Pig and farm report

 

This morning I opened a blister the size of the pad of my right index finger and peeled off the skin which will rehabilitate itself as I rehabilitate myself season after season. It is early I smell of toothpaste and apples. It took me seventy years to be this beautiful the word I most overuse when writing to myself my flying off imperfect self. I am quiet now my legs are white and covered in soft fur because I refuse to ever shave any part of my body again. My hair is French-Canadian from swimming in a bitter river all last summer with milfoil blading up and down my arms. I swam past the upswept roofs of the Water Barons I swam past boats and discarded Christmas trinkets. I floated under the flower bridge under docks under canoes under oxen drinking under girls washing their clothes on rocks. I swam past a bistro painted like Frida Kahlo a well cleaned spigot leading to the mouth of July. I swam naked my chilled legs scissoring like teenage Esther Williams in 1939 at the Los Angeles Athletic Club a million dollar mermaid a femme fatale synchronized and holy in a white swimsuit. 

Once I built a house in my head during deep prana-bindu hypnosis from the foundation up a house where I could conjure people and ideas and spill my fortune or create it a house above the sea that roiled and jumped with dolphins and whales. Eventually that house became this house in all its infinite beauty.

When I was a girl I lived in a house with fireplaces in all the rooms. I was thirteen years old. Not a run-away but thrown out of my mother's house and the house with the fireplaces was not my house. I was a child squatting there with other unhoused and homeless children through a frozen Spokane winter a city known for brutal temperatures. The house was in the industrial section of Spokane a deserted place with boarded up windows and no electricity but there was a wood stove to heat water for sponge baths and cooking and fireplaces in each of the six or seven or eight bedrooms. I lost my virginity (I didn't actually lose it I gave it up willingly) in one of those bedrooms a fire roaring in the grate me wearing my child's white nightgown a ludicrous queasy bride on a bare mattress on a floor the smell of woodsmoke already grown into my skin. Once you are in the business of building fires to survive it's hard to scrub that ash out. I kept my hands in my pockets all the time at school because I was ashamed of the smoke dirt in my fingers crevices.

I don't know why I wrote myself down this path. It has made me shaky and weird. There is something about the season that is both terrible and bright and even with a hollowed out family of origin we still travel there in our heads. The question is how can I jump out of the airplane if I can't even locate a body of water in which to land? 

Robots of my heart rejoice. Your time has come.