Invisibility

They don't hide their quarreling from me as they would from a person of higher status. As a cashier—a servant—I am invisible until useful. Often, it is the woman who has charge of the transaction. She determines bags or boxes, she's in charge of coupons, she knows if it should be check or credit card. If he's late wandering the aisles, if he picks the wrong broth, or packs ice cream with basil, she reproaches, and I become useful: I should affirm her glance, which says: Men! And very occasionally, a man will belittle his wife before me. He's exasperated that she thinks you use an ink pen to sign the tiny screen. His seeking glance says: Isn't my wife stupid? Both glances are ugly, but his, being more particular, is somehow uglier. Either way, I gaze intently into my scale as if it were a tiny portal to the old invisibility.

Lists 2: Night shift

9 am. Temperature 34, clouds bright but thick, passerby twelve.
9:14 am. Oranges must be peeled in single spiral, else unclean.
9:27 am. Phone Gretchen, get reports on son, dad, weather six miles southeast.
10:01 am. Nap on couch thanks to blissful heat from oven.
12:31 pm. Out of oranges. Also Cream of Wheat, rice.
12:42 pm. Aim to leave, cannot leave, cannot be sure I would not leave oven on, ignite house, immolate journals and pathetic wardrobe.
12:43 pm. Also cannot be sure I would line plants up in correct order. Might disappoint plants.
12:44 pm. Chair, couch, bed.
5:00 pm. Call from Gretchen, rent not paying itself, etc., OK, OK.
5:41 pm. Outfits unfit. Sweaters stretched, taupe, beige. Drowning in ocean of neutrals.
6:12 pm. Beige must suffice.
6:14 pm. But better with orange lipstick.
6:22 pm. Time to go.
6:28 pm. Time to go. Time to go.
6:29 pm. But rituals.
6:59 pm. Must buy fireproof lockbox for journals; can't stand this every day.
7:04 pm. Plants wary but wet. Sleep tight beautiful greens!
7:06 pm. Off to work. Late in both senses of the word. Good night world.

Lists 1: Found in bags left for re-use

Half-eaten string cheese.
Popcorn.
Potting soil. Once rich, now disappointed.
Human hair. Subsets: curly, grey, brunette, wavy.
Dog hair. Mixed.
Earwig. Subsets: living, dead.
Tears. Subsets: oily, spattered, pooled.
Orchid bloom.
Snow.
Laugh.
Shadow of cat.
Hole of mouse.
Sigh.

Empty

Beyond everything is emptiness, they say. It is beyond and also immanent in sunsets, lice, chimneys, beans, philosophy, cribbage, reiki, my god, their gods, love, hell, flannel. The ground of being, from which all is made, into which all dissolves. Unconsoling, unpunishing, unanything, it is also fullness, complete potential. But how can emptiness be the highest currency of spirit? Who can pray to emptiness for clarity? Who can visualize emptiness for concentration? And what did emptiness think it was, to write us into this book of colored chaos?

Minneapolis

Minne from the Dakota water, polis the Greek city. Metro laced with dirty slush, faces tight under scarves and hats and hoods against a cutting wind. Blocks torn up and blocks torn down in perpetual construction, reconstruction, deconstruction. Some are pushed to cheaper rents, some pulled to hotter spots, white flight and black flight and brown and yellow and red flight. But you are home. In dreams some see your true name. They crawl under wreckage, deserted projects and churches and communes. Graffiti signals the low way below the highways: here is where the pure river flows. Wide channel, slow and clear, here your people wade. A baby floats with eyes open. A pair of buffalo enter to drink, a covered wagon pulls to the edge, old ones fill a jug. A round mother, her thin lover, children whoop echoes off the bridges above. Lost vets push into the current, the dirt that had assailed them carried away. A row of paralytics swim, swift and free. High-rise foundations and ghetto beams rise all around us, but light filters through and we swim here in minne the temperature of love.

The blessing of tongues

Three voices bounce off each other, resonating up the stairwell. Two guys and a woman are speaking in Japanese, balancing lunch trays and exchanging jokes on their way to or from the break room. Languages surround you: as you blow on your microwaved soup, as you wait for the bus, as you move your whites from the washer to the dryer. The many tongues remind you that you don't know everything, that other ways exist. That speech is a musical and percussive tool of consciousness, rather than consciousness itself. That the stilted English you hear on the phone is the echo of a deep, full mind, its richness filtered through the coarse sieve of translation. You live in a world of six point seven billion teasing, griping, flirting, exulting aliens, of whom you are one, with whom you are kin.

To the poet

I can see that you're sitting there, pretending to read the paper, fantasizing about me. About my piercings and tattoos and how you could please me by buying me patchouli and fresh local irises and shiitakes. You would rent a loft and have me move in and life would be sunlit and candlelit by turns. I'd be an easy catch, late thirties and still pouring coffee and toasting bagels. But maybe you don't imagine that I have two children? One with a learning disorder? A live-in sister? Psoriasis? You know as well as I do that even if I hadn't, we wouldn't spend the rest of our lives making love on the futon. Anyway, you're not my only gazer: there's the Swedish human rights attorney, and the bass player with the houseboat, both at least ten years younger, I might mention. Does someone pay you to write dreams in your notebook, to stare through the steam of your half-caf? What's behind your glut of down time? My life's bound up, all hours, with ties most folks can't see. And all my dreams are free.