he is wrong
he does not know
my truth. I am not his.
I cannot be owned, possessed,
taken, and given like a sack of
flour, or a pound of nutmeg.
I know he thinks
I have no voice, if I want to have
a place to lie my head...except in
needle and thread. I can sit here
by the fire, night after night and
sing my protest song in faded
colors of linen and flax
i will scream my truth across the hems
of petticoats and pillowslips that
he will never see.
I am my own person and I will
think my own thoughts, worship
my own God, hold my own tongue...
when I choose...
and govern my body in peace.
this is a truth...
and I will speak in silk
until until my voice is my own.
the train carries us from the center
of the city beyond museums. shopping,
restaurants, and hotels with
valets and concierge....
deeper and deeper into the soft, golden light of
provence....tuberose, stone walls, and
shutters in a faded shade of blue like
shards of pottery and the sea on a stormy
morning in brittany
walking through the village market,
my fingers brush against woody branches of
rosemary and lavender...
she sees me lingering over her small cart of
vintage linens and takes the bundle of
lavender from my hands and wraps them in
something so delicate and honest
it takes my breath away...
"merci..." I stumble through tears that tumble
on century old cobbles....I hold them to my
chest and breathe deeply...
whenever there is lavender...I will return to
this place and her soft eyes
she waits while I take "just one more call"
she is patient and gracious in the face
of my "just another minute..." whispered,
holding my hand over the phone's
mouthpiece and then turn my back to
her and nod convincingly to an audience
that cannot see me.
she returns to her small kitchen, aproned in
aqua and pink...its bow tied perfectly
behind her... over a housedress that barely hangs
on her narrow shoulders, and grazes her slender
hips.
she will reheat the water in the tea kettle and
place the small jar of homemade jam back
in the regrigerator.
The scones will wait for me to remember that
her life is important too. That she is someone
with thoughts and memories of value.
The scones, lovingly baked, and beautifully
plated, will wait for me to remember that
she was once the most wise, important, beautiful
woman in the world to me.
And to remember, that I am still the most wonderful
girl in the world....to her.
"where will you use that thing
here on the prairie,
where the dust blows sideways,
and our ceiling is
the underside sections of sod we
cut from our field...clods of dirt
that fall into our soup..."
his calloused hand reaches down to
touch the square of white linen she is holding
and when he sees his cracked and blistered
fingers against the delicate fabric,
a tear escapes...
"someday..." he says, wiping his face with
the back of his hand and turning to the fire
as the wind moans outside the windows
made of oiled paper, and snow blows under the
eaves,
"someday..."
when I was a little girl,
my mother had a drawer for
her "delicates"
it had a small linen sachet filled with
"muget d'bois"
(lily of the valley)
and when you opened it, just a sliver...
a scent, like spring, and weddings, and
something so fresh it tickled your nose...
tiptoed out - for a moment - and danced in the air..
she never told us not to, but
there was something so private about that
scent, that I felt like a French spy
each time I stole into her room and
silently, slowly
slid open that slim drawer, in just the right way,
so that the dresser
handles did not rattle.
behind all that was cotton, and a small cache of
embroidered linen handkerchiefs in the near right corner,
tucked in the back, carefully wrapped in
faded ivory tissue paper, was a peach
slip of the softest silk with thin lace straps
woven with satin ribbons.
Long after i returned it to its hiding place,
i'd make up stories about this slip...
her war hero boyfriend sent it her, just before he was
killed on a mission behind enemy lines...
my mother was actually a husky-voiced
jazz singer who married my father because
she fell in love with him at dusk
on a street in Paris under full moon...and he
was really a famous piano player being
chased by the KGB for smuggling a ballerina
out of St. Petersburg one winter night, just before she
was to be sent to Siberia for refusing to
dance for a cruel General.
I still don't know what is true...
I don't think I want to...
i have come here to grieve
to be where wailing cannot be
heard by loved ones,
or friends.
I have come here to feel her loss
deeply...to let myself give birth to
the mother I almost was,
and cannot bear to let go of.
I have come here to sit on the edge
of the world and cast my heart into
a vast sea of mingled despair
and hope.
I have come here to weep words upon
this page in tears, and rain, and let the
mist turn paper into something that
ripples and curls like the the surface of
water.
I have come here to write about a child
I love, and whose name I am not encouraged
to speak...
but here I can whisper to her about the dreams
I have for her,
I can sing her lullabies of sailboat that navigate
a sea of starts,
I can hold her here, rocking side to side, until
my heart is quiet, and the only sound is
the hush of the sea...
and in my dreaming here...I speak
her name....
Jane,
my Jane.
i saw him there
a simple man
walking
head down
searching the sand for
what I did not know
but the intensity of his
hunger make me ache for
what he wanted...
shell, or stone, or bits of glass
I left my boat without a
backward glance.
i could always throw nets,
but they would never catch anything
that satisfied an appetite,
or slaked man's thirst...like this
his focus was transfixed but
not on something
below the sand or above the clouds...
his eyes were paradoxical
like sunlight breaking through storm clouds...
both a vacant stare, and
filled with vision...
looking within...neither lo here,
or lo there...
to a place where men swim
like fishes and sleep under the wings
of a great dove...
i knew then that this was where I
must follow him to...
and that is when I left my boat
upon the shores of time
it was almost
christmas that winter day when
we steeled ourselves to
sort through her things and begin to
pass them on to family,
her friends, goodwill...
the snow lay silent on bare-knuckled
branches in the orchard just beyond the
summer kichen, as
if the infant pears, themselves,
were wearing white in honor of all those years
of tending, mothering, putting up for winter
generations of their
kind...
with family names like
bartlett, anjou, endicott,
bradford, bosc...
the others were downstairs with the
sterling and limoges while
i wandered up to where
the bed linens and pillow slips still carried the scent of
her...lavender water and
something mysterious, simple, and sweet
i found it
in the far reaches of her cupbord,
hanging, well hidden beyond my
grandfather's tuxedo and her
wedding dress, on a
small wooden hanger...
a tiny, finely-stitched
christening dress
for the child she only held for
a day...
I buried my face in
the delicacy of its folds,
and could almost taste the
salt of her tears, like a whisper of
sea water...
this would be the only
thing I would
take that day...
yesterday morning
you met my coach when it arrived at
the western union office
you were standing on the
porch steps, starched and tan,
much taller and
broader than your letters
led me to believe...
and you were handsome
I was surprised by that...
i will tell my sisters this
by sunset I was your bride
and from the buckboard seat of our
wagon, filled with trunks of Boston linens,
my mother's sterling, and old lace,
you spread your arms and said,
"all this is ours..."
and it frightened me to think
a land so wide and empty
could be owned.
this morning I am no longer a girl
I am your wife and you have brought
me a bowl of eggs as beautiful as
the sea glass my mother always
found in the pockets of my father's
vest when he came home from
the sea....
i will be happy here
with eggs the color of the ocean
and grass that dances in the wind...
"yes," i said,
eager to get pennsylvania behind us...
"let's just get on the
road, and drive until
we get tired.
ohio, indiana, missouri,
kansas.....into the night, as the
full moon rose behind us and
cast a gentle
light over the prairie
spread out before us like an undulating
blanket of shifting grasses...tall and
soft to the eye.
james taylor, journey, simon after
garfunkel...static...
tired we pull off the highway looking for
a place to rest our eyes..
a long, winding, overgrown drive,
canopied with apple trees that even in
the moonlight give off the sweet scent of
old fruit...
and at the end the gravel...an abandoned
porch, sweaters for pillows, and our old quilt...
a place to call our own
if only for the night...
when I wake in
the morning,
one arm tucked
under my pillow
my fingers reach
across the landscape of
crisp white linens for the
cool iron of the headboard
curled around decades of
old paint my fingers
trace layered patterns of
white, on white over memories
of
rust and iron...
a baby born into a winter's night,
honeymoons,
tea and toast on Sunday mornings with
the New York Times,
the delicate crepe-like skin of my grandmother's
hands, her thin wedding band swimming
on her frail finger...
before I open my eyes,
I know where I am,
and I know
that I am
home...
She stands in the pasture
staring towards her Shepherd
"lead me, i will follow..."
she whispers into the
dew-drenched fog of morning
on the fen.
and from the mist the Shepherd's
voice returns,
"I am here, listen for my voice
and know you are not alone.."
And she keens her ear to the
sound of Love...
and she is not untethered
:not all who wander
are lost..."
j.r.r. tolkien...
when I was a little
girl,
my grandmother had
an old hatbox filled with
buttons
there were buttons of stone,
and coral bakalite buttons in the
shapes of flowers and hearts.
there were mother of pearl buttons
that once graced narrow plackets on
the front of a
delicate shell-pink silk blouse she
only wore to church.
and then there were the small
wooden buttons with holes worn
wide by years of resewing them
to linen shirts and coarse cotton
work dresses...these were
my favorite.
I could imagine my grandmother's slender
fingers pushing them through hand-finished
bottonholes in my mother's school dresses
or to my uncles leather suspenders...
wooden buttons were my favorite
you could see the touch of love and time
on their faces...and they were so softly
polished by my grandmother's care...
I would like to be
invited to sit at this table
to be poised on
a linen-covered chair waiting for
tea.
I would slip off my
shoes and let the coolness of
the floor remind me of
sea water.
