Pretty the World

10.06 pm
The pre-Symposium dinner at the Prof.'s house was tonight, and driving home I felt like I'd been pulled back into a strange sort of time warp. It started with the road through the Berkeley hills, sinuous and twisting back on itself so close I couldn't help but wonder why it doesn't bite its own tail. (A lifetime ago, it seems, I rode through those hills on the back of a motorcycle, the bay spread out below us like Elliot's evening.) Then onto the highway - 580, moving strangely slowly tonight, only 60 instead of its usual 85 - and music playing instead of the usual lineup of news/cultural/historical podcasts. (Once, I drove up the highway after work - 880, probably going too fast, sometimes headed to the dive in Jack London, sometimes to a bar on San Pablo instead, usually with a boy in a Lexis who didn't love me following close behind - with the music loud enough to drown out the night.)

10.14 pm  
Sometimes I miss waiting tables. Lazy mornings writing in a rose garden, the sun soaking my shoulders and putting honey colored highlights in my hair. Getting to work early enough to polish my silverware and my stemware. Nights when the kitchen didn't go down in flames, when the kitchen plated my food and slid it into the window the instant before I walked into the back. Taking the elastics from my braids at the end of the night and letting them unravel. (Do you know what I love about your hair?" he asked. "I love the way its perfume leaves trails through the restaurant.") Staying at the bar until last call and then a little later, watching the boys play pool on battered and tilted tables.

10.23 pm  
Sometimes I think the poetry has left me.


A few years ago, I was bitten by a spider that got stuck under my shirt and left bites all along the path it had taken to get out. I wrote: "The bites along my ribcage are like a constellation. I look in the mirror, from this angle and that, trying to read a pattern from the random scattering." Someone told me that it was such a beautiful way to describe it - like poetry. I wasn't trying. The words just came, sliding out from beneath my fingertips the way all my best work does. Law school, though, with its emphasis on reason, with its careful writing techniques designed to strip the humanity, to strip the poetry from the words...


10.30 pm  
Sometimes I think I am the one who has done the leaving.