Helen Powers Glimpses

[unlimited sink]

one so once we nibbling at cups

and haven’t since so simply haircuts

Helen looks up from her old Smith-Corona and repeats the words she’s just typed with her long, ink-stained fingers. The typewriter is no affectation—she’s never gotten used to the computers and word-processing machines of the world she’d returned to in 2008, at least not when composing. And handwriting reminds her only of where she’d been in the interim and that’s something Helen cannot abide.

Her pronunciation is painfully slow and yet her voice has a searching, melodious strength that transforms the awkwardness of tempo. Not that it matters—no one is listening to her. It is as if she is hearing the words for the first time. The O’s and S’s roll around one another, see-sawing back and forth as if pitched about on the deck of a ship caught in high seas. And then there are the N’s which permit such slackness, that give the lines their elastic stretch—with the I’s and H’s sneaking into the dance of the tone colors.

Helen repeats the lines again and again, almost entranced, listening to them in the quiet of her new apartment located on the delightfully named Eggplant Alley in downtown Sacramento. It’s been a week since her arrival, since the big men she’d hired helped move her things into this second-floor walk-up. At her age, one needs help with such things. And besides, the men had proved wonderful company, warm and funny, constantly teasing one another and laughing loudly. By the end, each and every one of them were calling her ‘Grandma.’ She’d even missed them when they’d gone, at least at first, and in truth not very deeply. Helen does not mind being alone.

again books due books lightly blooded

and ground to what sweet Helen green

These lines interrupt her thoughts. Or more accurately: the sound of her fingers picking them out interrupts her thoughts. She’s typed them without even looking. She reads what’s been written, closes her eyes, and again repeats the words, ever-so-slowly, out loud. It’s the play of the vowels that pleases her here: the blunted impact of A’s to O’s to U’s and back again, all of them edged sharply with B’s and D’s, T’s and G’s. And then there’s the bright points of those I’s and E’s. Helen is pleased; surprised as if she isn’t the poem’s author. Indeed, and as always for her, it is unclear who makes what or what makes who—Natura naturans / natura naturata etcetera etcera. Do we do because we want or want because we do.

Or as the lovely Charlie Olson would say: ‘on the puzzle / of the nature of desire / the consequences // in the known world beyond / the terra incognita / on how men do use // their lives.’ Helen smiles. Beautiful words make the man beautiful.

Truth be told, she’d worn those poor men out moving her things. Helen is laughing now, alone in her apartment, at the thought of it. They’d never seen so many boxes of books, so many bookshelves to hold them. Solid shelves, well made of good wood. All those pages, all those words made the poor men sweat. Helen knows the feeling of course, the feeling of being buried under books, under other people’s words.

Stop it, she thinks. This is no time to revisit The Library—no, don’t even name it—that place. Any further down that road and the night is ruined—and it’s too fine a night for that. She looks around desperately for some distraction. The books are all unpacked now, and neatly arranged on their shelves (save for those she’s been reading, and there’s always a pile or two of books-in-progress). My books, and no one else’s. The thought calms her. Though Helen still finds it funny that the same objects can be a source of succor or torture. Ain’t it always the way, as they always say.

Other than her books, the living room is sparsely furnished, a heavy wooden desk where her typewritersits, and a matching chair where she sits in front of it. A large, overstuffed leather chair across the room, big enough for Helen to curl up, as comfortable as any cat. A few lamps with dim bulbs—and the plants, all stripes of green things she’s been out to purchase over the last few days, placed strategically throughout this room and the apartment at large.

Helen gets up and walks to the large windows looking out onto Eggplant Alley, coming to a stop beside a small hibiscus staked in a pot. She absently strokes its waxy leaves, toys with a few of the buds that, small and tightly self-wrapped, will soon explode into colorful trumpets, a vague smile curving her lips.

Sacramento, sacrament, ‘means of grace,’ land of new beginnings, of new things more generally, where she will greet the coming of a new Spring. Let the fraud-Her, the one who kept their real name, have San Francisco, Helen has the here and now, this place, this means of grace.

As she looks out at the night, she wonders what others like herself, other Lost, are doing out there, at that exact moment. Despite her penchant for solitude, for quiet broken only by her voice speaking the words that make her want, Helen finds herself excited, and slightly scared, at the prospect of meeting them.

hibiscus went too many goes

sweet so sweetly Sacramento

Helen turns her back on the window and walks back to her table, to continue being worked on by the poem.

[unlimited sink]

Language indicates things that aren’t there, but that we want to be there. It makes up for things in their absence, you could even say that it makes things up given their absence. Every statement, every sentence, every word, is prefaced by a silent ‘I want.’ Even when you say ‘chair’ in the same room as a chair, even if you are referring to that chair, the gap between the word ‘chair’ and that chair, the distance between the two, keeps this dynamic in play. No way around it: language is desire. Humans speak because they desire, humans desire because they speak. And though Helen is no longer quite human, touched and twisted as she is by her time spent under the power of the Others, she still desires, still speaks, and is therefore still, in a very real way, a human being.

She’s thinking about all of this as she wanders the stacks on the main level of the Central Library in downtown Sacramento, having just finished an interview on the second floor. The meeting brought good news: she’s to begin work as a free-lance restoration specialist in the Sacramento Room, where the library system of the city keeps its more aged and precious texts. Helen is happy. And, as is so often the case when she is happy, she finds herself surrounded by books.

If language is desire, then each book, she thinks, is a little machine made to cause those who interact with it to want. That wanting could have any number of objects: knowledge, pleasure, escape. The list goes on and on. But books spur desire. This much Helen knows. Is it any wonder, then, that yearning seems to blossom in libraries? Maybe to others this would be a surprise, but not to Helen. Here, surrounded by these little machines made to spur on desire, in this quiet and private place, humans come to read and to relax and yes even to learn, but more often than not, what they do is want and want and want.

And yes, as if on cue, Helen feels that tingle along the back of her neck, the spreading warmth on her cheeks, that pupil-dilating rush of unrequited passion, the aching want and desire of one human for another. She allows herself to drift along its current, letting the intensifying throb of the glamour pull her into its orbit.

What she finds is a young man, an employee of the library. Handsome in his own way, if meek, who is supposedly re-shelving books. In fact, his real task is eyeing another young man, far more handsome than he, in a more popularly accepted way, who is working the circulation desk. The object of desire is wholly unaware of his admirer’s affections, and said admirer is wholly unaware of Helen’s proximity. A chain of desires, as it were, ending in an old woman who is not quite human. Not that anyone would notice.

Helen busies herself behind the oblivious shelving-clerk, so lost is he in his yearning. From this vantage point, she can survey the whole scene. It is a scene that has played out since human beings came into existence: the lover watching the beloved without being noticed, lavishing the beloved with a desire that has no purpose other than its own persistence as desire. She runs her fingers along the spines of the books: texts on organic chemistry. Not her typical faire when it comes to reading, but it’s not reading she’s after.

She closes her eyes and settles into the ache of it.

[unlimited sink]

Helen is tired, feeling her years. All of them—not just the number assigned to her on earth. Those certainly. And the others, the years upon years she spent in the Library.

There are always days such as this one, where even her vivaciousness, which some might call preternatural, wears thin and she’s left with an ache in her body that stems from all that accumulated time, coagulated somehow there.

There are always these days, yes, even when such a day is as lovely as this one is: clear and warm and stroked end to end by pleasant breezes. Even when Helen is sitting on her lunch break from the Sacramento Library (always Libraries, she thinks wistfully) in a locale such as Cesar Chavez Plaza Park, on a bench in the shade of the trees, watching the passers-by. Even on an errand such as the one she finds herself on: meeting a young poet, brought to her attention by a co-worker, an admirer of the older woman’s work.

Despite all of that, at this moment, in the alternate sun and the shade cast by the blowing treetops, in the pleasantness of the outside air, Helen can’t help but feel a touch of desolation. While she waits, she opens up her copy of Creeley’s Pieces to a random page and reads:

What
do you think it is.
Dogs wandering
the roads.

All I knew or know
began with this—
emptiness
with its incessant movement.

Where was it—
to be younger, older,
if not here,
if not there.

Calling,
calling over the shoulder,
through a mist,
to those fading people.

This, in the end, is why she brought the book with her. Who better to keep as a companion on a day of such despondence them the One-Eyed Creeley? His plainness, unadorned rhythms and rhymes, a love of common words, a sadness that somehow amounts to staggering beauty. And this is why, nonetheless, a smile touches her lips.

She flips the pages again:

You want

the fact

of things

in words,

of words.

But, it’s at just that moment that Helen feels something else. A surge of excitement, of desire, those pinpricks of longing that run up and down the back of her legs. She looks up to find a young woman before her. Pretty, though not stunning. Shy certainly. The poet.

The younger woman speaks, haltingly, unsure, “Ms. Powers? Is…is that you?” To which Helen nods, “Yes my dear. And you must be Catherine.”

Her visitor gives an eager nod. “Yes…Thank you so much for meeting me. When Jacob said he was working with you at the library I just had to…I mean. Well, I really wanted to meet you is all.”

Helen gives her a gracious smile. The day suddenly seems brighter, more pleasant, swollen with Catherine’s wanting to. She pats the bench beside her and says, “Well here I am, dear. Please—sit with me for a while?”

[unlimited sink]

The evening is hot, but not unpleasant. Helen, tired of staying indoors, finds herself at a small cafe down the way from her apartment. It's charming, in that way that coffee shops are when they try their hardest to be charming. But more importantly, they have ample outdoor seating, which is where the Wizened has settled herself, at a small, metal cafe table with a cup of coffee. Most likely, it would prove a bit cramped for a person of normal size, but the little old lady fits just fine.

She's brought along a copy of Bernadette Mayer's Memory. It's a bizarre book, which is appropriate (memory is bizarre), and one of her favorites. A herculean effort at self-examination, a comedy of confusion when confronted with one's own life and one's own thoughts about one's life, a record of being a woman with all its attendant joys, miseries, mundanities, horrors.

& something upside down
& a cover & pictures & paint
& something crossed out
& something crossed out, it was done
& an idea about transcription, off to the side
& some numbers, a theater & service equipment & some long division
& some copying
& a face a tree a girl with her head down
the sun, marks, a head an ax an ax-flag
& food & a photo of M & a note:
the negative's in the trunk, the key is mailed, will arrive at 33 tomorrow,
signed.

When she looks up from the page, two men have settled in at the table beside hers. Both are grave. One has eyes that are shining, wet with recent tears. It's that one who lights a cigarette and says, "I just want her back, man. It hurts, you know? To want her back so bad." The glamour is coming off him in waves. The need, the desire, the longing. It's all Helen can do not to close her eyes and sigh in contentment. Instead, she raises her book again, but keeps watching over the top of the page.

The other nods his sympathy, sipping his coffee, never taking his eyes off his friend. "I know man, it's rough. When'd it happen?"

"This afternoon," the broken-hearted fellow replies, ruefully expelling a column of smoke. And, despite her sympathy, Helen knows it's going to be a good night. For her at least.