On Cottage Time
A prose poem
Not honoring the rocks enough because we are in it, the pleasure of dust picked up and put away before it races against the air to its hiding places. First thing I see is these five sea cow kind of relics bobbing toward the east, a family of sandstone figures in the mist.
Not enough honoring, not staying long, not playing cards but watching. Not preserving but cleaning. Wanting to sit now and consume. We need another word but it is completely right to tie it to hunger. In the chair, content with the right-side-up rooms, but the dark pine of the ceiling like a church or cabin is happy slender fingers of bleached wood now, it is an interior’s fresh importance we’re looking at, not believing. They used to have so little and still spend so much time outside. Straw mattresses and neighbors to raise the baby with you while your husband sketches battles from the battlefield. They considered these structures glorified changing rooms. Not even glorified, there was another place for that.
The view will never not be an illusion. To the sea cows is half a mile, the fog a mile up, but it looks low enough to touch. And so-called submarine rock, a lookout point for the lost, I don’t know what the brine and chunks of ice did to her over the low seasons, I do not recall a single day of our gray trees now, much less seven months of storms that chip off whole features of the cliff’s face. Summer, when she finally comes, is a hypnosis by a mother figure. She soothes until each sense of winter—wind, gray, whistling, numbness, burning hardwood—is forgotten. We sleep and dream of green, and blue sky, its saturation boosted by God.
The dream took me to LA, this overbearing tide world joking around, first night this year dipping in to the legacy and it gives me a podcaster’s home, my cherished celebrity, a little arrangement on polished wood steps of organ pipe cactus, giant crystal and third forgotten thing. I was doing something on the steps waiting for him and knocked it all over, crystal beheading cactus, and when by way of introducing myself I said I would replace them all, he despite his wealth did not object.
Still felt I had an in. Did not feel I was borrowing someone’s sense of home. But wake up just wanting the young mother of four back here to tell me she already shared everything with me. Nothing really was secret, it all came out at dinner. One of the four preferring another galaxy but changed our earthly coordinates anyway, often, out of boredom. It’s possible to be given only life and school and plane tickets and find what you were looking for in someone else’s parents.
Imagine still not getting it. Maybe I still don’t get the red clay moonscape despite holding it, because the unfinished work of the children behind me clings. Thinks I am the parent. Thinks I have enough time to sort through this. Injustices, ornamental timepieces. I prefer the digital colors on the black screen keeping up with my escapes. The wavering holding and connecting and homing but it tries so well, it is so well-intentioned. Don’t you want this too, or is the white sand cradle of civilization where it’s at.
Next night the tiny face of my grandmother’s watch turns modern in my dream, blue time and pink stats on the tides and moon. The soft humming mind remembers what you care about and makes it art, as if it’s nudging you to think about this in another way, as fan or patron, as if this is not yours to understand. If I said my one true love in life is and will have been running, would that make sense. It is perfect, it is my perfect image, unlike man.
The third of four, maybe I called him in just by fighting the hot breeze from the over-tilled fields sprouting the cattle’s corn, and which itself was fighting a cool north wind. It’s a gift to see the lone star in his face, and their father too, and watch him seem to age backwards from the brink, life-changing medical event set off by his dedication to our storied buildings.
The changing room of the great, the preserver of our way of life in pictures now owned mostly by secret people. Who came back in the afternoons and shed his career for normal things, sailing and magazines and marriage. Never looked at a computer screen. Shown the internet once he said, I’m not interested in that stuff. They watch us now, but I see only his wife, the mother in the rocks, as if he was only trying to put paint to paper what she saw, trying and trying again, once a year on average. Felt sometimes that he’d aimed and missed, but kept on aiming.
I love this.