dancing barefoot
[note 2.11]
[Kahn & Selesnick, Maeve and Bat, 2017]
Patti Smith, at the end of Dancing Barefoot, chants over and over, O God I’m so confused. Woven into this chant she recites a poem, a poem that touches on her many Blakean obsessions—childbirth, childhood, grave visitations.
Why must we pray screaming? she asks.
As a teenager, this chant (O God I’m so confused) gave me permission to admit that I too, was (so) confused.
Just yesterday (seems like) I was floating in a lake. It was the end of summer. I was trying to get back in shape. I’d swum to the far shore and back. I was now close to where I started from. My wife & daughter were beside me now, also floating (I’d ended up in the hospital at the end of July. A tick had transferred a parasite into my blood-stream, and the parasite had multiplied and sent me to the edge of something. I fell into a two-week fever, which landed me in the hospital on an IV drip. This was back in 2020—a hospital was the last place you wanted to end up).
Our daughter said, Look, as she did a somersault in the water. Can you do that? she asked. This is what we do now, what we’ve done, on good days. Not this exactly, not somersaults & questions in lakes, but versions of this. We haven’t been home in five months. Home, I guess, is Brooklyn—that is what I’d say if asked. Or I’d say Brooklyn is the place where I feel less not at home, which in my cosmology makes it home. We fled upstate when people started dying. When the maps on our screens began to fill with red splotches. By upstate I mean two hours up the Hudson. What was your first apartment like? our daughter asks each of us. We are still floating.
These months of isolation have made her restless. She’s twelve (and my daughter), so maybe she’d be restless anywhere. Lately she’s been imagining a place of her own. Mine was a boat, I tell her, which is true. When I was nineteen or twenty I moved out of my childhood home & onto a boat. I’d been paying rent to my mother, to help out,but she didn’t need that kind of help.
Besides, the boat was cheaper.
O God I’m so confused.
You know that’s not the actual Patti Smith line, don’t you?
It’s O God I fell for you.
