You watch the spot to see if it will grow, watch the spot in the sky and wish on the star but then it is an airplane. Things are not always as they seem. The slim, fit, vital man with clear brown skin and eyes and straight white teeth was in fact, as the doctors would later say, the proverbial ticking time bomb, with three of four arteries almost completely clogged, something no stress test told us. The brown mole he watched and fretted on his hip turns out to be nothing, a splotch of pigment.
Sometimes the smiling person is not happy, but Ficre believed that your outside reflected your inside. He ate blueberries and stood on his head in yogic aspiration, faithfully walked the treadmill and pushed away cheese.
One cardiologist I spoke to after his passing says he believes unequivocally that the stress of growing up in war and being a refugee affected his heart.
Some who do evil live to a hundred. Ficre lived to exactly fifty, he who never did wrong and never told a single lie.
The earth that looks solid is, in fact, a sinkhole, or could be. Half of things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true. But now I must know it.
Eleven
I first became a mother on a gray and misty spring day, April 18, 1998. This Mother’s Day, my fourteenth, the midwife who helped bring both sons into the world writes me an email message to share her memories of what a devoted partner Ficre was throughout my two pregnancies and births. Solo and Simon, the loves of his life. They gave him body love until his last day to give him all the strength he would need for his journey.
I find a poem by Ficre for Solomon in my computer files and I understand as never before what the children saved him from:
The funk is loud, toxic. I am veiled
In speed and shrill, clear, one note
Screams. They are aware
I race leaving all things behind
Only to catch up with more things
to overtake. Speed.
I scream back, infected, up-lifted
“I see the moon daddy”
I hear
Every now and then
Yes we see the moon almost every day
Several times. “I see the airplane daddy”
We see as well
The lion, tiger, rhino, hippopotamus,
Donkey, bantam rooster, the hen, chick chick,
The alligator, the crocodile, the snake, the toad,
The frog, fish, bird, red bird, cat
Doggie, cow, sheep, goat, coyote, caterpillar,
Worms, butterflies, bees, ants, whales, sea lions,
Belugas, cars, trucks, homes and more homes
This is what it is like
To ride with my son
Seeing the invisible
My son
Who is 1 year and ten months
Who has all of his teeth
Who is peaceful
Who is full of wonders
And song.
Twelve
I feel certain I can wait forever for him to come back. I leave the light on in the living room, the light that faces the street. If I am patient he will come back. If I sit on the stoop through the night he will come at dawn. He would have waited forever for me; he never was not there waiting for me. I can wait and wait and wait, as long as it takes.
Gone on a trip? Hiding in the crawl space under the stairs? Visiting a sick relative? Around the corner, picking up milk and eggs? Sitting in a café lost in an esoteric book?
I will wait for as long as it takes for him to return to me. He will return to find the children grown tall, perhaps married, perhaps with children named for him. He will return to find me composed in my starched dress and head-bonnet, waiting in the same wood-framed domicile he’d left.
Last night I thought he came on a skateboard in my dream, but of course, it was not him. He turned and smiled to me and was someone else, and skated away.
I am getting older and he is not.
Thirteen
I have to go to the studio and make sure it is secure. There could be flammable materials, turpentine. I don’t know what I will discover. Two of my beloved students from the art school say they will come with me, Ronny and Kenny.
When we first enter, the life force within the space literally brings me to my knees. He is utterly present, but of course he is not present. He has left the studio tidy and ordered. I begin to take in what is there—the hundreds and hundreds of canvases, not to mention the photographs, multi-media pieces, short animated films, charcoal and pastel sketches, and much more—I see that what he had been doing was creating an entire body of work, full and complete. I had seen each line and mark he ever made at some point, but taking in everything together is another thing all together. He left us with his eyes on the world.
Ronny and Kenny dispose of what needs disposing: dried, stiff, paint-soaked rags, semi-full tins of paint thinner. Then they photograph everything, inch by inch, which they later make into a collage for me. There is a painting on the easel he worked on his last day on earth. It is a horseman, in swift, energized brushstrokes, and he is racing off the canvas towards something unseen, lightning-quick.
Fourteen