White Wool

        

An empty warehouse, he sits close to me, dripping.

I want to sink my mouth into back.
He sits with me. 

He sits at a bench cutting slabs of wood. 

Chips pepper my hair.
Why is T. in both places?
Am I not enough?

He whispers: You have to tie those up.

Two tiny strings, like small white snakes, float off the front of my sweater into the room.

I say: Can't I leave them as they are?
He says: It will be better if you do.
Reaching down, his breath pressing on me,
my tongue coils.
He gingerly ties the slivers of wool,
fingers moving like my grandmother's needle,
making two perfect white bows.

On the train last night next to a man in a crinkled jacket, I tried to read the Chinese newspaper over his shoulder. A column of stacked red, yellow, and blue graffiti rejected me. I squinted to decipher three letters. A house, a bird and a set of bunk beds. He continued reading the results of Chinese Olympic ice skating.

It appears that there is an unchanging fundamental law of the universe about men of a certain age and women of a certain age that I keep seeing crop up.


I saw Crazyheart last night, with Jeff Bridges. The premise of the story? That you can be a greasy, sloppy, puking on yourself middle aged drunk man, with your zipper open but, because you know how to write a good country song--a young, slinky woman like Maggie Gyllenhal, will want to sleep with you and treat you like a hunk o' burnin' love-- at least, until you lose her kid in a bar. She looked at him with these ridiculous doe eyes, hanging on his every slurry, whiskey drenched word. The scenes of them making out were creepy. I hope they were supposed to be.


For a woman on the other hand-if she's got a little untended facial hair, a few jelly rolls and she's over 45-- she's as good as a paper cup for a man her own age, I don't care if she's got talent coming out of her eyeballs.

For months now, I have sat in my office in dingy brown light, eyes straining, wishing I could be home. This morning, I put a higher voltage 150 watt light bulb in the lamp behind my desk.  Now there is a small sun on my back. The office is quiet now. I am here feeling the light, waiting for a phone call.

The first entry. I haven't any real idea why I am doing this except to try to make a small space for myself where I can talk about things I like and dislike, what moves and frightens me in the hope that it will lead me somewhere....

A few things I remember Toni Morrisson saying in the film The Black List that I re-watched again this weekend--"avoiding the white male gaze or just not being interested in it and being freed up to write and say what you wanted and something about "making a small space for yourself".  What I remember most about these lines is the gesture she made with her hands at the end of her sentence, as if to punctuate it physically, she formed her two fingers into a small box in front of her heart.  A space for herself that seems so small when she describes it but so powerful in the world. If I could only be so brave and smart.