Twenty Minutes: January 13th

It takes twenty minutes to pick up the trash off your bedroom floor, start a load of laundry, make your bed, send an email to an ex-lover, put your shoes in the closet, screen a call asking you to donate blood, listen to Solomon Burke sing Cry to Me twice and Serena Ryder sing racing in the streets twice, put your books away, pick up all the half-empty coffee mugs and water glasses, turn some lights on and off, close the kitchen cabinets, hear the sound of your breath moist in your chest, take a gulp of coffee,  look at pictures of your friends three thousand miles away, know what tv they’re watching and music they’re listening to and food they’re eating. Just twenty minutes after salad and bacon for breakfast and a book of essays and a cold sit on a misty front porch. Warm bruises from a lover underneath ripped jeans, eggs baking in an oven, dreams hovering around the edges of consciousness still, speaking of war, speaking of floods, dreams violent and strategic, warnings of incalculable loss. The fact of the holes in these socks, the cold floor on my feet.  A problem worth fixing, in the mind of my lover, who gave me his cast-offs upon noticing the holes in these, who teased me about the manliness of their faded blackness, rough against smooth legs. Some fragility there and some shuddering of ego.  What can be found in the fact of these socks, in my obstreperousness in not replacing them--some sense of  poverty cheerfully accepted or duty abnegated? My casual shrug when he asks me why I’m wearing socks with holes in them--these are my socks, I said. I crave his noticing and his delivery of it has this flip side, his attention, like the marks on my skin, can be measured less in good or bad than by a quality of wholeness. He asks me if I've washed my hands when I eat leftover chicken from the fridge with my fingers, and my body stiffens in offense. But he comes over, asks me what is wrong, makes amends for hurt feelings, for colliding world views. Sometimes he dreams about tidal waves and this morning I read about Mars moving into Pisces, rigid structures of force encountering primal flow. I don’t think about washing my hands in that way, don’t or won’t or can’t replace my broken things, don’t care if the period stains aren't totally washed out of my jeans, if my shoes are muddy. I prefer the total effect, lipstick smeared across my freckles into a blush, the wet corners of my mouth, the stretch of skin and bone and muscle between my shirt and my hips, the intent and the artifice of shaved legs, perfume, lingerie. “I like this, but I don’t get the point of it,” he comments on the sheer nude bra, a scrap of purposeless lace. “That is the point.” I say.