process
For ten years now I have written the same line, erased it and written it over again. In this way I have filled hundreds of notebooks. Each day I get closer to Giacometti’s fine filagree of nothing. The fretwork of the mind. My masterpiece will return music to the shuttered Symphony Centre. Descending from the evening sky it will break open into 150,000 birds, alighting like some great airborne beast, onto the outstretched arms of waiting trees. In the forest, flautists are warming up in soundproof huts. It is only a matter of hours now. The work went well this morning. As is often the case, sorrow entered with a flutter. A hand darkened the sun and I was left wondering who will feed the animals when the hunger arrives?
reflection
In the kitchen, the little piece of cheese in the mousetrap is hard and shiny as a diamond. There’s a round loaf of bread on the table and a newspaper on the floor. A nightgown is warming on the wrought iron vent in the bathroom. After my bath my mother stands me on the toilet seat and pats me down with talcum powder. In the medicine cabinet mirror I look like a butoh dancer. It doesn’t matter that the woman I am dancing with is dead. She moves my arms up and outwards in slow motion. I can’t tell if the child I was then is the same as the one I’m becoming now.
geriatric psych unit
My first patient, Tony, believed he was a fish. Lois, an alcoholic with schizoaffective disorder, insisted on giving me five dollars from the scuffed clutch bag she kept under her mattress. “Loneliness,” she said, “is a kind of poverty, too.” We didn’t need a building. On the boulevard, we sank into the velvet couch with a free sign on it. Tony looked for his relatives in the fish tank. Not everything is as it seems. I was happy knowing I could pick up a cheap copy of Cuckoo’s Nest from Harry O’Day’s Used Bookstore. I wanted to reread it. Particularly the bit where the Chief says, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”
