Autumn Poem for Fellow Trauma Survivors....Commemorating 9/11

Posting as well for DVerse Poetry Challenge on loss/healing..the first poem went up yesterday 9/10 and seemed appropos the challenge. The second is a draft to do with correlated violations:  rape and 9/11. xj 

Amphibian

The last time I walked

I played with a golden dog

carefully inching sideways

down to the slope to the creek,

unrolling the training lead

while she plunged in overjoyed,

her tail a semaphore in the rain of light

The last time I loved

was in the stillness of candlelight

and breathlessness

fingers brushing my nipples

unfastening silk strings

hands running down my thighs

I was strong and flexible in my joy

the taking into my body

of an errant golden boy

lost in the same ways

in the aftermath

holding his head against me.


The last time I took action on a dream
was to buy a white mare huge with foal
lugging redolent mash—
flaked corn, grain, molasses
down to the corral
where she stood in dangerous beauty,
waiting for me, eyes round and dark
with gratitude.

And the last time I yearned as deeply

as one may yearn

there was a seahorse floating

in the night of my womb

whose name I dared not speak,

A  tiny and uncommon thing

that slipped from me

a dream gone back to grass

a personhood absorbed by night

the kiss of a far existence

a fluttering away into thin air.

ii

  

And the last time I made a record

of an uncommon life

is this time, of an index of illuminations

in a house gone to ruin

moths in the window sills, in the cool

silences of morning

Brought awake by the imperatives

of language, mind burning

in the crumbling house of a body,

launching myself in my walker

out through the bedroom door

turning down the sibilance of the radio

To hear the swell within

of, you could say

the lyrical nature of living on

in spite of a surgical failure

to weld my bones together:

In making myself try

to walk again however I could

the weight of daily life curved my leg

like a scythe,  until like anything

going from water to land

I became other than I had been,

a tilted person

one leg shorter than the other, a rudder

attached to a once comely woman.

I go out, throwing the walker

into the back of my car

to see the mare down the way

come to her feet

newborn paint filly sitting up

in amazed languor

emerald field populated

with similitude and otherness,

each mare with an undaunted foal,

dancing into life.

The great stallion Halim Shah

The Violable

The first taste of a man,

The salt seas of him

I was eighteen, creeping to the bedside

Of a near stranger, thinking

That if I pleased him

I would be cherished.

One abandonment, cursory

Gratitude not enough.  Down

the decades down the metal stairs

into winter on winter

Reckless and gunning 

for presence

Feeding the being I hated

to them, letting them

Pull at my breasts like stoats

Ache themselves into my body.

This was not the order of love

And not the living night

Parked in someone’s van at the edge

Of a reservoir, choking and degraded

Held by the hair.

I forgave that girl whose desperation

Led her into the underworld

Whose fallen lamb she became

But then came sufficient madness

For all and all time: Planes flying

where they should not

great clouds of smoke, shattered 
glass, melting girders

Bonfires from windows

"Jumpers," widow-cries

Orphanings, barrages of vindication

From automatic weapons

In a mutated sun’s swelter.

How then shall we re-order the world

As if a cedar chest of clean linen,

A white dress appliquéd with roses

would ever again

Mean anything

Or that the scar of terror

Adorned now by willow saplings

waterfalls, marble engravures

could convince a broken-winged bird
to take again to the air.








After Reading Poetry Commemorating 9/11

I am swimming out of a nightmare

Swimming through a sea of dust

Among others drenched in ash

Confounded and running

And the soul is tired

Of its own mission to fathom the meaning

Of the collapse into rubble

Of trust

How on earth death to the innocent

Means martyrdom:

--Islam, be ashamed and wear your shame

In blood.

Here in the autumn a decade later

The heavy turning boughs

The Dona Nobis Pacem

Of the Bach B Minor Mass

Takes a fettered heart

Into the clouds building

To the north

To be mothered

by immortal light—

Et lux perpetua.

Each who watched our brothers

and sisters freefall to the street

Who heard the cries of those on fire

Climbs now into late summer’s

Runnel of hope-making

Takes refuge in the requiems

Of the sundered day

Where we may anoint these wounds

Together, press closed

One another’s serrated flesh.

Jenne' Andrews 2011   jenneandrews2010@gmail.com