Especially this morning,
cacophony of bird song under a canopy of clouds,
I awaken, cloaked in soft, moist robes of April dawn.
Strange journey, from tall peaks and struggling wisps of Colorado green
to these lush shaded streets dressed in every hue imaginable,
thick and lacy, a fantasy of jungle fertility.
I feel my roots plunging ever deeper into the moist soil of home.
It is the springtime of my mother’s death.
The unwanted growing in the well mulched soil of her body.
The final days of this century ticking past
(Will she survive to see the next one?)
That rhythm of recognition, as each spring resembles the last.
Buttercups, bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush feasting
on sunshine and rain. Blossoming fiercely.
Flowering in oblivious disregard of the millennium passing,
my mother’s passing, my passing through . . . the endless procession.
While my heart melts like butter into the warm, whole grain bread of my soul.
It’s always like this when I come to Austin.
Swimming naked in the deep and shallow emerald pools of memory.
Stark black paper pages of a photograph album from the 1940’s that
spells my mother’s young life out in etched tones of silver, black and grey.
Shapely dark-haired pin up teenage girl alchemically transformed into wife,
mother of four, seventy year old woman, vessel of memory, and now it’s my turn.
I sit in the cool breezy darkness of Liberty Lunch,
and see myself 20 years younger, dancing in the crowded,
sweaty darkness as though my heart might burst from fullness
or break from despair. Dancing tonight on that concrete floor of memory
to Austin music issuing from talent that wasn’t even born the last time I danced
between these painted brick mural walls.
Austin full of women inked from shoulder to toe with serpentine tattoos.
I wonder about them. Their invisible journeys visibly stenciled into their flesh.
An assertion of permanence in the face of endless change and the annihilation wrought by time.
I dare no such assertion.
Pierced by the years and memory in secret and not-so-secret places.
Old lovers and friends slipping down river as new memories form
and new lovers beckon. Balancing family and forbidden love on the tip of a needle.
My life has never been simple . . . or easy. Nor, alas, would I wish it to be.
Leaving this city for the thousandth time wrapped in the invisible tattoos
of memory, grief, and longing. Fulfillment and emptiness joined on my flesh
and deep within my soul like braided ink and wildflowers of desire.
I realize that home is not where I live, but the place that lives inside me.
Invisible tattoos scar my flesh, ever more intricate, marking this Texas weather,
my youth escaping, these fleeting bluebonnets, the passing of the millennium.
Beth Firestein
April 10, 1999