There had been a time when I lived over the sea in the dilapidated Spanish house next to a deep rincon.  I  lived my life in a holey skirt and unraveling sweater among weeds and wildflowers.  I sat in the shade of the carob bean trees beside the woody geraniums gone wild in the wasted garden.  I lived my ruined life far above the sea.  I had come to this place to live my ruined life.

With one tired eye open I lived in the same color all day… the smoothness of the navy blue sky and the mutable texture of the navy blue sea.  I focused on the thin horizon.  More than once, I had confused sky with sea.  Numb, I thought I would, perhaps, go mad in that blueness.  I had become that color of blue.  Had I cared to look into a mirror, I would have seen the fading flower of my blue face.  Had I looked over my shoulder for my footprints, there they would have been… blue in the dust.

Time began gliding with the fishing boats as they sailed out in the morning and  sailed back across the same sea in the late afternoon.  Later, the points of their lights  guided me from room to room as I had prowled sleeplessly through the long nights… my seamless days and nights of my ruined life in Spain.

For an hour each day I lay naked in the sun.  Content in my nakedness between the wall and the stunted, bitter orange tree, I no longer had worries… only I remained.  My life then, was nakedness, blueness, emptiness… and weariness… like the comfort of a worn slipper… I  never took off weariness.

There had been the long illnesses… there had been the great grief… there had been everything in between.   There had been the mother who had given me the gifts of sight and second sight… the mother who took me into the field to pick the wildflowers.  There had been the husband who silently covered me as I slept on the sofa in front of a fire fragrant from burning cherry wood.  There had been his hand on my forehead as he turned out the light.  There was his slow tread up the stairs… the creak of the bed… his sigh.  There had been the glow of the embers as the fire burned down for the night.  Late, deep into the winter, I  would turn on all of the lights.  I would throw on an old scarf and boots and walk out into the cold silence… listen for the crackle of the broken veneer of ice as I trudged around the house… the wisps of my frozen breath disappearing into the velvet midnight.  I would peer through the leaded glass windows and wonder about the three people who lived in that house… those people who nodded, smiled… had long conversations with each other by candlelight… remembered how they ate late summer suppers I had cooked for them in the garden of moonflowers softly lit with the flickering oil lanterns.  Once upon a time, I had lived a fairytale life.  I lived my fairytale life in a fairytale house with the pitched roof and the two towering trees.

There had been the mother.  There had been the husband.  There had been the woman with the fairytale life.  There had been the deaths… there had been the silence of her own epic sadness… and, then, there had been the dying of her fairytale life… the exquisite slowness of its bleeding to the end… drop by brilliant sapphire drop… and, then, there had been the woman with the ruined life and the Spanish house next to a deep rincon.

The poems began to write themselves in that house in ways that had nothing to do with time. The poems would be a parting gift from the woman with the fairy tale life to the woman with the ruined life.  She would have liked to say that they  flowed like honey from her heart and through her pen… but they did not.  They carved themselves into odd shapes of stones and pebbles, a little in the sun and, before she was aware, in the dark of night.  She held them in her hand. Some were heavy.  Some were light.  Some had clumsy patterns and some  sang a song only they understood.  She felt an old spirit in them that was hers, but not hers alone.

I would leave almost everything else behind, but I would take the stones with me when I left that house.  I would allow my fairytale life to take its leave.  That life would be a memory, often illusive and fading, but I felt the need for it no longer… only the memories of the people I had found in that life. I would  leave the life of the ruined woman behind, too, discarding it bit by bit on narrow, dusty roads across deserts and on a bridge in the pouring rain… on mountains that became clouds as they reached for life into the sky and next to the garbage floating in the open sewer until what was left of it was a distilled essence that was mine alone to keep.  I would meet other people in many unusual places. I would experience the unexpected and live through the mundane.  I would laugh out loud… give thanks for  joy when it came. I would know sadness again.  I would know the loss of love.  I would allow grief and take from it what I could… but I would steady myself and move forward, often more slowly than I expected, sometimes at lightning speed,  toward the unknowable… the impermanent.