Dog Days (A Belated Remembrance)

I wanted to write this entry earlier in the month, but I've finally got started on STARVED and didn't want anything to get in the way. Writing seems to be coming FINALLY, and the story that's emerging feels right.

I wrote five pages in less than forty minutes yesterday, so this encourages me that the rest of the story will be accessible once school starts. My goal is to have fifty pages done by the end of Labor Day weekend. My husband's going to Burning Man, so it's just me and the dogs and whatever lesson plans I need to do. I'm picturing long days and nights at the computer. We'll see . . . I really want STARVED to be done by early 2008.

The Dog Days, though . . .(I've tried for fifteen minutes to get spaces for paragraphs above and below here, so this blog is just going to be IMPERFECT!)

I thought the Dog Days were from August 3rd to August 11th, but I just Googled them and it said they start July 3rd. No matter. Sirius, the Dog Star, rises with the sun at dawn, ushering in the hottest days of the year.

This period has a personal connection. In 1978, my father died on August 3rd. I used to go into a depression at the end of July, coming back out just in time for school to start up again. After years went by, I finally saw the relationship between the depression and his death and had an aha! The dark period of the year that grew with the heat hasn't been as dark since.

I wrote the poem below just about this time, and when I was done, I realized healing had finally happened. I included it now for my dad, Les Eason, who would be 101 on August 30th.

Stars Falling in August

Daddy, the stars fell when you died, skidding across

the night like chips pealed from chrome,

carried by burnished wind across the sky.
The creosote was drunk in the dry desert air.

And though I wasn’t there,

I’ve imagined how you flew from your soul,
leaving your daughters like thistles blown over the chaparral,
our breath thin as the stems of the palo verde

that grew stunted in the yard.

The house filled up with uncles. My boyfriend and I slept

on a cot out back. As we made love, the stars

became silver nighthawks, fish tails swimming

through the blinding air.

I was numb like the space between stars

that are too stable, refusing to stray from the safety

of their paths. I didn’t feel the meteors
of broken glass falling to earth in silent breaths.

Daddy, thousands of stars have tumbled since then,
streaking through the heat of a hundred nights.

Each second they have been in the sky,

these variegated strands of burning air.
have burned open the portion in me that closed
more than twenty years ago.

Now nights stay sober
save for the drink of starlight and the odor
of yarrow and summer grass.

but the sky will never be shorn
Of star flakes nor the earth of burning sand.

The stars fell when you died.
You were carried by the wind luminous across the sky.

My sister, Gwyn, died three years ago on August 9th. The picture above must have been taken not too long before I was born. She was seven and a half years older than I was. I idolized her and could never understand why she didn't want me hanging out with her and her girlfriends when she was twelve or thirteen. Gwyn was cool in high school, turning into a blond beauty (is that blonde beauty?), had boyfriends, did dangerous things like ride motorcycles and go to parties, things that I wouldn't have dreamt of doing when my turn came as a teenager. She was the rebel, and so I didn't need to be. She was also a real hippie. I told some of the fifth and sixth graders that I had a sister who was a hippie a couple of years ago, and I couldn't believe how fascinated they were. They asked questions right up to recess. Gwyn gave birth to my two nieces: Angela and Nicolette. Had a volatile marriage. Injuries. Back surgury. Diabetes. Hepitites which was probably from a blood transfusion when her youngest daughter was born. She died at 55.

I remember by sister defending me, holding me during our parents' frequent fights, grabbing my best friend, Rhonda, and I by the scruffs of our necks when we were five and marching us to apologize for terrorizing a three year old girl with our rubber knives while pretending to be pirates. By the time I was 12, she no longer lived at home. In many ways we were strangers, but in the last few years we finally bonded like real sisters. I couldn't cry when she died. Perhaps it was because of the pain she had been in. It may have been because I knew what was happening for a year after reading Internet posting of woman after woman who found out about hepatites years after giving birth. Strangely, I wrote HUNGRY during the year she died, a funny novel in a time I wasn't laughing much. This poem came in a rush one day a couple of months before she left us:

Heaven

Madonna is all dolled up. Her glittery eyes

look down at the baby resting in her henna hands.

The Queen of Heaven’s ready for Mardi Gras.

The graveyard stones slant below
her sparkling gaze, too quiet for a party,

too white, too gray.

In the other picture, four dancing girls

do what they can to divert barbarian hoards,

spears full tilt as they rush in for attack.

The girls dream of feet free on desert sand,

far from the soft red carpet of the harem’s floor,
far from the bad manners of these sweaty men.

In the morning, I look through my scratched lens
and sit with Andrew as he drinks chocolate milk.
Must I meditate on death with this child at my desk?
On the decal of the shuffle skeleton on the car I passed?
The white rose so quietly growing on the vine?

My sister drowns in a hospital room.

In her morphine dreams,
divas dance on the walls.

From chairs by her bed, little black boys
speak to her of heaven. I pray her rose unfurling.

Her petals.
Her wings ribbed with glittery adornments.

I think of deserts carpeted with red flowers,

the mosaic spots on butterflies,

girls with bare feet spinning,

All things transforming
and unfolding. I write HEAVEN in my book

and underline it twice.

The Dog Days have passed, but I finally have stopped my business to acknowledge both Daddy and Gwyn's passing. This entry I write for them, but mostly for me.