Lola Haskins Maggie Taylor

S o l u t i o n s B e g i n n i n g w i t h

M o d e r n b o o k E d i t i o n s

Pa l o A l t o

E D I T I O N S

S o l u t i o n s B e g i n n i n g w i t h

Shawn ColvinN

i n t r o d u c t i o n

Nw o r d s

Lola Haskins Maggie Taylor

i m a g e s

N

Fo r D’A rc y a n d D j a n g o , c h i l d r e n o f m y h e a r t

Lola Haskins

Fo r J e rry , m y g e n e ro u s a n d pat i e n t c o l l a b o r at o r

Maggie Taylor

D e d i c a t i o n s

Solutions. They come in many different forms. I sometimes think we forget that art can be a solution, whether it be musical, visual, or the written word. We can be guided by these things in a most wondrous way. And sometimes, there are solutions within solutions, a collaborative effort.

n It is fascinating to me how two independently composed works can synchronistically come together to create a whole new unique piece. Such is the case with Solutions Beginning with A. Most of Maggie Taylor’s striking montages and Lola Haskins’ ethereal stories were created separately and have found each other here in this book; perhaps, as some kind of preordained “solution.” I have personally experienced this particular kind of magic when a lyric I have written jibes perfectly with a piece of music I had nothing to do with. The end result seems “meant to be.” I believe these unions are rare and special.

n For a moment, cast aside your textbooks, your self-help gurus, and your journal. Open Solutions Beginning with A

and go on a mystical, glorious, and evocative journey with Maggie and Lola. Become part of the process. Find a solution. And then go on to “B.”

I n t r o d u c t i o n

S h aw n C o lv i n , 2 0 0 7

9

The lines of a ladder lean exactly into each other, linked by the thin shelf of what

they share. One exists for support, but the other may be climbed, with the caveat

that anyone considering the top had better be ready to dive, like closed scissors,

into a pool so far below it can scarcely be seen--an act only the experienced survive.

Most people consider the risk, then settle for reaching as if for grapes, from the next

rung down. But not us. Although we understand that the stars we see burned out

before we were born, we don’t care, we want them anyway, yearn up so hard that we

overstretch, and are perpetually in the throes of injury.

North

Th e C o m pa s s P o i n t s o f A

Aqua dove into the green water. At first it only blanked her face, the way a stocking pulled over the head can erase the wearer’s features. But soon her skin began to melt in deep blue clouds, the way a spring blossoms within a river. Then the connections between her bones dissolved and they, being hollow like a bird’s, were able to float for great distances.

n The first to be discovered was a thigh. A young man, walking disconsolate on the beach, saw it gleaming. Back in a bougainvillea-shaded room, his lover lay prone on their unmade bed. Tomorrow, they would carry home in suitcases and shrouded boxes what they had learned. The young man picked up the bone. Tiny shells jeweled its length but its inside was air. Not sweet like sand, nor even bitter like salt. He lifted it to his lips and his breath made a sound which, exiting from the thigh, turned into more than his own. In the bone he had found the instrument of his life.

n An old woman, early down, found the first star. She put it into her bucket. Continuing, she saw the sand this morning was scattered with stars, Aqua’s delicate vertebrae, then wondered about her own seeing, if such things had always been there on the beach. Afterwards, they lived like plants in a blue bowl on her windowsill. Sometimes she would take one out and carry it inside her mouth, to be sure she was still there.

n When the man climbed onto his partner, she lay quiet for him while the curls on his chest printed her bare stomach, her breasts. But then something under her back started to work its way upward through the sand. After that, however she arched, however much she desired it otherwise, there was always this thing under her telling her no. Finally, she pushed the man away. It was a perfect skull, Aqua’s skull. When she got home, she set a candle in the skull. It was more than light to her.

n And who can say. When you go walking on the edge, who knows what you may find of bones where stiff fish gape, where sticks and bottles meet. But understand. The small and beautiful drift slowly. Generations may pass before they reach the shore.

AquA

10

Adrian’s skin was the hole into which colors fall. She was the answer to the beginner’s question, what happens if I mix all these? She dressed in the black of her arms, otherwise shades of silver, accented by the dim red of planets seen from earth. She seldom came to the city, but lived on a hill, in a house the stars would flitter through at night. Sometimes they would be hungry and she would throw them crumbs from her dreams. Sometimes, when the moon went behind a cloud, they would multiply, and at dawn more would flurry up than had ventured down.

n At fifty, Adrian discovered a spot on the back of her hand, and a splotch like a little nebula just above the left side of her smile. With time, the spots became clusters. She named them: opal, abalone, trine. With Adrian as with others, it is known--such patterns mark the bits of skin which death has claimed for itself. But what they are made of is different for everyone. For some, they are shadow, as of sun through noon trees; for others, the escape paths of doubts that have worked their way from the inside like bots from eggs; for others, simply the dust which has splattered on the body from years of traveling. But Adrian’s were points of light. She had always been a place the stars could feel at home, and a sky has its own stars. But what hers were could not have been clear until now, not until her body had spent itself making them, bringing them to the surface the way carp rise, beautiful and hungry.

12

AdriAN

As a child, Amaya had thought that if only she could paste some stars and perhaps a crescent moon to her inner folds, then she could see the night sky each time she closed her eyes. But she had not known how to do this. Instead, she would rub at her bald skin with her fists, trying to gouge sparks. And sometimes, with enough pain would come red blue and silver streaks, never quite clear, like meteors trailing clouds. But even these did not last, and afterwards she would ache from the gouging and see the world through a haze of blood.

n Tonight there was no sky. Instead, it rained. The rain entered through Amaya’s zoris. It traveled up her legs, blacking her grey trousers, as though it were trying to match her body to the night that had come suddenly down, like a lid on a pot of boiling noodles. The street shusshed as cars passed narrowly, throwing up shiny arcs which fell into the downpour the way a river enters the sea, as if it had always intended this, though when it was high in the mountains the river had turned glassy and forgotten everything but the snow who loved it.

n Water seeped through the thin lashes of Amaya’s eyes. Beads of it shone in her porch lights as if she might string them across her collarbone, a necklace of tiny stones to clean one by one. She leaned her head back. Drops fell into her mouth, ran through her body. Rain claimed her shoulders too, and darkened her black shirt as if there were degrees of black, as if the middle of the night were only the beginning.

n Now Amaya found herself lifting from the ocean on wet wings. Under the water she saw noodle shops and trucks, tiny houses with paper walls. She saw the small woman she had been. She rose in wide circles until the ocean disappeared, and the cities under it. Then there was only cloud, then slowly one feathered tip emerged then the other, until she was flying through open glitter. Stars fixed themselves to remember her neck, her legs, her spread wings. Amaya is alive now, only in the sky. Children fold paper cranes in her memory, hang them on strings outside their doors.

14

AmAyA

Adah’s mother had closets of baby clothes, which she kept sorted by color, the azures and the roses and the sunlights together. When Adah was taken out, the chubby folds of her legs would end not in toes but in matching bootees or tiny tennis shoes or miniature Mary Janes, as if she were being carried to a dance. From her first remembered moment, Adah experienced the world around her--the dusty green of summer oak, the flame of Indian paintbrush--as if she were wearing it.

n Adah grew up to be an artist of the skin. She knew where the blank spaces on her canvas should be, the parts of her body through which birds might flutter freely, the rests for the ears between notes, the harbors for the eye, weary of beating into the wind. She knew also that the body is music. She wanted to craft a concerto so unforgettable that someone who’d wandered into the hall by mistake, having to be somewhere else, and soon, would remember her all his life, so that she would wend its way into his soul or, more accurately, emerge, since she would never have left, at moments when he thought himself alone. At such times there would be a flash of green light as the music settled into the horizon, followed by softening rose, then a blue for which he had no name but peace, spreading like wind dying on the waves.

n Adah meets a woman holding a steaming cup. From this woman Adah learns how kissed coffee can blaze the throat, how the right pinot can turn the mouth edgy, how yellow crumbs will not stay put but insist on lingering on the lips. And now her curious art begins a slow delicious stretch, down through her skin into the organs her body keeps covered. She encounters her intestine, her liver, her contented heart. And pedalpoint enters her repetoire. And with it, force, as what is unseen impels the more, like weather building from the west, like the jet stream that speeds a plane to Boston where it lands, the lone aircraft on its runway, on a day so cold that words shatter as they hit the air, and should you cry, your lashes would turn brittle, and break from your eyes.

16

AdAh

n Adah moves in with the woman--Adah with her gauzy skirts like wavy-tailed fish, her blouses like no-moon-black fish or fish with fire-yellow gills. And underneath her skirts uncountable restless fish, new minnows every dawn to make up for those the ones had been taken in the night. And though this woman never sings herself--her small grey voice walks crippled--she informs Adah’s every note, covered or naked, sotto or soaring. Adah’s skin is lit from inside now, like a house seen from a distance across a dark road, in which someone is kissing someone else, kissing so long and so sweetly that the whole house first glows, then shines, then lifts away.

18

A dA h c oN t i N u ed. . .

When she was little, Anemone would skip along the beach in front of her house singing I am the Sea

Queen, I am the Sea Queen. When she started school, the minute her mother’s homecoming car stopped rolling, she would be away down the long comma of sand, her head bent as if the coastal wind that changed the trees were blowing now.

n Anemone kept in her room hundreds of shells. Some were twinned--those were her wings. Some were jagged and single--those were her tempers. The bites at the edges were the moments she stamped her feet. The night she was thirteen, Anemone dreamed she had killed every creature whose house she owned, pried the muscles loose that tried to hold on. But there was never any blood, and none of the soft bodies had entered her mouth, had swum even for a moment in that red cave with its veiny lights.

n Anemone’s hair drifted around her face, so blonde it was almost green. Her skin was cool, smooth, translucent as bare nacre. It never browned, never even tinted the way glasses, looking lightward, turn dark. One day she saw a stubble-jawed boy watching her as his hand lingered across the top of his bathing suit. Walking on the littered beach that afternoon, she noticed a new kind of shell, gnarled and twisted on the outside. The beautiful spit inside the shell was turning moldy at the edges.

n For days Anemone had watched the hurricane on the news, hotter and hotter as it approached the coast. Now the wind was up, and her hair was frizzling from her scalp. She was told to leave. Her mother and father had already gone. She’d sworn she’d follow, she wanted to bring her car out. Instead she went upstairs.

n She remembers floating without will. She can still hear the fish calling each other, the breaths of loosely-opening flowers on the black ocean floor. She remembers the pull of the root that kept her from floating away from here, where it was safe, upward towards the killing light. Her mouth opens and closes, soft as a kiss. Bright fish, entranced, swim in.

20

ANemoNe

22

AristA

When Arista came home from work, the box was there, leaning against her door. It was nothing she’d ordered. What if it exploded as she split the slick brown tape and pried it open with the same knife she’d stood behind her ex-husband with, having just cut an onion into little teary squares. She’d stood there for some time before she’d lowered the knife to her side.

n The box said Handle with Care, Human Eyes. Arista set it on the kitchen table, poured a glass of scotch. She looked at the wood-wormy cabinets, and dingy counters, scratched as if by a vengeful cat.She opened the pantry door and considered the shelves of cans, many already rusted and bulging. What the hell, she thought. So she took the knife (she still thought of Adam every time she used it), and slit the lines where the tape showed weakness, carefully so as not to puncture what might be inside. She prized open the carton’s cardboard arms.

n And there, shrink-wrapped on a nest of shreds sat a pair of eyes, whites bright as shells circling deep violet centers. She uncreased the booklet tucked underneath and spread it flat. How to Install, the booklet began. The instructions were longer than they looked. By the time she finished reading, it was full dark, and the view of the alley with its perpetual stink of garbage had been replaced by Arista’s face in the black glass.

n Remove the old eyes and discard. Arista got the trick in that. With both eyes out, how could she see to put new ones in? She decided to do the left first. The instructions had not specified a tool, but the melon scoop seemed right. She had a small one, just the thing for cold salads when you were in a hurry. Using this, she carefully removed the eye. The replacement popped neatly in. It was dizzying. If she shut her right eye, the lines around her mouth smoothed and vanished, its corners lifted, and something sweetened the kitchen air as if birds sang outside, not sobbing like owls but joyful, the sort of outpour she remembered from when she was twenty, waking among mountains, in love with her own visible breath.

n But if she opened the right eye too, she found herself riding a tilt-a-whirl which no one would stop, so she spun and sickened, sickened and spun until her life spilled out green and still she spun. She shivered and took up the scoop. This one was harder. The root pulled against her, and she had to cut it loose with the knife.

n But finally she got it out, and both eyes stared buried from the trash. She did not relax until she heard the pre-dawn banging of the pick-up men, carrying them away.

n Adjusting to Your New Eyes. From this section, Arista had gathered that adjustment would take some time. This turned out to be true. The problem wasn’t work. She floated through that, explaining the change of eye color as contacts. But at first the perfumes disconcerted, the way they’d shift without warning from balsam to patchouli to something else, and back again. And Arista found it hard to get used to the way her skin felt perpetually stroked, as if any touch could send her over the edge. Then there were the songs. Arista spent evenings writing them down, her pen drifting beyond her across the pages spread on her shiny kitchen table.

n Whose gift was this? She wrote UPS. But her letter arced across the country and disappeared. She tried the telephone. A recording said, press one, which she did, but no operator ever came on the line. Finally she decided on Chance. She said it out loud every morning Thank you, Chance, and every dawn fell fresh in love with the white clouds that came out of her mouth.

24

A r i s tA c oN t i N u ed. . .

She had northern skin and a heart curled to keep warm. One spring, traveling, she met an island man who smelled of soft mud, like the bottom stems of marsh grass in receding tide.

n He used to moan her name across the waters. In response, she’d gather tighter the small white jealous shells she couldn’t give him, hold them like sharp babies to her chest.

n One three o’clock they went downtown. He took her arm, and in the heat they passed from square to square. Finally, they reached the river. Over the way loomed a dry-docked boat, a black freighter with many decks and a foreign name. His index finger traced her skin from elbow to wrist. She shivered like the worked boat’s hull. And suddenly she wanted to let the shells of possession fall, all the white fans of them in tiny clatters to the ground.

n But outside Alabaster’s window the snow had flurried all night, all night. It lay heavy as burial against her door. Trapped inside, she picked up a shell and touched it to her tongue. She tasted salt, the sweet sex tang of fish. She put the shell away, closed the lid of her basket, and left him sitting there.

26

AlAbAster

She works the A’s point against the seam that joins the pages. She throws the cover

and binding threads away. She climbs the flights of the fire tower, one hand on the

rail, the other holding close the baby of her work. The steps are steel but slender

and as she ascends, the staircase sways, like a woman’s hips keeping time. The wind

turns sudden, huh, huh trying to separate her from her book, but she holds on. If she

looked down, she would see her crumpled roof, the continents of rust on her car’s

blue top. If she looked across, she would see a faint thumb of smoke, where someone

is burning trash. But she is looking up.

n At the last step, she lets the pages go. They arc, they sail, they waft, part

handkerchief, part genoa, part something she can’t yet describe. Then she turns

aside to watch the miles of trees for flame. When she finishes her shift, she climbs

down and picks up what she finds. She’s leaving her story to the air. It may end in

the middle now. It may never end. But it’s hers, and she holds it in her hands.

31

Th e C o m pa s s P o i n t s o f A

West