These Acts of Water - spdbooks.org · 6 War Story #2 I am in a refugee camp, against a backdrop of...
Transcript of These Acts of Water - spdbooks.org · 6 War Story #2 I am in a refugee camp, against a backdrop of...
Copyright © 2015 Nina Bannett Copyright © 2015 Cover Design by Mary Ann Biehl
ELJ Publications, LLC ~ New York
ELJ Editions
Esperanza Editions Series
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930310
ISBN 13: 978-1-942004-11-0
CONTENTS
I. What Child Is This
Curator 3
Rachel St. Michael 4
War Story 5
War Story #2 6
Artist in Residence 7
All-Day Kindergarten 8
Artist in Residence #2 9
Dr. D. 10
I Am Violet 11
Let’s Talk About Jesus 12
Ceremonies 13
Circles 14
What Child Is This 15
II. A Tall City of Sepia Pain
Be Good 19
The Long Winter 20
Settlers 21
Where I Am Going 22
Planetarium 23
Blackbirds 24
Pilloried 25
Plath’s Recipe 26
Revival Meeting 27
Espalier Notes 28
Confidences 29
Tempests 30
Emergency Topography 31
Ambush 32
Nurse Beverly 33
Re-enactments 34
Election Day 35
Like a Saint, Rising 36
Hospice 37
Woman’s Work 38
Requiem 39
My Falcon to Your Swallow 40
Pantheon 41
Dream of the Forsythia Tree 42
A Prayer, A Lamentation 43
III. These Acts of Water
The Pinnacle 47
Getting Far 48
Waiting to Speak 49
Wilderness 50
On the Spot 51
Twisted Dream 52
What I Carry 53
Lost or Changing 54
To Jericho 55
Consent 56
The Giving Moment 57
Nosebleed 58
Nesting Dolls 59
Anchors Away 60
Who Is Annie Sullivan? 61
Mythology’s Undertow 62
Pretender 63
Snapshots of Still Water 64
Impromptu Art Show 66
Fire at Pratt Institute 67
Photo Synthesis 68
Governors Island 69
Underwater 70
Flameproof 71
Breathe This Ring 72
Harvest Time 73
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Plath’s Recipe” appeared in Bellevue Literary Review , Fall 2012. “Revival Meeting” appeared in CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer 2014. “Rachel St. Michael,” “War Story,” “Artist in Residence,” “Tempests,” “Re-enactments,” “Woman’s Work,” “Requiem,” and “Dream of the Forsythia Tree” appeared in Lithium Witness (Finishing Line Press, 2011).
3
Curator
Your leaf motifs grow,
tower everywhere
you are not
gone
they tell me,
but in these arts
you remain yourself
unfettered by death.
Putting together a coherent show
by myself
will not be easy.
It is so hard, you told me once,
it is so hard to move a library.
Implicit within these arts,
your sweet voice,
my heartbreak.
4
Rachel St. Michael
We were passing out your business cards,
a woman artist and her daughter,
a madwoman and a four-year old.
We flicked monochromatic cards
inside mail slots,
houses that ringed your mother’s,
but you were Christ’s daughter,
a lamb shorn of outer trappings,
nude, shouting after a city bus.
I have lived a nineteenth-century life,
early exposure to madness,
sentimental love and premature death,
holy crosses and guardian angels.
5
War Story
Surrounded—
my mother and I are flanked on all sides.
This waiting is a serious business,
these trenches,
this series of stiff chairs and couches,
have been placed here by our enemies,
our dentist and his secretary.
Suspended in space,
I am waiting for time to begin and end.
Outside, as we prepare to surrender,
the red brick houses
stand at attention.
What are they thinking?
Right and left: my police car, her ambulance.
Undefeated, my mother screams my name many times.
She will not be vanquished in her psychosis-
convinced that the hospital would be the best place for me, too.
Shattered, I sit in the front seat,
squashed into the squad car radio,
huddled against what I have witnessed.
6
War Story #2
I am in a refugee camp,
against a backdrop of police metal,
Styrofoam and Oreo cookies.
I am a four-year old celebrity.
Sitting and staring is what I do best,
still,
these many years later,
it is what I do best.
Turn my head? Never.
Refusal is an art form.
I cannot be broken into betrayal.
Soda can be poisoned,
Hershey bars manipulated,
reality swayed into unbecoming,
a mother distorted into disappearing.
My young will is like iron,
as I prepare to sit here, forever.
Officers staring sympathetically,
their offerings sitting limply in my tiny hands.
7
Artist in Residence
I reach the right ward by following the pipes,
those primary colors on the wall.
Everyone here is Lewis Carroll,
making animal gifts instead of watercolors:
For me, a blue-grey cat with wispy ears and a yellow tongue,
a dark green turtle, stuffed head bobbing.
Outside the common lounge,
away from the other patients,
she offers me a skein of yarn,
casts on,
waits for me to come to this hook.
If I learn crochet here I will be chained too,
tied to dulled smokers,
their thoughts vested in thorazine.
8
All-Day Kindergarten
I shift from mourning to afternoon.
From the outdoor misery of steady rain,
I watch my little classmates,
Their wait for revolving wheels,
other mothers,
their diurnal returns.
My new red boots glisten, grassy.
I am led inside, shorn,
handed off from one shepherdess to another.
My head nestles up to its blanket,
napping to the Nutcracker Suite.
I am with the celesta, interlude of solitude.
Within my landscape of sweets,
dancers twirl in punishing circles,
their toes explode, far away from their homes.
9
Artist in Residence #2
Seven feet, high separation.
A thin divider of unfinished wood,
threaded with a metal eyelet and inner hook.
You are in communion with your materials,
your garden cadmium red, like dahlias.
The Moonlight Sonata floods your phonograph,
your fingers tending soft strands, delicate Natsumi paper.
Forests of young colors cloister you from me.
I find myself wandering your perimeter between pilgrimages.
10
Doctor D.
He was your call waiting,
your manic fiancé,
beckoning you to God’s Unity Center.
He favored monotones,
his brown china dog standing in the corner,
waiting with us for your time.
He built on to his own house,
receiving you, flush by car,
driven, sullen, cross-roaded into the Roslyn hills.
He was your mercy, righteousness,
a shepherd with unstable hourly company,
swaying from tricyclic hymns,
staying with the breach.
11
I am Violet
The announcement is made,
the jubilation of a weekend morning.
Your childhood parakeet, Violet, is now your child,
much beloved,
reincarnated, cited by God.
In the face of such surety I am bound,
rapt with havoc,
lost in the violet wilderness that soothes only you.
My wings are set in amber.
I sit, hovering on your left shoulder,
overlooking a vale of confusion.
12
Let’s Talk About Jesus
I can’t.
My childhood could not grasp His hand,
your conversion reaching through the locked ward,
voices debuting on Queens streets.
His pastures turn to plenty.
Little Women appears under our new, artificial tree.
I read only the pages where Amy drafts her will.
Demanding my family’s religion,
classmates press me for clarity.
I lose myself with hesitations.
This is the opposite of faith.
13
Ceremonies
We are the symbol of our slow ripening future,
dressed in red, flowing scarves,
graduates, in unison singing “Memory” from Cats.
To the audience, families, we are still one
primary school, joyful in our onstage harmony.
My mother stares, downcast and hollow.
I am troubled by moonlight even though it is bright, sunny.
My father angles for good light for photos.
We are each Doric and Ionic columns.
To the audience, we appear as one family,
classically posed within the show’s dithyrambic trappings.
We reunite with our new car that afternoon,
a Reliant of such poise that we should all rejoice
after six long months of winter crisis.
My father drives the car away from its large stage,
not a sound from the roadway.
14
Circles
There has been slim preparation.
The tear in space-time created by so little,
snatched so much.
At the wheel, maternal panic fevers you.
As we spot the span, I see the cosmos.
This, then, is the world’s edge, wondrous,
precipice-torn, astronautic.
The U turn you execute is valiant,
the widest stretch of desperation moves you,
as pedals harmonize with your feet and arms.
A carousel of captive time cascades through our afternoon.
We are fireflies inside our jar.
15
What Child is This
Smearing me with your green sleeves,
you cast me off as part of a deeply manic struggle.
“Am I your mother?”
My delayed reaction, my own disembodiment.
At least we are home, you cloaked in a wide meadow of childlike desire.
Such a discourteous question,
“Am I your mother?”
For I have loved you so long, so well.
My full cup of fear hovers,
brims over your bright brown eyes,
runs into your housecoat, its field tiny green and blue blooms.
Churning, your bright eyes,
more than clouds.
Christ’s child, not Mommy, beckons me for my response.
Am I your mother?
This is my brink,
the new womb I can create with a “no” or “yes”.
19
Be Good
Your worries still course through me.
The flow of your fear reaches my knees,
locks them in place,
sticks to my toes,
leaving me with bad feet,
the ones I thought no slippers should hold.
We might, one day, be homeless.
I would go with my father.
You would rot, in some armory,
in a psychiatric ward,
electrified.
My eyes cannot close through these moments,
their bulbs of bright doom dazzling my eyes,
as I keep reading between the lines,
these links of chain.