Category: Blog

I don’t mean to mislead by my title: there’s no murder with a nightgown at the center of intrigue, not even a juicy romp between women. The gown’s previous sleeper was unknown, her origin out of state. She was offered to the highest bidder on ebay and I was the fortunate recipient of the soft package that left a perfumed detergent fragrance in my mailbox. Nestled in lavender tissue lay a long gown, true to the describption, ‘condition gently worn’, a bit nubbly textured light pink flannel with darker pink rosebuds. Before dark when I would try her on, I imagined a character in a film, an older woman from an earlier time wandering on a landing, her grey hair loosened from its braid. Not exactly virginal but it didn’t say ‘sex”. I named the gown Jane.

I’ve always loved clothes but was not easy to fit. My mother, short and stocky, encouraged me to forget my figure, also short and stocky, and enjoy what I dressed it up with. She’d been an excellent athlete but despite her protestations that her sturdy legs had served her well and I should be happy with how I was made, she confessed that whenever short skirts came back, she groaned. She admitted to positioning herself behind furniture in photos to hide her legs. Growing up in the fifties, I was influenced by cultural images of beauty and spent decades before elongating mirrors hoping I actually looked longer and thinner in black pants. Then I moved to west Sonoma County, where older hippies, artists, eccentrics dressed in rainbow colors and natural fabrics that fit loosely around tall, short, skinny, ample women..

I haven’t bought retail or anything new except underpants for most of the time I’ve lived in the county. Sartorially, I’ve been liberated by from department stores by t thrift stores, used clothing shops, artisan wear and especially clothing swaps where I’ve found recycled treasures of loved garments that are unique and interesting in the way the mass-produced clothes seldom are. I have a friend who grew up wealthy with a great wardrobe decided her dominating mother. Mother insisted her daughter never wear another’s clothes, and never give hers away where she might meet it on another woman. Perhaps superstition or simply a sense of privilege, my friend’s mother would have turned over in her grave before sleeping in a gown that had warmed another’s body. I’ve felt just the opposite: when I give up clothes I’ve loved but am not wearing, when I put on a friend’s garment from a clothing swap, a gift exchange has occurred. Even ebay celebrates the gifting feeling despite being in the money economy.

I slept in Jane every night for a week, the sweetsy detergent fragrance giving way to by my own body oils, the nubbly texture becoming softer until she was truly mine. When a big October storm with heavy rain and high winds downed trees all over the county and left us without light and heat, I stayed in bed almost all day reading on my kindle. Even more than at night, on this long grey day, I felt that Jane had once wrapped around a reader as she was doing now, and today we were going to finish Howard’s End before the lights came back on to television and bad news.

The world around my cocoon trembled with turbulence and the sky was dark, the storm, the darkness and instability of the barometer extending way beyond our windows to every part of the planet. We trembled before the unknown, human to human, nature to human, and I imagined the woman who slept in Jane before she came to me was well out of the turmoil of this second decade of the second millennium. Being of a vintage ready to fall, I contemplated this flannel comfort as my winding sheet. But before those choices, the first intoxication of love came to an end; two beings as one began to seem confining, Jane feeling clingy to the touch, smells no longer pleasantly familiar, verging on stale. We were ready to separate. I sent Jane to the washing machine while I, aninconstant lover, awaited a pair of panda-printed pajamas from the post box.

My half-eaten apple falls onto the carpet and I yell:

This is me now, perpetually, the sound of a knife dicing

echoing from the dim kitchen down the hall:

A moldy seed I’ve swallowed and coughed up and then

swallowed again, the seed germinating into a black cactus

pressing against my trachea as I speak, as in a robbery

with my own hands circling my neck, blade pressed firm:

Yes this is a threat because with this disease tomorrow

is always harder. When swallowing smoke is no longer

an option. Instead, the necessary medicine is

sitting at the counter with my son at seven in his

stretched Pikachu jams, ankles showing while he paints

a little ceramic bear he got in his Halloween haul.

Husky sitting obediently beside him. Blue and purple

on his fingertips. Makes me think about how if

I draw enough triangles, and connect them,

they’ll make a hexagon. Later, I think about Uno cards

incinerating in my hands. Specs of paint

on my son’s face as we play. He is smiling but also

becoming the bear tonight and I wonder if that bear

will become brimstone when I dream of hornets and

first-degree burns. I want to get the paint off his face

but my hands are always in fists. And the rays on my

drawn suns are irregular, stunted, but there’s one

that goes off the page, long beyond the messy Uno deck,

off the table, down to the carpet where the apple fell earlier

and I spent all afternoon on my knees, picking off

little pieces of dog hair, hungry, crying hard.

My baby speaks in rawrs

and his currency is bubbles.

Proof the prehistoric

can jive with the fleeting.

This is why I banish

alarms in our house

and write a formal letter

to the school board asking

for clock-reading to be

stricken from the curriculum.

My wife says this is worse

than my brick-and-string theory

to keep the kids of the earth

from growing tall and jaded

and I say just wait until

I campaign against waiting and

use sand from county hourglasses

to fill in the infield nicks:

This is where the stegosaurus

will re-emerge from dirt, redefining

fossil as a thing to lay down on

and watch the stars gas out.

of the twelve steps prepared her

for the younger woman who emerged

from vodka’s wet slumber

from the swaddling fat

she shed at the Y—a girl

without a newborn’s innocence

but its same needs.

In a torrent of spring, she overflowed

her mother banks, gave up the care

of those she’d fed like fishes

from her hands. Told her husband,

her teenage children, “You can

clean and cook for yourselves.”

And left them stranded

at a company dance, on the vinyl tiles

of a cafeteria floor—huddled together

like flood victims watching the dancers’ flow,

watching her step higher, faster

than the music

flipping

the red-striped skirt

she’d bought the week before

to catch something

with her new thin body before

it was gone forever. 

The far side of the sky is burning 

red & an orange evening tunnels 

into our tender eyes. 

Heaven light cut the ribbon

of our countries. 

I now understand how moths feel 

around open flames. 

I now understand how immigrants 

feel at borders.

The silent rays that ripple us when 

our foundling feet find new soil

even if it burns – even if it cackles 

I wear the belief of my faith &

I thread myself into prosperity 

Let this black ram stomp the river 

& become white 

Let this marshy land become the river 

that flows for others

Let our eyes see Jerusalem everywhere

even if we enter with a voice of Jacob 

& a hand of Esau

We all need salvation & soil 

to call ours.