THESIS
THE ARCHANGEL OF INSOMNIA
Submitted by
Jenne’ R. Andrews
Department of English
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado
Summer 2013
Master’s Committee:
Advisor: William Tremblay
Mary Crow
Patsy Boyer
ABSTRACT
THE ARCHANGEL OF INSOMNIA
In the title poem of this thesis manuscript, The Archangel of Insomnia, an old man
appears to the speaker at a coffee house counter in a midnight annunciation--and with
the obvious corollary of the great Gabriel’s visit to Mary. This nomad and I had a short
exchange in Spanish before he prescribed what I should do to fix my life and become
happy/able to sleep; yet, rather than announce to me that I had undergone an
immaculate conception, I was abjured to live up to my womanhood—as he understood
it, and which in an uncanny manner paralleled my own preoccupations and yearnings.
I never saw him again. But before I could take advantage of his compelling
prescription, to immerse myself in the mud baths at Chimayo, make mad love and
conceive, there remained the thorny dilemma of what it means to nurture the halfformed and broken person within the woman—to grow her up.
It is fair to say then that in a sense this manuscript is the account of how the
speaker deals with the archangel’s advice and comes to terms with the two-edged
sword of longing to nurture and a constant yearning to be nurtured. The collection is a
record of the trials necessary to enter adult life as a woman—or at least, how I see the
impetus of these neoconfessional, narrative/lyrical, lyrical/narrative poems.
The therapies of the 80’s designate the ungrown persona as “the inner child.”
While some modes of said therapy have survived the intervening years, it is now hardly
au courant or even de rigueur to write of the inner child in serious lyric poetry, much less
ii
allude to her. It seems that it is antithetical to feminism and a retrograde proclamation
of fragility and weakness.
However, for this poet, the archetype of the inner child provides a resonant and
kinetic trope with which to envision and write toward freedom from symbiosis, and to
locate and inhabit both the wholeness that results from what Carl Jung and his disciples
call “individuation” and connection to the Other and the world.
Thus the work moves from a poetry of nurturing and grief to the quest for
completion of self, revisiting the maternal relationship, to cut to the chase, as hell on
earth—per Deposition and In Esos Dias. How many maternal chimeras there are, in the
circles of Hell. And Persephone and Demeter in mortal combat. The anger in some of
this work, that in moments the speaker “hates” her mother, no longer inflicts any shame
upon me. Anguish in poems should be honest.
These poems were written and “workshopped” when high praise for ambiguity
was nonexistent and “language poetry” had little currency; critics had not yet chastised
women writers for the flux of neo-confessional work in the 80’s—notably that of Sharon
Olds, Lyn Lifshin, Rachel Zucker and others, and certainly in the milieu of the Twin
Cities literary renaissance, yours truly. Today it is popular to accuse those writing in the
first person of firsthand experience as lacking vision or dimension, as “self-referential.”
But I argue that first-person lyric poetry still has authenticity and cachet in
current arts and letters. The truth-telling of Sexton and Plath yielded to the groundbreaking thematic, linguistic archaeology of the great feminist Adrienne Rich, my major
figure for this degree, who availed herself widely of the I as the voice of witness, with
iii
the poem as testimony. In addition many of today’s women poets write successfully of
relationship and interiority, including the most brilliant poet of my generation, Tess
Gallagher, who is unafraid to continue to explore the relationship between Self and
world and the power of whose intellect is so remarkably and fully present in her
stunning language and the sheer craft of the individual poem.
And mature poets know and understand that however autobiographical a poem,
however it may have been compelled into being by the poet’s own need for catharsis
and transfiguration, the successful poem has an aesthetic, possesses the dimensions of
art, in that literature is only able to refract experience with a sufficient agency of
language and effective lattice-work of form and genre.
For me, language itself has immense power and primacy. It is the quality of
language that separates a journal entry from a living, breathing poem. Language is the
instrument of transformation and truth-telling. My sense of the musicality of language
arises from many hours spent alone half-singing the poems I found in Stevenson’s A
Child’s Garden of Verse, in the mnemonic quality of the Anglican liturgy, poems seminal
to my work and the American lyric tradition, and in music itself—especially, the great
requiem masses. I began the study of Latin very early and am fluent in Spanish and
Italian; there are no more musical languages to be found anywhere else on earth than in
the Latinate.
I have also used the West as a great objective correlative and in the belief that being
can only know and describe itself in terms of its environment. Hence, adobe, light,
dust, the incomprehensibly deep blue of the mountain ranges. The iconography of
iv
region, the lore of what it has meant to settle in and live in the West, all provide
abandoned mines where veins of imagery-rich language gleam.
To sing the nature of becoming, the facets of loss and love, the inexhaustible
representations of duality of these things all around us, woven as they are through daily
life and culture, is what I have striven for throughout my career, the focus of my
endeavors in the Master of Fine Arts program, and my concerns now, many years after
my apprenticeship.
I offer my sincerest thanks to Dr. LouAnn Reid and other members of the CSU
faculty for accommodating my disabilities in making it possible for me to complete this
degree many years after I began my graduate work. It will not have been in vain; a new
collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, is forthcoming in 2013.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these poems appeared in Wingbone, An Anthology of Colorado Poets and a chapbook,
The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, John Bradley and James Grabill,
editors.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... vi
I. VIGIL
Apprentice ........................................................................................................................................2
Dreaming Thea.................................................................................................................................4
After the Nativity .............................................................................................................................7
Famine..............................................................................................................................................9
Of the Old Territory .......................................................................................................................12
Vigil ...............................................................................................................................................15
II. LOS POBRECITOS
To the Girl in the Photograph ........................................................................................................18
Living in the West ..........................................................................................................................20
The Horse Flower ..........................................................................................................................22
Los Pobrecitos ................................................................................................................................24
Trout Song .....................................................................................................................................27
Epitaph ...........................................................................................................................................29
Toward the Emancipation of Hands ..............................................................................................33
III. THE ODYSSEY AS DARE
The Dark Animal of Liberty ..........................................................................................................37
Lily Coddington, Waking ..............................................................................................................40
The Odyssey as Dare .....................................................................................................................45
vii
The Solace in Naming ....................................................................................................................54
IV. EQUINOX
Midlife at the New Year ................................................................................................................58
A Hot Plate in Italy ........................................................................................................................60
Georgia O’Keefe in Tierra Amarilla .............................................................................................62
Equinox ..........................................................................................................................................64
After Amadeus ...............................................................................................................................67
Ada, Leavetaking ...........................................................................................................................68
Corazon ..........................................................................................................................................70
V. DEPOSITION
In Esos Dias ...................................................................................................................................74
Deposition ......................................................................................................................................80
The Archangel of Insomnia ...........................................................................................................84
The Ceremony of Milk...................................................................................................................88
Alone with the Good ......................................................................................................................90
viii
I. VIGIL
1
Apprentice
Today I think of your visit home a month ago,
our drive up Bingham Hill at sundown
to play a tape of Bach fugues,
watch the moon rise.
We held each other for the first time in this way,
looking steadily at each other as we talked,
family of two: two deaths
and the desert years at our backs.
Below us the late winter river
stretched through a field of Herefords
with their calves, their common tranquility.
All about us dimension, time:
that blueness of the near mountains,
the blurred outline of the far ones,
noses buried in cloud banks.
mountains where you live, paint,
ski—psalm-like hills, that call heart and eye:
this our West.
2
In these moments the old scrim
lifted or dissolved
into the present’s air and the moon rose.
I prayed for your recovery and my own.
In your white powder ballet
how easy it has been for you to give yourself to the sky!
How beautifully you paint sky, clouds,
mountains, work in a ballet of the hand,
with brush or pencil out from the center
of canvas or sketch-pad, all whiteness.
We have practiced all we can, hung back
long enough.
.
3
Dreaming Thea
You remember and love the name
from a late-night call you made, lonely
to a hotline;
the answerer’s name
was Thea. Your talk lasted an hour;
a generous voice said,
we women have each other,
we’re not alone.
Now you watch Dutch Iris
swell in April,
your hands folded over your tight stomach.
At night you eat rich bread,
put a chintz pillow at your back
to write in your journal about how Thea
swims, developing hands.
Then it is summer, and you can scarcely
bend over to weed the yard, to pull up
the young dandelions; these riot
4
everywhere.
You nap alone, now and then phoning
a friend, putting the receiver on your stomach;
Can you hear her grow?
You are so huge and ripe you think you might
burst some night, alone. Your heart
thuds heavily, and in August
you stop sleeping— the baby boxing you
hard now, wanting out,
into the open hand of the dawn.
You summon friends to your labor;
they drive you to the hospital, flank
your birthing chair.
Late roses spill forth hosannas
and you burst, bleed, wonder
if you will go crazy from the pain.
But you are made of bone and yearning;
when the head crowns, the midwife
5
makes the slit and you reach down
to pull your infant to you.
Your friends are stunned into tears;
you, breathless at her beauty,
speak her name.
6
After the Nativity
In one of the dim kitchens of the town
fever beads a woman’s face
after coming home from giving birth.
Her hands voyage over old lace,
making a canopy for her newborn.
In afternoon
a thundershower stops all work;
a red hawk hangs like a flame
over the marketplace,
then cries away
toward darkened fields of water.
In evening, after dinner,
she smoothes the mariner’s hair.
His hands ascend her
like partisans with heavy feet.
She places a kiss like a seed
against his face.
7
She brings a small clay fox to the table
to ward off fertility,
and cold water for the alliance.
.
8
Famine
The sand scorches our feet—
we walk toward them.
They are all huddled together
on a necklace of shadows, a bracelet
of dark the tents cast.
They hide emaciated young in the tattered
folds of their clothing.
We walk on, on—
the ox-cart groans with its load of wheat.
Their eyes have a look of dark intensity.
It is an awakening to the dharma of famine
the true hunger.
I throw off my shawl, unbind my hair,
my feet braced apart
on the hot sand.
It is soundless here.
Someone hands me a child and at last
after our long trek
9
I can be useful.
My breasts tighten with a flood of milk.
I begin to suckle her.
The sun is red on the horizon.
A star rises in the east;
darkness rinses the plain.
An ass brays wearily, eating nothing.
The missionaries all about us
croon psalms for the dying
but there is a vast and ethereal silence;
the starving have no use for hosannas.
Darkness pulls light from the edge
of the world.
I eat dust; grit stings my lips.
I feed and feed the child.
She is insatiable,
her skin is the color of carob,
dark against my arms.
She pulls on my breast hard,
10
pummels me
with her miniature fists.
Her almond-wide eyes
are intent on my face.
11
Of the Old Territory
You, with a Sterling silver cross at your throat
sit with me in the car.
We drive toward church in Sunday’s autumn.
Through cottonwood leaf-work
we see gables, white spires.
You tell me of territorial pastimes;
our uncle the first to float over Albuquerque
in a hot-air balloon.
This is one of our first conversations;
the sanitarium where you were lost to us
is far back, stained with shadows
behind the canyons.
In the parish hall we talk with churchwomen.
You hold your cup to your cheek;
your forehead is smooth, your eyes alert.
You lean toward us like one who has come back
from a long death.
12
We embrace; we watch each other unbend,
mother and daughter.
Tonight a white, full November moon
rises at the back of our house.
I am curled around the dogs,
half-sleeping, sailing in Brahms.
If he can speak with tranquility
of losses
then perhaps I may hear him
and retrieve you from
this sudden leavetaking.
The moon hollows out the house
with her maniacal spoon.
Who is left?
In your silken bed jacket, I sort earrings,
pacing like an old and fragrant sail
in my insomnia.
13
I need to relearn you,
that you were here.
I lie down in the dark
to receive the moonlight,
in its cold efficacy.
14
Vigil
Disheveled, her skin hot,
the woman gets up at two a.m.,
wipes away the tears of half-sleep;
language travels along the burning wires
of the mind, lines of Lorca,
fragments of partings.
She goes to the window;
alone, at the edge of the limp curtain,
she looks out; the moon trawls for silver,
tumbling in its sea
above the skein of dormant apple trees.
She sees a man in the garden
wandering in the dark,
bending down and combing the leaves
for seeds or loose change
or keys to his identity,
or perhaps he is looking for her,
15
as if she lay half-buried
in the frozen grass.
When he is no longer visible,
or when he is subsumed by the trees,
or eaten limb by limb
by the moon,
she goes to the dresser,
where there is a photograph
of herself as a child,
wearing a silk blouse,
stilling herself in an antique chair
for a portrait.
The woman sits then, in her rocker-listening and dreaming in the dark,
as if there were an infant
no one has ever seen by day
who would be waking soon,
crying out for her touch
in the next room.
16
II. LOS POBRECITOS
17
To the Girl in the Photograph
A mountain’s black and whiteness,
its cinematic secrecy,
belong to those who play as children
in cottonwood bosques
on the Platte in the spring,
sighting pink doves, seducing the dusk
with dream-singing.
No developer or cloud-seeder
knows of the blue pockets of the valleys
where a girl yearned
to sing love out of the mountain
on deep-eyed horses.
We turned our spoon-rings three times
to savor the delinquency of the heart;
we played conquistador in fun
because a pink dove
builds her nest so quietly
18
in the budding fever of the tamarisk,
in her private summer.
Today we ski
in conifer-redolent flurries.
Rising over a lip of ice the sun strikes
like a spark, we turn toward earth
in scrutiny, praise, straighten
and tuck into the powder,
soaring again.
Beyond sleeping towns,
beyond the near canyons,
the Never Summer Range towers in pink light
engraved with frost and quartz,
as if a deer in flight
had been traced there by the moon.
19
Living in the West
In the pioneer museum
there is a ladle, worn smooth
by a farm woman’s hand.
And rusted and skeletal plows
from the days of Colorado Territory
arch their backs in dim light.
These implements
came from a shack on the grasslands
where the wind has come and gone
like a cadre of Sioux, madly galloping
from Army fire
and the bones of the farmer and his wife
compost the vine-ruin
of a vegetable garden.
You tap the power of the talisman:
Grandmother’s brooch,
worn as she rocked and prayed
in the Conestoga from Boston:
20
the turquoise ring
from the trading post in Estes
given you by your father,
its veined, oval blue nub
linking your knuckle with his.
You give yourself to the dust,
the corn pouring like panned ore
from the mill-chute.
You buy a savvy grey mare
for afternoon rides over uneven ground,
reins crossed and loose,
back straight, heels down.
21
The Horse Flower
I remember touching him
through the soft, dry wood
of corral rails, one morning in June
when I was seven.
And his flank was as smooth
as the felt of a good sombrero.
But he was cottonwood golden,
sun-shot, completely,
in his otherness.
Then my wonder:
how does he feel
about the sun, my hands,
the new alfalfa mowing
at our backs,
or being penned for so long
without visitation.
My godmother Anne:
22
He’s a valuable quarterhorse, Jen ,
stay away from him—
Over her shoulder, going in with Mother
into the adobe for tea at the hearth,
pinon consolations.
So I watched the palomino Leo Q,
who breathed on my jacket,
rubbing his head on the post,
the New Mexico doves
nearby yet low-voiced.
Then, I climbed in,
as one would reach for a lucent shell
on a first visit to the sea.
We simply stood near each other,
and neither of us moved away.
23
Los Pobrecitos
They come in to the arena
where the buyers sit
raising the imperceptible finger
and the auctioneer sings.
They stink
with murk and fear.
Some are fat, stomachs heavy
with brood;
one is tiny, alone, gingerly making
her sale debut.
The men kick her though the gate
when she is sold.
Who loves the pig?
The old woman, stretching
worn sheets
on a sun-baked clothesline,
her sow lying in a wallow
at the back of a garden
24
or on the border of a cornfield,
half-hearing the craven laugh
of the vieja,
viejita herself, dugs wrinkled
from the dozen young each litter
year after year
sold off to relatives’ farms.
Who anoints this flesh,
rubs balm on the cracks,
shampoos coarse hair,
digs out the wallow, lets the sow
have room not to soil herself—
calls her to snuffle scraps from a pail
near the back door, keeps her
from the high-handed rutting
of the old boar?
Old abandoned ones, farmers aged
into compassion,
their hard, mean money-hunger gone,
25
crooked over with vision:
Widows and widowers,
ready to be taken up into palest light,
even as the earth draws in
and dissolves old pigs,
fallen robins.
26
Trout Song
To the memory of Hal Hagan
My brother tells me about trout,
how he shepherds them up narrow waterways
on the trout farm in central Colorado;
he describes their sleek, innumerable
bodies carried forward on the current,
gills fanning in shallows,
eyes looking out with prehistoric dignity.
My brother shepherds fish,
paints his dreams in oil on fresh canvas,
trims his lamp at night,
sleeps warmly under down, turning
in the waters of sleep, slips free—
freefalls like a star over incandescent hills
of snow, comes down soundlessly
on thin skis: sails without weight or any
unmet need, toward morning.
27
It is a dream of liberty,
a life lived in pursuit of liberty.
There were tyrannies of the blood for us;
I climbed an old trail reeling with Peyote,
tried to see the woods with a blind vision,
drank Mescal.
Now my brother is trout’s husband;
he slips food into the causeway,
perceives the spawning, keeps
careful charts;
he shepherds pigment into a fusion
with the most delicate movements of his wrist.
Now I want him to have the fusion
and movement upstream,
the flowering, star-falling joy
of a love calibrated in days without end.
28
Epitaph
I remember her singing a Southern lullaby
to me when I was three—
cradling me briefly.
I learned to finish the song
myself.
Humming it one night
I walked down a long hall
to her room,
where I saw her
lying in the dark,
talking to the air:
I think she said
I hate all of you,
I can’t get rid of you,
and fell back sobbing.
I went to her closet
where there were soft kimonos
made of World War II silk from Japan
29
and I looked at how my small grey one
hung next to her robe,
splashed with orange flowers.
ii
In a photograph, she wears a black dress
with her cameo pin,
while she holds me.
I look off squinting, a patch of sunlight
on my cheek,
in my froth of blue tulle.
I have held this moment to me:
that we were this near each other.
iii
Tears and time,
I hear myself say tonight,
stepping into a scalding hot bath,
sluicing water over the body
30
that looks like hers—the family
short waist, the fullness.
Earlier, when I drove past the nursing home
I remembered how she used to sit all alone,
her hair still dark,
waiting for me.
iv
Shame on you
for unmotherly behavior:
how I would come to you
with the baby I tried to draw
in pastels
whose face you irretrievably
darkened, snatching away the crayon.
Shame on you
for making me mother you,
for abandoning me
31
with a look,
a single inflection
in your voice.
And I come back to the home
where you have never been,
where the cat sleeps with her kittens;
I crawl down on my kitchen floor
onto the old sweater with them
and put my face down
into the vibrating nest
where they knead and suckle,
where there is a purely animal bond.
32
Toward the Emancipation of Hands
I want him to know
that these are kind hands,
the old cat that runs at our footfall,
cat who had not known touch
until I cut loose a hump of matted fur
tonight, dubbing him Loch Ness.
Now he stays,
gumming what I leave for him.
And I want the apples weighting the tree
at my door to know these hands,
to move my fingers among them,
freeing her of her burden.
Late cooling off from a run
I see them, glowing spoilage at 10 o’clock.
Who will see to the harvest
with no orchard keeper
and no ladder?
33
And how does a pair of hands unlearn
caretaking?
Years ago I came home to scoop up
broken parents, rewound them,
made order and dinner.
And the succoring went on:
my hands have drawn vagabond men close,
tending, laundering—
they have guided and rewarded lovers,
made order when someone has gone home.
Now they lose themselves
in a cat’s pale fur,
in communion with a bay colt
at sundown,
dancing over the alphabet:
aching with hard-won wisdom
they begin to resign
as the caretakers of the world.
34
III. THE ODYSSEY AS DARE
35
The Dark Animal of Liberty
In those days
we found ourselves in small and stale rooms
built against a hillside.
A feeling moved through us
of something seeking existence:
an animal with wary eyes.
It glinted in an old mica knife
from South America;
it spoke through our poems.
“Fundamental talk” began.
We were cradled in the mountains.
We traveled to them and returned
singed from the stove-fire.
We plotted our labor
and our commitment, our unidad
billowed and changed like a sail.
The two-fisted heart
tried to keep itself out of reach
of the dangerously lonely mind.
36
Sometimes there were invasions of light
in a bell-shaped household
and love turned in the womb, cohering.
But we were barren of all language.
Mountain in ruin and a covenant:
the silence of a room,
the dear faces of companions.
It is necessary to say that Lenin…
It is vital to imagine that Che…
It is necessary to keep the body taut,
free of love.
In daily life,
under the sprawling shadow
of a mountain owned by the government,
what did we know
of love, of hunger?
In the spare rooms of our youth
looking out at Medicine Bow
the tongue could do little
37
about the old dying alone,
the women detained and debased
in the Bonhoffen,
the guerrero mediating with terror
in his cell:
or that the dark animal of liberty
watched from the blind.
38
Lily Codington, Waking
These were the least
of my passions…
Lily Codington writes
from her seat on the Zephyr
from east to west;
it bores, iron mastodon
through Utah ranges.
Passengers lean on the panes
and dream:
gold sleeps underfoot, in the arroyo:
there are silver threads
in the graves.
Lily’s hair is a skein of cinnamon.
She writes, sipping from a cup
in a pewter holder.
Passing sombrero mountains,
she pours from a Rose Medallion teapot
in a wicker cozy lined with pink linen:
39
Meditation on the Imported Teapot
Wedding Gift from John
The surface pictures are harmonious.
The mandarins court in gardens,
their feet hidden under silk robes.
In pink arbors the brides to be
are pale, redolent,
and gibbons hide in the banyans;
it is their mating without temerity
at night in the trees
one hears, above the lute.
By night,
in a dance as oblique as dross,
they conceive.
ii
And why then the appearance
near some of these mouths
of prayer or anguish
and why the upswing of the pagoda roofs
40
and the eyebrows’ arch?
The track curves down toward the Mojave;
Pekoe steams toward the glass
and the wheels echo through
the shadow-laced canyon.
A single hand is so mortal
a familial gnarl of the fingers
holding cup and pen;
It is small and claw-like.
But the privacy of my hand, here
and of my body, away from John.
iii
Do I say a woman sings?
No language for our redemption
not poetry,
not pain. I cannot reach you
with ready speech.
Yet how we once wove our conversation-41
the chrysanthemums of Amherst,
the appetites
of the Bostonian.
We agreed on love as mercy,
as labor toward an erratic God.
We wept near the lilacs parting for war:
I promised many gardens;
In my heart, I said
I would not covet
possible lives.
Yet while you were away,
I was moved and restless;
I had a séance
in a grove:
I was tapping syrup
with Mother, on her cane.
I saw Emily Dickinson, in dimity,
in salt grasses,
striking her breast,
her fists like quartz
and her shoes wet and sagging.
42
Trying to write on a train
is like trying to walk in the winds
of Boston with an umbrella open,
but I want you to know about
our separation;
in your face I thought I saw
a spirit both man and woman.
I thought by hope or luck,
we would leave the parlor
of our immovable lives.
I am impossibly alone at twilight
on the train to San Francisco;
they will hurt me
but how can I hate them;
all our hands are restless,
and we are all pioneers
crying out Vision!
43
The Odyssey as Dare
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.*
- Dante, Canto Uno, La Commedia
We head around wide and green-banked
highways into Verona;
dusk pours from the clocks,
pigeons take to the paling air.
We sit in the Piazza di Dante
sipping white wine in thick goblets,
sparring with young men
in hybrid lingo, following them
to Juliette’s balcony, where I am kissed
and kissed again
by one Giuseppe Candido
44
alla vacanza in Verona,
il piu bel citta nel mondo.
At midnight
in a courtyard banked with roses
we try phrases—La donna e mobile
women are fickle,
and dunque propria finita,
And now, our finish,
and on his part, from the Beatles
I luv you—yeah,
back to the bus parked in the cathedral
courtyard and an uneasy sleep,
while the feral cats of Verona
yowl and mate there all night long.
In the morning, we sip espresso,
leaving them
to put out in the Corsica Star,
dreaming a stretch of wake and sea
45
to Sisco, town half buried in coastal
mountains.
By day Caroline and Julia write and talk
in bikinis in the sand.
I write in the cafe’, checking the Ferma Posta
for letters, and look for a translator
for the one that comes;
three, strapping bilingual butchers
of Bastia laugh, read, laugh again
at you are the bone of my heart,
il osso nell mio cuore;
my little big love—
il mio piccolo grande amore.
That night at our campfire
on the cliffs above the Mediterranean,
Julia paints me in a basket carried
by the moon, floating
down the Italian coast
to Calabria where the famiglia
46
is waiting.
You must do this for us all
they say, and help me to pack,
to go back by ferry to Livorno and board
a war-dark train.
Jammed into a third class car
with soldiers on leave,
American regazza
with a knapsack of clothing,
I rock through night tunnels.
Far back, Corsica,
wild black goats in the night meadow
and the long breathing of the sea,
but here, the conductor frowning in on us
and a ride to Napoli,
then Roma then on.
Morning, noon and a landscape
dream-spare with brush and stones:
47
my clothing sticks to me. I have left, I think,
who I am.
Journey’s end then,
at Reggio station; clutching
my belongings like a mail order bride,
I see Pepe, unshaven.
We whirl up and down steep hills
in an old Fiat, Franco the cousin
whispering, We meet the family first,
then we eat. Then you and Pepe
go to my father’s villa
to make love.
In a foyer
small family of eighteen, counting bambini,
Mama, Papa. They gather
for my baptism.
Papa, with three-inch eyebrows, shouts
Mangia tutto!
Mama leans toward everyone:
48
When will she marry my son?
Outside the Calabrian air
is cool-- we promenade
on the sea.
I half-dream, stepping through foam.
In the palazzo of our assignation,
we rock in a jackhammer clench
until canaries wake us
at dawn.
ii
We sit in small chairs, on a balcony
in Scylla,
looking out at the Costa Viola—
that sea shimmering off toward
Sicily. Swordfish trawlers come in
to dock; marinaios haul their catch
over the pilings. Pepe says Scylla is poor;
our speech flies now
like impromptu doves
49
from our sleeves.
I talk of American feminism;
he says Italian women worked underground
in the Calabrian Resistance.
I have asked him to slow down
in bed, and we have fought, and I have asked him
to give me room, lie on our sides, to touch me
awake, and he has said,
Non ho mai fato amore cosi-I’ve never, ever made love this way.
You call it una vita breve insiemi in Italy-a brief life together, the affair.
When I tell him that I want to walk near him
but not entwined, down the street;
that I want for now only brief times with a man,
tu sei una donna di poco fede-You are a woman of little faith.
50
In my journal I write,
I want to sing this richness.
Pepe writes there, Ciao, bella ciao,
the canzione of the Resistance.
We see announcement for Boheme
and Pepe says
You should have seen this one.
Later, alone in a garden
I braid and unbraid these words.
iii
We are fluent.
Pepe leans out of the train
in Verona station,
off to Turin to paint palazzi,
his tears falling over my hands.
We agree that America is not far away.
I weep, he weeps, bystanders
all begin to weep.
We repeat ourselves,
51
and the abrupt lurch forward
of the train.
At dusk Julia takes our bus
over Monte Bianco,
urging me to leave Verona,
to not seek over my shoulder
any swordfish leaping from
the Violet Sea,
or any lover’s face
in the Scylla rose arbor,
turning to stone.
*In the middle of the road of our lives
I found myself on a dark path
Because the direct way through
Had disappeared. trans. jra
52
The Solace in Naming
Today we sped along a back road that keeps pace
with the unfolding hills; the humps of indigo
reaching backward, granite-pillared, gods chained
in rock at the backstroke,
Lapis Lazuli tiers of butte
sprinkled with brush and many light-shot stones.
We raced along with the clouds
and I bent over my coffee
like a question mark, looking out at the marvelous.
Deus mihi providebit--God will provide for me,
words from the family crest over my bed,
in the house where I braid strands
of solitude, growing, paining—
Once these words with their dark and detailed serifs
seemed to belong to another world, an Arabia,
a familial empire
far back, with this marked in red
contemporary italic: I fear coming home
53
to myself.
I close my eyes in belief:
I am standing in a drawing room, in low lamplight,
singing an Italian song.
Or, I am a cormorant, exotic, aloof,
in a garden pond ringed with orchids:
I am a blue sail on fire--
but not that, not that. I close my eyes
and I am straightening my back in a farm kitchen,
pulling dough from my fingers, shaking out
pastry cloth over green tendrils pushing through
mulched dark Colorado earth.
And no cormorant, but egret, osprey,
on that wire stretching off
toward Denver,
parallel to and then diverging from the rolling
caravan of mountains.
54
IV. EQUINOX
55
Midlife at the New Year
My friend’s silver hair is smooth
and her eyes, blue like the Mexican glass
in a small window.
She holds her cup of tea to her cheek
and we talk of yearning.
We say that at night we listen,
our bodies fragrant, tired,
to half-sounds in the darkness,
wondering who will kiss the hollow
of the waist,
the listening skin
of the forearm—
that the sleeves of her red silk dress
hang in the shadows
and my silver bracelets
gleam in their ceramic dish
like bangles for a Carmen.
56
Tonight the clock edges
toward the New Year;
we gauge the eyebrow’s contour
in the mirror,
paint the lashes dark,
redden our mouths
together.
57
A Hotplate in Italy
At daybreak the market flowered
below our window.
We had been dreaming, to Mozart—
rolling inseparably, asleep,
swordfish on the rocking deck of a trawler.
The peach vendor’s song was first to reach us;
she rummaged with great arms
for those fruit perfect and dawn-colored.
On the corner, where you boarded the bus,
stood the woman you called “putan.”
Housewives watched her,
pinching at their skirts
with their free hands.
Lamenting our hotplate,
I brought back chicken, bread
and wine.
After I cooked, I slept,
dreaming of views through tunnel walls
58
from a train,
the sea rising and falling
over perfectible lives.
I had forgotten your face, your voice
unfolding, coming in later
to our room:
paint stood like snow in your hair
and you said,
Bella, bella—che cos’ ‘or mi hai fato?
“Beautiful one, what delicious thing
have you made me now?”
59
Georgia O’Keeffe in Tierra Amarilla
His hands won’t still themselves.
They walk my spine like terns
in sand dunes, counting my vertebrae.
I can’t see his eyes, but his chest against me
lifts and falls. Through his ribs
his heart sits, a blue-veined desert
flower, vibrating.
Who let him in?
I was scattering hollyhock seeds,
completing the walls of my garden,
closing the chinks with mortar
I slapped in myself.
Stepping into my adobe
I felt silence whiten the walls.
I gripped the red tile
with bare feet.
Now he turns the pages
of the book of pressed asters,
60
photographs me, sleeping,
cleans chaff from my dog’s eyes,
bathing her.
I turn from punching down dough
and he cradles me.
I dream I’m falling back
into a garden choked with spring
where the first storm-purple iris
breaks from the weight of flowering.
61
Equinox
The barn is dusty and quiet
I stand against my horse’s shoulder,
braiding her mane,
winding coarse silver hair
through my fingers.
Her sides lift and fall.
Later I drive toward town, into the sun.
Cloud-cover hangs over the mountains;
music pumps from the radio.
I am alone in my car
moving between fields of damp alfalfa,
whole and separate from those I have lost,
squinting at the horizon.
In my kitchen I broil green chiles,
dropping them into cold water,
stripping blackened skin from pulp.
My feet grip the floor; my frame
creaks slightly as I reach, bend, lift.
62
The dogs lie near me, watching.
Blood beats in my temples.
My lover comes in;
Seated on the edge of the chair, he says,
I don’t think we should go on
but I can’t resist you.
I listen, my heart pounding.
I sit on his lap, hold his hands,
mine burning from the juice
of the chiles.
When I drive across town and enter his room
he is propped on blue pillows,
his bald head smooth and clean,
dark mustache soft, smelling of soap.
He tamps out his cigarette;
I climb over the bed on all fours,
sit astride him, drink our kisses
in the lamplight.
Back in the eggshell of my apartment,
63
in the yolk of its light
I strip down, look at myself,
touch the places he has touched,
see the flush marks on my skin.
I gather my sweatshirt into my hands
to smell my horse,
see myself reach for her head
pulling it down.
I lie alone in the dark, in the orbiting
capsule of my body,
sent forth
into what could be death
or morning.
64
After Amadeus
At the heart of his requiem
I was transfigured. My passion rose again—
that urge to ascend, be immune to death.
I wanted you, covering me in your tenderness
like an angel, our faces touching.
Even though it had known rapture
the body went down
into the grave alone
and the wife watching
discarded the warmth of her own being
over the coffin
in a hail of half-opened flowers.
It is spring.
We are taking off my vanilla chiffon.
We walk into a temple of roses
and thunder.
65
Now I don’t hear the ordinary
or my own nightmares.
I hear caves echoing under the sea.
66
Ada, Leavetaking
She was too old to bleed,
my neighbor recently put in a nursing home.
Yet, searching the chaff her family leaves,
I find bedding covered with an Africa,
an India, of dried blood.
I wonder if she lay at night,
dust on her Limoges and pewter,
given over to Alzheimer’s—
saw the torn moon flagged
in dry cottonwoods,
tried to pick its netted light
off her face, and bled in terror.
I often saw her creak out
into the day on stick legs
in a short black skirt,
hump over to pluck leaves from her lawn.
I saw her follow a tortoise-shell cat
through the iris,
67
her hand outstretched, her pale lips
moving.
And I learned that she wandered away
one night
into a nearby neighborhood,
where children up late found her.
Now I spread the stained sheets on the lawn,
wondering if I should launder them.
Others drive past, while I carry tree limbs
broken off by last night’s storm,
with the rolled-up bedding, over the grass,
as though I have swaddled her
to keep her from being taken away.
68
Corazon
I come home
to radiator silence
the house where we have been
so briefly, so gently
and I am still thinking
of your heart.
Soft-beating tanager
full of song tonight.
Of weariness.
of yeses—
and of exhausted
dreaming.
I want to speak to it
or to you,
to make a shape in the air
with my hand, some signal
that will not say too much
about this,
of how much
69
I wish for you
all possible health,
all sweet rest.
Who knows how long
we are to lie in our separate
silences,
our hearts in a slow, solitary
reggae
until morning?
But my heart beats its
own words
thinking of your heart.
It aches, thinking of what
we both know,
of what must be done.
70
Smoke or dust
settles at our backs
on past lines of light
we might call
old horizons.
71
V. DEPOSITION
72
In Esos Dias, In Those Days
Tonight we recover a summer
I had forgotten:
the perfume locked in stones,
the backs of men curving
and falling through the wheat
like dolphins.
Inside the adobe, inside
the pumpkin shell
Maria peels green chiles
in a red bandana,
and my mother teaches me
how to tie a bandana
around my chest
so that we get tan together.
On Saturday she shows me
how to make pincurls
so that we meet Sunday
with crafted heads,
73
spaniel-sleek caps of familial
brunette hair,
the winning, feminine
arch of eyebrow
like Fitzgeraldian beauties
among the blond parishioners.
Mother Goose did not teach us
what to expect;
her songs did not make us
powerful
against rituals that could
say who we were.
But these books bled our rage
against the intractable
West, sent us dreaming
to the dark side of the world
so that cardinals flew
through our sleep
and the morning sound
of tortillas being made
74
became the perpetual rhythm
of a dream horse trotting
around a flagstone dais.
Here the later days
of my mother’s absence
are reopened;
how she was kept in a place
called Nazareth
on the outskirts of Albuquerque,
given voltage every day by nuns
in white linen,
made to love the male doctors
who came punishing
and rewarding,
caressing her name
with their voices.
And how years later, in Mt. Airy
Hospital in Denver, she came
down the hall with her smile,
never the smile of an idiot
75
or an official although some
teeth were missing now
in uncertain recognition
of my father.
That day March wind shook
the Virginia Creeper;
he brought her home, forever to live
with black magic,
the broad, ranting, sharp-bladed
harvest afternoons
of her terror, his slow illness.
These parents rose and fell
through their pain
like the splintered slats of boats,
tossing all day in the ocean
of the household.
When we came home
we woke to silence,
to a fractured aging;
we knew them
76
by what they loved:
Mexican tin, the tribal faces
in photographs,
the many Ways in
the patriarch’s face,
the many lines through old
earthenware.
In summer,
in the simmering heat
when the mother could not
leave Nazareth,
the daughter brought in
tin curlers to the father,
to have them placed properly
in her hair
for Pentecost.
In the adobe house in late
evening the father lay drunk
on sadness
after the trip to the store
77
to buy absorbent napkins
for the daughter’s menstrual
epiphany
while she fed the infant brother,
consoling him
with lullabies.
No goose was ridden up
against the great Western
moon then, even in sleep.
There was a mail-order
marriage, overland journey
to another life:
the living backbone
of the trail cracked and reset
in another direction.
78
Deposition
They held the mask tight
over her face
when the pain singed her spine
so that she slept
when they jacked me from her
with forceps,
hoof-like clamps on either side
of my head,
brands that took weeks
to go away.
I lay on a sheet curled
like a question-mark:
was this the world?
She knew me by my cap
of dark wet hair
like hers, but our eyes
couldn’t meet
in that first marrying second
that you see today
79
when a mother lifts up
to find the child
on her stomach, its eyes purely
animal but turned toward her,
working its tiny mouth,
sucking air.
I was brought to the Botticellian
swell of her breast; her nipples
burning with colostrum,
she placed me there until I
sang my hunger cry
and drank.
When she bathed me I studied
her eyebrows
and we dreamt of how alike
and yet unalike we were,
how we were one and yet
how much I was the stranger,
floating like a pod into her
universe,
80
my cries hanging like twisted sacks
full of coal from her wrists,
with their swelling indigo veins.
When we fought in the kitchen
in the later years, flying at each other
to get fistfuls of hair
and gouged each other’s arms,
cursing with a panache
that turned my father
into a gasping blue carp
doubled over in the background,
I vomited up her milk,
hurling her out of my life
like a brave passenger in a movie
might cut a terrorist loose
from the door of a plane—
and she, furious
at how much I made myself distinct
from her, broke every bone
81
of the onliving infant within me
before she let me go.
82
The Archangel of Insomnia
It is 4 a.m.; an old man leans toward me
at the coffee counter;
“You need children, hijita—
go back to New Mexico
where you were born—
to the Pecos Valley,
to recover your song.”
He is dressed like a renegade
in a spangled bravado.
His cuffs are black with grime:
His teeth are gone.
His hands on my cheekbones
smell like bread.
“You need amor loca, mad love
amor fuerte, powerful love,”
he says. “And the mud baths
at the charismatic church
of Chimayo.”
83
Archangel of insomnia,
he discerns my fear of living.
I think of his words the next day
where I swim.
The old women’s flesh
hangs in darkened folds
about their stomach and thighs;
yet they move with bearish grace
from pool to shower,
where they oil their skin,
talk and laugh, rub lotion
into each other’s backs.
I look at them, imagine
each of them, braced against a bed
with bent and parted legs, pushing down,
crying out: deliverance,
and then the coming in of the milk.
Later, I see a baby with a bisque face
lowered into the font,
lifting her hands up to the light
as she is baptized with a sterling shell
84
of consecrated water.
“Give her an inquiring and discerning heart….”
The Book of Common Prayer reads.
The bread in my mouth
has the sweetness of flesh,
of the old man’s hands.
It is palpable and good--it is plain.
In the midst of my prayers
I lift my head
to see young children
with their mothers, row on row
of madonnas with coiffed hair.
85
In the night, when I cannot rest
I go back to the coffee counter.
The old man has gone away.
Later, in my dream
a fresco of dark-haired women
comes to life;
they pour water over the bodies
of the dead, midwife one another,
suckle and cradle the young.
86
The Ceremony of Milk
At 3 a.m. I go out to buy milk for my child,
she who was left alone, many nights,
in the dark.
This child wants to lie with her mother
and father, in a feather bed,
to be suckled and sung to,
rocked to a lullaby,
nestled on a shoulder while the tree
is trimmed, but the old family
is gone.
She wants a mother who holds her
in serapes and a warmth of cats and weavings—
who reads to her for hours,
getting up only to bring in food,
more books, warm milk.
Tonight the snow has made a cave of solitude.
I cradle that self I have hidden
87
from my view
and from others;
I tell her a story of dark horses and Navajo,
of pumas after the hunt,
of mothers who foray out into the night
and return.
Simple keys fit now
in the old locks—
out in the dawn waning into Thanksgiving
morning, the creamery trucks idle;
this the child sees with relief;
there is milk enough
and perhaps, in me, a mother.
88
Alone with the Good
It takes some time, but I sit down at last
to work in the silence
and not the silence, but the way a great requiem
threads itself through minutes, hours--
producing an elusive sense that time
has been called upon
to proffer meaning,
to bring down rain,
sun, sift pollen in the light,
separate solitude
from isolation.
Sometimes I notice I’m alone
and I feel sorrowful, feel that brave
and incandescent spirit melt
like a candle in the sun
beating in a window,
the tallow of a body bent
89
over a field.
But then light blesses my hands,
my mind flowers, peony petals tear loose:
raindrops spatter and the music
rises and falls.
Memory of recent love is there
at my fingertips
to be worked like hot copper wire
into language, words that may seem
wrung from the living filament
of the good,
running through the heat.
ii
To say how it is.
to reach for the shreds of cloud, fluttering there
on late afternoon sky.
Martha’s garden nearby—my next door neighbor
out in her garden, seed falling
90
from the prayer-temples
of her hands.
It is the good that ascends in this garden,
through and through the moist stems;
even the young green cornstalks proclaim
it, and I envy the wildflower
flamboyance there,
the ardent growth.
91