jolie laide: January 2009

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

1.29.2009

Sometimes you get a second chance. Sometimes you get your first chance. Sometimes you get a chance you never thought you would have.

I was storming and grating in the bone-yard at the bottom of the hill, and if you were walking on the railroad tracks on the ridge, hopping from tie to tie in the only shoes you thought you deserved, I wouldn't have seen you.

The light is soft here today. It makes lace out of the bridge spanning the bay, blooms the calla lilies in the yard, dissolves edges. If that is the reward for making a woman out of the oubliette, I only want it by half.

1.11.2009

I'm leaving work on time, but already the horizon is pinking and the full moon is well up. On the sidewalk is a man in a waiting posture and he sees I've got a slew of hula hoops slung over my shoulder and waves his hand in a circular motion at me.

The highway on-ramp is slowed by an underpowered overburdened little pick up truck. Its suspension is roached out and it bellies and sways up the slope. A magic song comes on the radio and at the end of this week, finally, satisfaction and a quieting. and I am grateful to have had an enormously rich life. To have shown up for it fully present means I know about The Dog Suit and the Bicycle; Dr. Zaks Pyramid of Doughnuts; The Great Banana Experiment; What You Can See in the X-Ray of a Dog; The How to Curse in Hungarian Thanksgiving DInner. The sun is lowering behind the hills that ring the reservoir and now I'm on my way home.