It’s like we live a great distance apart and come to visit sometimes, but usually when the other is away. We walk around, touch the dust kindly, see we’ve both been busy breaking and stacking colored glass in the windowsills— methodical about hue and striation. This one is like a bear and this one a bird. This one is like a wave and this one a glacier. This one is sunlight. This one is also sunlight.
How are you? I’m embarrassed it’s been so long. I know there has been so much and I care very much. I hope you know.
When my grandmother knew she was dying she picked out an opal for me, had a ring designed and sized it, for the short time being, for her own hand. I was an infant then, recently diagnosed lifelong colorless and could-be blind.
My grandmother was a force— a farm girl who took beatings for sneaking away to read, a young woman who left her family to work among foul mouthed boys at the Pentagon during WWII, a single mother, a stone wall, razor tongue, acid wit, first female management at the FAA.
She held me at the hospital in a hallway while the final diagnosis was pronounced to my parents in a tiny, sterile room. Her breast was warm, though the breathing behind it was labored. Her embrace was soothing though her hands were not soft from folding crust-cut sandwiches in wax paper for her children or grandchildren’s outings of uncomplicated youth.
She explored my hot face and closed eyelids with her wise yet diminishing fingers, the opal slipping forward and upside down under her nearly exposed knuckle, resting against my forehead, cooling a spot just above my eyes. She leaned forward and blessed me, “My dear little Michelle-y, I do hope you can see.”
She sheds herself one rough skin at a time, drops them dripping into the hamper, and, naked innards walking, drags the dripping hamper to a sly-smiled laundress who has her discount ticket pre-filled.
“Heavy duty cycle,” she says, “and remember, hang is the only way to dry.”
One sanatorium in particular, given back to time and riveted to an island at the seaward head of a canal in an ancient city, became like a Galapagos of spooks where all manner and species of good ghosts were left coughing blood and lovers’ names into collapsing hallways.
I dreamed of a very short person, flailing, asking me if I knew Brutus. Yes, I said, yes, yes I knew Brutus. Et tu Brute, and all that, chewed forever in the second mouth of Satan. Yes, yes, I did. Brutus and I were familiar. The short person, neither man nor woman, older than young but not old, dark haired, flailed wilder and screamed, No, no. No. You do not know Brutus. Not that Brutus. You do not know.
Now, of course, waking, I worry about twenty-three stab wounds on the Senate steps. I worry about most of them finding mark in my spine. I worry about not being hero enough for my bloody back to be counted a travesty. I worry about cruel gravity pulling me into the arms of a son or daughter metaphorical who I failed to acknowledge in real life, and trading betrayal for betrayal with my child by each other’s sticky, dilating eyes.
Maybe that’s the hazard in not caring who the person is inside the meat you’re butchering. You never know if that cow is sacred and capable of reincarnating herself into a fire- breathing she-bull and reducing you and your world to ash and manure
to be forked into the compost pile with all the rest of the world’s shit—used to grow whatever nasty things can grow
blooming weeds that grow on the empty graves of all the other calfs you slaughtered who have since risen in rage at the she-bull’s call.
Mourn for yourselves at those empty graves putrid ashen shit flowers, droop and die cycle through your agony endlessly.
The night you find yourself alone outside an emergency room with a concussion in a bad part of town having paid a bill you can’t afford to pay waiting for a cab and shivering because it’s February and you left your coat at work
which is where you were injured which is where you left blood on the ground which is where the first words out of your boss’ mouth were to inform you and your involuntarily closing eyes that if you reported it the safety record would be ruined and no one would get a pizza party after all.
-M. Ashley
I still feel guilty about messing up the pizza party. Hear me read it:
Patting his bowling ball belly, my Hungarian violin teacher would say, “This is my integrity!” then laugh and point to places in the music where it was OK for me to blink.
It was a perfectionist problem, he declared, knowing better. “A perfectionist problem!” why I kept my eyes open, why I cried when I played, why I was “Masterful!” he said, at shoving my shoulders into my ear canals—why he trotted out his “integrity” regularly to buy my smile.
Trust your bright hands can handle things when you need to close your eyes. He rested his celebrated fingertips on my right shoulder.
“You don’t have to go any faster than this.” He rocked with me like he used to with his lucky daughters and sons.
And he sang,
“doe-mi-so so-mi-doe doe-mi-doe…”
-M. Ashley
Another one I found buried deep in my notebook. I miss this man. If only I could do a Hungarian accent! Hear me read it:
M. N. Ashley 