Old new, Cashew! Member of Poison Ivy Family, Ana...

Old new, Cashew!  Member of Poison Ivy Family, Anacardiaceae.  Sounds scary, wanting to do what to your heart?

 

Dish dish and wiki wiki.  Looking for some thing to say, to participate.  Getting guilty feelings for sitting in the corner playing with the dust on the windowsill.  In trouble for that still!  Anyway, yesterday was my later father's birthday.  Went okay, talking with my mother and offering such words as were there, but by bed, looking at pictures and the rough of it.  It is rough.  Fuck.  You lose like this quarter of your compass dial and you think, "East?  East, what happened to East?  It was an important direction, for God's sake.  Everything I thought I was, thought I knew--East had something to do with it.  Then, a friend of mine, Susan, lost her father a few days ago.  Echoing pain and walking in borrowed shoes and prayer offering and things. 

     But still, I promised myself I'd stay somewhat current here.  I like this thing, this blog.  I like the people I meet, and the cream rising from my head is watery tonight.  That's okay.  Poisoned cows. 

     I'm retyping, or trying to save some things from my last computer I never got around to moving.  The old comp is up in a closet, and there were many files I wanted to save, but I was out of town, in D.C. and there's too damn many things with people and asking for things, so...I did print out, at one point, a fair amount of random notes.  Not unlike this present, inked in the flesh moment.  Typing lines tonight, lines and lines and lines and falling alseep in the cathode glow.  But, I'll type something here, and I promise not to edit.  Let's be maudlin and visit the past together, eh and eh, oh.



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I went down to Mictlan today.  I am getting desperate.  Bridges singing my name song and the lines seem to follow a trail of bubbles down under, under the rock and the coontail and the duckweed.  The rotting pondcabbage, what will it taste like?  Last moments, differential plant diagnosis by taste.

     But, I went down to Mictlan.  This god, this Aztec god of a death not mine, seems more approachable than mine, sometimes.  But Mictlantechutli, typically, wasn't home.  In the hard packed earth walk leading to their home I scraped plaintain from the ground with my toes.  They call this weed, "White Man's Footsteps," and that is as apt a name as has ever been given.  Of course, it is a mouthful and no one calls it that.  Everyone calls it Plantain.  Some people, under duress, to distinguish it from many other less offensive plants, will call it Plantago major.  I called it nothing that day, but scrubbed it instead, from the rusty earth with my white toe.  Fibrous roots catching sun like an inadequate toupee.  The seeds yield a powerful laxative, I'm told.  You almost certainly have consumed it, if laxatives are your thing.  Not mine, not mine thank god Dear and yet.

     In my toes, clutching a pineapple weed, came a moment, a moment of breath and dust and time forgetting to chime.  Here was a woman walking the path.  Not a relative of the Aztec God of Death I was sure.  Here was a woman unclad, or never clad, but wearing the most interesting beating light.  Here were her young breasts, not large, not egregious, but held up none the less by thousands of fluttering wings.  Butterflies.  Monarchs and viceroys beating orange dust into black covered pink nipple kisses making impossible to think, and painted ladies doing their best to do just that.  Swallowtails trailing sweet breaths to her belly.

     I never noticed what she wore below the navel, as the wings tickled the entired world and me, inside, despite.  I thought, "Jesus, this is something.  This is something wonderful.  How nasty a bra, how profane."

     I thought we had met, perhaps.  There was that sense of familiarity.  These eyes I had swum before, so I asked.

     "Do they tickle?  The butterflies?"

     "Yes," she said simply. 

     "Oh," I said.

     "It's after urea they come.  The salts.  They taste with their feet, you know."  She smiled, the wrinkle and the nose and the eyelight.  "But they eat with their mouths."  Serious.

     "Oh," I said.  "Jesus.  It's beautiful."

     She smiled, and it was.  Beautiful.

     "Jesus would have liked the butterflies," she said.  "If he had thought of them."

     I said, "Oh.  Oh!"

***

So I went home to talk to the cat.  The cat doesn't need a bra and never talks about Jesus. 

     "I like to eat butterflies," she offered.  "When I can catch them."

     Nodding, I.

     "Like paper candy, tearing in my teeth."

     I fell asleep, depressed, on the couch, cat staring.  I dreamed of her, not her, but of the cat, with yellow swallowtail scales in her whiskers, her tongue in vibrant summber hues.  Painting her fur with tongue while she groomed.  I slept and the cat was transformed.  When I woke she sat in the trap of the window.

     "Well, can you taste through your feet now?"  I asked her.

     She blinked crumbled jade and uncoiled her tongue.  As pink and antiseptic and mammalian as it ever was.

     Hiding tears with my forearm.  The cat shifted her weight inelegantly on fur elbows.  She stared through the wire screen, stalking her dreams in sympathy.

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Don't really remember when, exactly, I wrote that.  It was a dream I had of my Mary, before we were together.  Different cat.  God only knows how she is.  Still think of those butterflies, and the skin.  Anyway, best to all.