THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

The sky remembers her best. It has, after all,  observed her every moment  filing them away in the archive of the clouds It remembers her crawl which she performed  sitting upright  gliding on her tush like Sportin’ Life. It remembers the Betsy Wetsy doll that she doted on The blindfolded grope around  to pin the tail on the birthday donkey It remembers her banging on the drum skin of a frying pan with a wooden spoon  Through the grin of a wide-open winter window To greet the New Year The second that it arrived As Guy Lombardo’s orchestra played  A clarinet-tipsy Auld Lang Syne from the Waldorf Astoria on the Dumont TV. It remembers her lacquer black Mary Janes Which landed on the lunar surface Of Daddy’s shoes When he danced with her at weddings Like they had been partners for their entire life. It remembers the measles and the mumps.  The pastry pilgrimage of Aunts and Uncles Who swung their Saturday night Entenmann boxes Like string-tied church...

  When I think of her she’s not the discarded old lady asterisk lying in the ICU swatting away nightmares  like dive -bombing hornets as darts of Florida sunshine pierce through the body armor of shuttered metal blinds like a burst of machine gun fire in an old Cagney film. She’s my sister from the 1950s who looked like the girl on the label of the Fox’s U-Bet jar dressed like an Ideal doll in smoothed-down taffeta and buckled-up Mary Janes her hair tamed like a pony’s mane her eyes the size of silver dollar pancakes her profile a perfect hollow-cut silhouette her smile a silent dispatch sent to our father in the secret cryptography of daddy’s little girl heartbeats Whose syncopated beep...beep...beep sound like the mechanical ventilator that is trying to keep her from flying far, far away here in the ICU.

Grief does not creep up on you like a stealthy infant  on the wings of palms and knees  It comes at you like  a sudden attack on the serengeti or a full blast hose on a peaceful protest which exiles you to the dreamscape of The Great Somewhere Else Where light cannot breathe Music cannot see And fear spreads like weeds In a flower bed that can no longer recall  The hospitality of the wind  Until perhaps in a year  or so once the final step has been taken  You emerge with older eyes  And a chrysalis heart Whose wounds  have grown membranes as fine as fairy wings which will tear however briefly whenever we feel the presence  of the lost who are as impossible to hold as a butterfly.