<sugarman's "and we did love her, didn't we?"> 2003-03-30.10:24 p.m. And We Did Love Her, Didn't We? Yerra Sugarman Over the buildings a thinning mist, dawn takes a match to. All the fuzzy, whirring molecules spin a yarn of oneness, then flare up, flail, and burn from such crystal, such sobering, spectacular arsons as this. Thistle, thistle stop your purpling. Don't listen to the chorus of fog, its unbearable sophistry, its prayers. How I hate its implausible reasons. O, the body, the body. . . Body, shmody. To hell with the body. The body can die alone on an uptown stoop, seeking refuge from its bug-filled studio. And the damned, duplicitous mist will weave a pall from its once soft cloak, its membrane-over-everything. You see, how we're born: solitary, dying, holy, broken. And sacred are the broken, sacred the inconstant. The pain-in-the-ass's politics, the distracted genius, curmudgeon, refugee, and the one who would offer an only pair of good shoes to a victim of fire. -Sacred. Sacred. Still, no one would rename the street for her loneliness. "Ruth," from the Hebrew whither thou goest, I will go: half-Jewish, half-German, who spoke good Yiddish, led Vespers. Still, we climbed the dumpster, that institute of higher learning her belongings had been dumped into. Never mind, she danced for Balanchine. Too short, and so eventually condemned to backstage after years of swallowing hormones for art's sake, for God's. Your think artists can't be fascists? Listen, Hitler was an artist. Never mind, she arrived in 1938, after watching him parade through the streets of Hamburg. We use such immigrants to filigree our words. Such immigrants suddenly silver in memory's convenient dusklight. And, never mind, dear alma mater, that you'd make her a refugee again for one more dorm room. And, yes, me too. I'd kill for a place, wouldn't I? O the body, her body, stained, soaked by its own breaking. Squat, breathing unsteadily-but beautiful, no?- when it once had lumbered, limping down 112th Street, a barge towed by the cathedral. She left me a clock with a magnet on the back, a delicate fruit bowl of amber cut-glass. Later, my x and I fought to have her ashes placed in that unfinished cathedral. He, finally, convincing them. Ha! Everyone believes an historian. Whereas me: no one believes, and no one should. I've lied about almost everything. And still do. An artist of sorts, from birth, you could say, who believes truth most delicious, best served, over a steaming pasta of artifice. She left me a black leotard, her white wooden jewelry box hand-painted in Mexico, a silver-plated measuring cup. And from that dumpster, we dug up her photo-album's sheer sleeves: "Ruth on her 18th birthday," (in suit and beret, diamonded with sunlight); "Ruth with Rusty, 1943, 86th Street," (cradling her large orange cat, leaning on a balustrade); "Ruth before Swan Lake," (gazing deeply into her own eyes); "on her proud dad's arm"; and one of a boy, marked "cousin, Hamburg," dressed in the uniform of Hitler Youth. (Who's without lies? Who sine culpe, without error?) The body, the body. So solitary can be a body. . . Once upon a time, the artist I loved best did it solo in a gallery: fetal, hidden, but heard, under a ramp. "Seed Bed," he called his artwork. Opal handfuls of unlastings glistened in his cracked palms. Handfuls of unlastings. . . The body, the body, alone, ejecting its once child. The scared, scarred and sacred body, broken into, then giving it away. . . Some say the woman wastes herself if she does not have the one child. Hers, thirty-years-old, another leaf from her archive in a dumpster. She and I solitary together, days before she died, watching the sky thistle purple, listening for the unbearable coming chorus of fog, when her child, my child, would again be yoked to us, removed from dawnfire's divisive crystal. I told you. I've lied about almost everything. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad