School day for Catholic Girls

Outside, little Polish girls hedge
the step sides
at Prince of Peace School.
brushing
pleated plaids smooth,
straightening
white blouses and postures.

Except for one-
she hiccups cries
that she's afraid
Sister will break her fingers
if she can't
get the words straight
between the lines.

Inside, at the window for good light, I pluck a gray
stray from the eyebrow, powder summer-blotched cheeks,
and decide this is a day to play hooky from classroom
paper restraints.  Hazelnut stream drifts up in an ease
from morning coffee toward a thin rain drizzle above
where the moon still remembers the up-all-night
clink and sweet blush of cordials, low octaves of a room
full of women with birthday wishes and stories
of where we are going, where we have been.

In September this sky, like a weather report, is all wrong.
It should be an Easter of violets when a Catholic girl's
guilt skipping catechism for a cherry coke and a bog of chips
at the corner drugstore could be easily assuaged listening
to out-of-work stories about G-Men riddling the Bottoms
from Helen Street.  Taking a soda jerk's advice, she could
drop a dime in the poor box and a good act of
contrition at the alter of an Open-hearted Jesus.
The father could pay even an Orthodox priest off
to pass a daughter on through holy communion.
She could go unpunished for spitting the first taste
of red wine down the white keyhole lace, laughing
at the red-faced boy with taxi door ears peeing
right through his first long suit pants on the pew.

Outside, the little girl's cries
soften, nudge the air.
She moves in , chorusing in

behind the others' murmurs. They,
like cloistral notes and chords
tuning up, pass through
the baroque doors;

a life I survived floats and dissolves
with a sugar cube in coffee.

Only the blank
schoolhouse window eyes
look on

as I take up a basketful present of summer's last squash, fresh mint, purple-veined kale, overripe
tomato.  Inside, the gift bottle of old cognac
perfumes coffee to celebrate being off work.
After all - it is my birthday, and the first year
no one made me tell my age.

Hot Flashes

Aunt Mary always had hot flashes
that made her cry at wedding, at wakes,
as soon as her foot crossed the threshold.

At her skirt, the moment her hand squeezed
mine and our heart lines pressed close, my own
face flushed crimson with tears.
Aunt Mary cried when cats crossed her path,
at ladders too near doors: bad luck, bad luck,
she cried.
Summers at picnics, she tore at her blouse
in the heat, blazed: hot flashes, hot flashes.
She cried all the way
in the car ride back from the fortune teller
in Ohio who said, it's a spell - it's a curse.
She cried at the doctors big with a change-of-life
baby, bad nerves high strung, a flair for
the dramatic that ran-in-the-family, but jumpy
as if her own shadow could be stepped
upon, pulled off, forever lost.
Aunt Mary still cries, mixing up
this face with that name the same
as always, but doesn't understand the new word
for it: alzheimer's.  Aunt Mary, who can spring
to her feet on all the quirky little steps
she remembers from the Charleston, waving
trophies in each hand, rattles walls
with gibberish now, explosive as nebulae
rising from mill furnaces she once stroked.

And I, I cry, bawl, blubber, have a knack
for the boohoo, too.  I cry, hot, in the middle
of winter just watching the moon ride low
like a locket against the flushed breast
of night; and when a spark of star catches
my eye, I see; in me her blood runs red.

Weaver's Tale

You always say I make things up,
that I've never told the truth
about anybody's life.  You say
some things are better left unsaid.

I sit patient at your side.  You drift
in dream and drug.  I run one
finger along the slick silver rail,
smooth wrinkles from the sheet,
within the buzz and hum of your new
mechanical breath, the bump and line
that monitors your heavy heartbeat,
too large for even all your years.

You say I make things up, like storytellers
do, conjure whole truth to half lie,
twist good rhyme to hone a poem.
I make things up like weavers of tales
must, steal the dramatic edge, pitch
a lilt of voice, steady a trembling hand,
flutter a still eye.  I exaggerate.
I get it done.

Her within the buzz and hum,
bump and line, you become
my New York nanny walking a carriage
through Central Park South, a war bride
Rosie riveting the mill, an NCO crooner
lavishing in the last long note of
Indian Love Call.  Ginger trophy winner,
my jitterbug dancer.  Is that so bad?

Lights flash in the scream of machines.
The pen falls to a foot flanked floor.
I hold on to the slick of the rail, to
the end of the bed, purse my lips to
the pink of your ear, whisper
your secrets are safe with me.

View from the Bridge

I think of these in this higher
altitude, staring West.
                    Weldon Kees, thought to have
                     leapt to his death from the
                          Golden Gate Bridge in 1955

Halfway across this bridge
stretched golden on the western fog,
halfway there, there is the point
where jumpers face
the morning skyline hunched in the bay,
distant as the graveyard stones
I searched for names,
and could not find:
Degas and Nijinsky fenced in
on Montmartre, Wilde lost
at Lachaise, and these I found:
Baudelaire in the flowers,
Satre and de Beauvoir
at the gates
of Montparnasse.  But these are not
the ones who take the plunge
to waters guarding Alcatraz,
not the ones who sink below
the ricochet of the laughing gulls,
rattling the bridge at my feet
in conundrums of childhood's
superstitious verse.

These are the ones
of "sad and usual heart"
who comfortably bored counted
up columns in the red from Nob Hill,
or, figuring out the end, banked
badly in Larkspur on spill over trade
from Sausalito, who sleepwaking
sidewalks smoked a last
begged cigarette on union Square.
These are the ones
who have come, will come
to take the leap
from jumper's point,
some who like my own father did,
will dance a sidestep at the edge,
take aim at bad faith stars
and swing some emptied
bottle from the ledge.

They are not the ones
who will listen, as he did then,
hear upon the wind a baby's breath
suck in the air before a cry - 
not the ones who will look,
see singed upon horizon
the real fact of sun,
the new clarity of sky.
These are the ones
who span the breadth of morning fog,
who have come, who will come
to take the plunge
from jumper's point.
These are the ones
whose names
I'll never find on graves.

Tearing Down The Wall

I know he won't want to do it, tear it down,
not the wall, not with his hands.  But you insist,
and he will against his will.  You tempt him
with the old claw hammer, new Saws-all,
a tire iron charlatan tool from the car.

He takes the first swipe, near miss, then
determines one blow upon the next, maybe even
likes it.  You pry old boards up from the floor,
the musk of pets you could not scrub away
when the rood cried down in spring.

He slam bangs again.  You pound back the jam
intruders jimmied.  He tears down the wall.  You
put up a protest flier masquerade of city work permit,
mark lines where it should stop at bearing beam
and stud, I pretend high deco print along new trim.

Dead plaster drops in chunks to the floor.  Then
the lathe comes, his saw clamoring unseen pipes
against your chides for using good scissors on brads
and nails.  His blackened nostrils flare against
his dust-masked face.  He yanks off gloves
and screams, "You tear down the goddamn wall."

Blistering, breathless, you clear the floor
with shovel, broom, and pan; pocket loose change
the past threw in for luck; pack boxes with mortar,
wood and mesh; haul out debris, disguised in paper
with ties trashmen might be tricked to take.

Other summers, you'll walk by the house again,
the one that inhabited you for years, and you will feel
the pull of all the muscle then, the weight of it,
tearing down the wall.

from Traveling In Reflected Light, by Andrena Zawinski,
Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio.

© All Copyright, 1995, Andrena Zawinski.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.