Katz and Besthoff

I found a little pharmacy bottle in an antique shop
And I made the man keep it for me behind the counter because I didn't want to buy into it

It's glass, circa 1920 K&B and the tag said "very rare"
I didnae care because it was all very rare for me to be in the FQ at all and so I bought it and paid a very rare price.

I think I like little old glass bottles because they are deliberate and delicate. For all I know someone took all the contents of my little bottle all at once and thus opposing ended. Such a consummation. 

The real story is probably more or less interesting.

and I promise you, I'll lay on the floor in the dark with you if that'd be good. Sometimes that's the only way to know what we are. I will be your pinhole of light if you'd be mine.


 I'll hold my empty bottle and think on its life in a medicine cabinet in New Orleans in August. That must be what Hell feels like.

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Oct. 4th (or, Turning Darkness into Light)

On this day, 27 years ago
I was born.

I was born 5 weeks too early to a 27 year old woman.
Ever since I've been trying to figure out the balance.

I was born a Libra, but I should have been a Scorpio, and it shows. I vacillate. My mood will bottom out, I'll tumble down. I pick up, and I skyrocket. I can find balance, but I'm constantly teetering.

Twenty six was a big year for teetering. Whereas at twenty five I was very (overly) focused on self actualizing (move out of the city! Plan a wedding! Go to graduate school! Start planning for the future! It has pensions!) 

I succeeded at one of those things. I did more teetering than anything else.

I teetered a lot on who I am, and what that means. How do I define myself? Where does my skin end and the outside world begin? Have you ever watched the light dance just above your skin in the morning? Am I the light? Is the light here because I see it?

 I gained many friendships and perspectives out of my 26th winter. I started to realize some things that initially worried me about myself. I'm not as ready to settle as I thought. I have so much wandering still in my soul. I think I always will. I'll always need that little vardo in my mind. I'll always need to wonder, I'll always need to spend a month drinking whiskey on a fire escape unable to name the feeling inside me. 

I feel that this past year, I've gotten to know and love some people I've always known and loved, in the most "woo-woo" sense of the phrase. I will not deny the spooky thoughts, the fatalist in me who believes in cycles. I felt it when I visited Ireland with my father, re-creating a trip he had done with my mother while she was pregnant with me (27 years ago, now). And isn't life beautiful, and strange?

I suppose it all comes back to that "Am I an adult now?" thing. I want, so badly, for there just to be a switch. A switch that makes me whole, or something. It's the "adult switch". It's when I'm satisfied, when I have the answers (I don't even fully understand the questions). It's where I'm the rock, and not the sea beating against it. I want there to be a switch that takes me out of the dark.

I am starting to let go of that idea. That I'll ever be an "adult" per se. I can, more importantly, be a person. I can be humane. I can be understanding. I can be forgiving. I am a masterpiece of stardust. I am a beautiful, natural machine. I am the sum of my experience. I am terror, I am grace. And so are you. 

Happy birthday to me, and to you. Because we all have one day, when we became little lights where there used to be dark. 

<3 

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Hello, I'm Your Auntie

Hello to you, Maynard.
You weigh less than my Dad's cat.
You eat two ounces of formula, then fall asleep on me.
Your eyes are shaped like your mother's, and you can only see
in black and white, I learned that in school
You're one month old.

Hello little person, little friend.
My name is Catherine Cecile, you know the last name because we share it
And I am your father's big sister.
Grandpa's daughter, and I know even
less about the world now
Than when I was as new as you.

Hello sweet child, hello small life.
I am sorry you never got to meet your m�m�re
But, it's like your father says
She is in the garden, she's in the sun that warms your face
You already squint like your father and uncle and aunties.
She loves you because we all do.

Hello to you, Maynard.
I loved you even when you were
Kicking my palm as I laid it on your mama's belly.
I don't know much, but I do know that.


I'm so pleased to meet you,

Love,

Auntie

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Not Normative

I've always lived in a funny place socially.

I think everyone has multiple personae, but mine are ripe with disparity. 

But, what has always been, and continues to be the most pervasive and insinuating is just this;

I'm not normative.

I also don't feel queer enough, or straight enough. I don't feel like a bachelor and I don't feel like fine, American Wife Material. I don't feel discordant enough, I don't feel distant enough. Nor am I on your wavelength, smiling, holding your hand. I can't whisper "I know", but I will sit across the room from you and nod. I'm always on the goddamn fence. 

Sometimes I feel like my heart is too wild and it will get the better of me. One day I'll disappear into one of it's whims. Sometimes I'm so filled to the brim with something, some fixation, a thought I feel like I'll burst with it. I give in so the pounding stops.

Lately all I have been able to do during the week is drag myself home after work and hide in my bedroom, I've been so exhausted. I'm doing the bare minimum, really. There are days I do fine, and there are other days where I have to put all my energy into the show.

I suppose we all feel that way though.

 

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On alone

It's a too-warm evening in NYC, and while walking to the train, a friend says;

"I get tired of being alone."

And it struck me that "alone" is something I used to be quite paralyzed of, and now I find a sort of beatific solace in it.

Alone is different from lonely. From lonesome.

I think when I say alone, I actually mean "through my eyes". I'm sure immediately that makes no sense. 

It's just that, there is no one else who will interpret the stars in the sky the way I do. No one feels the same vibrations in their throat when they sing. These are the things we create and experience when we are alone with ourselves. It is how I recreate the world, it is how I build my story.

I love having time for others, I wind them into my tapestry. This summer, I'm seeing the little flecks of gold, the little flecks of red even being woven in. Coriander, poppy red, surprising colors, scented even. 

I tried to convey these things on a too-warm night, and of course my words jumbled and my jadedness blocked my way. Cause I'm really just a kid, wrapped in a cloak, staring up at the sky.

My friend replied;

"Alone is a strange word."

I should have said "Yes."

But I don't remember if I did.

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Learning by Ear

It's easy to laugh at myself and my little
Fits of faith

Because every once in a while I open my eyes, smile,

And I think about Learning by Ear.

When you fiddle, you're not looking to be a virtuoso. Pouring over musical books, the circle of fifths playing round and round your brain.

you're just learning tunes. 

They're simple.

 It's patterns, it's harmony. It is something you feel, it reverberates through you.

I try to be patient - I know I am learning a language.

My teacher's strong voice speaks slowly for my stumbling. I repeat, eek out what she's said. You learn when to come in. You learn how to join the cacophony.

Some of the clearest, proudest moments of my life came when I first coaxed sound from my instrument. When my shaky, tinny, flat little rented voice slowly started to intone, then to chant

And now, every now and again, there's a song. There's music.

Learning by Ear is just that. It's listening, and that is a dying art.

We do so poorly at truly LISTENING to one another. And this is where we misunderstand. If I really listen to you, I can learn your language. I can learn your subtext. I can learn when you're sad. I can effectively learn the cadence, the music of you. 

I might not like it, but that does not mean you are not beautiful. That you are not art. That you are not worth listening to.

I am a silly, wordless jig.

And perhaps you are a Leonard Cohen song.

You can learn us both if you listen.

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Post 25 (One Day When I'm Older)

It seems that
Once I reach the far corner of my day
I curl up in it, and a bit more life bleeds out

Just a bit.
I think this happens to us all; on an exhale
In a look, at the bottom of a glass

And I'm left wondering as I feel
The slow burn of summer, the long days marking me

I'm burning and bleeding, these things are all figurative and somehow
It makes it worse, sort of.

I've always been better with the pain you can feel and see
The pain in your muscles, the pain on your skin.

But the nagging pain in my soul
What do I do to cool that?

I feel myself prickle, I feel myself get angry
Because my mind will not be made up
I make big, hacking strokes at my psyche

I'm sure that does nothing to catch the life
Where it dribbles, unused, spilled.
I'm always spilling, but for the occasional fit of splendor

I'll drink it in, I'll be drunk on it
Careening on something I'm afraid to examine too closely
 But one day I won't be
When I stop worrying at it

One day when I'm older.

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Sacred vs Spectacle

Earlier today I was frustrated by the fact that the trains had stopped running during rush hour in New York City. Exasperated, I cursed under my breath, and told the internet masses that I was going to buy a fucking bicycle, since I couldn't trust the MTA.

I was promptly alerted that trains were suspended due to a suicide 4 station stops from where I live. 

I did not feel sad, at first. That was what alarmed me. At first I felt a swell of anger, which was quickly doused with a wash of apathy.

Apathy. And that's when I broke down. 

Somebody fucking died. Somebody was so sad they through themselves in front of an elevated train, and their body parts littered the street below. It's apparently all over twitter, which is disgusting. 

It's disgusting because you take pictures of fireworks. Or of your friends at a party. Some sweet moment. 

What business have we taking photos of spectacular deaths? Someone is heartbroken tonight. Someone is weeping because of what happened today. And you put their broken body all over the internet.

What is sacred?

But should I even have the gall to speak on it? My first reaction was marked indifference. 

I watched my mother die; death is not pretty. It is a part of life, but how sad, how broken does one have to be to actually seek it in such a way? This person felt like they couldn't take that train home. They couldn't take that train anywhere. 

I probably shouldn't feel so fucked up by this, but I do. 

I'm feeling fucked up from my own, creeping apathy. How long until it eats me? Will it? Am I ever going to look for the train? Will you?

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You must laugh

I had to make the trip home to New England, heart in my throat 

hearts are the most contradictory organ. They're so delicate. They break at the drop of a word. Yet they will pump (albeit, mayhaps, arrhythmic) for 90 years straight. From womb to tomb.

But my heart floats when I run through the front lawn, through the backyard

It warms when I see my little (big, they're all taller than me now) siblings.
And we can sit around a fire pit, the firelight washes the gray from my hair
And the pain from our faces, and for a moment I see
The wisps of children we were
For a moment my father's hair is dark again
And my mother sits next to him in the shadows

For a moment, I'm eighteen again
And I've never lived in New York
And I've never had a sexual partner
And I've never been truly sad

and I was ripe with hope.
I'm still ripe with it

But a bit more cautious (ly reckless)

For now I'm just glad all our hearts are beating in time, they say:
I love you I love you I love you

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I guess we're all just dust in the end

This is a picture of where I spent the majority of my Tuesday evenings after school. It is also where I spent my Sunday mornings. 9 AM, like a suburban cuckoo clock, I went to church.

The priest always loved the Corbetts, good Catholics, four kids, the perfect number for altar serving. Some family would always flake, they'd be short a wine pourer or cross bearer. But we'd be there. With our pale blue eyes. Little white Irish Catholic ghosts. My siblings all were blonde when they were younger, all except me. I've always been a bit darker.

 We would fight over who got to ring the bell. The bell was the best job. It was the only one where you got to make noise.

After church, we would go to Dunkin Donuts (which I still go to, every morning). We'd go visit my mom's parents. They had 8th grade educations and could speak French, but they were Qu�b�cois. They hardly talked about it that I remember. They had an old attic where there were photos from the War. Most of the people in the photos were dead by the time I saw them, covered in dust.

So are my mother's parents. They've been gone almost ten years now. 

My youngest brother was baptized here. We all had our first communions here too. I didn't get confirmed into the church. My mother gave me the choice, I was sick of wandering around the graveyard while she taught CCD to the younger children, so I opted out.

My mom's buried here now, and sometimes I wander that graveyard and I remember my petulant teen self. I was so sure of everything, I was so sturdy. My mother was in the church basement, talking about Mary. Now she's in the ground beneath my feet. Dust.

They had her funeral at St. Stephens in South Attleboro. Where my brother was baptized. Where we rang the bell. Where I had first communion and confession.


 And now the church is dust. 

 It happens to us all.  
   

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Ophiuchus and Orion, Libra and Scorpio

Orion was a hunter. Though I am not quite sure what he hunted for, really. What are hunters but pursuers, people of wild thought and mind?

He was hubris, and angered Gaia when he threatened to hunt down everything, and so she sent a scorpion to dispatch him. 

Ophiuchus, the snake charmer, revived Orion with an antidote. This is why he stands halfway between the Archer Orion and the Scorpio. Good friends, those two. But what sort of antidote?

I don't know if I've said, or you know, but I was born 5 weeks early. I should have been born 'round Dia De los Muertos, I should have been a Scorpio, but I was born a Libra, fighting and a cord around my neck.

And I see in myself the trepidation, the delicate balance, the diplomat, dance of Libra, but as I grin in the mirror I see the mood, the bile, the passions of Scorpio. Torn in two, I look up at my favorite constellations.

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Swell and Ebb

I'm falling back into routine. It's remarkable how Pavlovian I'll let myself be. Days bleed into one another, wounds that don't hurt or heal.

Yesterday I visited a friend and her new baby. 16 days old. That kinda new baby. My friend was tired, so I let her take a nap while I held that tiny new human. 

I forget sometimes that babies are the beginnings of people. Neonates especially. The baby fell asleep in my arms, and I found myself just watching, somewhat impassively. 

And then I felt one of those heart pangs that take you by surprise.

It wasn't my "biological clock". Mine doesn't tick. Perhaps it needs to be wound (clock needs to be wound and a wound that doesn't heal)

...I looked at that baby and I thought about all the sadness she will have to experience. All the parts of the human condition. Cause' she's not quite "human" yet; she has never known the dark inside us. 

And then she seemed impossibly beautiful. This perfect little life in my arms. She is living, breathing potential.  

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Catalyst Rex

I've been many things.
Catastrophe. Catatonic. 

But for now, I'm Catalyst.

Made of cogs and feathers, shots of whiskey. Strings pulled tight and bits of leather.

.

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Orion's Belt

In the morning it's still a little cold, but it's bright
Even squinting I see the water's the same gray blue as my eyes which
Widen
As my body bristles in the breeze and I want to curl up back in 
The dark little vardo
And wrap myself in memory, grin.

Instead I brace myself and stare at the pier and think
"this is the last time you'll see this pretty pier, you're going to fly back to New York in no time, and this breeze will be replaced with that of the Q train shuttling you home"

I feel my self grumble with the thought, and my mind instead turns to red solo cups on worn wood planks, silks in trees, Orion's belt,toes in the sand, and Cool Hand Luke. The heron that scolded, and I just laughed and laughed til I stumbled back to my little gypsy wagon, pitch black and I felt the hush and rush.

And with that I can grin. We're all travelers of some kind. We enter, we exeunt. But I will not concern myself with the end of the play.

And so my pale eyes reflect back the water, and I stretch up towards Orion's belt,my fingertips smell like a kretek, perhaps Orion thinks of me when he smokes a djarum. He's there, with a slim waist of stars, even though I can't see him in the sunrise.

My fingertips graze the cusp of morning and I whisper prayers of thanks that my wings are not clipped.

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Yearly letter-5

Hi Mom,

You know it's been five years now. Five years have passed, and I still don't have very many tears, I think it's because I lost so many when I lost you.

My tears never fill up like they used to. Remember how I used to cry all the fucking time? I can't really cry anymore. 

But it will sneak up on me once in a while, in a gesture or a smile. In something outstandingly beautiful in nature, or dancers' grace. I remember all those hours you spent at the studio before I could drive, the time you added all the little flowers to my collar in the corps de ballet, even though the whole point is to be the same. Thank you for that. For the flowers. When I did my little piece in the back of the corps, they whispered to me "you're beautiful"; of course that was you, wasn't it?

Spring's here now, even though it's supposed to snow on Monday. Every year I wait for Spring for you. There's that chance to feel reborn, though it's bitter, ridden with the cycle of time. Time doesn't give a rat's ass for my whinging, and so it passes, so I seem to get farther and farther away from your memory. I used to be able to draw your face with my mind's eye. That's fading now. That's why I wish I saw more of you in my face. 

Sometimes I look in the mirror, and I don't really know my own face. Although

This year on the Ides, something got made. The part of the making I did, I dedicate to Claude.

Its pictures.....

but it's also me   

of some sad boy

And that makes it also you.
And also Dad.
And everything I've felt and known.
And how I feel about not knowing.
It's all very strange and beautiful, this living. I'm not quite sure if I'm doing it right, but I feel like I'm going somewhere.



Dave and I are getting hand-fasted in May. That's a fancy way of saying "hippie married". You'll like it.





                                 I miss you.

                                       Love always,

                                                  Cat 


PS-(All the photos here were taken by Marc Schreiner, in Brooklyn NY) 

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Ornaments

There is nothing wrong with being an ornament.

I do not always need to be important, in fact 

I relish sometimes that I am a take it or leave it proposition.

You might take my hand and carouse with me for the instant. We run through the woods, or smoke cigars on a bridge, we finger paint with tempera, or watch a seisun, we could drink coffee late at night.

And that 

Is all you need do. You don't even have to think about or consider it afterwards

Just enjoy our space in the moment.

There's a certain beauty in the unimportant

I cherish being without gravitas

The older I get it seems the more the anchor weighs

But oh how I love the ill planned adventure

I'm learning again how not to plan

And how to let the pieces fall

And smile through it cause

There's so much beauty in not knowing what comes next

When it's not in your hands, since, really, is it ever?

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Pierrot

I woke up and found myself in March again.

Again, scratching my head, with the wringing of my hands over the Ides. I slip gently, gently into the bath of fond remembrance, lukewarm now as time passes.

I feel the hollow, it spreads from my throat down to my heart and it will congeal there until the Ides. My jaw tight with the filaments of shock that reverberate, reminding me of my sister hushing me in a sterile, sterile room. My mother looking first blue, then small and pale, like Pierrot.

When I was younger, I flipped, fascinated, through my mother's photo albums. Looking at a person who was but also was not her. I stumbled across that young woman covered in white face and a black skull cap.She's doing her best Sarah Berhardt, her eyes rolling wistfully to the ceiling somewhere in the 70s. 

And I remember how her eyes lit as she told me of Pierrot and how she loved him. 

I loved those photos, my mother's face drawn but full of life.

And here I am, looking in the mirror. I think about the Ides and I think about the sad clowns in the world, and I cannot help but smile. I laugh even.  

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genuflect

I am learning to honor all of my pieces. 

I am a veritable mishmosh. 

I am wildly innapropriate, I am also seminal in the formation of young minds (seminal not in the semen way; see?)

I laugh when I'm in pain, I cry when I see remarkable beauty (or when I'm forgotten).

I will be a funny little wife living a full life.

Devoted to my Dave, dangling from fabric, commiserating in classrooms,creating a world out of musty costumes and wit every summer, pressing my cheek against the wood-grain of the floor. I am all of these things and perhaps more.

A cog, a sprocket, a bird escaped from the cage.

Never owned, never tamed.


 

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Why'd you cut it

I think

My short hair makes me look younger. I know that is only because the last time my hair was so short

I was sixteen years old, that's ten years now, and my mother loved my pixie cut. It became synonymous with her definition of me, for better or worse, her oldest child. Small, soft, light. 

January 29th 2013 would have been her 54th birthday.

This was her last birthday gift to me. A copy of Colette's "The Vagabond", as she had always viewed me as such. Wandering in the grocery store as a little girl, wandering the streets of New York City as a 21 year old.

Happy Birthday Mom.

Love, for always,

Your Vagabond.

 

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Small and Awash

D'ya ever feel cognizant of how you're such a little cog
In a great, big wheel of a machine?

See, I've always felt it. I've always known I'm this little bit in a greater whole, but it took me a long while to figure out how I worked. Why I worked.

And I've been feeling slightly warped, off kilter, off my alignment. 

Which is something, I think, I've always been and felt.

And it's neither good nor bad. I place no judgement on my cog in the machine.

But that doesn't stop me from thinking; what happens if I break? 

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Life near the panic button

I was really proud of myself for blogging pseudo-regularly. They say it takes three weeks for one to attend to an actual routine. So I'll blame hubris. C'est la vie.

I suppose I could give a laundry list of December. Accepted into graduate school. Loans commence. Ran the 10k. Did quite well. Can't run half marathon. Signed up for another half marathon.

And....I fit the dress.

Strange thing, to see it fit. It did not fit me in high school. 

Stranger still to watch my dad's face at seeing a specter; half of him, half of her. Crinkly and white and blooming outwards after being trapped in a box for so long.

Strangely enough, I struggle thinking about changing it. My father's memories of his first wedding are warm and fuzzy and perfect. It was more than 20 years ago. If I change the dress- one of the last pieces of her, untouched by actual marriage and all that it was fraught with- do I change the memory? Do I dilute it in some way? It's ridiculous I know, but these are things I wonder.

Things are moving along swimmingly, but there's always the grim fiscal realities. New ones. I'm really, very, tired. I cannot work more than I do, and function. Even still, I'm wringing my hands knowing there is so much I cannot effect no matter how I scream or kick at time that doesn't care. You cannot help who you love, and sometimes, you can only help them so much. Creeping back from the edge is hard for me. I have the lackadaisical tendency to leap full out, headlong, into the fray. 

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