What I am
I am not a window pane. Used to be, used to watch.
No longer a window pane, I open windows. I am a woman with lungs
with fingers with ears. I am alive. I still watch.
I do things: the sun greeting exercise. I sweep floors. I am a business
woman. I want to please my customers; I have a good product to sell.
I must survive must survive must not only survive. Je ne veux pas
vivre sur la vie. Il faut vivre! I want to live, write poems. A wise
poet told me to get along with all the different parts of myself.
It’s my job, yes, my job to LOVE myself. I love myself, I do.
Today. Some days are easier than others but I don’t want to
give up. I am a woman, 41 years old. This morning I looked in the
mirror and found myself beautiful.
A mother, I love my kids. A mother, I love my mother. And my grandmother.
My grandmothers. In their own ways, they were right about things.
Grandma Keel was right when she said I’d get a stomach ache
from eating too much candy and Grandma Klahr was right when she said
45 years of marriage was somethin’. My mom was right in 1968
when she gave me the pink paisley dress to wear and took me to a be-in.
We sat in Fairmount Park in endless fields of hippies who smoked pipes
full of hashish. That was right, Mom, that was right!
I love women, especially the cheerful, active but also gentle types.
I like gentle people. I love women who love themselves.
Walt Whitman loved himself. What a man! That long white beard. He
must have been somethin’.
I love sex. I love men. All kinds. Ugly Chinese poets who sell tires
in Philadelphia . Kayakers. Skinny men, big men. I once read a book
by Paul Auster and fell in love with him. The intellectual, melancholy
brooding type. The mysterious type who’s hard to crack. Difficult.
Love those types. Wish I could make them all happy.
But I can’t. There’s a limit to what I can do.
I like to make fires, listen to wood snap as it burns, like its smell
and warmth. Once -- it was in December -- I made such strong fires,
the house became as hot as a sauna. I was new at it then.
I like to go on walks and gather things: flowers, grasses, berries,
mushrooms. It gives me life power.
I like to do things at my own pace, don’t like to be rushed.
I like to get up alone, get my breakfast, open windows all in my own
good time.
I like my rhythms, my ovulation and menstruation. I like the love
labyrinth inside me and the ticking of clocks. I like being pregnant,
watching something grow inside me.
Things grow inside me all the time. Visions, dreams, love and hate.
I want to dance the tango and let off steam. Passion. I must have
spoken a romance language in a former life because when I hear the
tango, I know it and have to cry.
I love to drink: big mugs of clear water and foamy golden beer, pots
of tea, wine in delicate glasses. I like smooth porcelain. Tea cups
and saucers. Roundness.
I am a woman who learns to let go. A wise poet told me to do it.
I decided she was right.
Let go of addiction. Let go of suffering, jealousy and power struggle.
I am very religious, though I don’t know which religion, yet.
I hold onto myself because I am the one thing I can count on. I have
a salve that soothes my wounds. I am my salvation.
I am a hermit a housekeeper a gardener. I’m a human a poet
a wife a lover a party girl. I love a party, though no longer a girl.
I am ripe, no longer naive, no longer the ballerina alone in the rectory.
My father’s a religious man. I take after him. He has questions
and he knows what he knows.
I know some things, too.
I am a traveler. A wanderer who lives in peripheral regions. I like
margins. I am at home in my skin. My natural habitat is a bed.
I want to study, I want to dance. I am hungry. I want music.
I need help and I like people who help me. Mart picked up my violin
when I dropped it in the brook. It was pink, it breathed, it’s
skin peeled. He tuned my violin. I like men who tune my instrument.
I like tram rides in the city on rainy days, to sit in the rain under
a café awning and eat cake with my boy after a visit to the
museum. I love red rain coats.
I am not afraid of pollution or radioactivity. I am not afraid of
global warming or global economy. Right-wing politics. People whose
mobile phones constantly ring. Fake eyelashes.
I am interested in the occult. I love the dead and talk to them.
Yesterday I asked my father-in-law how he liked my shirt. He said,
“It looks good.” Since his death he’s become bilingual.
I am in constant movement. I change every second.
