Having said all that, I close
wordless wednesday
Monthly Archives: July 2024
you wish
I admit, part of me is still like you, Lord.
Some days, I’m tired. Some days, all I want is to
eradicate the earth. Instead, a man I love enters me
slow as light stabbing its way through to morning.
O God, don’t refute this. I know your rage
is fueled by jealousy and your jealousy fueled
by sadness.
You wish you could hold a body
like this and understand what I mean when I say
it was worth it. All of it. Yes, it was worth it.
~ Isabella DeSendi, from “Eve’s Protest”
the map of god
“Are we lost, I arksed tenderly. Shut up, he explained.”
(from Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrants)
my slant on things
the axis tilts on what stood
for something… the light
moves to the next day
and on we hope
heliotrope as if
life could
choose to
stay
© Liana 7/24
all the news you need
Just a couple days off the grid… to go without knowing anything or needing anything or wanting anything or worrying about anything. When we did leave the cabin, we took the sand roads through forests almost the whole way from Ruby Creek to a quiet beach near Pentwater. Plans to stay ‘til sunset were thwarted by the storm roiling darkly in our direction that shoved the waves roughly onto the shore. Frantic winds arrived about one minute before the pelting rain. Still, we were about the last people to pack out, having lost all hope after the Twizzlers got gritty. That’s all the stress I could handle.
Yesterday, the sun came back brilliantly. We launched into the Pere Marquette on old innertubes and flowed with the cool, clear stream. I tried to make my mind float, too… little damsel flies of thought coming and going, nothing landing for long. When D saw an eagle overhead, I looked up, shading my eyes with my hand. I really couldn’t see it, but still I believed it. But it was her eagle, not mine.
the hunger
the answer to everything
After she’d been pulled under the third time, she thought: So this is how it ends.
She’d been excited about the canoe trip. She’d listened carefully when the guide called a warning back to the group to paddle like crazy to the far side of the stream when the river bent around huge boulders up ahead.
She saw them, felt the current picking up speed, and the next thing she knew, somehow she was clinging to limbs wedged into those rocks, her canoe long gone. The tighter she held to the last branch, the lower she sunk into the swirling vortex sucking her under.
She was pretty damn sure she was going to die here. As she relayed this story to me afterwards, I kept waiting for the punchline, given who she is… my father’s illegitimate daughter whose stridently sarcastic sense of humor isn’t even a little bit funny. It’s a coping mechanism of sorts, I guess, for one not sure where or to whom she belonged. Uncharacteristically, she just stopped mid-sentence and shook her head like she was reliving the stunned moment when—soaked and gasping for breath—she surfaced.
Well, I had to ask, “How did you do it?”
“I let go,” she said. “I gave up and I just let go.” Then she got sucked under, but only for a few moments before the current popped her out several yards downriver, sputtering and alive.
Normally, I cut a wide berth around my sister over our vastly different politics and religion, but I have held onto her story for dear life more than once myself, gratefully.
“Little sister,” she nodded at me, “Eventually, letting go is the answer to pretty much everything. In the end, it’s sometimes the only way to save your own life.”
© Liana 7/24
post mortem
With a little harp-tone text, I awoke to a meme posted by Kit:
This is completely off-brand for my Type-A daughter, newly-minted with an MBA. Usually, she eschews the socials in favor of reading real books. (She spent her 8th grade summer in a hammock devouring Dante Alighieri.) Kit rarely forwards a meme… never one like this, but there in a halo of cellphone blue light was “looking at my mom & realizing I’m gonna be pretty forever wow”.
It’s embarrassing how much this compliment pleased me. Gosh, I do want her to think of herself as pretty. Kit is indeed preternaturally and exquisitely lovely… beautiful inside and out. But she didn’t do this for herself, she’d fixed the spotlight on me. Truth is, I felt a gush of unexpected delight, and proudly reposted the meme. But each of the next 25 times I read it, my initial thrill diminished with an increasingly unbearable awkwardness. A conspiracy of dark thoughts including “How Much Do We All Hate Humble Bragging” completely harshed my buzz.
So I killed the post. Now I mourn. Why did I even need to repost that—what an ego?!? And why did I need to delete it—this lovely gift from my daughter that made me feel good? She had given me a beautiful tribute; I’d reduced it to vanity. There’s something here that deserves better.
Maybe whatever is in us that wants to be seen as pretty evolved from what ancestors needed to stay alive—to survive. What if some endless epistemological chimerism in maternal DNA could explain how two serious-minded, self-aware, autonomous, capable, career-oriented, brave, articulate, self-actualized, independent grown-ass women with advanced degrees can be simultaneously reduced to and elevated by someone simply noticing we are pretty?
I don’t know… in this “post” mortem, I’ll say the cause of death was vanity, but beauty is what brought it back to life here.
© Liana 7/24
the hour of soft light... 
