1. Woman Carrying Buckets of Water

Before there was a baby, just before...

there was a small room, empty, with a large, wide closet--the largest in the house. What would we ever put in that closet?

A baby did not need so much room, you see. Our freshly painted walls, saturated with color--blues, greens, yellows, orange, tan--required time to soak in, to permeate the infrastructure of the house that was now ours, to reflect us and our new surroundings. Those walls, those colors

were our only mirrors. And no pictures yet, no pictures on those vast expanses, those backgrounds that needed time with us, time to know us, time to become one--thunderclap, bruiser blue, cornhusk, wild prairie, green breath

Skin of house left intact, smooth and beautiful like my original skin. Much as we wanted them, no paintings or pictures could go on the walls, no holes pounded into walls. What rises to the surface of such skin; unknown, unwarranted, unasked? Things do.

The pictures--we had pictures, flat framed things with wires and hooks on the backs. They were sandwiched together into the future baby's big closet, its open shutter doors

gathering them in, whispering, tricking them into darkness; doors closed.

Woman carrying buckets of water on a pole across her shoulders. This painting is made of silk, is dyed in a process taught exclusively by the masters in Thailand, is infused with yellows and reds--a sunset, or a sunrise? But the sun is not really going up or down, the earth is the one revolving around the sun.

It's a quiet painting. She's walking along a beach. It will go in our living room, the room that faces east. It is a sunrise, then. It is a quiet painting made by a too-tall, red-haired American woman we knew who went to Thailand to study this type of painting. It is maybe too small to go over the sofa, though. That wall is so big for a woman. A yellow wall, a room of wild prairie infused with greens and blues and brick reds, the fireplace, the picture window overlooking flowers--purples, and glass, leather-bound books, wood. The cushions of the sofa are soft and fluffed with springy stuffing; you can beat back the fat pillows; the footstools are square, neat cubes. She will have to go over there. Is she happy? She is so familiar

 

but edges of mold have made their way onto the silk. Inside her gold gilt frame: yellow mat, red mat, woman, suspended sun, and mold snaking along the white waxed outline of sea, sun, wave, pole, water jug. She has lived in the closet too long. Dirty laundry, blue plastic bags of clean, stacked cloth diapers, outgrown clothes, the woman. View blocked by several other frames and glass crowding in. Pictures with shattered glass covers, pictures of no consequence we used to like. They are of another time and person. Waiting for reawakening, they all might die before we get to them. Excess toys, moisture, dark.

The diaper pail across the room fumigating, aerating the room. The diaper wraps soaked and dried in a wire basket, baby's breath in the crib and spit-up clawing its way up from the bottom of the carpet. She will be expensive to repair

or impossible. The walls are saturated now, fading into background. (We used to rent antique white--walls, ceiling, baseboards, moldings, all.) We press the woman against the wall.

Does she feel the weight of the mold? I can't keep it out, though I try. She is not in white--it can't get on to her, but it can get all around.

Pinching with my fingers, around edges of sky, cloud sticks to my arm like spider web, fish net. It shreds like colored silk and cotton, fishnet stocking.

 

2. Drawing Back the Curtain

The sun keeps coming up in the time frame, the sky evens out and colors burn off. The day is clear and blunt-cut. The woman walks out of the frame, to a small hut with thatched roof and a portion that stays open to the outside all day.

She carries the water to a husband and her parents. She is the carrier of water each morning and each afternoon. Such a basic simple function, to serve in this way. It is a calming thing, to fill those buckets, to concentrate her body, heavier with this load, but more settled, as if she is carrying a piece of ocean onto the earth. The water comes from a well on a hill above the ocean, fresh water flowing before it hits salt. (The river and the well are not in the picture.) All rivers feed into the ocean by and by.

Outside the frame is the ache of her shoulders, are the lessons she was taught in carrying water, how to fill while bending, how to balance her body to the water and the earth, is the way she carries water in her body and becomes aware of that in order to learn of the water outside her. Her mother taught her this and she taught her sister.

Outside the frame is how the buckets are used. Feet must be washed. They are sacred, the part of a person in direct contact with the earth and all the elements. Head and shoulders travel high above but feet see deep down, are sprinkled with the powders of what rains down and what is thrown upward from within the earth. Others grow tired washing feet, her sister for instance, who doesn't have patience. But for her it is meditation. Through her hands and the water she prays for each foot she washes. The feet take in everything and when she holds her husband's foot, it sighs. (Someday she will hold a son's--already she thinks she might carry him in her, though she hopes more for a daughter to teach these things.) It is the same as holding a person's heart, and their hand, and all their unconscious sighing to be touched.

That was one bucket.

On the holiday that falls farthest into darkness, in the short days, they build great pyres, then rake them flat to glowing coals and walk on fire, the women first, then the men. Then all is burned away.

The other bucket is for drinking, for purifying the insides: heart, liver, bowels, skin, spleen. Making us the ocean again within our bodies.

She dips her husband's foot in a shallow bowl of water, rubbing up and down with a cloth, clearing each tendon and bone, each toe. Her husband sighs and rests his rough hand on her cotton-swathed shoulder before leaning back in the wooden chair. "Good," he says. She bows her head.

To him, in that task, she is the water, is the waves, her touch is nothing and everything. The more she works, washing around the bulbous toes, touching the shallow hill of bone that forms the roof of the brown foot, the more invisible she becomes, the lip of ocean at sunrise.

 

3. A Bit of Earth

"Don't go out before you sweep the floor," her husband said. Her mother, or was it her father, had said.

She came back for the floor, to sweep it.

The sweeping drew the dust particles and dirt together again and it spoke: "Don't go out until you clean the hearth."

The hearth spoke: "Don't go out until the windows."

The windows: "Don't go. Just don't go."

She stayed. Until the colors of sky over the hills called: "Come back for the water. We need the water--we need your water."

She went out, the dust still crying out: "It's not enough!" The ocean wanted her now. The ocean demanded. The ocean called to her blood. It called all of her that was liquid to the surface till she bent into it, letting herself be pulled. The water wanted the water in her. The water loved her water. The water needed her water and her willingness to carry it back to the dust.

Her shoulders ached, the pole pressing flat against them. She had carried rocks once. Rocks did not have much to say. They were inert. Water never could be quiet, pervading deep inside, the rush of waves forever coming in and going out, whether or not she listened or cared. But she came, she went. As long as she lived in this place--and there was a time she didn't exist here--she was drawn. There was no will, only a well. Only the lip of ocean and the sunrise. Only her.

"Wash my feet?" her husband commanded in his warm tones. His body begged for it: Wash away what has come before, what has covered them. Each time she arrived at a place that was not pure water where she could pray. Her husband's foot was in her hand, held there the entity that existed when they had joined together. In his feet, the temple.

 

Had he ever washed her feet? Once, his wet mouth had sucked and swallowed each toe, spread across each inch of her foot.

Water, water everywhere.

                        Where is the mouth of wet, of waves washing?

                                                "Bring it! Bring it back, Amelia. Bring back the ocean                                                                      because I will not go there myself.

Here in the dust is what desires you. Hearth, home. I am outside all that. Amelia--server of the water, servant of the dust. My feet call to you. Your feet are walking, carrying; they wish for a land beyond. Your hands know feet. So I give you mine to work. To till. Toes, hill of bone, blood, green vein, leaf,

heel, arch, rim you run your finger along.

                                    It is too sensitive. I can not stand there.                                     

You wish your own feet were held, in the dark where the dance has to be felt, not seen. That is why the daughter will come first, son second.

Holding her feet will be like holding your own.