my eyes looking at you

I can’t remember which one of my twin toeheads said this to me ‘cause my heart and head are full to burst and my hands are lackadaisically behind schedule. All the wood is wet here at Hungry Hollow Farm, and so the little needle perched atop our chimney-pipe rarely reads much more than 400 degrees. We bundle up, dry wood atop the stove.

John and Eamon are settled it seems, as are the girls to ebb and flow of their presence. Hannah hangs out several times a week and plays with them and helps cook. She and John enjoy talking food and process. Eamon reads his book for class, waiting for another Friday to lift his spirited sails, nose into a wind of dreams.

The Book Farm has become a reality. I have two minions (term of endearment) and a functioning at-home book business that is only on the up-and-up. My dreams continue to work themselves into reality, however steep or rocky the roads may be.

Too many people demand my attentions and I yearn to satisfy them all and fail, falling flat on my face for half of my scheduled appointments for coffee or phone calls or something resembling genuine friendship. Relationships are hard as a single parent, as I have only begun to learn over these past six to twelve months (depending on how you choose to look at breakups or the fallout of love).

How do I talk about this and respect everyone involved? Fuck (I meant that as an exclamation, not an answer). Maybe I’ll just talk around it. I can barely read a book. It takes me two weeks to stagger through half of Valis by Philip K. Dick. Rob reads it in one day and I curse his name through the haunted barrooms. My attention span is shot and my habits borderline neurotic at times (though I harness energy and redistribute it well, towards productive tasks for the most part). Some days I laze around and read a few pages of several different books, or plow through one comic, or watch too many movies and enter books to sell online.

E-mails and phone messages pile up, duties are shirked, monies are low, chores clog the arteries of a house well-lived in. Little stacks of notes about the girls and memorable quotes make tiny towers atop the sixth ring of hell that is my desk. I vow to sort them all and write and clean house and get my life in order and file my taxes from the last two years. I pledge to get my act together and then the fog sets in and the grass freezes solid overnight and the geese plop down in the meadow for a few days and I steep in my own lack of go-to. Sigh and say to oneself: “Come the spring my talents will turn.”

I enjoy this new community our house has become, and Lyli and Scarleht bask in the extra attentions, the spice of life this variety brings to their beings.

I fish in new pools this winter’s rain forgot to swallow, whose heart the ice di'n't clutch. Or p’r'aps I’m only thawing now, in the sunshine of love, in the X-Ray of gazes, in this awkward rediscovery of self and soul and sex and life and lucid dreams and my daughters look up into my eyes and say things like:

“my eyes looking at you”

or

“i see my eyes in the dark.”

and everything just melts into easy, all my troubles tempered by a casual calm I call “now”.

“born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”

Chalres Bukowski, excerpted from Dinosauria, We

All of this that I do each day is for my friend Boston Jon, among a multitude of others lost at sea. On this, the anniversary of his disappearance those many moons ago.