Relentless

Day after day, the unintentional sun burns steady, without respite or coquetry.

Anna's Apartment

In this weather - spring streaked gray sky tempered by new-green shoots - I can't stop thinking of afternoons spent visiting my great-grandmother with my mother and baby sister. Anna lived in a highrise by the highway, near St Patrick's in Bridgport. Her small apartment was well-appointed and smelled distinctly of the elderly. She always had a liter of 7 Up on her lace-covered kitchen table when we went for lunch.

My mom was more relaxed here than she was with her mother, Josephine. We would listen to the very old lady tell stories about her life while eating a frittata or Danish butter cookies from a purple tin. Somtimes I would wander out into the hallway, wondering about the other octegenarians, living out their last days all together alone. I worried about dying, then went back into Nonni's for another glass of lemon lime soda.

Good Friday

option 1: after forty days in the desert reflecting, we give ourselves up to suffering and death.

option 2: the god who is always sacrificed if sacrificed again.

option 3: knowing that there is resurrection, we still grieve mightily the dead.

option 4: burial of the dead. (a cave-like tomb, the earth's own womb).

option 5: the union of brahman and atman - the drop being wooed by an ocean.

option 6: triple union, which includes compassion, the comforter in the holy trinity.

option 7: anticipating rebirth and renewal of Mother Earth, we are humbled by God, Death, etc.

Blossoms and Revisions

that is all.

Quoth Rabindranath Tagore

"I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung."

In the Graveyard

There aren't any signs of spring here. Many stones are crooked, faded markers marking time until eternity. So that'll be awhile, I suppose. Families reunited under the ground. Lavina the wife of a captain. Mother, Father, side by side, with no sign of children in their plot. What about the guy who owns the fenced-in obelisk? Was he a guarded loner before the afterlife? Maybe he prefers leaves to roots. I stumble over brambles and fumble with the aperature, looking at the sky. blue sky. elsewhere crocuses are coming up. It's about that time of year. Renewal for those of us lucky enough to live. I breathe in the brisk April morning. Again.

The Interim Years

What have we been doing all this time? Or better, what should we have done? Instead of moving swiftly from courtship to nuptials to baby time, many of us spend the ten years after college working, drinking, traveling, developing interests, cultivating hobbies, sometimes turning into douches, sometimes not, and pursuing other, assorted distractions. Almost immediately, I went to New York. When all seemed truly bleak in Brooklyn, I took the train back to New Haven. But M wasn't happy there, and neither was I; we weren't fulfilled. The idea for a move to Mexico was born out of boredom and family foresight. M needed a place to caretake his ailing father. I longed to escape my fate, and despite having read Oedipus, I thought I could. Now that we're back, I feel the years we lost most acutely. Nothing was saved, only rearranged, as a surly science teacher used to deride the changing of the clocks. And certainly no one has changed, least of all me. All my fears are still here. But so are my friends also. Finally, a new phase is upon my generation. I don't want to mourn time. We spent the interim years the best way we knew how. I wonder what will happen next, and when.