pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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POETRY POSTING

I'm posting a poem I wrote for a weaver and bike racer and high-school friend and sometime lover. I escaped to the house she shared with her British mum, a former Rockette, the night that my mother shot herself and many other nights when I ran away from home during junior high and high school.

Sara was one of the most physically beautiful women I have ever met—beautifully sexy in a way that makes a room go quiet when she walks in with her gorgeous body and yellow-flecked golden eyes.

Unfortunately, her beauty made her uncomfortable—she didn't like the attention, especially from men.

Several years ago, I found out that Sara changed genders and now guides kayakers down whitewater rapids in between racing his bicycle up and down mountain trails.

My brother Lad ran into him when he and his girlfriend were celebrating his thirtieth birthday on the rapids.

I guess, ultimately, this poem is about faith, self-knowledge, and belief in the healing powers of creativity and fragments (even though it's about much more too).

THE MESSAGE WAS THAT YOU'VE BEEN COMMITTED TO THE SAME MENTAL INSTITUTION MY MOTHER WAS IN: LETTER TO SARA IN S.C.

I.
I've never understood why there's a lake there.
They scan your pockets, confiscate lighters,
but there's that lake in the middle of fenced grounds.
Five hundred miles away, I have to imagine you
staring through the glass out at the water.

At lunch today I spoke of suicide
of the gun-in-mouth years we're unraveling
but she fingered her gold uncomfortably
asked Why Must You Serious Artist Types Think
if it only makes you grow so damn depressed?

And I thought, This is our life Sara
all questions and extremes.
We spend it weaving fragments
out of what's not understood.

We attach ourselves to edges that unravel
create a life out of fragments
try to hook a stitch somewhere that holds.

II.
My mother made rugs out of socks there
staring through the glass out at the water.
I watched her lose her focus
wander broken through those halls.

Her eyes were changed there, flattened
and their image blurred my mind
as I scraped her blood off cabinets
looking past the bullethole.

They tell a survivor to not take risks
to stay within the lines
and color slowly.
With predictable adjectives, they prescribe
accepting conventions
and smiling in the mirror every day.

Twisting their Mont Blanc pens
they scribble your name in files
while you shuffle to the dining hall
in a uniform, straight line.

The images I construct of you are sirens:
you shrink into the lines of a bench
blend into a Norman Rockwell print
become the fur-lined cup that wakes me screaming.

At lunch today I struggled for words
but the focus stayed on smiling in the mirror.

You tell me that you want a life
that doesn't take from others
but I tell you they've taken it themselves.

The rational response is tears
but rationality limits
and we've learned to ask these questions
as they come.

A part of me has grown aware
of these patterns of our lives
encircling us like shackles spun of gold.

III.
Think of those medieval christs from art class:
their disproportioned parts, their gold-leaf skies.
His distance from us is painted on
and that is what we're offered:
They plug the gaps he fails to fill
with blood, and call it life—
hand us skies of one flat color
to join every seam

while we weave in numbing darkness, steady
grapple with the string
and glance out at the water seeking patterns.
But the balls of thread keep rolling
and the stitches stretch and tear
and the patterns that emerge contain no rhyme.

It's our weaving that unbinds us
but it also is that sky
that cuts off every move we try to make.

We come to them with fists of string
clutched in bloody hands—
they hand us nothing tied to what we've seen.

But we have learned to trace these strings
as they unravel, to count the holes.
Our thoughts are fragmentary, but linked.

Listen. They yearn for empty saviors
but we hold fragments in our hands
that can piece together a world.

© 1990—and I'm not citing where it is published because then I'm no longer anonymous.

12:14 p.m. - 2005-05-09

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