A Sense of Drifting and of Meeting

This piece emerged as the third experiment after having "built" the following hexagrams from The I Ching: #55 Development (Gradual Progress) and #44 Coming to Meet. My intention here was to provide a first person account of a fractured identity. I can't help but draw my own comparisons between Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Kafka's Josephine the Singer and Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers; hence my bizarre dedication. Hope you enjoy :)

A Sense of Drifting and of Meeting

or an homage to Our Lady Josephine of the Flowers

A sense of drifting and of meeting. Is there something betwixt a lament and a song? I hear her calling, she who once gave shape to the operatic vowels, to the places without faces, without texture, without land. And what is between? Why can I not hear her tonal heights clearly as she soars far above the trees?

I wonder if she even remembers my face. Yet, it was just last night that I saw her out for a stroll through the park, chewing away at those florescent pink stubs of keratin - each finger bleeding as she bit. I'm not sure if she's starving herself or just nervous, but she's always at it, and her hair seems much thinner than it used to. Locks of straw. A tattered trench coat. Her aura aglow with an unkempt fragility.

And oh, how she loved nature! My skittish soprano was always complicit in a mighty chorus! She used to engage geese in the park and as she sang her lilt would synchronize with their aerial hi-jinx. Having mastered the birds she soon moved on to creating whirlpools in the pond. She progressed so quickly that she eventually learned to control the bringing of light, the darkening of the earth, and the great rushes of autumnal wind that wobble the empty rowboats. Every Sunday, she would again command the geese, though on this day she would revert to The Marriage of Figaro; this would promote a most erratic flight, scattering feathers every which way. Even the pigeons knew her voice conducted the meeting of ornithology and opera, and I have heard that if she could sing now, it might prompt the definitive merger of science and art.

Though never at rest, she would often sit with me over a latte and we would take turns sculpting and subsequently tonguing frothy beards from each other's face. We lived together for years, nursing wounded or aged creatures from the park back to good health, providing euthanasia when necessary. That's what I've been helping with lately at the SPCA. One day we brought a feral dog to the vet, who suggested that we keep her; she was a mangy, sweet little yapper. See, my singer and I used to sing together, but my voice is too rough since I had the operation. But she still sings day and night; she often keeps me awake. We were very close once. Sometimes I wake up thinking I'm still wrapped up in her dirty afghan, reeking of wet dog.

My therapist said I'll never really forget her; I'll just have to learn to love her like a sister. See sometimes the only way for me to see her is by going to the park and staring in the water so that I can dream a little about how I used to paint my nails and sing and walk my Chihuahua around the pond.

And when the wind picks up, I know it's her vibrato that causes this image to disintegrate, as the surface tension is disrupted by explosions of new rain on old water, and my newly bearded face struggles for congruence. And now the thunder scares the geese. And now the hotdog guy turns off his radio and Mozart's magic floats away.