that. 27, 28, and 29
were the golden years, she was just a normal age, regular, the past
sometimes welling up and breaking like blisters, one wipes up the
ooze and goes on, reading books, watching television, taking walks,
called cunt and pussy, followed home nights, but not once raped or
beaten, she had known she would have to pay for those golden years.
God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and
still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her
30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss,
bertha schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that
pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the
kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.
so in her 30th year bertha had found herself bereft of milk, fish,
and eggs, and all she could afford was cake wrapped in plastic, her
teeth began to go. her friends had already left, all secularists, when it
was writ they obeyed.
bertha had never had any money to speak of but her friends had
been pure gold, the best of every generation, the ones who stopped
wars, the ones who wrote the poems of their time, the ones who held
hands and treasured single daffodils while decadence raged all
around, the ones who were not waxen and false, the ones all those
others could not destroy, the ones police could not police, corruption
could not corrupt, bitterness could not embitter, the ones on whose
hands dirt was clay, not mud. but in her 30th year, God had struck
again, and she had fallen from grace, which is something like doing
a somersault and missing the floor, she kept falling and falling and
falling until she lost even the memory of solid ground.
bertha had learned a few things in life, exactly 3. 1—every Up is
followed by a Down. 2—every Down is followed by an Up, but you
have to live long enough which, depending on how down the Down
is, can be tough and is not a foregone conclusion. 3—Disembodied
Wisdom is the only lover who doesnt get seasick on the curves and
take the easy way out.
bertha had courted Disembodied Wisdom assiduously. Disembodied Wisdom, not nearly as formidable as it is cracked up to be, had given in, lured perhaps by the rhythmic certainty of berthas
tragic sense of life, bertha had had, to be frank, carnal knowledge,
like light through a window pane, bertha, pregnant from the union,
had given birth in a profane world where dog shit and the urine of
drunks and junkies were the only available sacraments, now,
bloodied from delivering the divine fruits of her unique fuck to a
fairly indifferent world, bertha looked around for that one lover detached enough not to run. gone. Disembodied Wisdom had fled, just as Warren Beatty might have. lost, like light through a window pane.
lovers, friends, dust unto dust, dust clings, bertha sneezes, dust
doesnt take kindly to sneeze, dust scatters, bertha calls after it. dust,
what can it answer?
the others are dust and what is bertha? more dust, but bertha
doesnt trust dust, she knows herself, she knows the others, chaos,
craving, dust has its own laws, dust is inconstant, dust hurts the eyes,
dust can sweep up in huge gusts, suffocate, inside the nostrils, blinding the eyes, choking the throat, dust
