Nine Kinds of Lines

Crossing over to the other side with ink.

Imagine the Gaza strip.

It was the last line of the most beautiful bitter impossible heart breaking note I ever received. It was sent to me in a fit of rage and sadness and disappointment and truth-telling years ago after a terrible breakup. It was the sort of email you don’t come back from. It drew a line. It was twenty years ago. Imagine the Gaza Strip he said.

Forest Fire

That’s your Papa across the lake Mama says to me and my sister. I look out past the beach over the lake way in the distance and I am less than three and I can only see more lake. My Mama picks me up and I begin to see over the curve of the lake. Where the lake and sky meet she calls it horizon. But instead of a line there is a smudge. There. This is where Papa is helping fight the forest fires. Planes scoop water up from the lake and turn the fire into smoke. My sister and I and my Mama are all proud of this smudge.

Bomber

I am three with a string in my hand and dragging on the end of the string through the big city beside the Detroit River a beat up piece of rubber folded into a kind of boat-shape. It was once one of those balloons that are thick, a punch balloon sometimes coloured with a marblized pattern they come folded up accordion style and then when blown up are almost perfectly round and kind of boing out and back when you punch them because there is a big rubber band attached and that echoey drum sound and to a toddler they are big. Down there at sidewalk level and my ex-balloon followed me along observing everything from the level of streams at the side of the curb carrying dried leaves and sticks and cigarette butts now in rivulets down into the sewer drain and out into the river and down into the sea. I called it my bomber because of the water bombers that fight forest fires. A lifeline of string.

My Name is Name

I am twenty starring for my first (and last) time in a theatre production. I am playing a recluse in Andy Warhol’s factory called Billy Name. We cover every inch of the little theatre with tin foil and there is a band that plays velvet underground covers and everyone is a bit in love with the actor who plays Nico. Most of the play will be improvised. I have just have a single line to memorize: My name is name.

Decoy

The plastic duck (it was a mallard) came with a string and it was tough enough to be dragged everywhere and if you brought it to a lake it could have adventures not just pulled behind you but it could be launched out into the world. It was a kind of emissary, an extension of the self a quite noticer a scout unafraid of the deeper weedier waters. It could be pulled back in whenever you wanted. And how elegantly a duck floats out into the world skimming the surface of the mirror bobbing slightly but balanced. The green green lake. Mama laughing with a glass of wine on the grey dock overlooking the lake, Papa taking the picture of her with his box camera. The decoy and the child are out of the frame at the edge of the lake making concentric rings in the glassy water.