New Poem: A Road and Its Scars

I recently posted a narrative about our family and my mother's illness, "An American Travesty: 50's Medicine Dooms My Mother"-- at Loquaciously Yours.  This poem companions that piece.  It is also, despite prevailing literary taste eschewing personal melodrama, a personal epic-- a love letter to myself as a trauma survivor.  It is my hope that the speaker in the poem is in some way, each of us and that the intimate nature of the work invites the reader in.  jra.

A Road and Its Scars

Prologue

Oh quietude of the night, the ice-coated blades

Of grass in their garrisons on either side

Where the way parts open:  I risk it now,

I leave my beloveds to themselves.

i

Someone writes of the road that takes him home

and he is glad of it.  I write of the road

that takes me away and on

That it has a soul, has become a soul

from half a century of tears over it

the wetness of its shining

When a rain cloud disperses moonlight there.

How on the road I am aloft, not of

and bound by my past

Nor burdened with a wooden door, its keys

and rooms that invite yet warn--

the road my lover, the road

Toward all, ever cresting

unto a horizon claimed

by the yearning eye

Ever commanding a heart

to contain and confine

its own breaking:

To entrust all to the surface

that is a way to an ebullient radiance,

a fairway of lightness.

ii

Before midnight’s reckless journeys

across time

like a back way through the dark

Before the cascading decades

forced a mirage

from a life's half-troubled hours

They rocked in Minnesota’s winter

darkness, in a barn apartment

pn old steel springs, making me

In the sweet rut that kept them warm. 

they were young; he had come home

from the Phillipines with a medic’s

Hardened dreams. She had a wide pliant

mouth and coiffed dark hair,

he had a genial smile, warm tan hands.

I was made from the thrusting in the dark

the ripe flush of his rapture

her hips held high, her voice

Softly taking him higher.  I know not

how it was for her; she gave

unto him, for a child not at her breast

But to be swaddled at her heart.

I gestated then

over restless draft mares dancing

On the barn’s wooden floor

with sharp, tufted hooves. 

I was as a dolphin

In the wound of the womb high up

in its night-dark water

my head pressed upon her

And I pummeled her ribs.

I slid into the cove of her arms  

minute vowels from my mouth;

She didn’t give suck, she warmed milk

in a glass bottle and rocked me

on her shoulder.  I dreamed

And below us the wild-eyed mares

pawed and called to the farmer

in the barn’s cold wheel-barrowed deeps.

iii

Love’s winter-hardened mares

pulled their load of stones across dawn--

she was a vigilant mother then

Her moon-face came over me

And I touched the cheeks

Of the moon, and its soft dark hair

And watched her mouth move

With lulling rhymes whose sibilance

I remember

And how she would bathe me,

scrubbing me hard

on the bed on a towel

Holding my head under the water--

that I would cry

and they would laugh and scold.

Forever afterward at times

and after my brother came

her face would shine at dusk

In a luminosity that lingered

when I played the piano

and she rocked and drank.

To forestall the abjuring litanies

of the delirium that had begun 

to claim her, I played on.

iii

Before I could span a chord

There were Albuquerque’s

Dusk-filled years, its pinon smoke

And the doves in the banks of tamarisk

On the Rio Grande;  el bosque.  Canciones.

And road the first, a death road

Camino del muerte

That took our dogs and cats unto itself

Pressing them into the asphalt

So that it was a slab for death and then

A graveyard and a girl on her stick horse

Saw this

Slipping out of bed and riding out  

To visit the grave of dogs

Under the leering moon

.

Patrick’s black legs carrion for the buteo

buteo, buzzards turkey-necked,

Saw-voiced, like the slurred lies

A girl is told when she asks what has become

Of her mother. 

I was riding my conjured horse

In the gardens of hollyhocks and Virginia creeper

When she vanished the first time

Taken away to the hospital on the desert

The sanitarium of adobe called Nazareth

Forced to endure jolts of current

To reconfigure her brain to stop

The voices of my aunts taunting her, wipe away

Memory, erase her wedding day and birthing us.

When we came she didn’t recognize me

Then she called to the girl

With the Buster Brown haircut

And hand-me-down brown dress

Standing on the linoleum

With clean hair

And she brushed cobwebs from her face.

To calm me, Father rocked me

In the dark, kissing me

On the mouth.  I went down

Into the gloom

Of the bed, turning my face

To the adobe wall

And I listened to the owl in the tree

Counting the hours until morning

Dreaming a roadway from the garden

Bridged over the river to a valley

Filled with imported white Arabians

That wanted nothing with their great

Black luminous eyes, their delicate

Noses, blowing, arching their necks,

But to be near a girl.

iv

This lost Child was mother

to the woman who remained

a child. In ‘79 coming back

On I-80 in my red VW bug

one set of ashes tossed into the wind

Mother in the nursing home

At my back a damned love, someone

forcing me onto the highway home

not home.  A road away

And then toward the granite mortuaries

of the mountains.

snow clogging the tracks

I got stuck there, slinging back brandy

from a silver-plated flask

and I made a blue road on my wrist

That opened, spilling forth dark roses.

in the blood-surge of that lost hour,

the stopped-in-its-tracks silence

She said, looking at me like Jesus

“You did this because of me”.. Drink this

 because of Me… I heard

But it was untrue: I had maimed

and scored myself, forgetful

of the dolphin vigor of my own soul.

It called to me at the last

and I saved myself, stitched up, wrists casted,

liberated again:  live or die

On that thoroughfare of being and its true

lightness and right of way

snaking through the bluffs

Into the ether

of the Never Summer Range

buried in cloud-cover.

What was all of this:

hunger,  folly

belated cris d’coeur.

v

One needs a road

to a future, a road to populate

with others galloping on horseback

Unpaved access through wet fields

roads away from the reliving

of how a crumpled father

Sighed in the kitchen and a mother

dreamt drunk

in a urine-soaked armchair.

Yet some years later, relapsing in the darkness

of the kitchen in the double-wide

thinking I would saddle the white mare

To ride in one circle, someone with me

I still fell, and in falling

my leg shattered.

The trauma center,

a morphine pump, nurses murmuring

litanies of stats like nuns

With silver rosaries. On the big screen

starlets mutating to bluejays

calling in beetle-chewed pinons

Mother’s ghost wailing in the night

abjuring doctors, loco

staff writing Rx’s

For the doomed and damned

fallen rider

in the shames and shambles

Of alcoholic relapse. The nursing home then

for rehab and long shining hallways

like funhouse mirrors

Polished every morning

by of a janitor in a white mask.

I assailed these in my wheelchair

Rolling up before the crucifix

in my room, Bach on the stereo

indivisible beauty coding to me:

Bear up, keep on--

then the Buddha-bellied administrator

stood over me, in her skirt of flesh

Warning me that should I call out

when the old woman next to me

spoke in her tongues

Of love and war, should I swear out loud

I would be locked away.

I went a.w.o.l then, calling a cab

Hobbling in my brace out the door and then

down the dirt lane over the bridge

to the home not home I needed

To make mine again

with its wolverine ghosts

of failed love

Plundering and feasting

on the festered wound of my fear--

I’m not enough

I’m a dispossessed Eve after the fall

but once more

when I couldn’t walk

I built a way of light and dark

of solitude and privacy

a sanctuary, and time-traveled away

Until I imagined freedom

and roused myself past my fear

forcing the dead leg to heal

So that I walked again--

even crooked, remembering

that throughout time

There have been comings back to life

of the dead, the damned, abruptly

upright, in a miracle’s daunting

Vigor. The flight-path

of a road away into snow-lit air

freedom of being

And the singing in all weathers

the whiting out

and full releasing of a soul.

iii

If you can’t run

You make a way where light comes

You weave it for yourself

Of a magnum mysterium

The chords of a requiem mass, and forever

The transforming moonlight

Whale-bodied mares dreaming

Along the fence line--

You go there after Holy Communion

And how when they said take eat this is my body

You felt the nearness of the priest

And your breasts tingling for him

And were ashamed—to pull over

Well out of the streetlight

To assuage yourself. 

You go there

To show yourself that you can spin wings

By dreaming of wings, and sing

Beneath your own breath

Imagining a proscenium

Where you lift your face

To the house lights

In an emerald gown about to stun

The world with your coloratura. 

For a road is a dark scar

Made by the weight that travels it

The beautiful burdens it carries; yours.

cc 

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011