Olds - Arias

Sometimes the orb pops back up, a ball of cream balanced on a whales watery exhale. Then I gather the tools of my craft, the cherry sounding-board tray for my lap, like the writing-arm of a desk, the phone, the bird book for looking up the purple martin. I repeat them as I seek them, so as not to forget: tray, cell phone, purple martin; tray, phone, martin, Trayvon Martin, song was invented for you, all art was made for you, painting, writing, was yours, our youngest, our most precious, to remind us to shield youall was yours, all that is left on earth, with your body, was for you.

I need to apologize to the letters of the alphabet, to the elements of the periodic table, to O, and C, and H, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, which make up most of a human body body which breaks down, in fire, to the elements it was composed of, and all that is left is ashes, sacred ashes of strangers, carbon and nitrogen, and the rest departs as carbon dioxide and is breathed in, by those nearby, the living who knew us and the living who did not know us. I apologize to nitrogen, to calcium with the pretty box-shape of its crystal structure, I apologize to phosphorus, and potassium, that raw bright metal we contain, and to sodium and sulfur, and to the trace amounts which are in us somewhere like the stars in the nightcopper, zinc, cobalt, iron, arsenic, lead, I am singing, I am singing against myself, as if rushing toward someone my song might be approaching, to shield them from it.

And if I were a German, and you a Jew, or I a Jew and you a Palestinian, or, as this morning, when you are an African American woman, and I am a WASP, one of your family might have been taken from their home, and brought through murder to murder by one of my family. It is there in the air with us. And if youre a woman in the city where you live, and I am staying at the hotel where you work, and if you have brought me my breakfast on a traythough you and I have not met, before, we are breathing in our lineages, together. And whether there is guilt in the room, or not, or blame, there is the history of human evil, and the shame, in me, that someone I could be related to, could have committed, against someone you are related to, some horror. And in the room, there is a question, alivewould I have risked harm to try to protect you, as I hope I would risk it for a cousin, a niece, or would I have stood aside, in the ordinary cowardice and self interest of my flesh now sharing your breath, your flesh my breath.

If theyre close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving, as if I have no features, I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, I am like a water bear talking to them, or an amniotic traveler, a vitreous floater on their own eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them. And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool, so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses, no floral tribute, no goddess, no grown-up woman, no acknowledgment of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the gray matter of spirit talking, the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard granite, ash, chalk, dust. I tried the paint, but I could feel it on my skin, I could hardly move, under the mask of my desire to be seen as attractive in the female way of 1957, and I could not speak. And when the makeup came off I felt actual as a small mammal in the woods with a speaking countenanceor a basic primate, having all the expressions which evolved in us, to communicate. If my teenage acne had left scars, if my skin were rough, instead of soft, I probably couldnt afford to hate makeup, or to fear so much the beauty salon or the very idea of beautyship.