Falling

I drove all the way to Kearny Mesa to scrub

away my skin. To this place I’d been once.

Years before with my mom for Mother’s Day.

That reminded me the banya on the north side

of the Fontanka I went to in Leningrad. In

minus-thirty winter weather when my California

skin wanted to unfreeze, feel warm. Or at least,

alive. And after paying twenty kopecks for two

hours of scrubbing with chunky grey salt and

being beaten with birch branches, all while

wearing a little felt cap so as not to lose the heat,

God forbid, I’d sit in a little room and drink

tea with cubes of sugar and eat stale prianiki.

And then, then I would reemerge into the slushy

greyness that no longer seemed so grey. Or so

slushy. And I’d take my thawed skin through

the Summer Garden  and  gaze upon the sculptures,

particularly the busts of women whom I’d imagine

myself into. Perhaps that’s when it started, and I

guess it’s served me well. At times, yet now,

thirty years later I wear a layer of skin not

my own and all I want is to have it off. Start

over. Not back to that twenty-something girl

searching for herself in stone, but the almost sixty

one. Mother and wife. Citizen of too many places,

wearer of every line in her face. And when I

arrive at the place in Kearny Mesa they tell me

to remove all identifying jewelry and clothes

even shoes, just a robe and a key. The number

of my locker. One seven, one plus seven eight,

infinity on its side. And I lie on my side and

feel a falling.