who says he loves me insists it is all mine, now, that there is no need for a license for this to be true. Licenses, I agree, seem better suited for dogs than marriages. Dog gone missing? The license will lead him home. Husband gone missing? A marriage license will not have the same effect. Trust me on this.

Perhaps if we had worn tags that jingled. Wedding bands, perhaps, are simply too quiet.

Back to the car that is not mine, which takes me to a Main Street which is not mine, not yet. I am in search of something, something that says I AM HERE, I AM COLOR AND LIFE AND ANYTHING BUT DOILIES AND SKELETONS AND PRINTS OF VULTURES. I will take a bright cheap pillow. I will take a glass windchime. I will take a poorly executed painting from a thrift store.

Every shop is closed, even the Salvation Army. Salvation is not as simple as we’d like to think.

I return to the home that could be my home, but is not yet my home. People say what they want to say. They scratch their itches. News is scant, where I am from, and I can almost forgive the idiocy that I’ve been hearing, but not quite.

This man has given me license (that word follows me like a stray) to have my way with a spare room in his home, but I am uneasy. Something in me does not believe his words. This is a room where someone he once loved dearly used to toil for hours, hunched in the same raised stool, at the same work table I work at now. He does not feel her ghost, he says, anymore.

I wonder if my ex-husband sees my ghost, catches her shadow from time to time. I don’t imagine he does.

I see ghosts, the living and the dead. I feel her presence at this work table, where I now drink red wine from a Stella Artois glass. We are not unalike, as I understand her, but we are not alike, either.

I stand up and reach for brazenness in a jar. With a two-dollar sponge roller, I dare to roll raspberry pink paint onto the molding of the threshold that passes from this room to the living room. The name of this defiant, cheerful hue: Cupid.

I paint a checkerboard of Turquoise Bay and Grassland on the wall that abuts the work table. I want to look up from my work to see my own mess now, my own bright, spectacular absurdity. I have not decided which color will win out, here. The effect is ridiculous, for now, but it does not worry me.

I sip my wine and consider the blank white wall over the bulletin board that belonged to woman I will never know. Women know the value of a bulletin board. We are the keepers, the clippers, the scavengers, the memory-guardians. It would be folly to toss a perfectly decent bulletin board. I wonder what she kept pinned to this board. I imagine her patchwork of paper to be cleverer, in some way, than mine.

But then, I imagine the world is cleverer than I, most of the time. I’d like to shake that. But I have no idea how. This mind snags, slogs, second-guesses, third-guesses. Forty years of this—tell me how to fix its brokenness, and I will.

This room: it’s been leached of color, and of soul. The walls: cracked bone, picked clean, dried pristine, in desert sun. I pull out the raspberry pink again, the Cupid. We necessary fools reach for the unmistakable, that which cannot be denied, if given the chance.

I clamber up onto her stool, which is now my stool. I take a 99-cent sponge brush and dip it into Cupid. Above the dark bulletin board, I paint a messy, massive heart. It suits me, reflects my own bloody muscle, smudged around the edges, its boundaries unclear.

I have no idea if he will regret turning over this austere room to me. I imagine it will be jarring for him to return home to this: the pop of raspberry, the sharp tang of turquoise and yellow-green, in this room — once devoted to steel gray, dusty black-and-white, antiqued yellow, cracked brown leather and splintered wood. He likes things just so.

“Let me choose you,” he says, and says again. I will let him choose, though his choice is bound to surprise even him, from time to time.

Happy Mother’s Day to all my favorite mamas. Here’s to whatever your now looks like…and everything that led you here.

Recipe for perspective:

One Cessna flight
Two daughters
Familiar landscape
Unfamiliar view
Firstborn as co-pilot
Secondborn holding my hand in the backseat
Love waiting below
Or so it says

I find I don’t want to talk to you.

You there—for instance—you leaning up against the car, you with your obscene smear of eyelashes and your bucket hat, you with all the answers. It’s nothing personal. I don’t want to talk much, right now, to the ones I know well. I don’t know you at all, so.

I can’t find the payoff, in talking. I’m all talked out. Been talked up, talked under, talked to and talked through. I’ve got nothing for you, or you or you or you, anymore.

I am tired of explaining myself. I’d like to hear what you have to say, what you have to say for yourself, why you are exempt from your own rules, your own judgment, your own blame, your own c’est la vie, c’est la vie, c’est la vie.

I know what you want to ask. Is it true? Is it? Have at it, how you like. Search my face, my hand. I won’t offer it, to you. I still don’t understand where you were then, once. Community is a convenient lie, when it bumps up against something it doesn’t understand, has no time to understand.

For the record, like everything else, I don’t know what will happen, how it will happen. Nothing is simple. I don’t recall a time when things seemed only simple, although I’m certain that time existed, once, for me. The simplest I can recall: She is hungry, I will feed her. She is wet, I will change her. She is tired, I will help her to sleep.

When I want to speak, when I need to speak, the words dart and hide and refuse to come out. I do my best, but my words prefer traveling by fingers, not by tongue and teeth.

The living? There are few to whom I wish to speak, anymore. You know if you are one of my living, because you will catch me trying—trying too hard, often. I need you to listen, you of my living. I would give anything to find the right words, for you. Be patient. Please, please, ask. Don’t fill the space. Listen, and listen harder. I am trying to give you a gift, I am trying to give you what’s not been given.

Often, these days, I find I want to speak to the dead—both the dead dead, and the living dead. I find I want to speak to the one who—when photographed at just the right angle, as she has been—could be my sister, just to see, to know. The nose is right; the eyes, right enough. I recognize the elusive smile in those eyes, the hope in all things new and all things left behind. I understand how the heat of a feverish child sanctifies, how the alchemy happens. I understand that change can come—before the demons eventually find their murderous way back and slip beneath the locked door while everyone’s asleep.

I understand too much of what I should not, and not enough of what seems so simple to you, and you, and you.

I could climb to the top of Mount Greylock and holler
I know what I want, I want this, I want to begin again
But it’s muddy and gray here. The few who brave this
season of mud and muck in their sensible Keens
and sturdy Merrells could not care less what the
yelping, impassioned, off-her-rocker middle-aged
brunette wants. No, some passion plays have no venue.
When it comes right down to it, love often has no home,
no audience. It is not the commodity it once was.

Love: dirty filthy word, in the wronged hands. Those
of us who fancy ourselves survivors of the worst wars,
we count the losses that had us pressing lips against
scummed tiled floors, weeping in dodgy pub toilets.
We never meant for it to become habit, but here we are,
older and older still. He can’t see his feet. She can’t
bear to touch her own ass. “Love” is nasty, we can’t
bear to see the word. That’s a plague we managed to
crawl away from, drinking dark thick cancer-water as
we made our daring escapes. We’ve lived to tell, but
our mouths are bitter. We’ve made the plans: a lifetime
of coating our words, basting thought with oil and acid.
This is irony, and we want our new salvation. We will
not, we will never, ever, go back. Love is dead.

I will never say that word again, says she.

I am alone and fine with it, says she.

I will never marry again, says he.

No one wants to be the hog that leads itself to
the slaughter, chooses an apple, practices the
brave bite-smile, yes, ready, go, just make it
quick—

We should all know better. It was ugly, once, after.

And yet—

while the ironic are not looking, quick—

come with me, faster, please, yes. We know ugly
only because we had once known beauty, our soul
unfurling into the safety of a new, warm palm. Exquisite,
grant me that. We love our children, but it is not
the same as the love of two equals, it should not be.

I do not have the answers. Who was it—

Rilke?

—who pleaded with us to live our way into the
answers, to never, never force the answers?

It is easier said than done. Time is short,
after all. Shorter by the breath.

And yet: I have left my irony at the door
(in truth, it was a flimsy garment, I could
not afford the armor) and I am ready to live
my way into a new set of answers. Necessary
fool, necessary fool, necessary fool—

she is the idiot kneeling beside love in the mud,
she wraps it in a towel, wipes the grime from its
eyes. What else is there to do? It is a child,
always, in the beginning. What would you do?

I do what I do best:

I feed it, I clothe it, I rock it to sleep. In the
morning, love looks at me with bright eyes,
reaches to pat my cheek, and laughs. This
necessary fool laughs too. There is nothing
for it, nothing at all. We are merely answering
calls, this is a life of call-and-response, and
I will not be silenced, not yet.