....From The Tree Of...............Love & Family
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_______________________________________________________ Countdown Tonight, over dinner, my mother said casually, eyes big, "Well, it looks like we're at war." "What?," I sounded, properly shocked and wondering what bushel my head's been under when the thunder started. "The president was on a while ago, and said they have until tomorrow." "For what?," I pressed- never having understood the ultimatum in the least--or the deadline for that matter, March seventeeth, unless it's hatred of the Irish. "You know," she said. "Saddam." "No. I don't."- nor will I ever understand why that one bully, in a world of baddass sociopaths demands the focus of the Commander and Chief for one, thief-stolen minute of the world. I ate my beef in silence. Thought about cattle going silently to stun guns. Mouth too dry for prayer aloud--- and felt a touch of madness like a wet shroud. Oyster Fight It's about time I started telling the things that matter. It will not do to go on about the moon, and the color of fish in golden poi ponds- there were William Tell, apple on the head unnerving nights; threats to blow the house up, not to kill himself but take us all in crescendoed fit of failure. I was the baby, and was sent to beg our lives. Whether it was true or not, is hardly the point when, "He'll listen to you," is slurred to a six year old and she believes it. I never knew just why we were going to die. I think it always had to do with something silly, like the oyster stew -desired for dinner -dinner at one a.m. when the six packs had run out. Homemade was preferred, but there were cans of it in the pantry we called the 'fruit cellar', offshoot of 'the playroom' adjacent to the garage, crammed next to to the 'laundry cellar' in the basement maze of the home where I grew up. When his 'waitress' wouldn't serve the stuff, fell passed out on the couch, my dad opened can after can and decorated walls. She wouldn't clean up for days and it smelled awful. Monday morning came and freshly scrubbed and petticoated, plaited hair, I went to school and thought about the oysters on the walls. How there are things in homes that shouldn't be. How even in my late teens, passing through to get the mail dropped in the slot of the garage door--a shriveled, brown, dried artifact above the lightswitch brought it back--how in my childhood there was hey-diddle diddle and runaway, runcible spoons, and a Dali kind of madness, where sense melted, ran down walls and froze forever into silence. There were oysters. Elementary Chalk. The white powder smell and the ssssss sssss sound of steam radiators. Old, scarred wood. First grade sailor dress, matched to hair ribbons and the black stork starch of nuns. The click click click of rosary beads, hung from mannish waists, the flesh of faces pressing out of white, tight prisons, black and white: my memories of school. The photos with my two teeth gone in front, the picture packets for parents to buy; the shy smile for the photographer, the fear kept out. The waxy comfort of colored crayons, kept in cigar boxes one to a row and pass it down. Learn to share. The secret nibbles at aquamarine or blue, to keep some color in, inside the old brick building, windows eight feet high, the wooden poles with funny hooks on top -brass once, but dulled to black with age; they pulled the windows down. The tallest boys,the ones who wore their ties and had their shoes shined, got to do it. I sat, last seat second row. Too small that way to see the board, so I curled my feet up under my skirt and sat on them to make me taller. The way I shook, afraid the nun would holler at me when it came time, before the Christmas holidays to change our seats. Mine was scarred, like someone had taken a knife and gouged the planets' orbits, crazily off kilter, over lapping one another, crashing in apocalyptic mayhem, made from the buckles of two strapped shoes. Sister Teresa stretched her mouth into an impossible 'O' that pulled her eyebrows down, almost covering her eyes -as well she should at such a naughty girl, who every day smelled like puke because I brought up every 15 cent box of chocolate milk I thought I had to drink. My mother gave me money to buy the tickets, so I dutifully, fearfully downed the sickly, sweet taste of a lie. Each day, my several petticoats, stained where I used them as a napkin, wiped my mouth too scared to say I really hated the taste: it was the place itself, poured out like a dose of catholic poison, homeopathic. Given in thimbles full of destroying what would normally bring me pleasure: the devil's toehold. All that year, I remember quaking, staring out at trees and seeing them freer than I'd ever be again. Ablutions You're there. Somewhere in the dark, a life so separate, drawn by rote and ordinary rites like washing of the feet that cruelly felt each pounding as you walked another day toward death without my amulets, or my ablutions.
If I had hair
as long as rope
I'd be the rarest thing
And pain is no stranger to some,
And if a man lies in the road,
And what of the man
And because we each beat of life's single heart,
Ladies' novels leave me cold.
No candles
She slowly pushed the iron across
Stay as long as I can stand it,
My children
The life I've found, I didn't,
with such gravity
The rawness of love
Is there truly beauty in me
You stopped by the roadside
the flower |
