I Have

I have

6 windows
1 balcony holding 1 chair
1 wall painted sage green

1 guitar in a battered case
1 songbook, battered

8 boxes notebooks and journals
4 boxes research notes

2 candles, clove and sandalwood

3 boxes Christmas décor
6 Christmas novels

1 pair winter boots
1 pair hiking boots
1 pair winter hiking boots
2 pair sneakers
2 pair casual shoes
2 pair dress shoes
2 pair so-so tango shoes
1 pair Comme il Faut

1 bed
1 pillow shaped like a chair
1 quilt

1 wooden rocking chair
1 down-stuffed sofa
1 simple old oak desk
1 modern office chair
1 bookshelf, 6 feet tall by 4 feet wide
2 boxes of books that won’t fit on the bookshelf
3 boxes of books too valuable to store on the bookshelf
2 boxes bound magazines, ca.1890
3 file cabinets
5 tables
3 lamps

2 boxes framed photos

3 library cards, battered and covered in stickers like well-traveled suitcases, each sticker allowing borrowing privileges from another library system
1 library card from the Library of Congress

1 beach rock with a hole in it, strung on cheap cord
1 wedding ring

1 packet love letters
1 packet letters from Michigan
1 packet letters from Barbara

1 toolbox, stocked
1 cell phone, mostly turned off uncharged lost

230 sq ft of practice space

31 tango tops
6 pair black tango pants
1 pair tight tango pants
1 pair tighter tango pants
1 pair very tight tango pants
2 tango skirts
2 tango dresses
2 holiday tango dresses
1 tango ball gown
1 pair skin-tight tango pants, too daring to wear
3 tops too daring to wear
2 skirts too daring to wear
3 dresses too daring to wear

1 laptop

* * *

To the extent that one’s possessions indicate one’s attachments and preoccupations, what is to be made of this inventory?

Every possession is a talisman, every one tells a story:

… the sofa, a family joke: Two-of-Six’s third or fourth purchase in her Goldilocks effort to find one that is just right

… the lamp that looks like the Eiffel tower: where Six-of-Six and I went all the way to the top despite his fear of heights

… all of the boots that I own: from Keith, along with thick socks and slippers, gifts for the holiday we dubbed The Christmas of Warm Feet

… framed photo of a country barn painted with a portrait of Baldasaare Castiglione, pale moon in a pale blue sky, winter weeds aglow in late afternoon light, captured by Michigan when he was still just a guy taking pictures

… scented candles by which I hand-write personal letters

… table purchased from Hilda, a Latvian woman who immigrated with nothing but diamonds sewed into the lining of her coat, which she used to purchase the building (next door to Keith’s house) containing the apartment she rented to me

… tango clothes purchased from thrift stores with the secret stories of their original owners still clinging

… skin-tight pants and belly-baring top, worn to perform (that term used loosely) with Glenlivet in a transitory hippie joint entered through a chiffon curtain leading onto the narrow space between two buildings, off an alley in a neighborhood where the only bright lights were the signs in the liquor store window … afterward worn to the Merc for a full 5 minutes before hurrying to the restroom to change into something modest

… almost-done quilt, single-bed size, 24 large squares printed with an intricate, fleur de lis design to be cross-stitched in royal blue, started at age 9, picked up and packed away over the course of 12 years, stitches solicited from summer-camp kids and friends and relatives, then quilted on the same small hoop through an unseasonably cold Arkansas winter, oven on full blast and its door wide open to heat the drafty place, quilt spread over the legs for warmth, in a trailer park on the banks of a country lake actually a wide spot in a river manmade to serve as the cooling pond for a nuclear reactor that the town lobbied hard to get because the tax money would allow the city to reopen its public schools, which had to close despite kids and parents begging door-to-door for money to pay the teachers’ salaries; and despite the jokes about glowing in the dark, the red lights atop the beaker-shaped cooling towers glow in a reassuring way, like nightlights through the bedroom window when the local radio station goes off-air at midnight

… guitar, songbook … a season of magic many years long, ending with Barbara

… mysterious hole in my arm that never goes away, possibly my personal kipuka

… scribbled poem that started it all at age 10 in the dead of night upon being jerked out of sleep by a beckoning idea that could not be followed in dreams but only chased down with feverish pencil … match to tinder, my holy spirit burst into flame


The door to my apartment opens on Wonderland. The space itself greets me. Every possession speaks with affection. Beyond the windows are gardens and trees and a street with lively traffic; all the buildings in sight are covered with ivy. This has the feel of both country cottage and Harvard dormitory. I sit at the window and write. Everywhere I look, my eyes rest on beauty.

Sometimes I feel that I am connected to nothing at all. This is when I am spelunking, so far inside my head I forget eyes and heart were made for looking outward.

Possessions embody all the small bits of our whole, lovely selves. What do I want with a microwave oven, bicycle, nightstand, welcome mat, bowls? These are not my accoutrement. The world of my connection is small and dense. I live in a hothouse, a jungle of flowers. I live in a riot of scent!

Sometimes I feel I am connected to nothing at all, and sometimes I feel I am a node on a great, cosmic ‘Net. Ephemera. Connection. This is my context. I like it. We are nothing so substantial as dust on the wind.

Words are scent. Memories are. Love is. We are.
.
.

A scent

But of course a scent does not exist in a vacuum.

(I meant that metaphorically, but it poses an interesting scientific question.)

You might think that because it floats freely, disembodied, scent is not connected to anything at all.

Imagine.

You are walking into the Sears store in Honolulu, the one in the big mall outside Waikiki. You take the escalator to the floor where they sell formal wear. If you’re going to hang out with Honolulu’s Sinatra, who enjoys buying you a tiny dish of ice cream after each night’s last show and gossiping about what’s going on in Chinatown, who learned 14 languages by approaching them as if they were songs, who after the ice cream insists that you kiss on both cheeks and actually takes your head in his hands when you try to get away with air-kisses before putting you into a cab, who really does, like so many discredited men, want nothing more (but what could be more?) than companionship, then you need to have the cool Mamo mu’u, not some hippie calico thing picked up in the Salvation Army in Hilo. You are riding the escalator. Imagine a scent.

Hold on! First it strikes you. Then it floods you. Before you can name the scent, you feel… you are gone.

Don’t take a tumble! Hold onto the handrail!

You are on an escalator, but it is not the one in Honolulu. It is in Detroit, and you are so little you don’t even know how old you are, and your dad has the warm bag in his hand.

It is roasted peanuts.

Scent connects.

An Interesting Scientific Question

If a flower bloomed in the forest with no one to smell it, would it have scent?

Even in a metaphorical vacuum, a flower would emit its perfume. But perfume is not scent; it is chemical compounds. It becomes scent when it connects with one who has a sense for translation.

And if the perfume found no receptor? Is the flower less alive? Would it, heartbroken, wither and die? No. A flower lives fully, perfuming the world.

Perfume may exist in a vacuum; scent only by virtue of connection.

Words are scent. Memories are. Love is. We are.

Sometimes I think I may be connected to nothing at all

Sometimes I think I may be connected to nothing at all. My inventory--short-term lease, blank walls, scant furniture, stacks of boxes packed and unpacked (at the ready)--presents mostly ephemera.

This is my context. I like it.

We are nothing so substantial as dust on the wind. We are scent.

I Have No

Bicycle
Roller blades ice skates
Skis
Satellite Tivo Cable HD
Land line
Internet
TM IM iPod iTunes
Stereo
Radio
Camcorder
TV

Curtains nor drapes
Art on the walls
Framed family photos
Fresh flowers vases
Coffee table knick-knacks souvenirs
Mirror

Refrigerator art
Recycling bin
Garbage bags garbage
Disposal
Dishwasher
Coffeemaker
Microwave
Juicer steamer toaster toaster-oven
George Foreman Grill
Liquor cabinet wine rack liquor
Condiments
Crackers
Hot pads
Pasta
Serving spoons
Cheese knives
Placemats napkins dining room chairs
nor table
Bowls

Air conditioning


Fine sheets soft light
Chest of drawers
Book stack
Bedside lamp
Clock radio
Nightstand
Bible condom-stash gun

Holiday apron
Spare set of keys
Ashtrays
Potted plants yard art
Subscriptions deliveries
Welcome mat

* * *

To the extent that one’s possessions indicate one’s attachments and preoccupations, what is to be made of this dis-inventory?

Clearly the poet has scant attachment to consumer goods or creature comforts or even a domicile.

Perhaps the poet lives in a situation that renders such things moot, for example, a commune, welfare hotel, prison, asylum, nursing home, rehab spa, or monastery.

Every possession is a talisman, every talisman a mirror. Without accoutrement, how do we remember all the small bits of our whole, lovely selves? How do we situate ourselves in the world, space and time?

Without situation, to what can we connect?

Let’s explicate:

The poem is steeped in feminine awareness. Surely the poet is a woman, else the poem would not have been written at all. Or, in the unlikely event, it would have given us a glimpse into other regions of the domicile: the garage or music collection. Would a man have made note of the absence of flour, or the holiday apron?

[Yes. Of course a male writer could mention the flour or apron. But the writer is not the poet who inhabits this piece. The poet of the piece—the character living within the lines—is clearly a feminine presence.]

The poet seems singularly cut off from the world. It is not only the lack of media; every line says it is so. She has no family; a family has bowls. She has no lover; the bedroom is barely utilitarian, a cell. She has no friends—no welcome mat. No media. Not even a magazine crosses her threshold.

Does she live in dead silence?

No art, nor photos nor flower arrangements nor knick-knacks nor potted plants, not even yard art. On what beauty do her eyes rest?

It is precious to point out the lack of a mirror.

Perhaps she has a pet? The poem doesn’t say.

The poem doesn’t say.

Here is an artist’s trick: Draw the white space around objects. You will be amazed by what new things you will see in the same old things: shapes and relationships, varying intensities of light.

White space reveals what is not. In drawing it, you reverse the polarities of real and naught. You make the naught real--and thus render the real, naught?

The imagination laps this stuff up. In the end it leaves you with mystery. This is the holy purpose of art.

But.

It doesn’t do you much good if you’d like to know whether the poet might enjoy a cheese sandwich.

First things first. By making the naught real, the artist does not render the real naught. Of course not. We live in an Einsteinian world: Artists create mystery, they do not destroy matter.

Still, if Einstein were pondering the cheese-sandwich problem, he would be stuck. He could explicate until he was blue in the face. For all its material detail, the white space of this poem gives no answer.

Might the poet enjoy a cheese sandwich? The poem does not say. If you want to know, you must speak first. You must ask, you must say…

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