If all I could see were this
The waves that strike a rock
Cut from the cliff above
The spray of water—air and salt frothed—
Reaching for the sky
Falling back to the sea

If all I could see were this
The tangerine cast of morning sunlight
Stretched in a line that touches
The surface of blue-green shallows in this southeast-facing cove

If all I could see were the cluster
Of palm fronds, mesquite branches, flamboyant leaves
That frame this moment and draw my gaze toward a horizon

Away from what is behind me
The dirt and rubble road
The woman selling mangoes
The child (age six? age ten?) smiling and wandering
Directionless along that road
as the bell calls and echoes
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
the eighth ring echoes
the sight of this—this the all I see

Kathryn Janene Adams

Haiti, 2012

I hold her in my hands—ashes inside a box
I feel her hand, swollen, squeezing mine,
trying to let me know she knows I am here.
I see the fingers when they were slim, tracing loops onto loose strips of paper—
envelops, letters, the backs of receipts—
the white spaces covered in daisies, vines, leaves, swirls
I watch her hand move and flow

I recognize her name without reading the letters on the box
I see her at a table, rewriting the letter she has carefully drafted,
signing, again, her name, with strained effort
so as not to reveal in its wavering lines the shaking that unsteadies her.
I see her signature on a birthday card sent in the mail;
“Happy Day!” appears in a large, perfect, girl-like cursive.
I perch on a stool at a kitchen table—half on its surface with my hands and body,
half-off with my shins tucked under me and resting on the seat of the stool,
feet dangling off,
and I watch her squeeze bright pink-frosting letters
onto a smoothly painted white-frosting canvas: H-a-
Her “a” has the serif top line that only she took the time to add to
cakes, notes, letters, lists.

I feel her weight—nothing but ashes in this box
Heavier and heavier
they pull me back…
and back

I hold her in my hands

I begin here
Seeing the sky that remains after the sun has left it
High pale blues that fade to grey
A strip of lavender at the horizon that sprints
Before it too fades

I see what I have not yet seen, even though I have seen sunsets,
And pale blue, and grey and lavender
Sitting here in this white chair that is
not what it was when I first
Brought it to this room
Placed it by this window
So that I could sit and look out and see
what I was not touching—
Feeling

The once smooth white paint of the chair back has cracked
The legs wobble, unsteady,
At the point where a corner bracket should be but has broken
From my stepping onto the chair as my ladder
To reach for something
I no longer have, no longer need, no longer remember

The light leaves me
still here
Waiting for darkness

September 25, 2011

I sit, only moving in the rise and fall of my chest as I inhale…exhale.
I watch through a window what I cannot feel.

The branches of a tree bend, spring back, twist, tangle
then recompose themselves
Their leaves ride and cling to their stems,
Reflect the sunlight that finds their glossy surfaces,
Flip and toss the light away at the will of the branches pull

I do not see the wind; I see the branches that the wind disturbs.
I do not see love or its absence
I only see the movement it stirs in my body, and
the stilling of my body to all that moves.

Shadows before Rain

Each night, when I looked up through the clearing above avocado, mapou, and palm trees, I have seen the moon. The first night, all but a slim and narrowing wedge along its left side glowed white.  The next night, I thought it must have been full as I gazed at the ring that radiated out from the central sphere—a ring of humid air caught and held by the light. But this illusion was not yet the apex of the moon’s cycle.  On the third night, I looked out across a former courtyard-turned-school and saw the light bounce off the broken pieces of once solid concrete walls. My eyes followed the light as it touched the tops of palms, and gave life to the pale petals of fading bougainvillea blossoms.  I did not need to gaze upward to see the full moon—its fullness surrounded me.  I stood motionless in the space between the trees and looked down at the shadow the orb caste from me onto the path before me. I became the darkness. The sky became the light.

A day passed. Darkness arrived early.  I looked up and watched clouds gather in the sky.  Already, they had begun to hide my moon. The light rimmed the clouds’ edges, just for a moment, but then they merge. My moon was gone.

Within these clouds, the past from which I departed and the future toward which I fly disappear.  Light blends with oxygen and water vapor to cover my vision—to block me from seeing what I have left behind. I gaze out the small oval window.  Triple paned acrylic prevents me from feeling the temperature change from 90° Farenheit to 50° below zero. Or at least that is what the screen in front of me flashes along with the current time.  The screen flashes again and the time changes to show the hour and minutes that currently pass in the place I will land. The small piece of earth that formed the island once below me has gone now, and with it the clumps of broken concrete and pockets of muddy water—thick from limestone dust mixed with rain runoff, as well as tossed away dish water, urine, and excrement that had nowhere else to go.

From this place in the sky, I cannot feel the weight of that mud pulling against the soles of my shoes.  But I also cannot feel the pull of the fifteen-year-old girl’s hand as it had taken my own.  My hand holding hers cannot undo the cuts on her chest and neck from the belt used to beat her when she told her “guardian” why she had returned without the food she had been sent to buy at 6:00 in the evening. A trace of light would have kept the sky a deepening blue rimmed by purple where the sun would still have been falling behind clouds and sea. From this distance, I cannot sense the young girl’s hand cling to mine for one last moment before a transport takes her from me to a clinic where she will be handed a pill to swallow, ridding her womb of the memory of four men having violently forced themselves within her.  But that pill will not shed from her body the darkness brought on suddenly as the men placed a bag over her head, the hands that restrained her and that left claw-shaped bruises on her arms, the memory pressed four times over into her soul.  I press my hands against the window but only feel the unyielding surface that has at last grown cold.

The shifting air tosses this vessel that carries me, reminding me that I am not watching the truck pass through the gate; I am no longer standing there, for a moment very still, then turning to toss a Frisbee to a boy of perhaps nine years of age and his sister of perhaps six or seven. I teach with gestures, smiles, and “bon!” They learn with laughter and their own tosses too high or too low, then a toss right toward my heart.  The boy leaps up to catch my poorly aimed throw, and suddenly we are all dancing.  “Ballet classique,” I say. I bend then jump, turning in the air, while my arms form an oval curving from my shoulders to a space in the air that I cannot hold: “Tour en l’air.”   The boy bends his knees as I had bent my own.  He pushes the soles of his bare feet against the weedy, damp ground, and then defies it by shooting straight up into the air, completing a full revolution, and only then, landing back on the earth.

I am not ready to land.  I am not ready to leave these clouds that hold me tightly to what is still there. I want to keep holding the two-year-old I held just hours ago. He had allowed himself to rest his head in the cradle formed by my chest, and neck, and shoulders, and in that place, he had at last fallen to sleep.

Now above the clouds, the blue glares too bright, so I turn away from the intensity of its light, close my eyes, and see the dark skin of a young man’s face as he too closes his eyes and then lifts his inward gaze toward the sky and towards a trust I will never know.

When I open my eyes, the land that should be my home appears below me, growing closer and closer.  Row after neat and tidy row of houses with perfect roofs, solid walls, seem small enough to pick up and place in my pocket.  But then they grow, becoming larger and more permanent with my descent.  I look away, and instead fix my line of sight on the wing that stretches out beside me, keeping me, for now, aloft.

I wish the wing’s tilt would turn this plane back, or at least keep circling in a holding pattern just a little while longer.  Allow me to once more kiss the cheek that had greeted me in the opening of a door—see the knowing eyes that had watched me go. Let me stay in that heavy yet loving earth just a moment longer.  I am not ready to let it go.

So I turn within the train, and I
sit, facing the direction that
looks back on the place from which I came

I travel as if being
pulled out of the water by a rope that some giant hand
has wrapped around my waste but not completely
cinched so that if I were to
arch my back, slightly, I might
slip through—
escape back into my sea

I do not want to be
pulled back into life
release a day of nows without tomorrows
let go of a person unknown who
knew the words I
gathered in thoughts before I
could speak

So I look back
watch draining from my body what a moment ago
was my forward.

Colleagues, we sit side by side and across from one another
inside the thick, stone walls of this university.
I hear another question asked and suddenly
I hesitate to speak
I have already spoken too much.

I want to close the door
not to this room but
to me—

pull back down inside
where I am me and not this grouped us.

Why, where they feel found
in connection, I feel lost?

Because I fail at this art of joining
without merging
I step away.

I sit at the table,
alone while with others,
too old for being afraid yet equally
too young or unschooled in that
flocked way of being.

I close the door.
I am safe here.
But how much did I already allow

Out there?
Too much?

Too much of me is there
Can I pull it back?

Limestone walls deep and
impenetrable, do you keep
the world out? Or
do you hold
your life within?

Your coat-of-arms shelters me
from the damp air,
disruptive wind…

but I ache
from this cold

that penetrates from your stone-floors
up through my skin and into my blood—
my soul

From where does this chill come?
From within? From without?

The group calls me back to them…
and I am lost… again.

As I dug through a box of old photographs, I found with them old words.  These scribblings in a journal captured not who I appeared to be on the outside at that time, but rather, who I was in each of those moments in time–and perhaps better captured who I am.

Returning to these moments, I have played with words, combining the then with the now like an alchemist blending an elixir of life. Some of these appear below, some may fade in later through clouds of the past.

~Kathryn

Breaking Convention

“I don’t want to re-invent the wheel,” I hear him say and something long pushed down, stifled by polite conventions, wells up. I blink away the tears that respond to him for me. My hands grip the air, tightening inward.  My nails dig into the flesh of my own palms. I ache to let this thing out—to create my own wheel. Let it go flat or flounder, but let it be mine.  I do not care if it holds no more weight than the wheels around it or if it travels along ground traveled before.  Being mine, what it carries in that weight may be of different substance.  Being born after these others, the distance it covers may carry it to new ground. Or perhaps my wheel will have an entirely different shape.  The fact that a wheel exists, does not mean it is the best method for all travel. What is not yet seen in the blur of that spinning object?  The aching to break out of what is easy, tested, testable, is an aching to leave this safety.  I want to search, even if in so doing I become lost in the seeking. I outstretch my hand, yearning for that which is not within reach.

Leaving Praed St.,  London

Along the walk from Paddington Station to the hotel, the indoors spills out.  Building exteriors, rising tall and flat, oppose west and east sides of the street, at a stance so close they become halls. Their novelty shop closets spill out into this hallway their contents of Big Ben key chains, red double-decker bus salt-and-pepper shakers, tins of English breakfast tea, Buckingham Palace post cards, Tube-sign t-shirts, and desperately needed umbrellas.  All of these will be purchased impulsively, crammed into overstuffed luggage, emptied into excited welcoming hands, then stuffed back into a different closet 2,000 miles away from this cluttered street home. What is left in this exterior indoor-space fills with the noise of its occupants and the aromas of its kitchens. Occasionally, a cold gust of wind cascades down from above roof tops, the only remaining open vent to the sky.  The winds moan as they push and shove through the crowds that walk tightly packed—queued—from end to end north to south and south to north. Impatient wind disrupts carefully placed hair as it pushes through and cuts ahead in the line.  It upsets upright carousels of cards.  It sweeps clean discarded chip papers and ticket stubs.  Then, as the wind nears the station, it weaves in and out of the marginal gaps in the increasingly dense crowd.  This trespasser slips past the turn-styles without paying the toll or triggering the alarm.  Having fallen down the sinking stairs, the wind arrives ahead of the train.  It passes into the tunnel.  The train-doors open. Passengers crowd and cram.  The wind moves quicker now—forward and forward searching for the outside of this endless confinement. It calls out in ecstasy as it finds its way to an un-seeable union with the sky.

In the temporarily stilled air, the train departs, a new crowd pushes forward to wait, dropping more ticket stubs and paper wrappings onto the sidewalk-floor and closet doors open again to re-stock the hall that is left behind.