Women's Day, March 8

Judith and Holofernes. Jael and Sisera.

And me, plucking up orange petals from the cobblestone street, beneath the apartment window.

Blown a kiss in passing. Whistled at the evening before by two smoking men in a glowing doorway. “Tutta bella,” our landlord grinned as he handed us the key.

Is this honor or dishonor? Why am I ashamed?

It cuts me quickly to be perceived as available because American, judged by the immediacy of beauty.

What do I want, really?

“Nothing I know of yet.”

Rarely have I wanted so concretely as I have here, to be held. To be desired as wife, companion, friend. I cannot be your mother.

How great the girl that carried Your small body in her womb, her arms, and limply on her lap at last. How great is gentleness?

Mother of God. Lilies, mimosa.

There is fierce hope in the feminine heart. Forgiveness. The more we give, the more we love, they’ve said.

Though we deserve every jab and label (paint thorns and needles - bark sharp orders - spiral into preening, posing, gleaming florid faces and bared flesh for “we are more like Eve than the animals”) –

This is, at last, a story of mercy.

A woman is not laughter, perfume, or lively conversation. She, must be holy.

And so hold pain, bear loss, and hope in the impossible.

I am deeply a woman here.

Hunt

Lisping on the edge of words unspoken,
And shifting from one tender foot to the other.
In the darkness, I suck condensing air with a shallow gasp.
I am hiding because I want to be found.

If I plunge my hands into the softness of your stomach, will I find you real?
Are you only a silhouette on the damp grass, testing sounds and fighting tears?

A Debilitating Strength

I tend to take small directives seriously, moving obstacles out of pathways. Perhaps someone blind or absent-minded will come by. I never know, and so a stone sticks in my conscience like shrapnel until I turn back and kick it into the brush by the road.


I wrap a bit of glass in a lamb's ear; carry it in my coat pocket. Those who protect others will be protected.


I can't stand to smell the doubts of others. I must swallow them, and be sickened when my love is not enough. Feeding a child with dysentery. 


But there are some words I forget, so familiar etched in the backs of my hands. My few scars are faint, but clear enough to show that I've known pain. And perhaps I've made an idol of my buckled, rustling pages, but they melt heavy on my tongue, earthy and leaden like rain. 


So maybe your brother died. And you feel to blame for silence. So maybe you wake each morning guilty for your daughter, keeping her in sagging dim hotels. If I can't make it whole, let me help you make it evenly broken. 


No one believes you. And I want to. I know that I've felt more than breezes on my spine. Those white things you see are begging you silently for peace...and your eyes, selfless and helplessly seeing, crumble soft like glowing embers. A sound like breath on powder, in the burning orange.


Maybe I can comfort when... 
And try to extend some solace... 


It is getting cold. But I am still barefoot.

Princess

"No peace for sinners,"
 He whispered as I spun by. I was too dizzy to retort, but I thought how I could have replied.
What about the righteous?
But I'm not.
The forgiven?
Better.

Gene asked my name I think three, maybe four times. Wore a mint green shirt. Smiled kindly.
Mark was weathered, stocky, dwarvish. White beard, jovial eyes behind glasses. Led me well.

Drew... I cannot be sure what the battle was. But his built arms, ostentatiously bare, were intent on showing me just how the dance could be dared to the next level. Could we manage four under-elbow twirls before the left-hand star? We did. He told me spins wouldn't daze me if I looked at his eyes. "Unless that's too intimidating..."
I smiled, took it brightly.

But I remember most the way he tried to serenade my friends and I before we left. Strange mix of self-confidence, self-consciousness. He stepped to my side and told me he'd play a song called "Princess" while the others talked. But he was bashful halfway through, stopped.

Strange mix of defensiveness, tenderness. Empathy with hungry humanity, in my heart.

I asked God to bless him as I shook his hand goodnight. I looked in his eyes.

In Trutina

Lucy and Schröder in a cardboard box,
Herman and his dogs,
Neanderthals.

Andy Warhol offers me saltwater taffy under the barn door.
Will the absurdity of this moment induce me to succumb?
Yellow hay is strewn around his shoes.

Quivering in balance,
Between pungent printed pages and a bundle of letters, wrapped in diaphanous white, from four and a quarter years of patience.

Wrapped in blinding white,
I will carry a rock in each hand,
And climb this fragrant summit,
Damp in the scents of myrrh, cinnamon, cane, and cassia.


"In Trutina": Carl Orff

Forsythia

On the almost frozen ground

The young spring up, the old fall down.

O tender, tender, tender,

Why do you bloom in November?

Why do you bloom in November?

Umbrella

It was easier for me. I've been learning floating anyway, so relaxing was an exercise in life. Resting was a prayer in itself (but I admit to thinking how funny it would be if I held the ceiling handle, like our mother does).

I wondered if you felt carried as I did, or if you felt the pressure of causality, the burden of decision in a complicated way. Your voice sounded flushed. Nevertheless, we made it safe.

-

However do they drive so bravely? There are several things I am stepping out to learn. I am climbing in behind this wheel with real fears from all that I have (never) done before. Signal, Merge.
Single, Merge.

-

Rain pounds our faces faster and harder than we are prepared for. City lights blaze over black water like music and clinking glass. We taste wine on our lips. Or maybe it is blood, from biting them. A white flash - and the danger is behind us. We have passed.

Maybe, I hope, you understood,
That as I sang the words of those songs,
I meant them for you.

In some ways they were written for us,
For last night on the ride back.



Credits: "Umbrella" by The Innocence Mission.

Dancer in the Dark

It was a blessed film over my eyes, enough to make me crumble,
Or make me cry.
I had to pause last night before I broke what was thinning inside.
But I danced in the dark and prepared my heart for today. For what always makes me girlishly tired and afraid, meek and white and smiling.

Lying still and trying to forget the only thing I feel while all the rest of me is calm:
A pinch, a chill,
Spreading from the top of my taped right hand toward my elbow. Dripping,
a tube. I close my eyes and image myself tearing at the cords that feel so foreign,
Attached to what should be whole flesh.
But I breathe deeply again. How like a child I feel.
Mother, gazing out the kitchen window, washing dishes,
Papa, sealing envelopes downstairs.
There could be soup and cornbread on the table in an hour. I'm only resting
In bed.


This gown is a humbler of humanity.
I am glad though, that it's flannel, and long, and large enough to fold around.
Powder-blue dancing triangles on a white background.
I feel more like a princess somehow. No show, I'm just myself.
I'm in a space made by cream curtains. The woman to my right is giving answers to a nurse. She takes a pill once a year for her skin condition. She considers vitamins solid food. She isn't anorexic anymore.
Humanity. The man who laughed when asked if he had piercings or tattoos (saying, What, at my age?!) is trundled by, grinning, with a weathered patchy face.
Quiet.


It takes a while before they are ready. I am wheeled along with all my attachments, but hardly remember.
Drowsy even before I was drugged, I smiled over my chin
At my doctor in the hallway.
Cheryl (or Cynthia, perhaps?) wore purple. Diane wore pink.
Cynthia. Diane. Did I laugh inside to think of those romantic names?
Hyacinth Claire. Cordelia Fitzgerald...
We played the game of making conversation before I went under. But I started with thin shoots of oxygen that smelled like a new shower curtain. I turned on my side, a white towel under my left cheek.
Rembrandt and the Dutch Masters...
(Vermeer)...
We have a print downstairs. He looks older, and broken, but really a man..
Are you feeling it yet?
Yes.
And I made sure to murmur his name as the last on my lips
Before sleeping.
Jesus.



Credits: Names,"Hyacinth Claire": Elizabeth Gaskell, "Cordelia Fitzgerald": L.M. Montgomery. 

What Is Precious Is Not From Us

What's the trouble with these training wires,
Oh, I want family, inspiration...
These trellis lines, binding into tidy forms to try to bring to life?
Can living come from trying?

These tenderest things you can't truly make, can't create,
Can only be or not be as you are given, as you give.

Can we truly cultivate, or husband this healing flower, this winding vine,
Now strengthen my hands...
Or do our greenest thumbs damage every thing we try to grow?
Can growing come from dying?

Only the brave and gentle know,
If planted seeds can, of the vulnerable kind we sow.

Wild

Stripe me like a Bengal tiger,
Spread your wet paint brush across my shoulders, down my back.
Stroke your lines in daring arcs, and smack
Your hands in two palm prints against my cheeks.
Release
Your feathered thoughts in plumes of blue,
Beak your way to preen in grease,
Sheathe my arms in papered tubes,
And grow me wings where once my fingers grew.

Wild II

Stripe me like a Bengal tiger,

Spread your wet paintbrush across my shoulders, down my back.

Stroke your lines in daring arcs, and

Smack your hands in two palm prints against my cheeks.

Release

Your feathered thoughts in plumes of blue.

Beak your way to preen in grease,

Sheathe my arms in papered tubes, and

Grow me wings where once my fingers grew.

Bandera, August 8

I am given thirty minutes, fifty dollars, to walk the shops and find a souvenir. Strange to feel like an outsider, to greet shopkeepers with “hello” and be recognized for a northerner as soon as I speak. 

Boots, trinkets, blouses, plaques, all lie about as if they know they are practically useless. I cross streets, duck in and out, merely crack the door in one shop before closing it. In another, I only glance through the window. I am one of few shoppers, feel conspicuous but adventurous, somehow braver for looking older, chic but dignified, wearing clothes edging dowdy on a twenty-year-old: my grandmother’s linen pants and a well-made shirt and scarf. I feel safely unexciting until a car passes and two young men whoop.

I awkwardly cross the street, smile at the police officer who has been watching my inexperience on display, and smile broadly as I cross the parking lot to the cobalt-blue rental car. My five-dollar-and-forty-one cent souvenir bumps against my legs, and I think how strange I must be for buying a stainless steel mixing bowl in an antiques shop in Bandera. 

The First Morning

This is a place to pray.

I place “where prayer has been valid”*

Here there is an ache in the ribcage,

And against the throat, and in the pit of the stomach.

An ache of loss, and suffering, and resilience, through a battering,

Like the cold gray swells that that pound against the coast.

Even the young, greening trees are hushed into reverence in the morning,

They sway meekly, afraid to make a sound.

The threefold white of the sea and the sky and the mist in the dawning air hallows the room so early, that there is little chance of sleeping late. But I am satisfied with a rest no sleep could give.

A rain begins,

Pattering on the left-side panes,

Blending into a rhythm on the lawn.

The night is gone.

An un-met future awaits me.

The un-wet rocks are not convinced that my pleasure in them warrants my acceptance.

But there is little that cannot be worn away

By patient love.

*T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets: Little Gidding