July 2010 Words + Art Reading + Poems

On jewel color + light
I fly –
my mind a ribbon to
inner + outer space –
while the black-and-white blades
cut my body
back to gray earth.
But the body is form –
the vehicle, carriage, car.
As the car slowly leaks
its vroom onto the
greasy floor of the
concrete slab in the
concrete bloc in the
concrete country,
does it die + lose itself?
I know: not,
as I construct + am constructed
in Space,
of Space,
in Time,
out of Time,
I fly
and
as I fly,
I bring the earthbound
cars with me –
rusted, withered, sad –
and watch them
transmute into
magical forms –
no longer forms,
but formless.
That are so much forms,
they create a new species –
vroom + vegetation –
moist + mechanistic –
melding into tunnels of light + layer –
the airport
between
this world + the next.

I try to put myself in my mother’s child body, seeing through her 5-year-old eyes. She is – today – viscerally afraid of + disgusted by mice, squirrels + rats. If I fill in the blanks of her crossword puzzle life, I suspect she loathes them because she had to eat them. You see, her parents – ethnic Hungarians trapped in the living prison of Slovakia after World War I – set out on foot across Europe to escape to the legendary, mythical place – “AMERICA!!!”

Landed aristocrats, my family arrived here literally with one fewer shoe on my grandmother’s feet than she left with + little experience providing for the children’s welfare, coming from the old land of battalions of servants. From this life, the 5-year-old Vera was apparently plunged into being buried in holes hand-dug by my doctor grandfather every night across Europe, gagged so as not to give away their location to night patrols + sharing the space of this nightmare landscape with things that go bump in the night.

I imagine her child eyes huge + glistening with fear as she comes face-to-face with the glowing red night eyes of a rodent – unaware in its small brain that it is about to become dinner.

In photos at about age 3 or 4, before the actual nightmare descended upon her, child Vera is grim with a line-set mouth + eyes that at once seem deadened + wildly terrified + resigned, as though she was born already seeing what is about to come

Night falls + in the shade, there is no apparent light + the light her daughter carries brings a new kind of darkness – the darkness of knowing that the whole life need not have been so dark. When the light is extended, the response is an almost-terror. She says it’s like lifting a carpet + not wanting to see what’s really below, blinded by red rat eyes that obscure the glorious landscape her daughter constructs.

Where the darkness leaves off,
the daughters fly.
Flying to the landscapes
of the imagination.
Why does hope skip generations?
Where the mothers live darkness
+ the daughters are led to expect
nothing but the darkness passed
through the womb,
the daughters irresistibly
build the light,
build the world they
know seeps light
through every crack
of concrete –
Defying the rock
that doesn’t really exist.
Where the mothers are blinded
by red rat eyes,
the daughters refuse them –
blinding horror with
the light of reality,
melting it away,
so the mothers can breathe.