2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (12 page)

Isn't it funny how little we can do for ourselves?

WHISTLING WOMAN

You always had to laugh so hard. I never
understood it. And it was only later that I noticed how haunted you
were. Fighting, I guess, with quick knives against your throat and
fast ideas away from bitten nails. A little too far. A little too
hard.

I've never understood why I have to use my
best manners in the homes which break the most rules where the
meanest adults live. But I did take my shoes off and kept my napkin
in my lap. And that was okay. I was fine being respectful of adults
until I understood who was doing those things to you. But I never
said a word.

Don’t! You can’t! Get back here! Stop it!
Get down from there! Quit! I dare you.

Was it really fun we were having? They call
it acting out. Maybe it was resistance. Maybe it was hoping someone
would notice the injustices of our child-lives. But everyone was,
so who would notice? I just remember whipped cream-smothered
laughing and staging a fall from a third-story window. Remember
that? That was funny. Wasn’t it?

We were just kids, you know. Nothing better
to do than to believe what we were told. What we were raised up in.
What we saw of our tiny pinhole camera worlds. So I don't know how
to remember those awful times. Because they weren't so awful then.
They were just our lives—yours and mine—and friends forever doesn’t
really have to mean anything. They were just our lives. Now they
are textbooks and psychology and discussions behind closed doors
and fingers pointed with blame and dark walks through hollow selves
toward forgiveness. But then those whip-cracks of savagery were
good enough for us to call best friends with the peanut butter
sandwiches and the new tennis shoes once a year.

Now, after what you've told me, I'm glad to
remember back further to this dead working woman in our
mother-bones. She knew we'd be along. So she was happy enough.
Laughing so hard and whistling so loud without words, without
anything for him to really blame her for. Don’t tell! Please, just
don’t say anything. What if he finds out? What if someone finds
out? So no words. Just whistling. Just laughing. Just our lives.
With so much hard hope. And our entire friendship welling up proud
without tears in her whelped-whistling work.

ACOLYTES IN
TENNIS SHOES

I was recently given the opportunity to read
at a friend's wedding. I approached the pulpit, which was settled
nicely behind an arrangement of chrysanthemums, and stood. After
the ceremony several people asked, "Were you laughing or crying
there?" And the bride has called this morning with the same
question.

I really wasn't doing anything. It was just
another beautiful moment. Very similar to other days' moments. No
need to laugh or cry, necessarily. So I was trying not to trip. I
was staring at the base of the microphone, and I was hoping so
hard, if God were in the room, that whatever they needed would
last.

But then I began to read, and it went
well.

For your voice is sweet and your face is
beautiful…love is strong as death, jealousy relentless as Sheol.
The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of the Lord himself.
Love no flood can quench, no torrents drown. 

And I know her grandfather was there, where
they were kneeling, where he had died. And other weddings and other
moments were there. Weighing them safely. Tradition. Precedence.
And I was glad just to stare at the microphone momentarily and pray
for it all.

The two of them kneeling together, too
excited and preoccupied with routine ritual to hear anything new in
the old words, and the six-foot-six priest, and the altar girls
wearing their dirty tennis shoes and their middle school faces, and
more than enough of us under the beams willing to witness that Love
is strong as Death. And to know it's possible to invite a God who
says, periodically, "Set me like a seal on your heart."

DISSATISFACTION

a not-really poem for Dawn and the rest of
us

What do I love when I see you beside me—not
in any remembered nakedness, not stoking some old flame, but right
now—in the football stadium on the way up these concrete
stairs?

There's a long way between you and me and
the rest of us. And I'm sorry for knead-loving you. Vortex nights
get dungeon dark, maze crazed, and I can't believe how lifted and
lurched with-you I was, how clouds shook the baby.

Neglected? Who's not? Give me precious seams
of history to run my fingers down. Give me something to suck. Give
me time.

He's kissing and calling and such easy
support. I'm holding him back but pillows can't suffocate the
need-nights. And it doesn’t matter if I want to rush through you
not to plunge, touch, down under him.

Because he’s here and he's asking and he's
telling me something most comfortable. How can you let me believe
any of it?

I guess I could just tell him, “Maybe not,”
if you weren't so far away.

That's it, isn't it? So don’t bother to
swell me up temporary whole with your empty undoing and tomorrow
promises.

He’s watching. He wants me. You don’t. He
needs me. You don't. He'll move on without me and you won't.

So fine. If I kiss you on your, "Can't you
give me," lips will you go away? Will you leave me alone tonight
and tomorrow. If I lie cruel with you and don't get in the way will
you promise not to call from your, "I'm late. I'm sorry,"
world?

And if I die here sadly in your
give-me-all-the-naked-again arms will you resign to let me go? And
start over, and start over, and start over?

Please?

But, yes, still, fine, yes I like the
stories we told on your back with its thick broad me. And I like
your chest with Nothing inside but you.

CIRCADIAN

The sun is always chasing the night. Damned
by the regular day. Strange then we wonder why our identities never
really feel good enough. All of us children of the sun. If you are
there somewhere further than me, blazing, I have nothing to give
but the sunset pushing west. And sometimes I think, "Where is it
that my midday sun, my bright right-here, real-time sun, is
rising?

LIFE WITH THE FRAT
BOYS

I went to prom last night. Actually it was a
fraternity's initiation banquet, and I was the girl who went with
the guy who is twenty-eight and not over his keg days. This is not
the guy who joked theoretically about wearing Depends to the bar.
This is the guy who wore Depends to the bar. Now he works in
accounts receivable in Fort Wayne. He likes it.

I spent the two days before in the usual
feminine formal dance ritual: eyebrows done, hair done, makeup
done, shoes borrowed, dress shown off, body shaved, body ridiculed,
and multiple phone calls made.

I loved that dress. It was a midnight-blue
column of stretch-floral glitter.

I got ready at a friend's house where our
dates would pick us up. According to ritual we did not start to get
ready until the dates were supposed to be there. Also in keeping
with tradition the dates were twenty minutes late. Doorbell. We let
them wait. I answered the door, and my date thrust a bouquet of
flowers into my hand saying, "I smell like bleach."

Indeed he did. Apparently he had washed the
shirt that afternoon after forgetting about that pack of Big Red
gum in the pocket which, “Got all over my shit.” He did his best to
fix the problem and washed the shirt again with a lot of bleach.
Being a man after my own heart there was not enough time to wash a
shirt twice and also be expected to dry it before they came to get
us. So not only did he smell like bleach but his shirt was soaking,
sopping, saturated, silly wet. Everything else perfect: Pants.
Coat. Tie. And flowers. But, he stood there as upright and
dignified as anyone could possibly be in a freezing cold sopping
wet shirt.

Definitely a date of mine.

But who cares?

So my friend and I put on our dresses,
collected our compliments, let the jealous roommate take pictures,
and headed out into the night.

I was not particularly glad that some
faculty members were there as I was showing off my tattoo. There is
nothing I like more than putting myself in the position to be
judged. I realized almost immediately that my date was reflecting
on me. And perhaps not reflecting very well. Fine. If that's how
it's going to be, "Jack and ginger ale." Dinner. Speeches.
Embarrassing synchronized pledge stuff. Acknowledgments. Etc.

And then the faculty left.

Now, I'm never exactly sure
how I really want to present myself in any given situation so I
generally choose:
out
there
. Needless to say I'm scared to get
the pictures back. More than that, I'm scared of what other
pictures other people have. (The one with the chair, the one on the
table, the one under the hangers, the one—whatever.)

Toward the end of the evening I really was
impressed when my date one-handedly held two glasses of beer and
drank from one while the other poured into the first. It was a
cascading fountain made of plastic cups. He explained that he
usually uses six glasses, and I wasn't so impressed anymore.

My date and I, the two oldest people at this
dance, took a rather invigorating November swim to culminate the
evening. God love formal dresses, because if I had been wearing any
clothes I wear all the time I might have thought twice about
jumping into the hotel pool. But formal things are easily
disposable. I grabbed a pool chair and sat on it, sinking through
the air and water, as I jumped. He was right behind me. At this
point he informed me that I was not only the hottest date but the
coolest date. I wallowed in the oxymoronic paradox without mention
but my smile was not genuine and I didn’t laugh out loud until he
leaned over in the car, almost to nuzzle, and said quiet-carefully,
“Hey, you smell like bleach."

INTERNAL
STRUGGLE

It is a possession. I am possessed by it.
Creation is difficult. I imagine a steel taper, round but drawn out
to a sharp point like an icicle. This is inspiration. And then I
come naked and try to find a way to meld my body to it. I am round
and full of blood. I can wrap myself around the shaft of
inspiration but I feel this is not enough. I want to bring myself
to the tip. And there it is sharp. Very, very sharp.

I am learning and so perforated by this
beautiful thing that my flesh is pricked, bleeding, and scarred.
There are holes in my feet from where I tried to climb and I have
only just missed being staked clean through.

On the cloudy days when the rod lies before
me dull and without its glint I believe I can conquer it.

There is time to learn balance. A few
moments more. A few moments I have spent in the place of that
spear. Writhing with it. Knowing it to be a weapon, stronghold, and
tool.

But there are times when I sit off in one
corner bleeding and raw. Pain is only part of my fear and I stare
at it: that shiny stake trying to wait out my attraction.

I cannot.

I saw a little bald girl yesterday wondering if she was going
to die.

TOO MUCH SUGAR TWANG THAT VOICES SOMETIMES GET
CHOKED

She walked in with the confidence of
fidelity and found him instead in the arms of a skinny lover.

His eyes were wide and the skinny girl's
were formed in familiar hatred. She must have been in this
situation before. He stumbled to his feet, caught between the
coffee table and a pair of bare ankles. His hands found their way
to his back pockets, seeming to retreat as if from a cookie jar.
"Kristin, this is…" His voice was feeble.

She would not let this happen. Not in her
home. She was not the victim. Her voice came with that too much
sugar twang that voices sometimes get in uncomfortable threatened
disapproving situations, "Never mind who I am, child." She could
not stand to hear her own name with this Kristin skank’s. And she
could not bear to hear him say her name like this. She loved to
hear him say it and hearing it now would break her.

"Never mind who I am, child, call me auntie,
cousin, sister—what have you. More likely I'm just a neighbor. Have
to check up on this one now and again, making sure he's got three
squares and a decent roof over his head."

She was not looking at them. She took the
paper bag she had carried in and set it on the small dining table
closest to them. She moved quickly to the hall and found the
tablecloth. It was of antique lace. The words flowed from nowhere
as she she spread the cloth over the smooth veneer until her
engagement ring got tangled in the delicate cloth.