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Names Lea wants to change her name to Tina. Her mother says she must think very carefully because a name has to fit. The wrong name can bind like someone else’s shoes. Who knows where a name has walked, dust of what roads, uncomfortable creases across the toe, the heel worn down by someone else’s sorrow? Her brother says the name Tina fits. But if she’s Tina, he says, what happened to Lea? The name turned down the wrong street, got lost, fell off the edge of the mountain. The sound of her name fills the river valley. Everywhere it is nowhere, he says, her name needs to come home. Lea doesn’t want to be Tina anymore. It’s just too much responsibility.
Death of a Flea Plucking the black speck off the hair of my leg and tossing it in the toilet I stand, head bowed, watching it struggle a few moments then I flush. In the maelstrom is the last bit of life it knows And I wonder what my end will be. When speaking of death people tend to say if I die instead of when I die, a denial of the most obvious fact of existence I am my father’s executor (the word sounds like executioner doesn’t it?) And when we speak of the disposition (from the Latin placing out of) of his property, there is always an objectifying discourse concerning his death, my mother’s death, my brother’s, mine -- contingency within contingency, alternate futures forming a maelstrom of possibilities each of which is inevitable but the order of our deaths is unknown. What if we consider the idea, considered obvious by some, that my father will never die? He will, as my grandmother Zelphia Irene put it about her own death, just ugly away? The consciousness remains intact but the body fails, skin dry as leaves long off the tree, the heart slows until the blood moves like treacle on a cold day, and the world fades to a small hum in the back of the mind
the descendants becoming smaller and more distant until everyone is a dear stranger. And what if the consciousness no longer occupied with the noise of the self and its silly attachments, were to abdicate coherence, accepting the world as it is? What if consciousness became pure, the way water is cleansed by evaporation, leaving the lie of history and its history of assumptions behind -- rising, condensing merging with other souls in the welcoming air only to fall again and again to join the great watery spiral of death and life. This what if keeps me thinking of the flea’s existence and what consciousness it might have, what selves it may have fathered on its way to this life of blood-meal, hungry larvae, the dizzying leap into the maelstrom, the pure crest of being.
The Marriage-Bed
It is the sign of return, part of the great rhythm of the seasons and of the years. It is the dream of return, the strength and faith that sing of home. It is the wren’s nest woven of twigs and string, the swallow’s nest of saliva and mud.
It is what frightens night-devils away, even in winter. It is the tree that grows through the house, the hollow of the tree that has never known death. It is the crystal of all feeling, the flower of all understanding, the small containing the large. It is the nautilus growing its many chambers of love. It is the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. It is the idea that a calla lily can be shaped like a wineglass on a long green stem. It is the heart-stone. It is the name of all names that thinks it is a rose and a star. It is a conch-shell rough on the outside, pearly in its intimacy. It is a snail rolling over and over building a staircase. It is an animal, an almond, a repose. It is an oyster opening in the full of the moon. It is a mouth telling a secret. It is a kiln where clay battles fire. It is the simple happiness of sleeping on a boat. These are the walls we’ve pressed back into a circle in the shape of our merged bodies
In My Grandmother’s House Shadow of the pecan tree sways on the rusty screen. The kitchen sink has been scrubbed until black pits shine in the cracked porcelain. The Irish-Cherokee girl shells pecans until her fingers bleed, a bead of sweat lingers on the ball of her nose, hesitates, and falls on the flattened dough of pie shell. She is the salt that seasons, the soda that leavens, the rolling pin that pushed me into place. I imagine her in heaven making pies -- cherry, chocolate, peach, pecan (sans shells) mincemeat, lemon (leave seeds in, so they’ll know it’s real) pastries swollen like moons orbiting the holiday. Grandmother of my sorrow, grandmother of my anger, grandmother of the hickory switch, nigger joke, peach tree, cigarettes and coffee, the station wagon is leaving the driveway a last time, children piled high on blankets, a long sleep home.
Zelphia Irene Slavens Cook (1904-1983)
The Happiness of Animals When the soul-sickness takes me and my mind is in an ugly place and I resent other writers their success, I retire to my attic room
and I am no longer the ruler of my invisible kingdom and incomparable ecstasy is no longer at my beckoning and the honey of praise for my children is no longer on my lips and I am not the man I planned to be nor is this the life I wanted and my feet have forgotten the music and my hands have forgotten the smooth arcs and the gift I once had is a black wand that goads me into self-loathing and the small cruelties I’ve practiced seem large and the large irreparable and even the innocence of William Blake cannot console me my son says he’s cracked the code Dad, when you put your head under the pillow you’re dreaming deeply and don’t bother you and when you lie in bed staring at the ceiling you’re working on a poem and don’t bother you
Then I hear bees and ghosts of bees swarming
screaming her shrill mantra Spider web Spider web Let down your hair repeated all day all night until Ed Shaw the beat cop tells her to move on move on I pull the shades I lie down in the dark and listen to the rain I hear my daughter sitting on the carpet with crayons saying the heart is two circles and a dot and I remember Robert Herrick speaking of his lady’s spicy nest the scent of my wife moving from room to room I begin to believe the curve is the holiest of inventions and my daughter asks If God is in my heart where do I go when I die? and Dad, how come all your friends are in AA or else some kind of animal?
and I sing off-key until I realize I’ve almost figured out the equation of joy and I write down everything the mad-woman says, turning each line this way and that and I call to my dog Winchester -- we walk the forgotten streets in the last of the warm rain
and I consider the dirt under my shoe, how old it is older than arithmetic, older than spoons and mirrors and scissors perhaps as old as the happiness of animals the happiness of a cow lying in a meadow chewing her memory of sunlight and grass chewing everything twice coughing it up, spitting it out like a poet
Some of these poems were first published in The Texas Observer © Copyright, Michael Simms. |
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