In the odd shuffles of the living, breathing night, I remember her voice and the wrinkled hand that held me asleep those foreign summers on the hardwood floor, lime green electric fan spinning in its corner, my twin sister and I nestled against the leather of her age, the familiar and loving liver spots of Taipei, 1985. Was it from this apartment top that I fell in love with heights: the length of descent measured only by the fanning moon.
* * *
You are older now, the wings on your feet have shed their plumage. Everyday, the Earth expands, her girth and gravity pulls a little more. Those things with weights in them begin to drag: in your chest, in your head, in your stomach. There may have been a time when you sprung forth and never touched the ground. That the Earth birthed you and you shot from its womb, lost to dizzying orbit.
* * *
Tonight, I mark the completion of another book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. In the ICU ward next door, IV lines commence to pierce a vein.
* * *
We trudged miles up a narrow beaten trail through Climber’s Loop, followed the rock faces, our march impeded by bee stings and rattlesnakes. I dangle over a chasm and call for tension, rope strung out as my hand grasps for a handhold. This is my first outdoor climb and my heart screams out into the valleys, muscles jammed with electricity. Wrapped around an overhang, my breath becomes a ragged ribbon fluttering into sun; certainly, I am alive, I am at the top of the world, and I want to jump and let the million hidden wings swing me down, wild and wheeling into the late afternoon brush.
* * *
The solitary howl, yellow eyes and claws. Dear Lord, he sat up, something terrible had set upon him, something that crawled in from the streets. So familiar, it could not be named, all the words the world had given it seemed too meek, too mild for something that slunk and stank like swamp mud, breath the color of mildew and forgotten rot, moldering timber. It couldn’t be named. Yet it pursued him.
* * *
After the climb, I went to a party, fueled by delirium, and laughed loudly and made jokes and drank like a madmen. Invincible.
On the second day, I broke and no matter how I tried, it was impossible to translate thought into sentences. Only a fraction of these words made to speech. Later, only a little more onto paper. I tried to explain this to the girl, the one who repeated, “You are very quiet.” My thoughts are like a running river. And speech is the manifestation of artifice, the riot of turbulence and eddies, a trail of chaotics while the fistful of drops stream between the fingers. Hands wet and empty. “Sometimes I cannot speak.” Not with your head leaning into mine.
* * *
My friend had drunk too much. He became miserable and could not move. He lay collapsing from drink, and I followed the trail of mud out of grief, out of distraction. I am thinking about my grandmother who had fallen in the middle of the night, her skull jumbled with memories and blood, who landed from ambulance to hospital bed. “You cannot see her now. Come in two days.” How was I to know at this exact moment she had awoken from a dream, frantic and tearing off tubes and bandages, pulling and pushing at the tip of a needle that pressed against her heart, as if it were a record and her mouth a horn lost in the din of blue scrubbed strangers. The strange cacophony of wolves.
* * *
Here I am, voice and hand poised beside her slumber. The chair sits on a hardwood floor, lime green buzz and blips of pulse the distant howl of thunder. Eyes closed, and empty. “Sometimes I cannot speak.” I will not.
* * *
Various scenes from 4th of July weekend, 2009.
* * *
Edit: All is well now. August.