Unfathered by Jeff Foster |
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HOARDING
by Anne Germanacos One needs to live and dump, live and dump, throwing yesterday away today. Saved, hoarded—everything goes stale. * Often, in the desire to include everything, everything is left out. * Here, we have raisins in the leek stew—a happy addition. And ubiquitous red chili pepper. Only the applesauce is spared— * My mother can’t help it. She wants so badly to survive, and yet sometimes she doesn’t know the first thing. Her pyramid of cereal boxes. The cartons of ice cream that eventually melt onto the oak floor. Cash, piled high and out of the wind. * Writing has nothing to do with ideas or plans. It has everything to do with one’s readiness at the present moment to be receptive to the ways of language. * How to hold onto something that has no measurable weight, no shape or size, no scent or dimension, no color or look? All it has is a sound: a hum that reverberates with the inhalations and exhalations of your heart. So easy to call it nothing, to be content to banish it. * To dwell within a hum. * I like a striated sky. The monotony of all-blue leaves me cold. * Walking blind along obdurate walls, one seeks the yielding soft center of things. * Forgetting a story partially imagined feels like a betrayal. * I walk by an open door, peek in, but continue on, preferring the autumn day, the scent of wet leaves, this particular angle of light—with its attractive shadows. * Something noisy on the roof above my head. Bird? The starved cats have done away with the rats. * The prison of preconceived notions. The elbow grease required to erase them. * A rhythmic tap, tap—start and stop—almost exactly above my head. * If I could begin one story, would all the other stories fall out, as if that one story is the bag holding the others? * There are symphonies to be written and I occupy myself with elfin tunes. * Overzealous. The word popped into my head. * Maybe if I sneak up on it, rather than going at it head-on. * What’s the point of following the worm down? The ground yields nothing; one needs to stay in the light. * The action of grabbing amounts to nothing; it’s a generalized erasure that invites something small to begin. * Over the summer, disjunction reigned and came to seem a valid way of life. * She said he takes everything: linen napkins from the dining room drawers, soap from the bathroom, old photographs. He’s taking their life apart, bit by bit, through no desire of his own, of course. * Gossip-poor, there’s always the first wife as fallback. We may live as hermits, but there’s no question of our becoming saints. * Something in me wants to whittle these pages down to nothing—there’s freedom. * History is what you need to learn but can’t. * At some point, awareness of the old things falling away leads to a yearning not only for one’s own particular old things but all the old things that have ever been. The floor of your yearning retracts to reveal the depth of your craving: everything that came before, recorded and not. * Like a badly run state, my loyalties are endlessly divided. * Language is no longer my mother’s friend. Sometimes it’s there and many times it’s not, or it’s there, but only to trip her up so that rather than stating what she set out to say, she becomes confused by the words she hears emitted from her own mouth and then silenced. * The action of writing must occur. Otherwise, it’s just vapor, whose nature is uncapturable. * Old people are like skinned animals: everything shows. * This is such brilliant sunlight, it almost causes a wound. On the heart, if not the eyes. * On any journey, the traveler is seeking something. For those of us who rarely leave home, the cost of departure is great, the expectation of yield proportionately higher. * There’s some madly buzzing thing in this room, its buzz more vibration than sound. * My parents, with their (obvious) limitations, were proud to go out and vote last Tuesday. * The light of the sun comes through for a minute and we remember previous sunlit scenes right here. Then it’s gone and we’re mired in white cloud. * One can’t be thinking always of one’s oldest relatives, even if their lives require thought like prayer. * I’ve stopped thinking of what could or should be, and vegetate in the present. Vegetate in the sense of marinating in the natural conditions of the environment that gave birth to it. * It’s times like these when all the animals, the sheep and goats, the dogs and birds, gather to fill up space. A keening space; everything’s been razed. * Sometimes I have to listen to music in order to know sadness. It’s a prompt, a groan, a cry, a place. * Feeding my parents. Oh well. * Sometimes I feel like such a hero for not drinking coffee. * Time flows. There’s no such thing as capture; it’s not a thing to be hunted. But there are ways of sitting with it, breaking it open so that you can flow along with it. * The sum of our differences: zero. The sum of our similarities: absolute. * We thought rap music would get us through our parents’ demise, but the demise was long and slow, and the music wasn’t enough to carry us along and past it, as they slowly faded. * That period was about trying to become one with time so that it couldn’t outrun me. The daily newspaper seemed like a useful tool but turned out to be mere broomstick. * How the fingers move across the keys to describe sensation, destroying it. * That man was kind. More than anything, I liked the way he added a syllable to my name, making me beloved. * I travel popular streets not for the big stores but to hear the rush of languages. * On the underside of the moon. * In the quagmire. * Today? By the time I’d finished eating, my mother’s plate was surrounded by food. My son motioned to me and I used my hand to pick it up and plop it back on the plate. * I leave her unprotected, loose, alone. Like that howling painted mouth we’ve all seen in books. * He put his head in his hands as if to mourn a loss too great for human comprehension. It was just a wallet. What was this loss? What drama magnified? |
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