Gothic

(c) 2009

“We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender.” ~O’Donohue

The human soul hungers for beauty with boundaries:
stars enclosed in a cosmos, a slant of sun
on a path overhung with oak, and unions
book-ended by tenderness, not torture.

So it is that when Rachel at work tags me for tea,
spills my story half a decade later

my story which started in beauty
but beauty whose price like irises and rhododendrons
stinking in a musty vase was rot,
a union that cleft ragged craters across my heart
and where rivers too fast and furous to ford call home.

Rachel set my story within her own frame
and came begging
as if I’m a lower-cased Jesus
laying on hands to cast-out doubt,

or like I am her personal high school lit teacher
contextualizing Rumi, Moby Dick,
and the Scarlet Letter all at once
in a twenty-minute block of time,
interpreting why she feels like an appendix
to an over-wrought tome.

Forget the charm of the spine,
the filigree embellished cover,
Readers craving veracity
know she’ll never comprehend
that deceitful language.

Her phantom is a plagiarism of love.

Spiders, it is said, master disguise,
blending in to look like flowers.
Some dangle sticky strands of silk.
Those which appear to walk on water
merely manipulate surface tension.
Many eat their mate, even while mating.

This incubus of ours mimics the African spider,
the only animal known to select its prey
based on what the prey has eaten.
Like me, Rachel has eaten grief.
She has been gorging on it for years.
Big, sloppy slices of mommy’s rejection,
heaped, steaming bowls of daddy’s abuse.
None of it tasting right, but we’d recognize
that taste anywhere. Our faces wet with want for it,
like loud-mouthed babes, never quite certain
if we should run to or run from,
only assuredly voracious, clamoring
for prevaricators willing to dish out
more poisoned milk, until we are bloated,
all the deceits we’ve eaten in cruel mis-measures
of our resplendent worth.

After losing her toddler and six months later
her anger un-managed husband,
Rachel is engorged with grief.
To anything eight-eyed Rachel is a ripe, red, bit
of inconsequential meat.
I don’t want her here, soliciting my advice.
Doesn’t she know this flays me?

Leeched so deeply pain triggers time-bombs,
and I’m off rooting memory garbage for scraps of shit
I pretend to hold at arm’s distance;
photographs a woman with mettle would burn,
dissonant letters touting both annihilation
and transcendence that at its best is forgery
lifted straight from True Confessions
I devoured in grade school.

When death shatters a soul,
artifacts are that soul’s scattered remnants,
forming an ethereal cathedral housing memory
to perceive and preserve our lost.
What if there never was a soul to what we loved,
nothing beyond dross and slag?

Like a hologram divided a thousand times
each scrap a complete image,
only it is not voice-mail or e-mails or favorite ties
but us women burnt with voided images
of the nearly inescapable grief of our childhoods;
all our thwarted aspirations, neglected needs,
our potential lost, never knowing
exactly who we are or what we want
until all that remains is ruins.

In these recursive acts I find
some awakenings are followed so immediately
by surrender there is no between.

And Jesus, there it is, April’s Destiny,
the Blog of a professional victim.

With a malignant optimism that can only be born
of a childhood so harrowing it strip-mines all sense of dignity,
less than a year after I finally left him
she returns to drink his endless string of humiliations
boasting of her strength
which even we amateurs recognize
as mis-identified endurance.

Flowers thrive in tropical and subtropical climates.
Nonetheless, in the barren Arctic
conditions one can only describe as harsh,
with shallow, sterile soil,
a small number of flowering plants
with the slightest amount of encouragement
hang-on tenaciously in brief, remorseful seasons
squeezing out nourishment where they can.
Fossils indicate huge populations of flowers
moved on or died off. I can’t help but imagine
that if those remaining flowers had choice
like I, to uproot and move, they would.

The first time around April hung on marriage promises
a decade out and a decade back.
Pimped and porned, head-strong in masochism
and martyrdom, she fucked who she was told to fuck.
Even after we’d met and I told her to get lost
she wasted her retirement funds on Cruises and Rolexes.
She bought him a base guitar; I sat next to him in music theory.
With three children in tow, she moved forty miles to live closer.
I moved in.

I’m not saying she did anything wrong.
My own grasp on morality was subjected
to magical thinking, like Fata Morgana’s mirages
of safe harbors and well-defined coastal lines,
where alternating warm and cold layers of air
distort light, color, and distance.
Early Arctic explorers recorded islands or mountain ranges
that did not exist, going so far as to let them block their path.

Unrequited love, like delusions
serve well enough as prison bars.
In a Halloween house holograms frighten us.
Penn state researchers demonstrate
in their deconstruction of a model “female” turkey,
at little more than sticks and an empty head
turkeys are as aroused as men with pornography.

We are creatures of habit,
repeating failed plans of action,
only harder this time, louder,
exerting fanatical will
rather than trying something different.

What looks to us like a suicidal run of lemmings
is scarcity so life-threatening, that with poor vision
a desperate search for sustenance risks everything.
In a balanced environment lemmings thrive.

May we discover acts of redemption
in-between awakening and surrender
find that it is we who are doing the constellating,
not the stars or heaven.
In the grip of destiny and illusions,
we are hungry ghosts to whom nothing sticks;
even our most meticulously crafted lies have gaps.

In the circumpolar regions insects crawl.
We’ll never know whether or not
they forget they have wings,
whether they yearn heights,
or desire to dart swiftly among lily stalks,
Like us, a frigid environment
saps the energy to fly,
until at last the highest beauty we recognize
is a vase full of flowers that died
the moment they were picked.