silver tinsel sliding from angel palms
to slicken evergreens and other greens,
white oaks, red maples, hydrangea-blue poms,
my vision rapt with heaven’s garland strings --
When ribbons of rain thin as fishing line fall
from hosts of rods in the sky, casting, catching
rainbows in their threaded, shimmering haul,
my pulse entangled and splashing --
When champagne streamers spill from glistening,
sun-scented fountains, filling the tender
flower flutes with honeyed nectar, fizzing
my soul – sublime-stoked, I seize the ember.
Burning, I haggle with poetry’s muse,
drunk and in debt to ephemeral views.
I expected to feel less than whole. To mourn my uterus, to miss the procreant cradle where my babies rocked until I rolled them out and raised them up. To perhaps feel like I’m missing what makes me a woman. But that’s not what I felt.
I’ve felt missing completely. Lost in a head full of white static, my body lost in post-anesthetic cotton batting. Muffled thoughts floating in half-dreams and white-sheet other-worlds opened by robotic arms and pain-numbing canister snaps. So disconnected. So dejected. Missing parts and missing people. Body blue and punctured, matching my mood.
I also didn’t expect the exhaustion. Weights hooked and hanging at the end of my limbs, the start of my thoughts. Everything sluggish and sidelined. Everything empty. I shed a lot of tears. Felt sorry for myself. Felt forgotten and alone.
But that was far from the truth — was all the fallacy of post-surgical funk. Because I have had so many people rally around me and my family. So many people shower us with love. So many meals delivered, texts sent, pickups and drop offs completed, prayers spoken. I grow weepy (with gratitude this time) just thinking about it.
And today, the cobwebs and cotton batting are limned in a see-through-the-murky-to-better-days brightness. I feel like I’m closer to the other side now – the side where my family is, my friends are, where energy pours like sunshine and waterfalls. It’s shimmering there in the haze like the northern lights I missed the weekend of my surgery. The shine is returning. I’m nearly there.
And it’s all thanks to a little help from my friends, my family, my people, my village.
There they stand, pretty maids all in a row.
Salt of the earth #tradwives, wrapped in aprons
and humility, baking sour dough rolls
and buns in ovens since two became one.
The glory of their lord shines all about,
pillar cocked and smoking, an inferno —
a raging reminder of what’s been vowed:
be fruitful and multiply, trust and oh-
babes, you’ve let the laundry pile up and re-
sentment rush in, gathering here, drifting
there, coating your once-fertile crescents in
barren grains of sand. Your mindsets must shift,
be pliant, dutiful, beautiful, not
lost shakers of salt, defying your lot.
…I mean how much good could should would truly come from plumbing your depths beyond the breadth of your womb your tomb your lead balloon waking shaking breaking (no mistaking it) free willy-nilly I mean really from your perimeter placement on the parched and patterned pages of that aged staged staid and time to be waylaid patriarchy?
by Heather Peters Candela
Like
a calico kitten or a Dalmatian pup?
An appaloosa’s flanks or a speckled green toad?
Ladybug shells or butterfly wings?
A giant giraffe neck, a ginger’s freckled chest?
Cheetahs? Leopards?
A lantern fly nymph?
Or more like
Blueberry muffins
Or chocolate chip scones?
Or more like red-capped, warted
mushrooms? Poison hemlock stems?
Or spotted like
Cruella Deville’s floor-length fur coat?
Daisy Buchanan’s skittering pearls?
Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief?
The sleep-haunted hands of Lady Macbeth?
Gertrude’s black and grained soul?
Or spotted like
The hiccupping sun’s surface,
Brewing disruption in planet-sized
Storms of magnetic mayhem…
Pretty much like this thing
Spotted
There on the monitor,
Blooming like Rorschach’s inkblot
Amidst the hollowed-out, round, sound-
Waves spinning didgeridoo vowels amidst
Rumbling, bubbling bowel sounds.
A shifting, sizable storm cloud.
A pale and pockmarked moon.
A shadowy, seething portent.
Marring the vault of a once
procreant cradle.
A dappled dollop of disorder.
Spotted.
Get it out, out.
Just yesterday morning, rain clouds filled the sky in gray velvet folds draped heavy over the newly hatched woods, leaves shivering, sagging from the weight, the wait. The dogwood blossoms — bright as match flares – trembled, knowing soon they’d be doused, tender petals downed and drowned. The cardinal couple, wings flame-stitching the shadows as they lit from sod bank to branch and back again, banked on a breakfast cut short and shared their worm like Lady-and-the-Tramp pasta boiled well past its prime. While the cat, shoulders knuckled, crept toward them, one ear cocked to her prize, the other to the threatening cloudburst, the roll of thunder overhead. Then the clouds split wide –not with rain, but golden sun – showering treetops
in cream soda light,
leaves glowing lemon and lime,
blossoms blinding white
Today the same skies are different still, pale pink haze over lavender-blue, lying whisper-soft as an infant’s shawl above the feathered limbs of fizzy trees. The cat naps on her pillow. The dogwood blossoms tremble still, at the brevity of it all, the beauty of it all, as does the cardinal couple singing cheer, cheer, cheer through the
baby soft hiccup
of this morning’s scene, dogwood
blossoms losing steam
Last night, I watched a dozen preteen
boys hunt Easter eggs in the pixelated
gloaming.
Too big for their baskets, they chose bags
for their haul, grocer’s plastic snapping in
the wind
as they raced. Each new prize plucked from
its hiding spot settled snug in their sacks,
until, from
the ends of their peach-fuzzed arms hung
lanterns of multi-globed splendor, synapsed
and pulsing
with LED portent. Soon peach-fuzzed forearms
turn to timber-lined jaws and egg-hunting spring
turns to
university fall. And so on and so on until one day
quite soon, these too-big for-their-baskets egg-
hunters
become fathers with sons who choose the pull of
plastic beneath their fingers to the heft of handles
in their palms.
She walks
in beauty like a
Joan Crawford/geisha
girl, like a paper doll, silken
kimono cinched tight at the
waist, soft sleeves ballooning
beneath shoulder pads, fabric
flaked with the fragments
of your love, with the
fragments
of your
whims and shifting moods.
Blue like the jet stream from
that trip in September to Paris,
the one where she spilled coffee
(your coffee) at that café and it got
on your newspaper, and it got on
your nerves. She wears that
memory, you know,
deep inside.
She wears it
like the azaleas
blooming at those houses
you toured in Savannah last spring,
their pearlized pinkness nearly matching
the sunset and her lips, before the blood and bruising.
Before something, a misstep — a missed step on the historic
steps — broke a heel on the Prada pumps you bought her just
three weeks before, so you broke something too. Some
thing you regret, of course. Something that turned
all those little pink houses ghostly gray, the
pinch of your fist erasing her smile, the
soft light in her eyes. The wind will
rise, she’s learned, and she can
only try to curl inward for
shelter, to erase her
self even more.
Her center
is cinched
tight, but
her fold-
over
tabs
flap loose as,
broken-cheeked, with blackened-brow,
she walks in beauty, diminished by night.
A child was lost.
A child lost.
The world beat him
Battered him, bruised him to breaking,
And – go figure —
He broke.
His spokes gave out.
His wheels flew off.
His handlebars torqued.
And he tumbled.
He’d been tumbling awhile.
But this time,
He tumbled so far
He could not,
Would not –
Refused –
To get back up.
On the front end of a warm Tuesday
At the ass end of a cold month,
Sick to death with hurt,
He took charge.
With a discharge that fixed
And dilated
His pain
In a huge, gaping hole.
That opened to a ravine
That swallowed a family
And shook a school
And rattled a community.
His mother unhinged
His father undone
His siblings unstrung
His promise unsung
His lyrical, beautiful,
Guitar-humming
Soul-strumming
Sweet promise,
That could make this place beautiful
– so, so beautiful –
Left unsung.
How can we fix this?
Not this, that’s impossible —
Fixed forever in a curled dark hole
Deep in his family’s ribs
Howling unchecked —
But this?
This brokenness
This curled dark hole
Deep in society’s rib
Howling unchecked
… and ignored.
How?
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has and these are of them. Whither have they vanished? ~~ William Shakespeare
When I read this week about six people from Missouri, four adults and two children –
read about the metaphysical-and-quantum-physics-spouting cult leader spinning chaos
from a prison cell, proclaiming his targeted victims “carbonated beings,” I couldn’t help
but think of Banquo’s quote from Macbeth. Because those six people, like ginger ale fizz
and the three weird sisters, all vanished into thin air.
Kind of like me at sixteen – a victim of a cult, but a victim in reverse. My father, a chaos
physicist, teaching the science of surprise, the science of the nonlinear and unpredictable,
while mourning the loss of a father, found evangelical fundamentalism, fusing love of
subatomic principles with an unbending rendering of scripture thanks to a ramrod patriarchal penis-head
stirring butterfly wings with bible verses, and unspooling
a teenaged typhoon in Tennessee. All because I refused to walk as a sheep. Me, who used to
trail after my father like the dust trail on a comet, shimmering in his presence, preening as he
presented to my fifth-grade class all the mysteries of our brave overhanging firmament, fretted with
golden fire and planetary motion, his faith never faltering, even as his faith failed me. I learned the
science of surprise, how lines of scripture can become prison bars
destroying free will and families alike. The mother of one of the missing mothers in Missouri, when
interviewed, says she’s “holding on by her faith” to the hope that her daughter and grandchild will be
found. Ironically, that’s exactly how her daughter vanished – by holding on by her faith. As did my
father’s daughter — his faith a soothing balm for the ache of a father’s loss in his heart, which then created the ache of a father’s loss in my own.
The flutter of faith’s metaphysical wing – so fair and foul a thing I have not seen.
.
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