Paradise lies beneath the feet of your mother. A verse I’ve heard recited so frequently I do not know if it is scripture or hadith.
Hadith, meaning traditions of the prophet, are always accompanied by a careful oral lineage who said what to whom, and who heard who say they heard what. Usually back to one of the prophet’s wives who heard the prophet say it.
The veil also between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did not hear.
In butoh the dancers are rendered in white smoke, ghosts traversing the stage-as-womb, moving so slowly you do not even know they are there.
If paradise lies beneath the feet of my mother then how will I find my way inside unless she admits me.
Now I look at each face, each body, as it moves around the subway platform, down the stairs and around the platform, onto trains, off of them.
After my aunt Chand-mumani’s death I thought of them each as flames, in each the body is combusting burning up the fuel of the soul.
Michelle after giving birth walked around the city imagining everyone glistening, bordered in amniotic grit.
But is it really like Fanny writes, the body only a car the soul is driving.
Or something of us sunk into the matter of the body, part of us actually flesh, inseparable from it and upon death, truly dispersed, smoke.
The body of the prophet’s wife always between us. Who said what.
In which case there really is something to grieve at death: that the soul is wind, not immortal.
A middle-aged woman, in the seat in front of me on the train, wearing a green puffy winter jacket. Her hair, though pulled back, frizzy and unkempt.
It’s the unkempt I feel tenderness towards.
Have always felt about myself a messiness, an awkwardness, an ugliness.
As a child, such an envy of birds, of graceful slopes, of muscular boys.
In the train rushing above ground at 125th Street. Thinking about stumbling.
House by house, walking down this street or the other one. Going into the library, going into the school.
Where every middle-aged woman is my mother.
Waiting to be trusted with the truth.
I have nearly as much silver in my hair as she does.
Any pronoun here can be misread. He can mean you can mean I.
An odd list of things I want to do in the next five years: study butoh. Write an autobiography. Go back to Paris. Get lost somewhere I haven’t been.
Also begin to say it.
