Wake, Siren
Page 20
“We all of us have scaffolding off of which we hang our understanding of ourselves. I was a woman, a mother, a Trojan, a queen. What happens when every piece of that scaffolding collapses? Where do we find our borderlines? What happens when they dissolve? I tell you.
“I looked at my son on the beach. But I did not see my son. I ate with my eyes his wounds alone, the places on his body where he had been opened. I ate with my eyes the inside of him. There I saw infinity. I saw infinity the way you see infinity in the eyes of the infant, the universe that you see when you look into the eyes of the infant. That is what I saw when I looked into the body of my son. And it was inside this universe that I made my decision.
“Perhaps you wonder why I do not cry as I tell you this. As I said, this is a place past grief I hope none of you ever one time have to visit.
“I knew who did this to my son and I went to this man and I appealed to his greed so he would meet with me and what I did was—”
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What’s she saying? Why’d you stop? What is she saying?
“I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry. I apologize.”
Go on! Don’t silence her! Keep going!
“I say it again: I met with this man who murdered my son and I looked in his eyes. Inside his eyes I saw nothing. This is not the same as infinity. Not the same as galaxies. His eyes they held the most dangerous thing, they held the the top of the sins. Indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be. I saw that he saw me for the money I might give him. I was nothing. Sub. A dog. Does this sound familiar? What do you see when you see me?
“In his eyes, a vacancy of care. And then what I did—”
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Don’t stop! It’s not your job to protect us! Hey! Just tell us the words that she’s saying!
“I grabbed his face with my hands and I placed my thumbs and my thumbnails into his eyes not placed I pressed my thumbs into his eyes which held all of the cruelty and all the indifference. With my thumbs I pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed. I felt the wet of his eyeballs. For a moment my boundaries were back. In one flash sorry blast detonation of time, all of the borders returned.
“When my thumbs were all the way in, as deep in as they could go, I—
“I popped out his eyeballs. His eyes were not blue, not gray, not brown, not green, not orange, not yellow, not violet. His eyes were the color, oh dear. They were the color of the shit of a baby. And once they were out, each one, the blood drooled from his eyes and women helped me hold him down. And with my hands I reached into the hollows no sorry holes er sockets his sockets those sockets. And I—oh dear, oh god—I plucked oh god I picked out his flesh. I reached into the sockets and I plucked his flesh. It was warm. He screamed. I knew I could scream louder. Here is when—”
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Say it!
“I can’t.”
What does she say? Say it! Go on!
“I can’t. It’s too much.”
Say the words! We came here to know! Say them!
“He screamed. I felt each small bite no morsel sorry bit just bit between my fingers. Here is when I became what you see before you. Here is when I was born a dog. What happens when the boundaries dissolve? Your borders mean nothing. What lives at the limits of loss? Of hate? What terrible place is that? Look at me. I have been. I know. Do not come to this place where everything is fanged and singed and whimpering.
“The border of love. That’s a place, too. I have set my feet there. It can be as frightening. Phantoms live there, too. And boundaries dissolve in a different way, a way that joins you with the widening or or sorry the whole, a way that joins you with the whole. That place is there and it is yours to know. And I say to you with these words, you who belong to this place, you who understand what it is to live in this world, go there. Travel to that place. No one deserves the horror that has washed itself over my life. I do not matter. This country does not matter, not to me, not in this hour. Keep indifference out of your eyes, you who belong to this place. You will—”
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Speak!
“You will hear my yowls in the night, I who am a dog. When the darkness hoards the day, you will hear my yowls and you will remember this sadness. This sadness without boundary, born from loss, born from the dissolving of all the borderlines that made a world make sense. My howls, the howls of this dog you see before you, they will penetrate the soft edges of your brain while you sleep, and for a moment, as your dream turns sideways, we will not be separate. We will be as one.”
POMONA
How’s it that you spend your days? Do you put on shoes that shine and ride an elevator to a desk? Do you pull lobster traps from the seafloor of the harbor with the buoys striped so you know they’re yours to pull? Do you watch as your soft child tries to acquire the language that you speak? Do you clean the stalls? Spin yarn? Frame walls, measuring out the sticks of pine sixteen-on-center? Do you lay plates of food upon tables for people who pay? Soften the edges with whiskey? Harden your edges with squats or lifts or long jogs at dusk on elm-lined streets in the town outside the city? Laugh with your brothers? Snap a mask on and dance the whole night? Do you absorb the daily news? Push information through an entrance on a screen? Lose yourself in a trance of prayer? Hang laundry on a line? Give shots to dogs? Teach young others what to know?
Me, I garden. I raise the plants. I’ve done so for thirty-nine years. Alongside my father and my mother. Alongside my sisters. Alongside the crew of women I hired. What’s enough for you? Dirt was enough for me. Ropey roots in soil. Water air and light. Petals spreading. Buds that can’t contain themselves and widen into leaves, punchy fists to generous open palms. From seed to sprout to sapling to tree, and then to have an apple, or a peach, or a pear, that you can pull from the branch and eat, and feel the sweet juice of it running down your throat. What a thing! It never got old. Or the firm orange flesh of a sweet potato that you pull from the underground then roast so it’s soft as pudding and almost as sweet. The tender layered waves in a head of lettuce. The simple green straws of the scallions. I string a trellis for the beans to climb. I prune and pluck. I graft and snip and trim. I spend a morning pollarding the pear tree that grows against the barn, and it’s a day I can feel I did something. That by my hands, I helped something change and grow. There are many ways to make a life. This is mine. I spread fertilizer, deadhead, mow. I tuck bulbs just as deep as they want to be and no deeper than that.
This was all the pleasure I needed. To push a group of bulbs into the dirt in fall, watch snow come and see my breath in cold, and then the thaw, and there in April, a clutch of daffodils rise and spread their yellow selves to the sun. Could there be a greater joy? Call me easily satisfied, but this was all I wanted. The deep purple velvet of the pansies. The flayed leaves of the gingko biloba. The name gingko biloba! The bleached bark of the thick sycamores, white like they’ve been frightened. Oh gosh, the staggering variety of life on land. And I think about how much runs in sync to bring about new growth. The wind spreads seeds, as do the squirrels and birds, in and out of them. The sun. The rain. The pollinators buzz and zoom, chubby bumblebees, iridescent hummingbirds, the butterflies who fly on petal wings.
Me, I am what you picture when you picture a gardener. Not all my hair is gray. Not yet. Still some chestnut, carrot, wheat. It’s long and I wear it in a braid most days. I wear a wide-brimmed hat made of straw to keep the sun from my neck and my face. My shoulders are strong, and so is my back, muscles line my spine from digging and pulling and carrying sacks of manure from here to there. My legs are strong. I get freckles in the sun. The lines at my eyes are deep, deeper than other people my own age, in part from the power of the sun, in part from all the smiling. Why wake up if you’re not going to laugh? My hands are strong and the dirt lives in the cracks and always will. My breasts are smaller than they we
re. I miss the heft of them, but this is how it is. Time is the only one that thrives.
I was so content, growing and tending. I spent time with men. I spent time with women. The carnal pursuits didn’t pull me. Another way: love, fucking, I thought they weren’t for me. I used to hire men for the crew. All these Pans and satyrs. Their thick animal dicks on display. Priapus was the worst of them. He’d whip his dick out any chance he could. The size of it. Thick as a dogwood and long as my arm. Men said, Pomona, I love you. They’d touch me and I’d think, Okay. But maybe it should feel like more? Each time: Is this all? And I’d tell them, You’re nice but hit the road. They’d leave and I’d feel relieved to be back to my Siberian squill, Allegheny spurge, pink maiden. Swoon. I rolled with women in the grass, my gardeners. They’d smell like sweat and hay and their skin like mine was warm in the sun. And it was nice, but also, always the sense was something missing. This is fine, to roll and tangle. But I got more from the buds, the petals, the bloom, all the veined and grassy stuff that comes out of the earth.
And now, the peonies have grown five inches in as many days. Fast enough at this stage you can almost see them grow. We’re at that point in the season now. No blooms yet, but the buds are starting to swell, and last night they shifted over from the red-brown color of the dregs of wine to the pale green that defines the color spring. “Sexiest flower of them all,” one of the gardeners used to say. “Like a woman taking off a dress.” That eruption of petals. It’s hard not to love.
Spring again and change is all over. There was a man who came and came again. He’d shift his appearance—sometimes a farmer, with dirty overalls and a cow prod; sometimes a gardener, with a wide hat and a spade; sometimes a hunter, with a rifle on his shoulder. He just wanted to spend time. I took him for lonely and we’d chat in the afternoons. Vertumnus was his name, and I told him I liked it, verdant in there, and autumn, and truth. “And ‘us,’” he’d say. And I’d say, You’re nice, but no. It’s not for me.
One afternoon, an old woman came to the garden. She wore a blue gingham dress and her hair was white like Queen Anne’s Lace and though she was old she was still tall and had a force to her. She poured praise upon the fruit and I asked her what I could do for her, what sort of flower or tree or climbing vine she might be looking for. New succulents, I told her, too.
We talked about Japanese maples. We talked about a holly bush. We talked about the spread of lemon thyme and the way it smells like magic when you step on it, when the oils are released into the air and it’s like you’re walking through a cloud of citrus mist.
“You are amazing,” the old woman said. “To bring about this garden. What a fertile place!” She took a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes. “I can smell all of it, all the trees, all the flowers, all the fruit. You amaze me,” she said.
I thanked her, told her I could only take so much credit. She took another deep inhale and took steps toward me and wrapped her arms around me in a strong embrace, exhaling into my neck. And then she kissed my mouth unlike any granny. Okay, I thought. She’s lonely, too.
We walked among the plants. She took a rest on a bench I’d made from the trunk of a fallen oak. We sat below a favorite elm of mine, and she admired how the grapevines wound themselves around the boughs. The grapes shone in the sun and the vines helixed around the branches. It was nice that she’d noticed—it was a project I was proud of and I loved the way it looked.
“If the elm was unwed to the vines, it’d be a tree like any other. And without the branches to wind around, the vines would lie limp on the ground. The best of each is brought out in combination,” she said.
“You’ve lived your life as a vine without a branch, a trunk without a vine. Pomona, I am an old woman. I know some things. I’ll tell you: all your life you’ve been pursued, by women, by men. You’re irresistible. You’ve turned down every chance. Reconsider. There is one man in particular who can match you, who could satisfy you in ways that your garden can’t. I bet you know who I’m going to say.”
I did know. I knew all at once exactly who was talking.
“Vertumnus,” she went on. “He loves you like no one’s loved you. He’ll love you until he dies, you alone. He’s gorgeous. And you are kindred in your pursuits—you grow fruit, he loves to eat it! All he wants to do is eat the peach that comes from your garden, let its nectar run down his chin.”
I blushed at this, and laughed. “I am almost an old woman.”
“You think that matters? You have more youth than you know, and you are never, never too old to be changed by love.”
A stirring somewhere in my guts, like the light-dark flickering of the aspen leaves in the breeze. A feeling of ease. Like my whole body was smiling. Then the old woman changed the tenor of her talk.
“People with hard hearts get punished.”
My heart was the softest place I knew.
“Have you heard of Iphis and Anaxarete? It’s a story you’d do well to know, and I’ll tell it as quick as I can. Iphis was poor and he loved Anaxarete, who was rich. He loved her and loved her. He did not push, he tried so hard to be patient, he waited by her door hoping she would see him for who he was, and not just that he was poor. But she shunned him. She put herself on a shelf above him, too proud. She acted as though he didn’t exist. Poor Iphis. He tried and tried and loved and loved. But for Ana he did not exist. His heart broke in half. Outside her door, he said, ‘Maybe my own death will please you. Probably the only thing that will.’ With garlands he strung up on the rafters outside her door, he tied a noose and hanged himself. His neck snapped, he dangled, and his feet knocked against the door. Still she did not answer.
“When his funeral procession moved through the streets, only then did Ana deign to look. She peered from her balcony at the body being carried below. No sooner than she saw him than her eyes began to harden inside her head. Her blood thickened until it stopped running in her veins. She tried to move, but couldn’t. Her legs, her bones, her muscles, all became rigid, stripped of life. The rest of her body finally matched her heart and was made of stone.”
I listened to the old woman, and I saw through her disguise, and I was drawn, in a way I’d never known, to the passion with which she told her tale. The words themselves, they dissolved; I barely heard them. An image spread itself across my mind. In it, I was a tree, a huge tree, a giant sequoia with a trunk so thick it would take ten people hand in hand to embrace it all the way around, and tall enough to sometimes touch clouds, with roots reaching deep into the soil, deep, deep into the earth where it’s wet and warm. And above, my leaves soaked in the sun and the wind was my dance partner. And my roots twirled themselves around other roots and my branches tapped other branches and my leaves brushed other leaves. What love. And in this image a bear appeared from the woods, a burly creature, coarse-haired and bright-eyed and he rubbed himself against my trunk and pleasure rippled up and down my body. He growled and I shifted to give him more shade. And then he climbed me, clawed himself up into a crotch where one of the thickest branches split from the trunk. He surrendered all of his weight to me, and I held him, and here was new happiness.
And perhaps the old woman could tell my mind had strayed from what she said. She pulled the white wig from her head and became who she was, Vertumnus all along. And he looked hurt, as he had before when I’d told him no, and he looked about to turn away and leave, but the distance in my eyes wasn’t for unwant. It was happy disbelief. Here I was coming to know that this person, who I’d seen in so many forms all these years, was someone I loved, someone I wanted to share my life, entwine into my roots, let rest on my branches, help grow like I help my maples, my lilacs, my pears, and let him help me grow. There was still room for me to grow.
I put my arms around him. “Finally,” I said.
“Pomona!” he said.
“You can eat my apples. You can eat my peach.”
“It’s all I wanted.”
You think you are a certain way. But then you le
arn: there’s time left for change. Time will change your body, bring you through youth and strength and weaken you in old age. But like the seeds which need so much to grow, you have to tend your mind and heart, and they, too, can crack open, spread, and grow. So I am old. I am different from what I was, different is growth. I changed my mind. Time changed my mind. We walk the vineyards, pull grapes from the vine, explode their skins with our teeth and feel their sweet juice in our throats. What more could there be? What more? I braid my hair. I kneel in dirt. I take his hand. We leave space for change. We make things grow.
SIRENS
Put your eyes in the eyes of the seagull. See the waves from above, the shifting contours moving below you as the water rises and retreats into itself. Twenty feet above. Two hundred. Half a mile in the sky. Look! Wide blue view below you, everything is movement, a-swish, awash, splashing, spindrift racing the wind toward some unseen finish. Sister, brother, breathe the sea.
Everything is movement. Everything is song.
We’re golden-feathered bird girls and we sing by the sea. Bird bodied, gold winged, bird legged, bird clawed, girl shouldered, girl faced, girl voiced. Our harmonies are wind through trees, ice freezing across water, the moans of ecstasy and lamentation, all the birds, all the fish, all the creatures of the sky and sea waking up at once. We are the sound beyond the weather, the sound on the other side of the sky. Our song will bring you voidward. Our song will bring you home.
Before, on land, when we were girls, we were in the grove with our friend Proserpina. The day she disappeared, that morning in the meadow, we sang together as we collected violets and white lilies. We filled our skirts with petals and our voices carried over the field.
We sang and we picked flowers and then our friend was gone. We didn’t know then where she went. We cried her name to the stars. No one knew what happened. No one knew where she’d gone. All at once, an absence.