In the Bathroom with Matthew Dickman, Idra Novey, and Hélène Cixous
Now I remember: what I wanted to be was a person who cannot be reached. The elegance of that! The mystery! Like the mother who is always bending over, at the last moment, to kiss the children. Bending from a great height, because they are already folded up for the night, and her heels are so very high, her dress so slippery in the moonlight.
Now she is leaving again – the click the door makes when she closes it after herself is her favorite sound. We have that in common. In my family of origin, I was the individual in charge of facing facts, and that is how I introduced myself when the occasion called for introductions. Facing forward was someone else’s department; I tried not to worry.
Turning now to the business about truth-telling, that knowing and unknowing, thinking and unthinking, French as a baguette and a terrine of pâté de campagne. Knowing and unknowing! It is a subject on the subject of which I happen to know a lot, an inquiry with respect to which I am, in the familiar lexicon of one of our most quoted sages, a foremost expert in this country – perhaps the world!
This cannot be Paris, though the children here have skinny legs and wear school uniforms, thin gray ones, which they never change out of, not even on the hottest summer days. This cannot be Paris, notwithstanding the bridges and the fountain. The French are never there during the summer months, as everybody knows, and their children never play in fountains: it is absolument interdit!
I need to have more fun, and if I cannot do it here there is no hope for me. I’m pretty close now to unfathoming, which is as dangerous as truth-telling and much too heavy a burden for me to continue to bear alone. I want some of the attention that is traditionally reserved for vulnerable French children with their great dark eyelashes and tongues the color of Azaleas.
Unfathoming is what I do at night, all night sometimes, standing up with my nose pressed to the mirror glass, caught in my own gaze until the sky lightens and the pigeons start again and I reach one more time for the familiar pinnacle of my unreachability.
Medication Cocktail Briefly Effective
You walk out one day into the usual street, and the usual sunshine is there, illuminating not the usual things but something entirely new.
Now there are women in dresses of every color; storefronts; fruit stands; children playing games you have not seen before – or never noticed. Men in white socks and brown sandals are leaning up against the building walls, gesticulating as they speak.
And there are animals on leashes and off, insects crawling on the ground and flying practically into your face – you are so glad to see the insects in particular! (You wish them a special good day.)
So much life going on all around, and when you pick your head up for a better view the whole scene opens to you like a stage set with the curtain just now parting and everything revealed that has been hidden – for how long you cannot say.
The word “remission” occurs to you, but remission is not quite right, suggesting as it does a return to normalcy when normal has never been this: the bursts of color, scents of street food and weed, sound of street bands and the click of the knitting needles held by the girl who always sits cross-legged near the subway stairs.
Do you hope this will last? Certainly you hope so, but it is only a small thing, your hope, not urgent, and what it wants, you know, is not essential.
Whatever it is, this suddenly-appearing world will go on when you sleep again. And if today is your only glimpse of it, well, what can you do?
Sometimes it happens that way.
Laura Goldin is a publishing lawyer in New York. Her recent poems appear or are forthcoming in a number of literary journals including Driftwood Press, San Pedro River Review, Mom Egg Review, One Art, and Rogue Agent. Earlier poems appeared in The Comstock Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Bellevue Literary Review.