I Used to Fall Into Enchantments
You ask, what is energy?
[Here’s what I write on five hours of sleep. Here’s to friends who keep you up and drink from you stories you’ve never told.]
July morning and I cut up a sweet cantelope to eat on the porch. Purple folding chair, cantelope slices in a green plastic bowl, coffee.
The sleek young black cat crouches, trots across the sunny road, crouches again. Three or four yards away from her, in the shade by the neighbor’s house, a young rabbit picks clover.
The cat raises her head. Her ears prick forward. The rabbit lifts her ears, too. She stops chewing. Over the curved crabgrass she can see — I think — two black ears against the sky.
The robin stops singing and of course you never hear the meadowlark much, but for a moment, nature falls still.
Tableau.
It matters, doesn’t it, if the rabbit sees those two black ears? If she is frozen in sport, terror, or innocence?
A few months ago I broke up with my girlfriend of four years, who was gentle, kind, magnanimous, inoffensive — I just did it. It happened all at once, it was done, and I didn’t think much about it.
It was all my fault.
I look back, I assign reasons to it, and then a week or two later, I think, well, but that’s not quite right, either. I try one reason, then another, like fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle.
Why do we do what we do?
An internet stranger — playmate in that sandbox of the weird — asks for pussy juice photos and I can’t oblige, or won’t, but maybe out of spite or maybe joy send along a photo of a whole handful of fingers dripping crimson period blood.
But what is the story, what does it mean, what do they mean, these voyages into the surreal? Blood and pixels. Spirit energy, words onto page, blood onto fist.
Dancing, well, that’s surreal enough at my age.
A gray hawk hovers over the wetland behind the middle school. When the water’s high, it’s a real pond, almost a lagoon. As she towers at that height I think she’s a baldie but then she plummets, seizes water and pond grass, and I see she’s a hawk.
Her partner joins her and they fish until blackbirds drive them away.
Last night I ate dinner with friends, a man I dance with and his husband, and at some point I said, Am I even still a member of the queer community?
It matters, yes? This show — this space we were discussing — is for members of this community. And rightly so. The times are perilous and fragile.
They wanted to include me. Well, but you’re an ally, right?
I said yes, mistrusting myself. Tear everything down, see what’s left.
In the house of friendship, though —
I ate my rice and sweet chili chicken and blood flowed out of me, death sometimes faster than life, but for now I’m hungry, I eat, I dance — We discussed choreography. The conversation became technical. The details of our work, dance, rehearsals, counts. How many eight-counts until you enter? Then the husband’s job, my job. Outreach work, counseling, writing, detail of bureaucracy, detail of place, an office, a home, the street. All the meticulous, dull, amazing ways we build community.
Outside, somewhere, that hawk hovers.
Golden friend with Vermeer skin wipes her hands on her black dress. I used to fall into enchantments, she tells me, but not any more.
You understand, if you’re a lady of a certain age. Maybe André Gide understood. Not quite fairytale, not quite lust. What did he feel for Madeleine?
I’m ready for enchantments, I think, but oh the blood flowing out, words, spirit, and to what purpose? I suppose the gods want everything, all, like greedy kittens leaving only a bloody head and the tip of a paw on your doorstep. A tendon stretched and sticking to brick.
I tell golden friend I’m starting a dance publication.
Good, let the Chattanooga dance community suck your blood for a while. Stop pouring it out in relationships.
She feeds me cucumbers cut into long quarters. I sprinkle each wet wedge with crunchy sea salt. A mermaid snack, I think later, something like seaweed, kelp.
This is all getting a bit too much.
Almost too much is always, of course, almost not enough.
The hawk towers at the zenith.
Sun veers over her shoulder. Sunblock blears into my eyes and I blink, wipe my forehead with my forearm, and peer for her in vain.
No, wait, she’s there.
You’ve heard the phrase Your second 50.
It’s sometimes a tagline on magazines for older folks.
Fifty seems like a pinnacle, like you could hover here for ever, choosing, choosing, every degree of the 360 available to you, the compass rose, the territory which is its own only true and utterly useless map spreading in all directions, steaming, wooly-July-green, stippled with ponds and industrial detritus.
But that’s an illusion, isn’t it?
There’s only one way down.
You gather your wings.
You — do you? — fall.
The rabbit runs. The cat pretends she changed her mind.
You fork the last bite of mango-soft cantaloupe into your mouth. Salt and mimosa dribble down your chin. A bee is forcing her way up your nose. You —