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 

New Poem

Please scroll down two posts to One Stop/Magpie poem.  Do read this one if you've time.  Thanks!  xxxj

Cheval and I Dream in the Wind

I braid and unbraid my fingers in the dark

Demanding of that cave where I rest

Why was there never

A marriage or a child. 

 

The dark has nothing to say to me

Except to make a bouquet of shadows. 

Sleep won’t be coerced

And the pillows are heavy and hard

And there is the high-voiced

Tender lance of the wind,

Slicing in from the Wyoming border.

Sometimes I want to flag down

Some jaded trucker

And be taken away

But I am on the highway of shadows

Of impossibility.

As my father once said, in the “twilight”

The crepuscule, perhaps the last decade

If that, or, burning up time as Gallager says,

“like a madwoman eating pearls”

Flour and salt call to me

From the cupboard.

I could lay my woman’s hands on these things,

The butter, the canned peaches

To make something

Where my sadness was

I have given in to the sorrows

That gleam on their strand,

Pearls around my throat.  My loquacity

Is my shield but I burn

And hide

Here in the familiar dark room

I return and return to,

Waiting to be reborn.

  

ii

Worse than my angst:

No one has come to release cheval d’or

From his run.  He dies inside

And no one sees this

But I, the neighbor who comes and goes

In her white beaten up truck.  I imagine

Taking my walker

Down the stairs and bracing myself

To drag my leg with me into the  barn

Unlatching the door to the stall

So that Cheval steps out.

He would look at me with his deep velvet eyes

And nose me to learn my name

And my purpose.

I would tell him that he is to leave

Under cover of the dark

Gathering up mares along the way

As if he would not reach the freeway

Where the ghost ships of the night,

The rigs hauling goods from the edges of the world

Would mow him down.

Iii

Once I sought transfiguration

In someone’s arms.

It was afternoon, two voices

Pouring from the radio

Love scene Act I, La Boheme.

My lover’s kisses

Broke me open.  He parted my legs

And wrote his name upon me

And I shuddered in delight

And then I was alone,

And my sorrow came back.

In a bed born along by a dream-wind

Out into emerald oceans

Reunited with a family healed

My mother and father’s dark hair

My brother’s laughter.

I am not lost, all is not lost

But the well of tears, the dearth

The living on empty-armed.


xx


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
2011

Poem for Saturday

Saturday’s Child

What can be understood of that one

Who lives by enduring

The intolerable

Someone tending an alcoholic wife.

Someone on eternal duty to the broken

Someone bringing home stray lambs

Because no one else will

She imagines, or because

She has damned herself

To hard labor, like pitching out 
A rank shed of compressed alfalfa

Where something bereft

Had been shut in for years

What makes a man trudge through

His own house

Like a burro plowing poppy fields

In a track of obligation, bearing up

When he is running out of air and time

Hooked up to oxygen, too married

To someone too dissipated

To care for herself

When the door is open

And he could at least take flight

For a short while, dump them all

So that they are forced 

to save themselves.

What addicts someone

To a bankrupt past

So that even as the years fall

Like corn stalks, scythed down

By first frost

He lives in the ash-fields

Of his traumas and follies. 

Someone I know lies in the dark

All afternoon, her face to the wall.

She is tired of swimming upstream

Of willing herself on.

What will rescue her?

How will she come

To love herself

Enough to say

I matter

To the world.

Clearly she must locate her will

On the map of her own soul,

Pitch herself at the blue horizon

Heart-first, disobeying
the tyrant mind, return

To the fishing village on the sea

To listen to the tide 

pensione shutters flung wide

Permit herself a cup

Of happiness/alegre/alegria

Before the curtain falls

On the one-act existential play

You might subtitle

Waiting for God--

I ask a final time

we see that some

convict themselves

of imaginary sins.

How then

Shall we love such a person.

What liberates her.  What cure

As in a day in the country.

What food, as in 

A taste of forbidden foie gras.  

What marshaled, searing inner light.

x

copyright 2011 Jenne' R. Andrews

Poem for Thanksgiving Week

Inconstancy

We maneuver

Through the singing veins

Of autumn.

Day fades

To bone-shards

In the heart’s profusion

I understand discontinuity

I was born with it in my mouth.

Rain collects

At the temple, the blinds were drawn

Before we were born. 

.

There is laughter

Out in the dried grass

I wonder aloud if there are loons

Tonight

Not in Colorado I say.

You heard them: they must be here

You aver and I shatter

Away, pumpkins tumbling

From their places

To fresh asphalt--

Oriental children

Making airy paper lanterns

And then a sudden rising

Of dark water.