Work (washing dishes-- also, can you tell who I've been reading? heh)

I had been willing to wash dishes.  In the end that's what set me, like jello sets awhile in a mold in the fridge,-- set the shape of me in this cold world over the long time of it all.  And what was the shape?  Perhaps, like jell-o, an ordinary mound of angel-food-cake-shape; orange; chunks of could-it-be-peach hovering suspended in the ripples; whip cream to fancy it up.  The shape of me, just a dated household dessert. Cheap.  Good for the nails.  Easy for kids and the old folks.

Despite my common ways I never did have to wash dishes.  Not for pay.  I wash up for friends.  After I myself cook.,  Boyfriends' kitchens, Id' clean them when I got to waiting for him.  Didn't bother if the filth was too far gone.  But while the dish washers are most certainly in my realm with their sad eyes and sodden hands and scarred arms, lurching toward me and swinging away like broken ballerinas set to dance on the trapeze wire, somewhere behind me I came to perceive a something a light a thing bespoke a little word such that they'd put me on the floor if there wasn't anyone prettier.  Is it breeding.  Manners.  Money.  A nameless lace of overlapping bones, a bone tree.  Brittle as dried grass.  Those bone tree branches sown of something and the weather making them something else, too.
My bone tree has some ivory, I guess.  But my weather had so buffeted and smoothed and down right blown me til there weren't no china left, just the scrub juniper of my ordinary orange-jello self whipped on a sea cliff and clinging every branch to the thin soil of life.  Kinda pretty if you like that sort of thing.

Here at the flats Chala washes the dishes.  Washerwoman of Albion.  But paid.  She come up to California from Mexico-- seen times so hard you think the liberals gave birth to her to tell the story for their cause.  The coyote meant to bring her son to the states twice paid, twice lost.  The drugs.  The beaten diabetic husband,  The new boyfriend.  She's got raccoon eyes on account she has been up since two a.m. by time she comes here.  Works in the refrigerated abalone plant.  The make-up seeps into the crinkles around her eyes and rings them in a charcoal halo.  She freshens her lipstick between scrubbings.  Red.  Matte.  A ghoul.  A ghoul's face.  Maybe she'd be harmless but for that.  A busy body maybe, but a kind heart.  Ever since my first day with Chala on my shoulder weeping and telling me in helpless skipping-stone syllables the long story of her long lost life her youngest lost twice back to mexico and now a third time to drugs and miscreants I have yes I am truly partial to the makeup.  Don't mean busy-body.  I can't be sure of anything yet.  Ever?  Blame the dam that broke apart when she heard my low sweet Spanish.  Blame the mutual feeling of helplessness in the world.  Like she came a cross a friend in a deep fog.  And in deep fog gave a shout to find another, an other, rejoicing as all do, in even the paltry saline light of an orange streetlamp on a fogged street, and in that orange glow the roar of words coming out of her like vapor but heavier, and so numerous they gathered to a roar like fat drops in a cataract.  Gotas, they say.  Tears.  Lagrimas if they sneak up on you.

Now it has been seven years to the day since I have seen my home.  Possessed it is of a flinty look.  Grey skies and half-closed lids I see them still, moving in pairs in faces overcast, into buildings and along sidewalks like travelers on an escalator.  Then there is a pause and a meeting and you look and can't find where the eyes are looking but looking they are to something that is not-you ordinary-you.  Looking to something just beyond the reach of you.  No it was a home of sorts but no real hearth no inglenook no warming fire.

Here now the sun shining on this wood makes another small sun in the varnish.  My mother in faces.  The fathers and brothers.  The one's I'd rescue like a long lost seal pup I'd rescue my father I'd rescue me.  Blind of sleep and tethered naught I foreglimpsed him in the truck he will drive when he comes.  The next trip he will take may he not blow yet from the tree of his good youth may it not.  His is nostalgia so furious its little piranha teeth always coming for him ever he turns; turns.  He will best it yet for I see he tries and as he tries he makes a tiller's progress.  After all it is commonness we share though it chafes him worse than I.  Ours is a desert thing and what heaven we dream of is what heaven a laborer can dream of.

I know this as I too have helled my way pursued by hours years desire welted  by the bare flame of itself.  What if not more wretched than the nakedness itself.  The hurt of a burn and the filth of it to want to be other than you.  To seem someone.The heat of that cools slowly but it does indeed cool broke from the engine whence it lit.  What twitches yet in me of these does wear and make coarse in those exposed places but with my common sturdy eye I mark the shadow of this foolishness as a sailor marks the shore, its lie a fine filigree of coast sharp as razor fields of lava beneath the waves and no more harbors but the last one.

A laborer's heaven is my heaven so I say god of labor help me work I am willing to wash dishes.

QUITTING AT ALBION: Marilee Clement

Ye pillars

Ye delectable heights

Ye pleasure of suspense, ye push of time

Ye best mimic, whereby I am sparrow, gull;

Is thy offered thrill- of falling-and of flight-

within my heavenly
right?

Can Be Measured, Not Understood: Marilee Clement

Noah--

There was this rainy night the drops were huge and cold and the car was all fogged up it was the car before you will remember the white Subaru your dad had cracked the windshield with a ladder and shake from the Junipers was always on the seats you were crying it was hot in the car it was winter I think it was December Chase parking lot Capitol Hill I was waiting for your dad I got out to talk to you hunched in the hatchback I held your hands tiny hands you gripped my fingers I wanted you to say hand it's so beautiful such a beautiful word but you didn't say it you couldn't say it yet you just stopped crying you were so beautiful and so funny your dad came I climbed out to my side then a lady said whats his name I said his name is Noah she said that's Nuaccchhhhh in Arabic kind of spitting on me and I smiled and I felt like a smashed plate at a wedding so happy and proud of that one harsh syllable and of you who didn't say hand yet because you were just born and of the orange street light and the rain and the chortling engine choking fog steaming night and our breath sweet in the juniper beat up car and the way we held each others hands because we were measuring the distance between us and measuring the wait measuring the way it feels to be in time but not sure how long we might stay---

Be Thou My Vision, sub-version by Marilee

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me save that thou art
Thou my best thought by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Be my obsession, my soul's only jewel
Framed by thy facets, and faceted, too
Thou every rainbow, and color therein
Thy beauty resplendent among common men

Be thou my frisson, in terminals grey
Spark passion's flame in my present decay
Thine to disquiet, while all mine are larks;
Make constant the theme of this fool's stops and starts

Be thou my garland, of flowers, of thorns
Likewise in linen clothe me as newborn
Cradle my body as I drink from your cup
Lead me to table where alone we may sup

Be thou my captain in life's ragging war
Grey are the battlefields, grayer my heart
Forget not mere soldiers though thou art a King,
Lead as triumphant each last, broken reed

Be thou my language, and my native tongue
Translate the world that I might understand
Thy name and thine only the governing constraint
Each sign of thy grammar, a symptom of grace

Beauty: Marilee Clement

You Russian Doll

You tawny flank 

You grey dunes 

You valleys in the dunes 

      where rosy succulents prod molecular

      the packed embankments writ with salt lines

      with what glad ignorance
      do they deny the force above, below?

      as if they could build another redwood forest

      from their hidden sand floor, 

You crevasse hiding the garden, you windbreak 

You bent Junipers

       our made art from what bonsai the wind is always doing

       oh hider of best secrets, doing your work in patterns we are ever hunting

You seed pod,

You ovary

You bloom

You ornate carriage

      inside of which is our dainty czarina

      and inside of her painted mouth, space

      inside her lungs, breath

                which is a kind of waiting 

                to become words

                    then worlds

      inside her ringlet curls, "nothing"
You the waiting emptiness, the nothing around which our double-helixes wrap,

You evidence 

You fecund,
You delighted wife
of truth

giving form to all things