Nurse Log for a Seattle Hooker
I In the nook, I’d settled on a price and turned to face the street while he decided which hole his twenty would buy. I am the Mistress of Holes-- three I open for business, the rest I open for me. So I waited, jonesing on simmer, watching people and machines scroll by in the other traffic. Early morning still, but he’d be my last of the day. I’d have enough to score my never-enough. After the cook and poke, the black poppy spreads warm as milk meant for sleep, and I run any head movie I choose. Like the one where, prick-riddled as I am, I can work a music-box tune. Beaten, rolled, and soldered, I become the little cylinder gouged for plinking a lullaby of nod, wound for a spoon’s worth of turns. If the sun eyes me, its light won’t pierce because night always rules this dream. The notes wander the sky like a ribbon of bats, and I leave my shape to fly up after them, looking to be held by some kind of ark where I can rest awhile, safe and unpunctured. At times, I’ve slipped into shells, tucked like a seed or chick waiting to begin. Once, I nested in a sea lion, rocking in the soft torpedo of her body as she mimed the waves or waddled ashore. But above all, there is Rachel—the bronze sow of the Market who stands 550 unmovable pounds in the stream of patting, straddling, and camera flashes. The tourists drop change into the slot in her back, but she empties herself when I slide through, and I lie in the armored peace of her—my prize, my first place. Everything dangled, though—the smack, the lovelies dark with comfort-- till the trick cocked and paid, and when he palmed my shoulders, started hissing how he’d use me, I thought, Soon, soon, and braced myself to go blank. But, no. Just then this couple made us. I shrugged a hair to stall the job and stayed switched on behind a plainclothes face, looking sidelong without giving a tell. A few steps before they would pass, the man dialed his sight line to the storefronts across the street. But the woman blew that etiquette, struggling to unsnag her gaze from me. Need croaked to play shock, so I turned my smiling shield on her: lips closed over the teeth-poor mouth, corners raised the way a mocking girl would lift her skirt to curtsey, a touch of whore smirk to finish. Because her rain jacket—a bright green thing with big zippered pockets—blared “tourist” for days, I hoped for an easy startle, that she’d cut eyes and be gone. Instead, she smiled back. Smiled as though she were an old-time carny who saw me as kin, as someone who knows how even well-staked tents will collapse and bury, about the urge to run off and live in the trees while the trucks roll on to another somewhere, about the sadness that roamed her face like visible static. Finally, she looked away, walking with her man up toward Belltown, lit up like an electric fern against the gray, and in the dream I saved for later, she carried me in one of her big coat pockets, which smelled like a bed of leaves. II I knew I would carry her with me, knew before we passed where she fronted the john and the alcove sweating amphibian dark. Knew before I knew. Two days later, my husband and I pilgrimed up Rainier from Longmire. We began with the Trail of Shadows, where narrative snakes through a meadow. From panels mounted along the path we read about the leavings of pioneer enterprise: the foundation of a vanished hotel, mineral springs relinquished back to themselves, and a small preserved cabin hunkered beneath living timber. That what remains here of human past marks the felling of desire and the corpse of a future did not surprise but soon gave way to revelation. Not far from where the next trail branched, a nurse log lay among saplings and ferns. Words shouldered its chronicle like stevedores, lifting data into a plain and sturdy psalm. The tree fell, and will spend its death as gift, a rotting miracle at once food and ark, pocked and crannied for cisterns and stashes, a coffer for the windblown, the castoff, the litter of scat and husk. The microbes busied themselves with its body, and already a young hemlock speared from the soft anchor they’d made. Moving onward up Rampart Ridge, we would see many such shrines, seedlings pushing from them like hands from graves, and it seemed we walked in moss-bearded twilight, a blur between the fallen and sprung. In this changeful stillness, I rhymed with the plural of reach. The young trees stretched toward their colossal elders whose steeples claimed centuries of thrust. The pioneers had striven in the meadow with every arc of the ax. The very dendrites that thicket my brain extend their branches to the kiss of fire, and my words strain to clasp what can never be held. She came reaching in the fall, after we’d come home to Manhattan. Rose on the fish ladder from the muttering loch, climbed the steps of water into my knowing above knowing, where I thought of trees—the slow rain of loss as their Aztec cloaks molted color, their pending elegy of skeleton groves. And she tarried there, pale as a clinic walk-in amid the bright death of leaves, smile still all hard-ass Raggedy Ann, which kept me with and from her. Despite the contradiction, I welcomed her to my family without names, to dodge and sojourn in me as they do, those nomads once seen or heard, sometimes spoken with, whom I’ve sistered by chance. In Seattle, I’d failed to unsee her, and now I could only guess at the hungers that chined her will, the phantom-limb ache for lost dreams, the hopes abscessed by memory. Could be spikes Brailled her skin, but who can count the ways to gouge a life? I have read their signatures in the understory of the street, where, save for slivers of luck, I could have lived, where she lives still. But if remembering can be a chant, then perhaps imagining can be a prayer, so I pictured her on Rainier’s flank, where she walked among the evergreens and the nurse logs waiting to bestow their alchemy. I saw her take the gift, its surge lifting her bones as she chose her humus from the shit-strewn, the egg-bearing roach, the beer cans doubled over like a fetus or someone kicked in the gut, the metal mulch of shed needles. Then, with this quilt she made a bed in the shelter of who she was, pioneering from her own crumbling embrace to grow herself new, unpunctured, whole. |
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