Essay |

“Mid-April Book of Days”

At night, you lull yourself to sleep listening to an interview of a woman who studies the brain chemistry of sex and romance.  These hormones, the woman says, diminish activity in the decision-making part of the brain.  This shows up on scans.

 

*

All the next morning, you dream that a poet you know is teaching biology for writers at an artists’ retreat.  You are encouraged either to get in the water polo game or to cheer on the shore. The lake is terribly deep and not fit for water polo, so you wander back into the building thinking of the terror of the sublime, but not in those words.  You find a private lake-viewing room which opens on to the side of the lake.  A wall of lake is there, suspended, waiting.

 

*

It is evening, and you stand on your porch with your son, encouraging him to observe the natural world around him.  You are trying to distract him from rushing to the neighbor’s to ring the doorbell while you wait for his father to put on his shoes and take him for a walk.  You tell your son that the single tulip by the steps is a “volunteer,” the word for something planted long ago that sprouts unexpectedly, and also the word for someone who shows up to help because they’ve chosen to do so.

 

*

You write an encouraging message to a friend who is full of dread.  I know for a true fact that you are magic, you write.  It said it right there in the cards.  You succeed in making your friend cry.

 

*

You find a forgotten cache of copies of your poetry book in the closet, the one with cover art by your friend the cosmic milkmaid. You sit down to examine your own line breaks and end up reading the entire thing.  Woven through this book are tender moments between the speaker and the speaker’s boyfriend, later the father of her son.  You wonder who these people are.

 

*

I read the news before sleep and am so overcome with grief for a dead boy and his mother that I do not sleep.  I play a man reading a Borges story in my ear but refuse to listen. Finally, I take off my headphones and start down the stairs toward alpha waves, theta waves, sleep spindles.  On one of my rotations it occurs to me that my grief is for myself, having been abandoned in my own home, and I begin to wail soundlessly.

 

*

In the morning I ready E for school and then put in earplugs, landing thump into deepest sleep, then emerging three hours later, a lady of the lake breaking the surface on her bier.  Stuck I am again, in this non-elegant world.

 

*

At school pick up my small son walks up to a mom I am chatting with and socks her in the stomach.  I don’t know what he’s angry about.  Possibly my brain waves.  Possibly the shouting he heard from the other room.  Or maybe he’s just a very tired, very small boy.

Hours later, I can feel it still, that unexpected contact of a little hand in someone else’s gut.

 

*

He asks me if trees are nocturnal.  He talks to me on a soap walkie-talkie.  He recounts how his friend started punching him during recess and how he punched back.  How they were supposed to keep their hands to themselves, but how when the teacher turned her back, they did not.

 

*

I write my brother for practical advice.  My brother makes me a spreadsheet in which he explains that I must be twice as practical as I’d imagined to go on with life on my own terms.

My crown chakra wilts.

He tells me to take a breather, and I do some alternate nostril breathing.

The only thing that would cheer me up now is someone drawing a cartoon of me with a wilted crown chakra doing alternate nostril breathing while hunched over a spreadsheet.

 

*

There is mention in the other room of the physics of whirlpools, of certain items manufactured through a process called extrusion. Finally there is silence and sleep.

I wash my face and brush my teeth, make a cup of tea. I get in bed to answer some emails.  I hear a hoot owl not far from my window, and decide to step out onto the back steps to breathe alone.  By morning I’ve become quite still, my waves and chakras having settled.  I have, in fact, rejoined the earth.  A fine green dust covers me.

Contributor
Joanna Penn Cooper

Poet and essayist Joanna Penn Cooper Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press).  Her new chapbook, When We Were Fearsome, was published by the Ethel Zine.

Posted in Essays

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