Carpe Diem In The Backyard
Here we are, I say to my dog, who inclines his boxy head then lowers himself to the unmown grass, pointed tawny leaves scattered in heaps. This is the white sky of morning, birds writing their way across it. What’s the difference if you’re disappointed? A yellow garden spider strings up rigging from the chair to the camellia. A gray bird pecks in the red geraniums. You know there’s lead in the shafts of his feathers. Two shiny black beetles fall to the table, sex to sex, antennae twitching. The house needs painting. The stucco’s blotched with trial and error: pinks like Pepto-Bismol, taupe that could pass for camouflage, and a what-were-we-thinking royal blue. The bamboo leaves susurrate in a breeze. If you close your eyes, the sound could be the river you find in dreams: she kissed me before she left for work in the rusted blue pickup with the new seat covers.
Reading In Bed
Sometimes it seems like this is what the rest of the day is made for. Curled with my spine pressed to my lover’s breast, my cold ass warmed by her generous thighs. Whatever was going to happen today has already happened. The dog’s asleep. Lamplight pools on the page, making its own small gold world, where the mountain climbers switch on their headlamps, fasten crampons, fix their ice claws and pickaxes and carabiners. They melt snow for tea on a single burner and start off in the ghostly moonlight. Skulls throb, they’ve got wracking coughs, their nostrils freeze with every breath as they traverse fins of vertical ice, past hidden crevasses and avalanche paths. The beast of wind tears at their faces; waves of powder pour down the slopes. It’s almost midnight. The phone won’t ring. My children aren’t going to ask for money. No one’s car will run out of gas on the freeway. I won’t get my mammogram results. I slide my feet along the warm sheets.
Mountain
There’s nothing like a little blood in my urine to shed light on how slight is my spiritual progress. I knew I’d never climb into thin air, sip buttery tea in the smoky hut of enlightenment, but I did hope to reach one more rung on the ladder of acceptance, though I have to talk myself up each galvanized step like I do in the orchard harvesting plums. Then the doctor calls, and my composure bears as little resemblance to serenity as a leopard-print bra to a leopard. I go for a walk. The flowering trees loose their blossoms the way they did the spring my mother died: pink petals strewn on the road, heaped in gutters, scraps of beauty. I tell myself it might be okay to die. I’m not that young, my children are grown. But when I return, I’m love-struck, enthralled again by the actual world, the kitchen table littered with bills, the flesh-and-blood woman I live with microwaving leftover lasagna, washing lettuce, rivulets running down the grooves of pale leaves. So I pee again into a glass Pyrex container, one of the new ones she just bought. That’s when she says, You’re not taking that, are you? And she picks up a plastic cup my student left behind, an inch of once-iced-cappuccino sludge in the bottom. Use this, she says. And for a moment I think I might start to explain why I can’t carry my beautiful, frightening clean-catch urine in a used coffee cup with a straw poking up through the hole in the lid. But instead I take her shoulders and look into her gray-blue eyes, set in their dark, crinkly bags. You must really be worried, I say. And she stares back at my own increasingly fallen face. It’s how I cope, she says, dropping her head, like our dog who sometimes bites if a workman walks in the yard, but bites as gently as he can.
