dont bother me while im still raining

i'm still raining from europe and starting to rain all over latin america, from the edges to the centers of everyplace that knows itself as america, this place that we call home, where we speak too many languages that are not from here, and our tongues get colonized in a thousand directions, but our hearts stay young...i have a murmur from the last time i fell in love, and it flutters whenever it starts to wonder what the next movie will look like...because i love movies here, the ones from here are the ones that invade the borders of our dreams and reconfigure our alliances, and every film that's not about the father who learns how to stop working so much and love his kids is a movie about a revolution...this is the kind of thing that is familiar here, and we hear the stories about plazas and september 11s and wear the masks of english bandits, trying hard to stare into the sun so we don't have to make the connections about the peculiar repetitions we are living through...it all begins when the young people decide they need to eat and are suddenly aware that it's not necessarily in anyone's best interests to keep the people fed...and the old people are all starting to compliment this generation for realizing what's happening, and doing things about it...an old couple in a coffee shop are staring at me and my daughter, and i'm sure it's about liprings and punk boots, but i'm wrong.  she admires us, and tells us that she was the music director at the high school across the street, and in '68 she created an anti-war play where the kids wore the uniforms their parents and grandparents wore in other wars...and she tells me she stays young by eating onion rings for breakfast and traveling with her partner...my father is not yet moving in my mind into the generation of old people, but he has the same sparks in his eyes when we talk about revolutions in the streets in the country that he loves so very much, and i always forget that he planted the seeds for falling in love with the possibility of a revolution here...and earlier that morning i was sitting in the veteran's hospital with him while they poured bacteria into his body to eat cancer...the old men in the hospital all smell like republicans, and i want to fight them because i'm irish and i want to argue for lost causes because i'm polish but my eyes can't fight eye contact, and i decide to use all the trappings of old world courtesy and say "have a good day, sir," and when they hear "sir," their eyes go watery every time every single one every time, as if no one shows them respect anymore...and my heart starts to murmur and i find myself wanting so many things when i'm in the presence of so many ghosts, ghosts about to cross over and ghosts who are lingering near their heads to bring them home, and i start to miss her more than anyone could ever know, more than anyone could ever have loved a woman while living in a mortal body...i don't know what it's for, and i don't know how it connects to learning how to heal, and i don't know what role this love plays in a revolution, but maybe all revolutions are about a longing for something that was too young and tender to live on its own...and my daughter is too old for those tragic childhood diseases, so she's safe tonight from my crazy melancholy, and the dogs don't understand as much as i'd like them to...the boy gets soup, he's afraid of choking lately, and i have to be careful and be there with my hands and my eyes, because his hands don't work as well as they once did, so i'm focusing on his mouth and my tired and scratched up hands, i tell him that last night i was a calavera, and we're all phantoms, and he wants more soup, and in my inability to focus on anything but a daydream (i'm meeting with the suicide girls over coffee in a room full of bean bags, they've been reading my blog and they have so many questions...and it's a musing) i am looking at my daughter's hands, hands that are starting to make drawings of mermaids and goddesses, and we're cursed with the family enchantments...bridget drugan, the gael who knew secrets in oak trees is always calling this time of year, it's time for the heart to murmur and time for me to listen...and these lost warriors, the fallen heroes of unsustainable myths, i want to sing something for them...so i find myself looking at the tough guy writers, shepards and hemingways and bolaños', bodies broken by alcohol, fighting a battle between beauty and darkness, and darkness always won...but i know how dark beauty can be, and i was taught by my mother that when she came that i could never say no to her, and i know something about the goddesses that haunt the genitals of warriors of all the gender wars, and the goddesses that learn their secrets through centuries of eating flesh, these spirits are cellular and in these days the ether is so very far away...real love is written in fire on the flesh and burns through to the bones and leaves us all a little less than we once were, so we know what it means to long, and why we have no choice but to go further into that beautiful darkness, until the darkness becomes light, until things like darkness and light no longer even matter, and we learn how to become as relentless as the rain.