3 minute read
Lowell Jaeger Christina's World
Christina’s World
Ultimately, says a friend, each of us is alone. She says it standing beside me, both of us paused on the canyon’s rim, staring at what we’d trekked here to see -- the mud-froth torrent churning far below, grain by grain nibbling through rock, deeper toward the Earth’s core.
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She’s lost her mate recently to one of those man-eating multi-syllable synonyms for mayhem worming its way bite by bite into the brain. Forgive me, she says, for my morbid mood, but you know what I mean. A bothersome ache one morning, a twitch, a numbness. Say goodbye to steak, goodbye martinis. Goodbye walking in the garden, goodbye walking anywhere. Goodbye to dressing yourself. Goodbye speech, goodbye even to guessing whatever there was once to say.
She doesn’t speak all this, but we both can hear it nearby, in the river grinding its way onward. We can hear it in our footsteps. And in the trail unwinding, descending. And in the wind under the black wings of a raven wafting by.
Lowell Jaeger
Life Review. . . Fragmented
with lines borrowed from and inspired by the poem Everything You Touch by Charles Bukowski
putting on your tweed suit, stud earrings, panty hose and close-toed navy blue heels with a string-tie laced up in a bow under the collar around your neck
it’s time to leave your low-income-housing condo recently built in the preppy New England suburb where you live (the Town’s token tolerance for the less-fortunate)
you and your secretarial soul driving to the prep school against rush-hour traffic soon to be sitting in the weekly early morning faculty meeting taking the minutes. . . the only staff member among the (they thought they were) elite faculty most of whom only looked through you
each with the runs variations on a basic theme spouting forth their relentless, repetitive agendas
every week the same songs (incessantly dripping on your forehead…never-ending) and so enamored at the sound of their own voices
and you -- overwrought having left one of your latchkey children home alone with a fever
or years earlier in Kyoto coming inside after hanging out the laundry to dry and weeding the garden (and watching the bamboo trees grow)
to sweep out the sandy genkan and on up the stairs to hang out the futons from each bedroom window to be sanitized and freshened by the sweltering sun
you were never any good at choosing your partners the misogynists, womanizers, bullies, compulsive spenders, and drug addicts
maybe you were all meant for each other in some crazy karmic scheme
one summer back in that New England town when your children were visiting their father you went out to listen to Dixieland jazz and found other losers looking for love in the haze of Malbec or Sam Adams (one, it turns out, was a pedophile another, the husband of your sister)
and then there was a day at work years later in the Manhattan meat-packing district where transvestite hookers ate breakfast at a table next to you at a diner where you killed some time before the office opened up (they didn’t even give you a key)
once again trapped in this case where your new boss hired you to re-vamp the office only to discover his wife wanted the opposite
in the meantime, you had relocated to this Mom and Pop situation where the wife wouldn’t allow a modern phone system but rather insisted on an out-dated push-button setup with cables and phone jacks
(and with only two repairmen left in the entire City who knew how to repair these unfortunate fossils)
here it was in the early 2000s the books kept in ledgers by hand and not being allowed to update the computer system -- (see Jane hired under false pretenses)
your life from one debacle to the next you did it to yourself though you did it to everything you touched.
Jane Hallowell
Jane Hallowell grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated from UMass/ Amherst. She has been a teacher of English, piano, and yoga. Her first book of poetry, My Take, was recently published, and a second illustrated children’s book of poetry, Raccoon Platoon and Friends, is also available. Now retired, she lives in Texas Hill Country, where she volunteers for Hospice.
