Grief changes a face the way that
A long turbulant life changes faith
The mirror on my dresser isn’t anchored to the wall but leans back in the weight of oak
If that mirror were human its neck would be broken from the strain
Is God in the business of breaking
Mirrors to put a thousand pieces back together?
When you know a man, how he loves trees, how he loves birds, and you created him and all of those things, would you lean him against a wall to break him?
( More of me loving and relating to Marina Tsvetaeva. I am loyal. I cannot help that.)
Tonight I feel I need the harsh wind of Russia to crack and bleed my hands. I need your words to sleep my mind, Marina.
What a little childhood you had flitting about the seas like a whistling of weather. You know, I never thought to kill myself as a child. There are children now who do, Marina.
Once, as a child, my long and secure hair was tangled and matted down by the kids on the playground. When I got home I was spanked and my hair was cut off with dull scissors so that it looked like it had been ripped from the spine of a book. For many years after that people asked me why I hated my beautiful mother.
But who goes on about childhood? Who goes…
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This stuff is good. Check out Michael Simms poetry.
When the soul-sickness takes me
And my mind is in an ugly place
And I resent other writers their success, I retire to my attic room
To look out the octagonal window at the gray street dead leaves carried by the wind I hear a storm coming
And I am no longer the ruler of my invisible kingdom
And incomparable ecstasy is no longer at my beckoning
And the honey of praise for my children is no longer on my lips
And I am not the man I planned to be nor is this the life I wanted
And my feet have forgotten the music and my hands have forgotten the smooth arcs
And the gift I once had is a black wand that goads me into self-loathing
And the small cruelties I’ve practiced seem large and the large irreparable
And even the innocence of William Blake cannot console…
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( More of me loving and relating to Marina Tsvetaeva. I am loyal. I cannot help that.)
Tonight I feel I need the harsh wind of Russia to crack and bleed my hands. I need your words to sleep my mind, Marina.
What a little childhood you had flitting about the seas like a whistling of weather. You know, I never thought to kill myself as a child. There are children now who do, Marina.
Once, as a child, my long and secure hair was tangled and matted down by the kids on the playground. When I got home I was spanked and my hair was cut off with dull scissors so that it looked like it had been ripped from the spine of a book. For many years after that people asked me why I hated my beautiful mother.
But who goes on about childhood? Who goes on about the monsters under the bed? We all know who the monsters are. We saw them go free.
Marina, I don’t know why I keep seeing you vaguely smiling in black and white. I don’t know why I keep seeing you dying in black and white. I know your hands were bleeding with color when you penetrated the ice over my childhood with your aging.
I just wanted to visit you to tell you I found your poems on an old bookstore shelf. I wanted to tell you that there are still warm days.
( This was inspired by Marina Tsvetayeva’s poem, ” Some Forebear of Mine Was A Violinist”)
I dreamt about your uncle, of how
you stole those apricots and placed the blame on him,
dreamt of his hooked nose and his sharp and darkened
eyes.
I think of that face now and I’m sure you don’t favor it.
But I swear, Marina, in the mirror of winter your opal
eyes look the wild lost of mine.
We are all three wanderlusters. All smell of dirt
and rain, but I have never buried a sick child, never been exiled, and I
have never hanged.
Still, if your forebear stole those apricots through the hands of
you, then maybe he is my forebear too and with his silent violin
he stirs the dark in me.
We talked the guns down in a tight quartered waiting room. The tv was turned off and the young man was sitting there in ripped jeans that were soiled from the deaths of things.
I didn’t know the man when I took my seat but something in the moment was deja vu and I was sure somewhere between the two of us a gun was going to come out and wave and drop.
In the silence of waiting for our loved ones and the terminally ill future of all living things we exchanged our smiles of understanding. He was anxious and I heard bad news in my head.
I asked if he’d been waiting long? No, he hadn’t. Just a waiting on his mother to finish with her mammogram. She has cancer but they can do a lot for that now a days and I nodded my nurses head that yes they can and I imagined the rich and famous and the wealthy with their yearly checkups or their daily checkups and all of the drugs and cures in their hands and I saw this young truck driver dirty from the road with those old jeans.
I asked if they caught the cancer early? No they hadn’t but his mother would have all of the support in the world because he would be there for her just like now but he does have to leave for California tonight to carry a load of useless shit across America.
He tells me he never listens to music when he drives his truck. When he listens to music while he is driving his grandmother dies, his sister dies, somebody always dies. I had to wonder if he was listening to the wrong stuff.
Sometimes when he drives, he take his good friend with him because she has scoliosis like my son. She has it so bad she won’t go in public because in elementary school she was made fun of. That’s when he got started with all the suspensions and bad things and fights. It was because of defending that girl. So now to get her out of the house he takes her on the road these twenty years later. She’s had three surgeries but none helped her confidence or pain. He stops the truck every now and again to make her walk. When she tires out he picks her up and carries her back. She needs the exercise.
I had to tell him that he seemed very kind and maybe he should be a nurse himself. That was when the guns came out. He said that no ma’am, they’d never letter him be a nurse because he is crazier than all them doctors around here. I told him I doubted that but his eyes changed from a soft scared brown to black barrels and he stared at me like a crazy man waiting on some fragile prey to run. News flashes of hospital shootings streamed across my brain and with some strange paranoia I stared back like a crazy mother might do if she was protecting a child and I asked if he didn’t really care so deeply for people after all? Then his black barrels filled with tears and the guns dropped silent to the ground and for the moment he was just a boy who needed his mother.
It was so long ago when
we were happy, two
Cats napping on the sun ripened
oak floor.
It was so long ago when
your hand purred across
my face in place of pain.
So long ago that breathing
felt like we were cats stretched
out across the four corners
of our own earth.
Past midnight with cheap white wine
That comes from a box
I tell my terriers I have nothing to say
Worth putting down really
And they agree but I put something
Down anyway and the terriers agree
I promised them both a sip of merlot tomorrow night from a glass bottle
Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed
And never purchased there by anyone,
Yet similar to precious wines, my verse
Can wait – its time will come.
Tsvetaeva (1913).
Trans. Vladimir Nabokov, 1972
The house was built
Like a bluebird’s nest high in the trees
Where wings take form and fall and fly
The house was placed
Like a spiders eye to see all things
While silk is spun to sense to stay
The house was fallen
Like a tiger’s ground gave way
When buds turn leaves and lift and lie
And the people in the house built a nest
That winter turned upside down; a no one
Never there would not have minded at all
Jessamayann 