Ghosts of Hair and Flowers

I’m staring into this cup of old dead coffee thinking about how my red gerber daisies gave up their ghosts in an instant when I wasn’t watching. What is the sound of a falling flower? Sunday dinner found me sitting across the table from him again, and I wondered in my thinking heart, ‘how many more tables can we sit down to before we both know what we’re looking at?’ I smelled the smell of cherry tobacco on his skin, I don’t know if there is any such thing, but it was all rain and earth and sweet, like ancestors, a coming thunderstorm in July. I heard the scrape of his jaw when his hand rubbed his chin. Oh that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek Can you really say you know someone till you’ve heard him laugh in the dark?

I try to imagine that someday I may look and find nothing to love about these hours I spent, trying to give up the ghosts I’ve known, who have outgrown the trip I’m taking. So many people will not make it into this next decade with me, though I needed them to get here.

I don’t want to revise history, but I have to get out of its box of narrow definitions. If I don’t want to live my mother’s life I’ve got to stop bouncing checks, identifying with myself only by way of what has gone wrong.

I cut my hair for the wrong reason at 23, but if I needed to do that to find my niche at 29, so be it. So be it. So be it.