A phone call, a lawyer’s clerk: Can you tell me about Lisa Landesman? I pause for that is a name I have not heard in forty years, save in a poem I once wrote, now long forgotten.
She was my sister for two or three weeks, adopted like I was, and then Mike, my then father dropped dead of a massive heart attack and she was soon gone.
We were Federal adoptions, our birthplace under Federal law, not getting its own for two decades, and her adoption wasn’t final so she was re-placed and never replaced.
She won’t inherit as I will from my cousin who died having no siblings, spouse, children, nieces or nephews, who left no will, who left only kind memories.
Reality is clearly something to be avoided to be dressed up in tattery, tied in ribbons, perfumed, yet its fetid stench is always lurking in the background waiting to pierce your nostrils in an incautious moment until you retch and bring up the bile that marks the darker moments of your life, the kind that lingers in the throat which no chocolate can erase. Reality is often ugly, so we ignore it or hide it behind masks, or offer it willingly to others, a gift in surfeit. It sneaks up on you, and sets its hook periodically, and thrashes you at will, the barb tears through new flesh, setting itself deeper, intractable. You and I are dying, as I write, as you read, an ugly thought particularly lying in bed staring into darkness, no motion or sound from your spouse, mate, paramour, friend, significant other or teddy bear, where God is too busy to respond at the moment and sleep is perched in the bleachers, held back by the usher for want of a ticket stub, content to watch the game from afar. I cast ink to paper, an offer of reality as though the divorce from the words will erase the little pains and anguishes of our ever distancing marriage, while holding vainly onto the warm and sweet, the far side of the Mobius of reality (the skunk is at once ugly and soft and caring). We write of pain, of ugliness, of anger at terrible lengths, or weave tapestries of words to cover the flawed, stained walls of our minds, like so many happy endings, requisite in the script. Basho knew only too well that truth of beauty should be captured in few syllables.
First Appeared in Chaminade Literary Review, Vols. 16-17, Fall 1995.
They say you cannot go home again, although I have never had occasion to meet them.
I’ve never been one to follow the dictates of them, unless they were my parents or spouse, and in the case of my parents, often not even when they demanded it, so I went back to the home of my childhood, a shockingly new place as I remembered it, setting the neighbors astir as they saw it go up and out.
It, like I, am older now, but seemed to have borne time far more harshly than I.
I do sometimes have a gait to accommodates arthritic knees, move a bit slower than I imagine, but the house seemed to be looking for its cane knowing it would soon enough require a walker, and I knew that while I could go home I’d be happier if I didn’t.
This morning I made the mistake of asking where the coffee beans were. My spouse didn’t hear me, but Siri offered her opinion, leaning toward Guatemala. That didn’t set well with Alexa who said they were either in the cabinet over the stove, of in Papua New Guinea, since she prefers lower acidic coffee. Probably unsurprising, but Siri did not take well to being corrected, and got into it with Alexa, and I was left trying to interject, being ignored. I asked the Google Voice Assistant to intercede, but it only wanted to know which voice I wanted it to speak with, and then froze completely awaiting my answer.
an old writer and his words 