Guest Blog by Elizabeth Tannen!

A beautiful post by my friend, the terrific and talented writer Elizabeth Tannen.

 

            It’s evening in Santa Fe, and I’m standing with Ronan in his bedroom. He lies on his changing table, his body still, sheathed in a long-sleeved onesie dotted with penguins. I stand above him, beside the closet of his small, colorful clothes, next to the Big Apple Circus poster that reminds me of childhood in New York. 

            My response to being with Ronan is binary.

            In this moment, his presence soothes me with a visceral calm: a singular sweetness, a, soft, peaceful feeling. The perfect shape of his tawny eyes, the soft of his hair and skin; I stroke his body and feel at ease.

            But hours later, as I lie falling asleep in the next room, my mind lurches with the urgent, burning fury that Ronan’s illness provokes. It asks impossible questions: Why must you be this way? Why can’t you tell us how you feel? Stay longer? Be someone you’re not?

            For the past two years I’ve taught creative writing to undergraduates. Teaching them to shape stories has reminded me of the basics of human nature: those things that seem obvious, but we don’t always consider. Mostly, it’s renewed my attention to the human need to know why: to seek connections, to explain why one thing leads to the next, to know how people fall in and out of love, why people get sick and live or get sick and die. How can I avoid this fate, we ask, or achieve it, myself?

            At a restaurant earlier the same day I sat with Emily and Ronan and roiled with anger at an older couple sitting next to us: the ones with matching Lululemon from their morning run and stiffly coiffed hair.

            Why did they fill me with such rage? I wear Lululemon, sometimes, too. They weren’t even intrusive, like the older man in a knit cap who wandered over like some self-anointed Buddha and announced that Ronan looked sleepy; or the blond woman who wondered whether he could talk.

            No, this couple meant well. They admired Ronan in what seemed to them an appropriate way: pausing as they walked to their table, cooing at him, admiring his eyelashes, asking, “How old?” They smiled as they sat down and paid us no more mind. Perhaps they sensed something wasn’t right with Ronan; perhaps they didn’t.

            I know this is a regular routine for Emily: the observations and, sometimes, interrogations of well-meaning strangers. With babies, as with dogs and celebrities, people feel entitled to approach. Such interactions, I imagine, are part of the landscape—wrenching and turbulent—of being Ronan’s mom.

            But I’m not Ronan’s mom: I’m a friend, a piece of his world, a piece that comes in and out. And this routine isn’t something I’ve stomached enough to know how to let sit. So I watch that couple happily spoon bites of oatmeal into their mouths and I project my own anger. I project my own longing to know why—to ask (even if they don’t!) those impossible questions—and I find myself hating them for feeling exactly like me.

            Ronan’s life confounds the natural desire to understand. There are no answers to the questions our minds want to ask. We don’t know, can’t know, how he feels now or will tomorrow; why, besides the cruelty of genetics, he has the life he does. Why sometimes his body trembles and shakes and sometimes rests peacefully; whether he hears the songs his father sings to him and how it makes him respond. Ronan can’t give us the kind of sense we seek.

            And I wonder, as I stand above Ronan, grazing my fingers along his calf as Emily warms his bottle in the other room, if this is why he brings me—brings all of us privileged to know him—so much peace. Because we can’t ask the questions we want to ask. We can only be, in the moment, beside him, briefly touching the life he has. 

Wasp’s Nest

Tonight, at the National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases Organization’s Annual Family Conference in Orlando, I attended a commemoration ceremony for the children who have died this year and in previous years. The name of each child was read aloud. Pictures were shown. Candles were lit. A room full of grieving people. In February I wrote this poem for Miss Elliott, the daughter of my friend Becky. I post it tonight in honor of all the children who have been lost to these diseases, and to the amazing parents who loved them each day of their lives. Deep love equals deep loss, and parental love requires emotional bravery. There’s no other way. 

 

 

Wasp’s Nest

 

For Becky Benson

 

There is nothing I understand.

 

The nest fell to the ground. Framed

first in the window at five o’clock,

 

holes like a heart,

heat like a heart but empty too-

It is mid-winter, the wasps

half-resurrected. Why a space to house what isn’t there?

 

Here today, gone tomorrow.

 

There is nothing

I understand-

 

This moment spinning flakes

at the cold window, scabs

of old songs, old

curses. Valentine,

 

there is no veil

between the world

breaking

end of everything. Lying

 

in bed with pieces of

the fallen mind lifted

from a body,

 

hot snowball thrown into the gravel walk,

hell-bound rocket.

 

Where is it?

 

I found it easily

under the pile of dirt beneath

the window, snow-pressed, blown

along side, replacing what you wanted to see.

 

All night it was here and now what?

 

It is early. Time

to leave

the top of the staircase.

 

The upper hand

The lower hand

I have no hands,

no help.

 

Somewhere nearby,

far off, around this corner-

my baby swings in the bitter

peace of the dying.

 

If only I could strike!

Stinging and wakeful, touch it,

take it

in my mouth, end all desire-

 

Silence at five in the morning,

downstairs, listening: Where is it? Where-

 

Here all the houses are burning

but I am the only one looking

and I understand nothing

of this place.

A gift from my friend Monika….

For Emily

 

Last night you dreamed of a silver lake, a shelf of ice on the side of a mountain, and a sleeping brown bear.

The icy side of the mountain came with all the familiar sounds – a sizzling crack somewhere deep and unseen, some wind blowing like a backward scream, the requisite screeching bird.

The bear lay like stone against the only exit from your son’s room. Her breath puffed in slow grunts, pushing and pulling a downy feather to and fro. Her black lips curled into her matted fur.

The lake had the glints on the surface, and the laps of the waves, and the murky depths that say “Ignore the rest. I am what counts.” You don’t remember the sky. You’re not sure it was there.

 You woke up with your pillow damp, your hands tucked under your chin. Swore you’d never sleep again. And then your reluctant prayers began, the ones you deny to quivering voices, the “if you are there, then please,” the “whoever you are, please listen.” Hated yourself for saying please, hated yourself for saying them at all, hated everyone everywhere everything.

Afterward, you ate the smaller portion of the bagel your husband sliced. Toasted. Dry. He had already crumpled the newspaper, its corner stained with butter, and left you a note on the counter:

At the doctor. Will call.

When children dream, they can only tell us the highlights, how the robot hugged them or how the puppy was green. There is no plot at all, it seems, no need to decipher a meaning or future. Just a dream. And their nightmares are similarly streamlined. A monster. A clown. A snake. Just a snake.

Your dreams have become almost as slick. One message drowns out the rest. Something is waiting.

When the phone rings, you don’t jump. The news can bring nothing new. What more is there to say. But you listen carefully and then return to your day, absorbing the latest deteriorations.

You write your words. You wash your hands. You fold the laundry and put some on and then push your body into a sprint all the way from your front door to the canyon and back, sweat like a purging of some blackness, feet flogging cement to beat out the darkness. For a moment, you cross the finish line. For a moment, you win.

And then they’re home, and you hold him. He is so heavy, a surprise every time. His sweet-smelling hair sticks to your damp face. He becomes part of you again while you try to become him. He smiles, some unexpected impishness. He won’t let you in. You press your lips to his. His eyes don’t see you see him.

He sees this: The bear and the ice and the lap-lap of waves. The hiss and drip-drip of the shortening of days. He simplifies his pain. He is content to lie on a lap. That’s his gift to you, and the gift that you gave. It’s not just mercy, it’s progress. When you hold his hand, he squeezes for an instant. Fear grips you, the new defense against hope. But his smile stays.

This boy will someday take each touch you gave to the grave, a sweet blanket. No memory of how each day unfolded, or your crumpled shoulders, or his father’s slow fading. Just a rush of sure love and life, and then brief uncertainty, and then silence. Blue. Sky. From below the surface of the lake. Hope submerged. A smooth stone in the cool mud. Content to be dark.

Or a silent constellation. Brighter than white.

It’s late at night, and you’re awake. You keep writing your words and drinking your tea and your husband leaves the doorway and you hear the creak of the bed. There’s nothing left to say – it’s all been said. But you keep typing it away anyway, the uncertainty, the dread. A rendering of anger. Sudden, unwelcome humor. They all lie together like kindling for a fire.

You stand by your baby’s bed. The whir of machines. His chest, slow to rise, quick to fall. Damp fists. Slack toes. Pursed lips. The smell of him.

Tonight you dream of a red, dry crack, a scar, a fissure, across some blank canvas. A desert? A belly? Some untold secret. An injury just beginning or ending. You draw closer to peel apart the edges. A cavernous pain. And then suddenly, a wide swath of blue across the distant depths. The crack fills. Water floods the lens, a dam not holding, rushing toward you. A baby in a glass bottle, riding the torrent. What is the message, you feel yourself screaming. What will I learn?

And then. And then. The turn of corner comes. The water recedes. The old dream returns.

But the lake is quiet. The surface is still. The bear stands and shakes herself, stumbling toward the door. The block of ice is illuminated by sun. It clarifies the mountain beneath, sliding down toward you, melting as it comes.

Your face wet. The baby free of the glass. The doorway open. Dust in the air. The unknown.

You rise with an eighth more of something. Smile at him. Suffocate a little less. Rethink the dream.

 

Rick Santorum, Meet My Son

New post on Slate.com – “He has a degenerative disease that has left him blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. If I had known before he was born, I would have saved him from suffering.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/rick_santorum_and_prenatal_testing_i_would_have_saved_my_son_from_his_suffering_.html

A Poem for Elliott Benson

Today I got an email from my friend Phil in New York – a dear friend from graduate school who has already seen me, ten years ago, through a difficult time. A few weeks ago I received a beautiful letter from him, and I wrote an email this morning to thank him for that, and to tell him about Ronan — what was new, how I was feeling, coping, living. I told him that life after Ronan, that after life, seems impossible sometimes to imagine, that I often cannot see myself living in it even though I’ll still be alive. I was writing this before breakfast and had already burst into tears three times. About thirty minutes later Phil wrote me back, and it was tears again — in the oatmeal this time. I do a lot of that these days — crying — and on this day, as is often the case, it is prompted by gratitude. Crying, sometimes, can be a kind of grace, especially if someone can hold you in that space, can ride that wave.

Phil reminded me of why I keep writing about Ronan, why it’s important, why I must go on thinking, working, living, being. It was what I most needed to hear.

Last Friday my friend Becky’s daughter, Elliott, passed away. Becky is and was a kind of grief mentor for me — she has been there for late night emails, questions, fears, everything. I think about her and her family every day. And about Elliott, a beautiful little girl whose presence, last March, was a kind of healing. From the very beginning, Becky and Elliott were my guides — how to suffer and survive. I went back to Phil’s book while I fed Ronan his prunes, and found a poem that resonated with the moment, with the passing of this life, with the helplessness I feel to assuage the suffering of another mother.

So this is the first section of a poem by Phil from his book Meditations on Rising and Falling. A beautiful poem for a beautiful girl who was loved wholly, completely, unconditionally — all the days of her life. Held by the hands of her parents, her sister, and by many who knew and loved her. 

 

Two Hands

1.

We don’t, in truth, prepare

adequately, competently

even,

 

for this. The letter

that arrives or, eventually,

doesn’t,

 

the doorbell unfingered

still. The word un-

furled. We learn

 

from what we fear to run,

but this — what nothing

taught us the way

 

away from — runs with us.

With, a word we once loved.

The jacket we first slip

 

out of, then fold before the railing,

the finches building, even

as the island is sinking,

 

their nests. 

We each must make our peace

with what is evident

 

though mistakes are made – 

fearing you’ve misplaced 

God, you decide you might

 

have been misplaced, might

be about to be scooped 

into arms, blue and up.

 

-From Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008)

The Open Road: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling Revisited

A new essay on The Nervous Breakdown. A re-interpretation of Kierkegaard’s re-imagining of the sacrifice of Isaac from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/emrapp/2012/02/the-open-road-kierkegaards-fear-and-trembling-revisited/#comment-210925

The Rumpus

Today an essay in the Rumpus, about the life-saving power of female friendship. Thanks to Gina Frangello for commissioning the piece.

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/transformation-and-transcendence-the-power-of-female-friendship/#more-95368

Of a Beautiful Child

 

I am becoming cicada husk, the cool

Throat of an empty vase, the dark space

Between stars. You touch me and I see

That monstrous child Montaigne pitied

On the streets of Paris – my inseparable twin

 

Hanging from the center of my chest,

Your head where my heart should be, my heart

Pushed aside.

-From “Overripe,” by Danielle Deulen

In the news today, a young toddler was denied a kidney transplant that would save her life. Because she suffers from a rare and “complex” genetic disorder (as if genes were simple in anyone’s case), has severe mental and physical impairments and is not expected to live past the age of three, the doctors felt it unnecessary to conduct any procedure that might extend the time she had in her body. The outraged and panicked mother blogged about it, causing a flutter of letters – petitions, really – to be sent to the hospital, lobbying for the transplant that would save this girl’s life.

Whose life matters? Who counts? Which bodies are worth saving? Protecting? Loving?

In Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “Of a Monstrous Child,” the author, often deemed the “father of the  essay,” whatever that means, turns the word monstrous on its head. His tiny two-page missive about a child he sees in the street – a “double body and these several limbs” – has the Swiftian power of a brick in the face, a bullet crashing through the folds of the (what he argues is a very closed) mind. Yes, he pities the child, but not in the “oh, heavens, that poor thing,” way that I’ve been accustomed to all my life. As my grandmother said many times with a deep sigh, looking me up and down, “Well, at least you’re smart. That’s something.” My body was not enough, it seemed, and would never be. And now I have a son whose body cannot live in a world that pities him. It’s enough to make me walk around with a brick of my own, but reading Montaigne, I’m reminded that it might be better to walk around with some eyeglasses, some funky-ass, new-agey, look-through-them-and-the-world-becomes-a-scene-from-the-matrix-or-from-your-idea-of-the-afterlife eyeglasses.

Montaigne unpacks the reason why people stare at me when I swim at a public pool. Why people let their eyes linger over Ronan’s floppy limbs, his sightless eyes, his trembling hands.  Why our eyes are drawn to the faces of burn victims, missing limbs, identical twins, people of short stature – anyone who falls outside the normative standards of what makes a body, what makes it valuable. (It’s like that scene in any war movie, when the music gets all dark and serious and then amputees start crutching by, looking miserable and haunted and trailed by a nurse with a dour, doe-eyed expression). Quoting Cicero, Montaigne says, “What he sees often, he does not wonder at, even if he does not know why it is. If something happens which he has not seen before, he thinks it is a prodigy.” The burden, then, falls on the looker, and the looker is held accountable for the lens through which she sees – and sorts – the world. I love the way Montaigne makes that child in the essay extraordinary in the truest sense: brilliant and shiny.  The thing you want most to pick up when it glints at you from the street. The man born blind in the Gospel of John did not exist to make people feel grateful for their vision; the text is very clear that he, in fact, possessed the vision that others did not. That his was a looking that saw wonder, saw God, when others did not. His body was not a punishment; it was a kind of divine revelation.

A politician (who will go unnamed, so as not to give his “ideas” any greater currency) stated that disabled children are a woman’s punishment for having abortions in her sullied, slutty, ho-bag past. The notion of the “sins of the father will be visited on the sons” being visited on our country’s political scene. Disabled people as metaphors, as objects of disdain, neglect, as warnings, as punishment. Players in the freakshow. Pushed center stage so that others’ fears about what is normal, what is valuable and loveable, are pushed to the side – this, Montaigne seems to be saying, is true obscenity, if obscene means a total lack of imagination about form and variety, shape and possibility. In a world we know just about everything there is to know about molecules and neurons and photons and the smallest bit of what makes life life, we still pity those whose variety doesn’t fit with our limited notion of what variety might entail. Look again, I hear the essay saying now, reading it in light of Ronan’s situation. Look again, and look deeply, truly. Don’t just look at what’s on the stage, look behind the curtain, look up to the lights.

For deep truth is always simple, often deceptively so.“This story will go its way simply,” as Montaigne says. I will take my child out into the world. People stare at us. In my mind I imagine giving them these eyeglasses, fitting them gently over their face, and then asking them to look again (this last part perhaps not so nicely). Look at me and Ronan, in our bubble of simple, unconditional love. Brutal  and true and sad and rocked by the truth of death-in-life. Colorful. Weird.

Who should we pity? I pity myself before I had Ronan, before he rocked my mind, my heart. I pity the lens I was looking through, cloudy and dark, a lens that made the world small and mean and inscrutable and limited.  “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom,” Montaigne seems to be reminding himself at the end of the essay. What are the customs in our culture? Hateful politicians, starving magazine models, greedy corporations, a society fueled by the word “get.” The “imperfect” child that is only 14 months old in “Of a Monstrous Child” is a child Montaigne pities not so much because of the shape of his body, but because he has been confronted with, over and over again, the limited capacity of the human mind, our myopic ways of looking, our refusal to see past what is presented to us, our unwillingness to challenge custom.

I see beauty and tenderness in Montaigne’s detailed description. I feel grace. I look at Ronan and see perfection. I see my son. I see the truth, I see his rockstar, off the charts, blonde and green-brown-eyed, pale-skinned beauty. I see something extraordinary, the slick lip of transcendence, the edge of something I have always intuited but until now has been unavailable to me — off sight, out of reach. I hear something – a song, a sonar, a wave. Ronan rides at the center of my chest — his body against mine, his body from mine. I am relieved of the husk of what I was. I am new, which is a kind of revelation or redemption without a fixed endpoint. I feel my old, cold heart pushed aside for one that is explosive, boundless, electric, powerful, and beautiful - mine, yes, but also Ronan’s.

Anniversary

 Anniversary

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were a God.

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

 

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

-From “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” Sylvia Plath

This Tuesday, January 10^th, the moon will be full, a fact that people in Santa Fe tend to get quite excited about. Cancer moon: moon of new visions, surges of creativity and nurturing and growth. This Tuesday is also the one-year anniversary of Ronan’s diagnosis. 1.10.11. I have fallen a long way.

Typed out like that the date reminds me of the release date for a disaster movie, or the next Mission Impossible movie, or a film involving the latest generation of lovesick, lip-glossed vampires, witches, wizards, whatever. The year has been not so dissimilar to a disaster – epic, all-consuming, disproportionate, unbelievable. I realized this most distinctly during the holidays when, while trying to shave off a final few seconds from my mile time, I found myself running on the treadmill to the slew of holiday movies that are shown on cable television each year, an odd collection: Happy Gilmore (hell, no), Pretty Woman (NO!), and Deep Impact. The last movie is the only one I could watch. Quick synopsis: a few big-ass comets are headed to earth, and if they’re not stopped, the earth and all its life will be destroyed. The movie has everything: an ethical, calm-talking president (Morgan Freeman), epic heroism (Robert Duvall sacrificing his life and the lives of his team to deliver a nuclear bomb into the eye of one of the earth-destroying comets), and other gestures of kindness and compassion and sacrifice. For example: an “Arc” has been designed to preserve the best of the best of American culture: artists, politicians (?), scientists, etc. If you don’t get shoulder tapped as Arc-worthy, if your phone doesn’t literally ring in the middle of the night to let you know that you’ve been selected, you draw straws for the remaining slots. Tea Leoni, who plays a prominent television reporter, gives her spot to a woman and her child who drew the shortest straw. She puts her friend and her child in the Arc-bound helicopter (giving up her life), books it to the coast to see her father, and goes down in a dramatic, lethal, comet-driven wave of water. All this place-taking is kind of dopey, but it also delivers a profound message: life is precious, but it’s also cheap. I would trade anyone for Ronan’s life – Ronan, who got the shortest stick. Anyone. Me. You. A stranger. Anyone I love. Brutally. Mercifully. Without a stitch of regret or remorse. This is the light of the mind – lunar, lonely, true.

What’s so silly and also ridiculously appealing about disaster movies is that some people do live, even though some people die, even though the odds are impossible, stacked, undeniably crappy. There’s a collective sigh of relief, a group redemption. If only life were like the final take of a disaster movie. I’d love it if I turned on my computer to find a video of Morgan Freeman telling me that we will begin again, that we will live, that we will go on, survive. There is a cure for Tay-Sachs, he’ll say, just call this number. Last January – 1.10.11 – a descent into blackness, a plunge. This year, 1.10.12…

One weekend while I was writing and pregnant at Yaddo, a well-known retreat for artists and writers in upstate New York, I rented a car for the single purpose of driving to a local multi-plex to see 2012, the disaster movie based on Mayan predictions about the end of the world. During the scene when Amanda Peet and John Cusack (another reason I saw the movie) attempt to hand their children over to the people who can save them (There’s an Arc in this movie, too), saying please, take them, take them, save them, even though the kids don’t want to go, I cried into my popcorn, which greatly dismayed the artist I had dragged along to the theater with me. This silly movie kept me up that night, thinking would I be able to let my son go? Now, of course, I don’t have a choice, but as I wandered around the Yaddo lakes in the middle of the night, bundled up and sweating and sleepless, I wondered and agonized. Maybe I already knew.

Katrina Trask, one of the developers of Yaddo, lost her husband in an accident, and all four of her children in infancy. She had the flu, thought she had recovered, invited her kids into her bedroom and then they got sick and died. Just like that. She spent the remainder of her life at Yaddo, “an invalid” according to Wikipedia, although that definition seems dubious at best. The lakes around the property – beautiful, peaceful, tree-lined, banked by mud and a mash of fragrant leaves – are named after Katrina’s children. Ghosts abound, and not just of the Trask kids.

It is well-documented in several essays about Plath’s stay at Yaddo in the fall of 1959 that she turned 27, learned that she was pregnant, was finally able to work apart from her husband (during which time she created some of her most powerful poems and would do so again later after the dissolution of her marriage), and was treated to breakfast in bed each morning.

Sylvia’s life: was it a disaster? A “beautiful” disaster if there is such a thing? A weird, cult-inducing story that is attractive because it is tragic and ends with a death by suicide? She was a genius, no doubt, absolutely, hands down, but a difficult genius. Her poems about moons are not about hope and surges of life and gratitude and love and the Tarot, they’re about something else, something unseen, something life-giving and also soul-destroying. They speak to disaster without giving into it. They are triumphant without being uncomplicated. They howl without being hysterical. Now I doubt that any movie about the end of the world is going to have a line from Plath as an epigraph, or a little screen shout out to her, but maybe it should. She was a comet of truth, she was a poet of power. She was not a deranged, hysterical housewife who wrote some interesting and angry feminist poems about “Daddy.” She was not “the poet who put her head in the oven,” she was a poet who, unlike some, actually put her head and heart in the world, fully, and at the greatest emotional cost. She was an almost unbelievable mind; she provided a truthful vision of what you find when you look underneath the stories everybody tells you are true but are always lies. She was a muse to herself when nobody else was, and she is a muse to me. My disaster muse. A poet who won’t look away, who, instead of hiding behind a wall, burns it down; instead of putting her head in the sand, eats the sand and spits it back at you in a shapely, wet ball. She didn’t survive but she is a survivor. In that sense she is the most hopeful poet I’ve ever read.

Today Ronan had several rolling seizures, and when Rick swam with him to the opposite end of the therapy pool, this day before the day of the full moon, I imagined the day when Ronan’s body will not just float away to the other side of the pool, a sight I can barely stand, but will be gone. He loves the pool – perhaps it reminds him of when he was the most safe, swimming in amniotic fluid, being hauled around the dark glass of a lake named after a dead child, his arms free to move before the paralysis and spasticity that come with Tay-Sachs, a disaster illness like no other. Three guys with gray hair, all wearing yellow LIVE STRONG bracelets, massaged their hips on the jets in the pool’s corner, discussing the NFL playoffs. These men, with all their lives to talk about and their sore muscles to massage, and their favorite teams and their language and they can walk and hold their heads up. And my baby, almost 2, floats, helpless, in the arms of his father. I stretched out at the edge of the pool and closed my eyes, waiting for Rick and Ronan to swim back to me.

This year I am still writing in the same back room by the same fire as I was last year, but I am not the same. I can see Sylvia in her tower, the Trask kids standing at their mother’s door, then at her bedside, then the mother at the graves. I see the path around those lakes on my middle-of-the-night walks, see a grave pass from window to street, see gray parallel gray as the sun came up and I wandered back to my cabin. During her fall at Yaddo, Sylvia was firing out poems of such beauty and desperation, such shiny, clean howls into the void, that a moon would have been no contest.

I can see Sylvia writing herself almost out of disaster – almost – poems that are written from the slick edge of it, poems that slide and shine like the snow that’s skittering past my window now, poems that scatter and charm and smash and heal and rip, poems that look out into the moonlit night, into what is supposed to be some romantic, future-knowing, divinely-routed night sky and know that “the moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset.” Yes.

Poem for Ronan from Alma Luz Villanueva

Thank you, Alma, lovely poet full of generosity and compassion, for this gift of a poem for Ronan. Lorca was my muse this summer, so Alma is also a mind-reader!

 

“Where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes

a wind, a mental wind, blowing relentlessly over the

heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and

unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle,

crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant

baptism of newly created things.” Federico Garcia Lorca*

 

GIFT

 

I keep writing to

Lil Ronan, every

stage of his life,

(dreaded/beloved) teenhood,

 

manhood, I follow him,

I follow you, so

far until my mind/heart

collapses with grief, imagining

 

what you live

daily, Emily,

and I’m left with

questions, simple questions-

 

What song does every

mother’s womb sing to her

child? What light connects

the unborn to the born, the

 

dying to the living, those

waiting their turn to be

come flesh, vulnerable flesh,

life death life death

**Sound of a rattle**

 

again, oh again, between

their mother’s dark thighs, a

light emerges. What is this

light, always ancient, always

 

new, why do we long for

light, why do we long for

darkness, why do we wait

our turn life death life death

**Sound of a rattle**

 

Why do some be-come only

in the womb, a year, four

years, 16, 28, 49, 54, 90,

110, why, life death life death

**Sound of a rattle, sacred rattle**

 

I ask the ocean, why?

I ask the mountain, why?

I ask the stars, why?

And of course, I ask the Sun,

 

why? I ask Grandmother

Moon, why? I ask

my dream, why, why?

Within the awe-full silence,

 

the music, drums and rattles,

voices from womb, heart, throat,

I hear, gift, repeated

endlessly,

 

chanted endlessly, one

word, gift, we are offered,

we must receive, or not,

and you have life death life

 

death life la mar

moans, sings, in

love with salt, human

DNA, the womb echoes

 

ancient tide,

ancient child,

ancient rattle (stones,

bones, seeds), gift.

 

Alma Luz Villanueva

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

January 1, 2012

 

To Emily Rapp, her son Ronan

A poem I keep writing, so finally here it is, con amor…

*In Search of Duende, Federico Garcia Lorca