Raphael Kosek
MEDITATIONS ON THE COMMON LIFE
It’s raining again. Leaves shine and droop with moisture. Weeds and flowers spiral up from the soil unrestrained. This morning I dreamed I was marrying you again, cleaning the house, preparing for the wedding guests. We would keep it simple, no wedding gown, only a flowered dress, you in shirtsleeves . . . .
A robin’s staccato cry from deep within the wet June greenery woke me, day already long underway. How many days there have been. Sleeping, touching, talking, not talking, trying so hard, not trying at all, cups of coffee, cups of tea. I practice departure. Force myself to imagine rising in the middle of the night, touching my loved ones lightly so as not to wake them, and leaving. This is what you must do to live your life. Be uneasy as light, as ruthless as the enervating moon so insistent in the darkness.
I lay on the beach in the sun’s intense heat, determined to burn first one side then the other, listening to the hiss and wash of waves. I feel summer and seventeen, fire and ice, in Maine with my parents. The Prescot River cut in behind the beach. The current strong, water so cold it caught your breath. My parents warned against ever swimming there, but I would leave them and go swim the river like religion, learning to mark my destination on the other side and swim well upstream of that point because the river would pull me at a diagonal. Of course I would have to cross back swimming hard with fear and the exhilaration of the forbidden. No brothers or sisters, only wind and willful solitude. Love was still an unopened shell and its intense mystery hummed around me making me dangerous, alien to my parents and myself. I took meals with them and cracked lobster as a foreigner in their midst, incomprehensible and sullen. My heart was an uncivilized country, and all of me as hungry as the wheeling gulls.
I fought the river current to prepare for what I felt life would bring; I had to ice my blood, make the river mine. Anna Karenina had thrown herself in front of a train.
“How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
One of the biggest lies in casual conversation. Living from day to day causes illness. Juggling mothers and fathers, husbands and children, bosses and colleagues, money and pots. Getting out of bed and running off to the real world is enough to set my heart racing. Clothes, lipstick, shoes corral me. Define me. You are what you eat. I suffer from a tense stomach and bloating. I worry about who my daughter will marry, what she will do. And my son. He has broken two of his limbs since the second grade. Does not like to eat chicken with bones in it. Has trouble in math. Like me. Will they hate me for writing this? Will I be able to bear growing old, losing faculties? What if my sight goes and I cannot read?
I look in the mirror frequently, in the pink and gray bathroom at Lord and Taylor’s, at home with toothpaste on my chin, casually in passing with a feather duster in my hand. Not to admire myself, but to see who I am. I look at myself with the faint boredom, detached curiosity with which we observe zoo animals. Sometimes I cover my cheeks with my hands, the soft flesh; here is the mother, the wife, the one who constantly worries. See how calm she looks. A steady woman. Strong. But she comes undone when she cannot figure the future. She feels she is a good mother, but even the worst mothers think they are good mothers. She won’t know until her children are grown, until the cake is done. But when is it ever done? If they make terrible mistakes, do not know the simple things, choose wrongly, it will be her fault. A disastrous marriage, failed career, drug addiction.
I don’t hug you enough in front of them. They know how we love each other, but that edge of scorn in our voices, occasionally. I can feel her in me. My mother, dooming me at weak moments. This world that is nobody’s oyster. Don’t be lulled. Be on guard at all times. Manage your own affairs or others will make a mess of things. Whatever goes wrong could have been prevented if only you had managed better, had foresight, had not been slacking, ignorant, or lazy.
I have a pair of silver hoop earrings purchased when I was a teenager on one of our seaside vacations. They are large, slim rings which dangle, remarkable mostly in that I was fifteen on that vacation and now I am forty-seven. One of them is slightly bent and all the more dear because of how it happened. I lost the earring in a grassy area between the dorms at college. A boy I was fond of patiently scoured the ground until he found it. It had been stepped on, but was very much intact. To my anxious, adolescent heart, his painstaking recovery of the bauble was nothing short of a declaration of love, which was the closest he ever came to such a thing. The earrings have endured; the boy has not. He died in San Francisco on my birthday in the spring of ‘82. I remember hanging my daughter’s laundry on the line and sobbing under a bright blue sky. My daughter was not yet a year old. The relentless sun and a teasing wind made short work of drying the clothes. Pink things that whipped in the breeze.
The wedding day was cold November, sharp and sunny, wind whirling up funnels of leaves. I didn’t feel the cold. Like a child dropping into the watery safety of a pool. Giving myself over to the future without a thought. This is how it goes. How it is supposed to be. You were smooth and fine next to me, someone to love. This is how it goes. The organ pealed out the wedding march. Friends and relatives smiled. I was entering the secret society of the married, the world of the rest of my life. It floated before me like a plateau. No more trouble or pain. No more troublesome self. This is how we do it. Get through this life. The oyster was opening. We danced and danced. The rug rolled back, the orchestra playing. We made sure the musicians ate as well. Your hand in mine. Roses blooming all over the new bedspread.
I bought a kerchief and new sunglasses, and we sped over the blue waters of Miami bay. You made me buy a coral bikini. We dove and dove into the hotel pool. Watched the moon over Miami. Bought grapes from a Cuban grocer across the street. Every night I ordered liver and onions. We rented a light green Pontiac and drove down through the Everglades, disappointed to see only a tiny crocodile. At the tip of Florida we ran laughing back to the car as mosquitoes swarmed around us.
I can’t even look at liver and onions anymore. Don’t understand how I ever ate the rich organ meat. You never liked it.
I am forty-eight today. The air seethes and boils about me. Gusts of wind push heavy-browed clouds across the sky. I gut the past, welcome the new. I am the same. I am nothing like I was. Once I longed for love. I embrace all of you. Yet, you must know, I have murdered all my darlings. I might have been there in the jostling crowd with the cries of “Barabas!” splintering the air. But I also wipe the sweat from your nettled brow with something akin to love. Those abject and unpleasant, unready to be loved, I hug to me. I believe in what doesn’t match, flawed, unruly life, the pungent, bitter weed that riles the nostrils, all the moments that fall short, the glorious intrigue of human failure. I have sought what is under the leaves, deep in the eye of the dog, what cannot be cleared away with the supper dishes.
It’s raining again. Leaves shine and droop with moisture. Weeds and flowers spiral up from the soil unrestrained. This morning I dreamed I was marrying you again, cleaning the house, preparing for the wedding guests. We would keep it simple, no wedding gown, only a flowered dress, you in shirtsleeves . . . .
A robin’s staccato cry from deep within the wet June greenery woke me, day already long underway. How many days there have been. Sleeping, touching, talking, not talking, trying so hard, not trying at all, cups of coffee, cups of tea. I practice departure. Force myself to imagine rising in the middle of the night, touching my loved ones lightly so as not to wake them, and leaving. This is what you must do to live your life. Be uneasy as light, as ruthless as the enervating moon so insistent in the darkness.
I lay on the beach in the sun’s intense heat, determined to burn first one side then the other, listening to the hiss and wash of waves. I feel summer and seventeen, fire and ice, in Maine with my parents. The Prescot River cut in behind the beach. The current strong, water so cold it caught your breath. My parents warned against ever swimming there, but I would leave them and go swim the river like religion, learning to mark my destination on the other side and swim well upstream of that point because the river would pull me at a diagonal. Of course I would have to cross back swimming hard with fear and the exhilaration of the forbidden. No brothers or sisters, only wind and willful solitude. Love was still an unopened shell and its intense mystery hummed around me making me dangerous, alien to my parents and myself. I took meals with them and cracked lobster as a foreigner in their midst, incomprehensible and sullen. My heart was an uncivilized country, and all of me as hungry as the wheeling gulls.
I fought the river current to prepare for what I felt life would bring; I had to ice my blood, make the river mine. Anna Karenina had thrown herself in front of a train.
“How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
One of the biggest lies in casual conversation. Living from day to day causes illness. Juggling mothers and fathers, husbands and children, bosses and colleagues, money and pots. Getting out of bed and running off to the real world is enough to set my heart racing. Clothes, lipstick, shoes corral me. Define me. You are what you eat. I suffer from a tense stomach and bloating. I worry about who my daughter will marry, what she will do. And my son. He has broken two of his limbs since the second grade. Does not like to eat chicken with bones in it. Has trouble in math. Like me. Will they hate me for writing this? Will I be able to bear growing old, losing faculties? What if my sight goes and I cannot read?
I look in the mirror frequently, in the pink and gray bathroom at Lord and Taylor’s, at home with toothpaste on my chin, casually in passing with a feather duster in my hand. Not to admire myself, but to see who I am. I look at myself with the faint boredom, detached curiosity with which we observe zoo animals. Sometimes I cover my cheeks with my hands, the soft flesh; here is the mother, the wife, the one who constantly worries. See how calm she looks. A steady woman. Strong. But she comes undone when she cannot figure the future. She feels she is a good mother, but even the worst mothers think they are good mothers. She won’t know until her children are grown, until the cake is done. But when is it ever done? If they make terrible mistakes, do not know the simple things, choose wrongly, it will be her fault. A disastrous marriage, failed career, drug addiction.
I don’t hug you enough in front of them. They know how we love each other, but that edge of scorn in our voices, occasionally. I can feel her in me. My mother, dooming me at weak moments. This world that is nobody’s oyster. Don’t be lulled. Be on guard at all times. Manage your own affairs or others will make a mess of things. Whatever goes wrong could have been prevented if only you had managed better, had foresight, had not been slacking, ignorant, or lazy.
I have a pair of silver hoop earrings purchased when I was a teenager on one of our seaside vacations. They are large, slim rings which dangle, remarkable mostly in that I was fifteen on that vacation and now I am forty-seven. One of them is slightly bent and all the more dear because of how it happened. I lost the earring in a grassy area between the dorms at college. A boy I was fond of patiently scoured the ground until he found it. It had been stepped on, but was very much intact. To my anxious, adolescent heart, his painstaking recovery of the bauble was nothing short of a declaration of love, which was the closest he ever came to such a thing. The earrings have endured; the boy has not. He died in San Francisco on my birthday in the spring of ‘82. I remember hanging my daughter’s laundry on the line and sobbing under a bright blue sky. My daughter was not yet a year old. The relentless sun and a teasing wind made short work of drying the clothes. Pink things that whipped in the breeze.
The wedding day was cold November, sharp and sunny, wind whirling up funnels of leaves. I didn’t feel the cold. Like a child dropping into the watery safety of a pool. Giving myself over to the future without a thought. This is how it goes. How it is supposed to be. You were smooth and fine next to me, someone to love. This is how it goes. The organ pealed out the wedding march. Friends and relatives smiled. I was entering the secret society of the married, the world of the rest of my life. It floated before me like a plateau. No more trouble or pain. No more troublesome self. This is how we do it. Get through this life. The oyster was opening. We danced and danced. The rug rolled back, the orchestra playing. We made sure the musicians ate as well. Your hand in mine. Roses blooming all over the new bedspread.
I bought a kerchief and new sunglasses, and we sped over the blue waters of Miami bay. You made me buy a coral bikini. We dove and dove into the hotel pool. Watched the moon over Miami. Bought grapes from a Cuban grocer across the street. Every night I ordered liver and onions. We rented a light green Pontiac and drove down through the Everglades, disappointed to see only a tiny crocodile. At the tip of Florida we ran laughing back to the car as mosquitoes swarmed around us.
I can’t even look at liver and onions anymore. Don’t understand how I ever ate the rich organ meat. You never liked it.
I am forty-eight today. The air seethes and boils about me. Gusts of wind push heavy-browed clouds across the sky. I gut the past, welcome the new. I am the same. I am nothing like I was. Once I longed for love. I embrace all of you. Yet, you must know, I have murdered all my darlings. I might have been there in the jostling crowd with the cries of “Barabas!” splintering the air. But I also wipe the sweat from your nettled brow with something akin to love. Those abject and unpleasant, unready to be loved, I hug to me. I believe in what doesn’t match, flawed, unruly life, the pungent, bitter weed that riles the nostrils, all the moments that fall short, the glorious intrigue of human failure. I have sought what is under the leaves, deep in the eye of the dog, what cannot be cleared away with the supper dishes.
~