from Leeore & I

Leeore & the Ear

That the ear may be revered, Leeore says, is a lovely thing. He has been reading Neruda. Oreja, he says. I think of two men I have loved, one of them my father, both with rather large ears. Long ears really, ears of longing, ears of magnitude, ears of empirical stature, sensible ears, saddish ears, ears that have been badly strained listening for a music that may not even be playing; seashell of an ear I wrapped carefully in a white t-shirt and carried inland; lamb’s ear I planted one spring, pruning come summer, deadheading in fall; horse’s ear in Vieques between tequila and coffee, between finger and thumb; ears to which I have tendered words and received little in return; but ears, glorious ears, lovingly lobed, offering a canal through which messages might be sent to the brain; and Lingfeng, my student from China, who has just sat in my overheated office for half an hour, speaking of how, when he was a boy, there was nothing that comforted him more than his mother touching his ears; warmth, he called it. Are you listening? Leeore asks. I am.

Leeore & the Orange Julius

The day is so beautiful that Leeore wants to wipe his face with it. He dares me to pluck all the oranges off the trees, to squeeze them and mix them with whatever it is that makes a Julius. But I have no hands. For a disembodied person, he says, you are certainly preoccupied with the physical. I long for the sun to press on me. Remember touching? I ask. And sweating? He says. That feeling of being too full? Licking the frosted blade of the knife? Pain, he says, remember pain? The wind blows but touches neither hair nor hide. Pleasure. Once, as a child, I cried so hard I fell asleep beneath a tree. How marvelous that little shaking body. How wet the face. How no one called me in for dinner. How bitter the crabapple, how divine.

Leeore & the Rabbit

Would you rather be the rabbit or the hat? Leeore asks. But I am happy being the elephant in the room, and she is happy being me. What big ears we have! And thighs! To say nothing of our fat, sad eyes. Leeore ties us to the chair; his whip lashes the air. Would you rather be the clock or the time? He asks. The worth or the dime? And so it came to be, that winter, when I checked the box which had no flag for letters which were never mailed, that I began to ponder my being as a ratherness, or rather, I came to ponder my ratherness as a being. Would you be to have rather have been? Leeore laughs: the future pluperfect is pluperfectly past. Would you have rather been being or having been being would you have rather had? The questions begin to make more and more sense. Pass the tulips, Leeore says, and I do. I am both the salt and the shoulder, the bad luck and the good.

Leeore & the Souvenir

I go to the desert. I return from the desert with chocolate made of camel’s milk. Here Leeore, I say, I have brought you chocolate made from the milk of a camel. Leeore sits in my metal folding chair and unwraps a square. Did you know, he says, that the earliest known camels were the size of rabbits and lived in the woodlands of what is now South Dakota? Leeore is always telling me things I do not know. I say, oh. There are many things to know. One year, when I was a girl, I lived on a reservation in South Dakota. My mother was very small and very depressed; afternoons, we split a single McDonald’s cheeseburger, and evenings, we fell asleep very early, sometimes making it through Wheel of Fortune but never through Jeopardy. The winter was very cold. I memorized my multiplication tables and looked at porn with the neighbor kids. One time, a woman with a very long knife stayed with us, and another time, driving back from Rapid City, we spun off the road in an ice storm. In those days, we were almost always nearly dying. But you lived, Leeore says. Yes, so it seems.