everywhere

There's no mystery to it: the bricks and the gossip, the nicotine, the exhaust, the aluminum siding.

On the corner the girls come and go, never talking of Michaelangelo. It's all "mirror, mirror in my purse," tell me I am hotter than her. Tell me who fucked who. Tell me it is worth it- the tanning, the sephora foundation and layers of hiding, the five hundred dollar dresses and the fuck-me shoes. Tell me none of it will catch up with me. Tell me he loves me and loves no other and writes songs about me because I shall never write my own. Tell her, you tell her, that bitch, that the flimsy existence he allows me with his gaze is worth fighting for, is worth bickering for on the corner, like a couple of the Pharoah's concubines, the girls come and go, talking shit. There is nothing enduring in this quick-shift of loyalties and faces and foe. She has nowhere else to go, nothing else in her world. The orbit is short and the circles are smoke.

There's no mystery to it.

I escape into the dirty woods by the river sick with city and I find a shelter someone has built out of branches and tarp. I watch the city from across the water and I am so high and happy and alone, but I know what's waiting once I cross the bridge. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors. There's no mystery to it, but here- a spider with orange legs is crawling across the face of my self-portrait. Here, there's rabbit fur and bones and an old rusty knife. Human shit and toilet paper. What wild man lives here? What happened on the other side to drive him crazy?

All weekend in the mountains with my lovers: mountain laurel, rhododendron, and juniper. The smell of wet earth after a storm. A medicine wheel someone made of stones big enough to lay across. Vaginal crevices in the trunks of ancient trees. Rainbow trout swimming with me, naked, nibbling on my toes. Nobody around. Nobody to figure out or forgive or worry about hurting. Butterflies between my legs, their wings touching my thighs. Everything coming to me, recognizing me as essentially good. I gather bones in a basket and take them back with me.

To the city. The drama. The right angles. The billboards, the signs: dreams deferred die here. Mystery?

E, they call him Mother, paints icons, strictly continuing an ancestral tradition over six hundred years old. I've heard of him, his studio, his beard, his madness, and saints. I've heard how he trekks into the mountains to pick the plants to make his paints with. Tomorrow I will meet him for tea and he will show me his sacred hall of icons and I will pretend he's Dostoyevsky for a day and he will say, hey, lovely girl, who's your saint?

Philomena, full of holes, tied to a tree. Or better yet, me, wearing thick skin and a skirt of ginkgo leaves.