Exhibition at the Café
the café’s thunder-gray walls are covered in paintings of guns: rifles, handguns, one gun pointed at another. I am surprised by the lack of detestation I feel, as if my mind is protecting me by viewing the guns as mere symbol- almost harmless, almost good. sipping my vanilla latte I think how I want to hold the cold metal weight of one, to point the trigger at a cold metal place inside me no sunset or sunrise seems to take away.
my 2-month old daughter has fallen asleep at my breast. the length of her body is spread across my lap and I am comforted by her warmth, her curled hand like moonlight on my belly. I listen to the sounds from her point of view, what she would hear if she were awake: voices and ceramic clinks burning together in one ungraspable flame. the low backdrop drone of a middle-aged man who speaks with short pauses as if chanting a prayer.
I think of how my mother might have settled into her rocking chair, wooden, the color of her eyes. the sensations that might have swept through her as she nursed me, her firstborn, after a lifetime of water-treading starvation. hunger-her theme, her tragedy. how she might have found nourishment in the deep tender forest of my eyes, how she might have bowed low with her forehead to my feet and her love drilling a hole that she simultaneously filled with the shavings.
I read something written by the artist. that he is not making a statement but wants his audience to contemplate the powerful history-and-fate shaping thing called the Gun. there is a flavor in my mind, sweet and sour and resigned, knowing the forces that influence my own lamentable plot. knowing that to unlearn the mother’s hunger, the child must betray her.
I.
i’m folded into myself
on the cheap plastic deck chair–
an ocean wave
majestic crest bloomed
and rolling inward.
i’m trying to choose what to focus on:
the science of stars, texture of air,
chaos and ethics,
the effect of chaos on ethics,
a man’s touch/a woman’s touch
II.
don’t tell me not to cry
my body is decaying as we speak
soon no one will want to look at it
and then no one will remember
that it ever existed.
the people i speak to everyday
will leave
or i will leave them.
III.
each moment begins with a
heaviness
dense with tragedy and sin
silver threads tangled like moonlight
ghosts of primal fear
my shoulders tense and
my heartbeat quick as a summer storm
quivering through the skies:
then the shadow loosens into
a fine kind of glittery dust
lucid with eyes that
see into the dark.
I.
I am watching a mother and her son
the mother has left the father
and her colors are always shifting
for a moment she is summer blue
her hands, palms down,
look as though they are kneading air
as though she is laying her words
on the shore
of her son’s ocean heart
he tries to speak
but she is already running ahead
her eyes spill glass tears
and her whole body shakes
red, blood red, merlot red, fire orange,
sunset orange, slivers of black and coal
her son plays with his zipper
zip up zip down
zip up zip down
while she loses herself in rage
turns white with it
until her organs burn
and her body contracts, empty
she faces him, moist-cheeked,
and folds herself into his chest
his arms are stiff
in the shadow of her formless form
he avoids my eyes
the fingers of his right hand
are already
turning to stone.
II.
but I don’t only watch
the mother and her son
my task is to save them
from this fate
immersed in the mother’s
thick oozing voice
my own mother comes
with her woven pendant
of silver, copper, silk
and places it at the center
of my chest
the breath slides invisible
gathers and spins
its heavy web
in the pendant
a tiny voice unwinds
sinks down
as if the mother’s presence
is a lake
and the voice is a pebble
meaning, I lay my lotus palms
on the floor
and hold space for
fragments of spattered truths
the mother is tangled
in her worn-out stories
the son, silent, and
I am stuck at the cliff’s edge
where my mother’s soul
meets my own
you’re hurt,
I say to the boy’s mother
it seems the only thing
to say in this room
poisoned with words
or maybe it is all
I have the courage to say.
Georgia O’Keefe (Photo credit: Martin Beek)
Life is like
making love
with a partner
who doesn’t quite know
how to get it right.
The attraction can be
unbearable.
You move
your hips
in circles
for years
searching for the
right spot.
Sometimes
you are so close to climax
the darkness
like a tunnel
seems to crack.
stand still-
autumn brook
gives voice to
its many selves.
we sat in the screened-in porch and discussed what other kinds of things we could have done with our lives. the air was flat and sticky, poking through windows and walls.
our daughter, seven months old, slept fitfully in our bedroom. my body tenses when she hears or sees something ugly, like the day before when two teenage boys passed by throwing curses with hard jagged motions. we were walking on a sidewalk and I slowed down, let them pass, stopped myself from sprinting across the road. she showed no sign of noticing any of this, just gazed curiously from face to face, all the passing strangers with all their secret worlds. if she has nightmares I don’t know what they’re about: maybe they’re about sharp-worded teenage boys or maybe they’re about hunger. I hope she dreams of beautiful things, like the radiant-winged azalea blossoms outside her window and fairies guiding her through a sunlit forest. I hope that my love warms her even in the coldest corners of her dreams.
my husband thinks that maybe he should have been a scientist, a dendrologist, to spend his days in the hushed company of trees.
we sat in the darkness. outside, there was a mass of black space and it was the forest breathing itself to sleep under a starless wave of sky.
I thought of a walk I used to take with my parents, where the woods bordered on a classmate’s property. all through the walk I would wonder what he was doing, wonder if he could see me which of course he couldn’t and I laughed extra hard. stood extra tall with my chest open wide. the land was electric with pre-adolescent fantasy and lust. (a strange kind of lust, a ravenous and abstract craving which may have sounded like whining to the passersby.) years before, in the fourth grade, I’d slapped his back with my winter hat as an attempt at flirtation. he turned around and I smiled sweetly, shyly, but he must have growled something in response because I remember flaming hot orange in embarrassment and I never tried flirting again.
my husband would make a good scientist. he’s curious, focused, perseverant when there’s purpose to a task. when I describe myself I worry that I’m setting limits on who I am and who I have the potential of being but I’ll go ahead anyways and admit to a lack of patience. a kind of frustrated restlessness when the undertaking is too mundane or challenging or boring. as a therapist I can train myself to drift in cradles of stories and free-floating words. if a woman says ‘life is too unbearably hard’ then I can sink into the center of that phrase and nod my head. I can say ‘yes, yes it is,’ and then help her climb out with different words, different images, different symbols. I can say ‘feel the chair holding your weight.’ ‘feel the stillness at the core of every moment.’
in college I panicked, felt ill-equipped to live in this world. I became obsessed with the tragedy of being my own individual person bound by a skin marred with weakness and flaw. I followed the solitary swan to her place by the Charles River and settled into myself, a different kind of self than the one I was before. awed by my aloneness. bitter about it, and wondrous. I ate dinner alone as often as possible and came out on Friday nights to smoke marijuana with people who knew how to talk about nothing.
when my daughter was born I thought, I don’t want her to experience pain. every mother must think this, to see the shining tiny creature that’s come from her womb. if mothers could live by this feeling then maybe war wouldn’t exist. but how could they? the infant is hungry, thirsty, and tired, and maybe that is pain. the infant sees her mother leave the room and maybe that is pain. she wails and it sounds like she knows all the suffering in this world. a mother must learn to live with an aching heart, or she must let it turn to stone.
sometimes I imagine that I’m a tree, a tall and thick one, ancient. hemlock or cottonwood. catalpa, gingko, or weeping willow with my hair hanging loose. in their bodies I swallow the energy of earth and sun. I draw nourishment up through my roots, honor my ancestors and the parts of them that shape my life, exhale and reach, grow in intricate pathways towards the light. my skin hardens. the hardness of strength, not cynicism not judgment. I watch the shifting of things around me, I feel the movement of my limbs, I feel my leaves swelling and pulsing and dying, dropping to my feet. I feel the tremblings of procreation. the cool arms of a fickle wind. I feel a stillness in my center, the place where breath collects the ashes and carries them home.
the violence of humanity mirrors all the internal battlefields where volcanoes shoot fire from deep within and oceans open to inhale the rain. our contradictions shake the glowing core. people leak their lava everywhere and when my daughter was born I cringed at the lethargically sour inflections of my own imperfect voice. she was like a white dress made of lace.
my husband and I watched the darkness. hidden trails of rhododendron flowers and dead leaves twisting through the garden. for some time we stopped speaking and a slow breeze moved between us. around us. her fingers lingered on our separate skins, tugging at the seams.
a black mass unfolds
the layers of its heart
rocking chair, wooden table,
narrow bed
ivy stretched like lace
across the windowsill
this morning
you can feel it too
the attention, the tenderness
of light waking
and draping each object
the way a mother enfolds herself
around her sleeping infant
or a bud holds the blossom
in its belly
the hiss of shoelaces winding ribbons
cedar floors calloused with the
violence of frozen routine
the door creaks open and
you look back one more time
some nameless feeling
elbows you in the chest
you can hear its breath
behind your neck
there is no road
only the palest remnants of
some footsteps through a forest
spectral tracks which could be
one of those comforting illusions that
speak guidance and company
within the silver certainties of solitude
exposed tree roots on the earthen floor
the way you might excavate your past
to see the surface textures
of your path
all those loose stones and hidden holes
buttercups gathering where the
creek passes through
each step forward
shimmers with death
fire and ash
new seeds blinking open
receive the hushed rumble
through the soles of your feet
in the crinkling leaves
in the blue jay’s shriek
hear the common journey
of women and men
hunting foraging fleeing
sanctuary vision quest
seeking longing
tumbling stones
human rhythm
human voices calling to the
full moon guardian light
are we there yet
are we there yet
are we there yet
only white petals answer
and drop to the ground
in a series of songs
you, with your incense and candlesticks
climb her ribcage to the top and
wait there while the winds crash
a healing storm
follow her secret folds into
darkness moist with a
quivering pulse.
