LOVER

AnnaBelle

I see her & Beatles songs pop in my head, it's that sweet. I see her & my heart rests easy. I sleep with her and only then can I sleep. She's my Annie, I'm her girl.

Letter From Austin

68 degrees fahrenheit and it’s Christmas Eve. It doesn’t rain, hawks score the hard sky, this landscape thrums – a hollow-body Gibson played twangy by some guy who drives a truck. The earth eats dew to feed the tiny flowers that hide under tall dry grass. High winds and wood smoke, a tumbler of bourbon in hand. Winter in Texas. That mean December sun bites my eyes out. I see with my heart and hands. How could I not want a horse, living in this strange yellow-brown land?

It’s Texas but Austin so it’s not quite Texas. Austin’s a city of lefty liberals who vote that way, rally, work at non-profits, mock the president, have pot-lucks, community gardens, and are doing more to help the Gulf coast hurricane evacuees than most cities in this country. There’s thriving community centers, parks where kids really play, a booming health food cooperative. What this means on a daily level is that my waitress at La Reyna on South 1st is also a volunteer at a literacy center. When I tell her I live in a hotel because I lost everything in that storm she embraces me like an aunt and brings over a strawberry agua fresca for free, no big scene - just a soft smile and a wave of her ring-less hand.

Austin unfolds like that: intimate but powder-clean, with couture shoe-stores and swimming holes and a bridge where thousands of bats roost every night. They migrate to Mexico when October rolls around and I believe they carry messages of love and longing from all the Mexican men and women who clean the hotel I live in, fix the cars, cook the food. Some nights I think it’s just the bats and me, breathing, hunting. This is definitely a city that lives during the day. The sun hardly sets, patriarchal, the boss of everyone and thing.

So yes, it is Christmas. Fat colored bulbs wound round yucca plants, cloudless sky, country bands strumming old sad songs. A time for bbq from John Mueller’s which comes on a paper plate, with no sauce, sauce is for wimps. The meat is cut thick and burnt crisp on the edges, rubbed brown and crackling, sexy and absurd. And tex-mex for breakfast! Mexican coffee with honey and cinnamon, beans and rice, mushrooms and squash, eggs, black-red molé insanely seductive, corn tortillas. Austin tastes of leafy cilantro, tomato, onion, a little salt, lime. The food is the place - when I eat here I am baptized from the inside out.

For all of its homey earthiness, this city can be pretty uptight. For example, lots of folks ride bikes but not without a bicycle license. Lord, you can even get a ticket for riding your bike drunk! “Biking While Intoxicated”, I’m not kidding. And the bars close at exactly two a.m., the flirty bartender all of a sudden loses his sense of humor and I’m reminded yet again – this is not New Orleans. Cops have pulled me over four times in three weeks – three times for not using my left blinker (it’s broken) and once for not having my seat-belt on (it’s broken too but I’ve figured out how to rig it). It’s a tight ship they’re running here - not the waxy float of a sub-tropical raft but not exactly the rigid republican Texas two-step either. It’s something in-between – a romantic waltz on a concrete floor? A drunk-ish rock and roll dance where nobody touches but everyone looks like they’re having sex. Except it’s not sex – they’re only dancing.

I went to a gumbo party last week in a suburban house filled with candles and art. Everyone was interesting, attractive, sincere. Lots of rum was passed around, lots of smokes. There is a thriving healthy community here that cultivates the same appreciation for sharing food, music, and conversation that I equate with New Orleans. It’s as if someone built a bridge between the two cities and if you have the energy to drive without stopping you’ll arrive in what can become a home. It won’t be as beautiful as the Crescent City (when houses get old here they just get old) but there will be animals, friendship, and wine. A place to swim and grow, dry out quick, a skeleton of glowing sandy bones.

The way we danced till three

He flew here to be with me and we had our little Christmas like we do. Presents only we would get eachother, sausage biscuits for breakfast, pillow talk. You know, talking face to face while lying your faces on pillows. Dancing to disco at the Victory Grill. My hotel room never felt so homey. Nothing like Rhoden when he's nice to settle the nerves down.

I had a stuffed pony I named Noël cuz I got him for Christmas

(Meesha made this.)

Driving down Woodland, I saw a white bunny just nibbling grass on the side of the road. Talk about a U-turn! I hung out with him for awhile; he was rascally, wouldn't let me pet him, and he looked so unbelievably soft. If hands could salivate mine were. Pink eyes and round paws. Lord. And then walking Annie I just found an entire raven's wing. Not one feather more. Just the wing, pointing up to the sky. Is this symbolic of a broken wing or a found new wing? Either way, thanks St. Nick. I almost forgot for a second that my dog Annie's been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. Merry Christmas!

What I Miss, Home

Every Christmas Eve, starting around Lutcher and stretching as far north as the eye can see, on the levee that didn’t break along the Mississippi, a wild performance in honor of Saint Nicholas occurs. Because in Louisiana he travels the river by pirogue, and the river is black as black can be, bonfires must be lit to show him the way to all the good boys and girls. I’m not talking campfire-acoustic-guitar-playing bonfires. In glorious Louisiana style, any excuse to create a spectacle is grabbed by the horns and rode right into the ground.

For much of December, families devote a ton of money and time to build immense, towering, wooden teepee pyres. Every 50 feet or so, along the levee path, which follows the river like only a river levee can. They don’t just build teepees, either. I’ve seen an effigy of a car with stick people inside, to honor the father and brother that died in a car crash that year. Once there a replica of a fishing camp that had been lost in a flood - with a kitchen table and a family of four sitting down for dinner. Last year one family built a life-size fire truck to salute the firemen who were on strike and wouldn’t be watching over the festivities! A lot of care goes into the construction – they have to be built solid so they burn right – monolith Lincoln Log arrows pointing straight up to heaven. Ironic, sarcastic, and celebratory - the act of building something so complicated just to burn it down is another way the people of Louisiana ritualize the cycle of life and death. Just more proof of how Louisiana is not like the rest of the country, of why she must be saved.

So this is all a real family affair. The pyres get lit at 7 p.m. and most of them are filled with fireworks so you can count on utter chaos exploding all around you at some unpredictable moment. People pull up lawn chairs, coolers, card tables, and grills to set up camp next to their family fire – drinking beer and eating burgers while the kids go insane, sliding down the levee on broken down cardboard boxes, running in circles like goofy wind-up monkeys. River Road becomes a carnival of thumping car stereos competing with the calliope player pumping out off-key carols. There’s homemade corndogs, gator on a stick, and onion mums for sale from the garish carnival trailer.

Everyone along River Road flings their doors open to friend and foe alike, offering food and drink all night long. You’ll stumble shy inside, reeking of sulphur and fire, to find a stunning buffet of jambalya, cold cuts, gumbo, veggies and dip, hot rolls and punch bowls filled with sweet red punch, oranges and lemons floating with ice. By the time you venture back outside everyone shouts out your name, “Miss Elizabeth Merry Christmas!”

Down on the river the Mississippi Queen’s paddling along, all strung up with lights, holiday revelers leaning over the railing as the river runs gold with fire. The bonfires are wicked hot and burning low. Down on the muddy banks people are shooting off bottle rockets and M80’s, girls run laughing with sparklers, every single face lit up with the feral joy that blooms out of those pyres to lick you clean, to go to sleep, to usher in another Christmas morning in the absolute best place on earth you could ever want to be.

Erie Church Reigns Supreme

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.  I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees.  All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness.  All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom.  By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

- Mary Oliver

(Erie went down to the Mississippi river & read this to the waters for my sister, for me. She put red & gold flowers in the water and read this poem out loud. She sent red & gold flowers to me at my hotel. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, generosity, hope - these are the gifts my loved ones give to me, every day, a plate of red beans, a morning call, a bodacious laugh, the exhale and dignity.)

how/she died

Sadly. Her life was suffering, from top to bottom. Not the suffering that I know, which is the suffering of knowing. Hers was of helplessness, foreign-ness, impotency. Pain real and imagined past the point of imagining.

"I don't want to die that way," is what I was finally able to say out loud, finally crying, with Wendy on the phone at 2:34 a.m. That's a chilling statement and it terrifies me with its hope. How dare I hope for something other than that? Well, how not? That is the nature of my suffering, while hers was the suffering of how.

love love love to Milissa Jean, may that spirit finally crack open and finally breathe.

Funeral

One of my older sisters, Milissa Jean, died Saturday morning. She was 44. We'd been estranged for well over a decade - her life was a long string of abusive and self-destructive traumas that had a horrible way of spilling over and into anyone nearby. In order to survive, save myself, I had to cut her out of my life. And I'll tell ya: make that kind of decision and you can do anything. Pick up dead animals in the road, walk right into the middle of violent street fights and break them up, talk calmly to a man who is holding a gun to your head.

As my sister, she was the girl who was always running hot; she burned at a different frequency than the rest of us - you could virtually smell the ions. I protected her from a great deal and when I couldn't those failures became some of my deepest wounds. In the 70's she was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic but a doctor I know has explained to me how ... infantile the mental health practice was at that time and the diagnosis & medications were in their early stages of what they've become today. He thinks she was bi-polar. All I know is she'd crawl in & out the window to go hitch-hike to California and when she sang "The House of The Rising Sun" it completely freaked me out. When boys in the neighborhood would gang up on her someone would inevitably run up to our door and holler for me, "They're beating up Milissa by the church road!" I'd put down the newspaper (such a girl I was, in corduroys) and go find her. As soon as the boys would see me they'd run off like mice. I was famous for indiscriminately kicking boys in the nuts. Hard.

She & I would never talk about these escapades and beyond that, it always seriously confused me when she would steal from me, kick me in the stomach when I was sleeping, or lie about me to our mother to get me in trouble. "Libby's going to go to the Pat Benatar concert when you drive upnorth!" and mom would cancel her trip & stay home. I don't think our mother ever believed for one second that I was like her other daughters, it's just it was easier for her to believe I was a sneak than it was for her to come to terms with Milissa's pathological lying. Oh, the sweet bird of youth!

In the process of trying to find out how Milissa died I spoke with my oldest sister Lauren. She continues to think of herself as the martyr figure whose one function in this world is to "take care of everybody". Would one of you let her know that I've been taking care of myself since I was a little girl and it'd be best for her if she could just let that one go? I mean, seriously, just let it go. Maybe she could relax then. Hell, she's not called me once since the hurricane or in years - mostly because she's still furious with me for having asked her to make xeroxes of family photos she has so that I could also have them. Nuts! It was strange talking to her, it's strange my sister Milissa is dead. A sibling, dead. My parents have been dead for 20 years, the love of my life for 9. But a sibling? It just feels ... cold. All I can do is read Rilke and look at the night sky over the Dell headquarters and feel the sheer fragility of it all.

Et Vous

Die Dichter haben dich verstreut

The poets have scattered you.
A storm ripped through their stammering.
I want to gather you up again
in a vessel that makes you glad.

I wander in your winds
and bring back everything I find.

The blind man needed you as a cup.
The servant concealed you.
The homeless one held you out as I passed.

You see, I like to look for things.

- Rainer Marie Rilke