Write from the point of view of a freshly scrubbed floor.

Everyone seems to have convinced themselves that I prefer to be this way, which would make me laugh if I could do that, since they all hate what it takes to get me that way.

                This is not a clean house, which is what I love about it, and what I hate about it.

                When you’re laying underneath someone’s entire life, cloaked in their things, collected carpets and keys lost under furniture; when you are wearing their footprints as make-up every day, it’s a bit more complicated than “like.”

                You’ve heard people follow the phrase “if these walls could talk” with equal parts wonder and dogged fear.  It’s because inevitably, you understand that they are inanimate, unfeeling, the ultimate secret keepers.  So in front of them you’ve committed the most ultimate of your secrets. 

                You’re right.  Your walls have no mouths with which to betray you, no heart inside which judgment or envy might grow like cancer.

                But you’ve forgotten that your walls, your floor, your ceiling were all alive once.  We were trees, tall balsam sighing into a fresh breeze.  We were red dirt, freed from the crucible of so many geological years, mined and processed into the right colors, the hard tiled texture.  We are all wood and stone and elemental dye.

                Alive, unadulterated, we bore witness to our whole world, quietly watching so many animals extort our wealth, watching so much weather oxygenate our coals and dampen our flu.

                We brought that tradition with us.

                I am still looking up at everything they do.

                When I am dirty, I feel like I’m still participating in the cycle, the chain.  I can track the seasons by the temperature of the mud, the taste of dirt they leave scattered across me in waffled ridges.

                I watch tracks of my home’s residents stretch across my skin like such a dedicated hunter.  I theorize about their habits, their meals, their futures.  I am anonymous in my muck, but I belong.

                But when I am clean, my edges are sharpest.  It is removing an infection from a deep cut: white pain and an addictive itch.  Except they are the ones who get to feel the satisfaction of the scratch.  When I am so clean, I have no choice but to look right up at them.  There is no hypothesizing.  There are only secrets, bestowed upon a diary undesirous of them.

                I look up, and instead of my own branches, heavy with life, they are shining a mirror down on me, framing inside it a gaunt iteration of a thing I used to be.

The doorbell rings.

Happiness is a stranger here.

                You open the door, let her in.  She never looks the way you expect her to.  Covered in mud, or in clothes that don’t fit, or anachronistic in dress, like an alien who studied the wrong era before attempting to costume herself as a commoner.

                You didn’t know you were running a bed and breakfast but her fingers on the doorbell set you in motion.  Changing sheets, stocking the refrigerator, checking to be sure you flushed the toilet, hiding the detritus of your morning whirlwind in toppling piles under the sink.  You want her to think you’re at least okay at doing life.

                She will excuse herself to the bathroom with cool, unassuming manners, and you are racing to the linen closet, fingering the stacks of towels for the silkiest, the whitest.  You remember with painful agitation that there’s nothing soft or clean for her dripping hands in that tiny room.

                Should you knock on the door?  Stand outside and wait?  Lay them neatly on top of the guest bed for her to use later?

                You just don’t want her to leave.  You’re sure you’ve already scared her away with your cooking, your silverware, the pimple growing through the wrinkled stress of your forehead.

                But she walks out of the bathroom whistling, and as she brushes past you, you spot two damp hand marks on the backs of her jeans.  She winks and she’s good at it, just one eye at a time.

Open a book of poetry to a random page.  

(Go to a library.  Or search for Frank O’Hara or Bukowski or William Carlos Williams on your computer.  But jeez man, buy a book of poetry for next time.)

Read the first poem you see.  Don’t cheat.  Don’t re-flip, or pick a new one.  Respond to the poem.  

On wanting to tear out this page because my writing, like so many of my reactions, is imperfect…….

                Well, he wrote a poem called “29,”or probably it didn’t have a name, and this editor said, “well, they go in this order,” and so they numbered everything, so now this poem wears a numbered badge like a title, unearned and  unasked.

                Well anyway, what I want to know is, how do poets like W. H. Auden have dreams in 1936 that look like my love life in 2011?

                “Our whisper woke no clocks, we

                kissed and I was glad

                at everything you did.”

                Which, okay, is kind of unremarkable because everyone who wants to only admit they’re normal talks about dreams like these.  Love is eternal, duh.  Unconstrained by temporality, limited only to the surfaces the lovers touch, waking and lighting new spaces only as they move. Like nymphs of the forest waking their homes to the stretching rays of the moon.  They are an island of light and sex and caress, the lovers, everything around them moving at a different speed, with muted colors and sounds.

                Everybody knows these images because they stole them from Auden and everybody else.

                But then:

                “I, submissive, felt

                unwanted and went out.”

                I read a line like that and the horror violins that make everything sound like murder are screeching across the vinyl grooves of the old love ballad.

                How did he know I was going to do that?

                He gave me the answer a few lines before, with that “worm of doubt.”

                It’s nothing short of a plague of locusts praying on poets and childish young women parading as writers.  But what a relief to know that it’s not my fault!  That when he, my own lover, so uncruel in his ignorance and innocence, strays from the script of perfect courtship I’m composing my head  I will show him nothing but the inkblots of my frown, my silence, my busy fingers, expecting proper interpretation.

                I spend so much time going out.

                Oh, but now I know that my body is still mine.  Someone’s told me the truth.  That’s all there is, to beat this infestation, to boil out all the mites, to poison any little parasite.

                That’s all I’ll have to do.

                But if they’ve been surviving, at least since 1936, how can I be sure I can?

A nursery tree no longer lives and breathes, which is sad.

                When I inventory past conversations, words passed between myself and people who wanted to know me, or who didn’t want to know me but had no choice, I seem always to used the trees that surrounded me as defining markers of my young life.  My memories are mostly dappled with the shade lent by the limbs that hung low and high over my self, my house, my family.

                My sister and I, we were so keen to grow up, to move out, to stop scraping our knees on that unforgiving bark.  But nostalgia grows clearer than even hindsight with age, and I wonder if those trees felt the sting of our abandonment. 

                I’m sure, like most things in nature that have been forgotten after humans have extracted the last droplets of use, they shrugged us off, kept reaching for the sun, sighed at the new lightness of not having us hanging from every wiry branch.

                There were two trees that we lost before they could lose us.   My sister cried and cried over the old apple, but my eyes stayed bright.  My heart hung only with the loss of my tree, the crabapple in the side-yard.

                Saying its name always made me want to pucker my face into the smallest pinch, because a crabapple was what my sister was too early on a Saturday morning.  A crabapple was what my mom was when we wouldn’t stop nudging each other under the dining room table, building diversions against our broccoli.  A crabapple was what my father was the time we fought about why I had to bring the same peanut butter and jelly in a reusable, bright blue lunchbox, so completely offensive it was in its lack of cool.  To prove my point, I slammed a door, breaking the mirror that hung from it.

                Maybe my dad was worse than a crabapple that day.

                That tree was good to us, though.  Good to our minds.  The branches weren’t knotty like the maples out front and the bark seemed inordinately smooth.  It was a gentle tree, holding us with more care than any of the others.

                We swung from it, tucking it under knees to feel the natural friction of warm wood against skin.  We built worlds out of the leafy levels.  From a lookout tower at the top of the sturdy trunk we monitored approaching pirate ships, or craned to see what the neighbors were cooking for lunch.  We retired to royal chambers in the crooks of outstretched branches that cupped our small bodies like gentle wooden palms.

                Once, we broke off one of her biggest arms.  It was me and the oldest of the neighbor boys, hanging like apes and giggling until there was a crack like lightning and I was crumpling onto the unforgiving ground, knee-caps first.  The tree had been so full and giving at the time, it must have been fall, so the sour red and yellow fruit rained down.  We bowed our heads for protection against it and against my mother, whose face glowed with more anger than had seeped from the wound of that fallen branch.  It was on our neighbors’ property after all, just across that invisible line.  We were disrespecting, breaking, ruining things that weren’t ours, she said.  We needed to grow up, she said.

                They don’t even climb the old thing, I wanted to say.  They’re not using it.  But I held my tongue.  Just a child and alreayd I was sharpening my instinct for self-preservation.  The sour fruit continued to fall.

                The crabapple blossomed for six more summers, and I loved it more with each.  It seemed to have timed its growth to match my own, stretching branches to parallel my height, still cradling my lazing bones with ease.   For six more summers, I hung from it, regarding it with less imagination and more awe, using it to escape, to watch unseen, to think things through in peace as a teenage girl must do.  And then a crack like lightning, but it was real this time.  I wasn’t home, but I’ve still built a memory of the moment in my head to visit: the heat rising, the raw pale insides roiling white and sappy with pain.  I would have cried if I had known, but no one thought to tell me.  The City came and chopped it to pieces small enough to push through a great chomping machine.  They carted it off in trucks perverted with the mulch of so many other deceased friends. 

                Our neighbor lost a flowerpot in the fray.  Clematis, I guess, or maybe her peonies.  I hated her after for wanting only to clean up the mess, salvage what she could.  Her husband mowed the lawn; seeded the bald spot; planted more pretty, delicate things that didn’t belong.

                Didn’t she know a tree was supposed to lie where it fell?  Didn’t she know things, real things that belonged, volunteer oak and noble fir, could grow from those bones?  Handed she seen the gorgeous whispers of bright green saplings pushing up through the warm, nurturing rot?

                There’s a plum growing there now.  I see it when I’m home for Thanksgiving, or when her grandchildren are surrounding it, shrieking for the Easter eggs someone’s hidden in its lower nooks.  It is stunted and sad.  It is rootless, its beggarly height betraying how ambivalent the ground is to its existence.

                It bears no fruit and I laugh at that.  I laugh because that nursery tree feeds someone else’s growth in someone else’s city, anonymous mulch.  I laugh because that nursery tree no longer lives and breathes for me, and that’s sad.