Pulp Fiction Illustration: Ray Bradbury

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Post in Which I Don't Curl Up like an Ammonite

"The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also take the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unravelling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college."  Kate Zambreno, Heroines

Feminine pain--from cramps to childbirth--doesn't count; it's the curse.  You bear it because you're female.  It's bearable because you're female.  You're female.  Grin and bear it.

Men, however, can be terrible cowards over a toothache, or an ingrown hair, or a sore toe, and it's "Boys will be boys." That sick-male cliche makes me want to punch a pillow. Damned if they can cry at movies, though, or have tears well up when their children are born.  That's girly.

I am 1000 times braver than Harvey was.  And it didn't make him less manly.  Or me less female.

I am more Medusa than Penelope.  More Klytemnestra than Cleaver, June.

I bare it.  I bear it.  I bore it.  I have borne it.

And if my daughter EVER hears that she needs to be more of a lady, to be girlier, I know she'll take out someone's kneecap.

And if my son is EVER ashamed to cry from happiness, then I have failed as a parent.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Corn on the car--I have this postcard.  I love the lemon wheels and the convertible.  We found it in a little antique shop in Carbondale.  (We being Harvey and I, and I can no longer use we any more, because there is no we, no Pamela and Harvey, no Pamela and Dez, no royal we because I am not royalty or even a pretender to the throne like Anastasia Anna Anderson, although I am as Russian as many Romanovs).

Word of the day:  DRIVE

And sometimes Dez would put the top down on his Jag and we'd drive and drive and drive and my hair would fray from its French braid and hit him in the face and we'd laugh and laugh and laugh just being together driving fast and the simplest stupidest things would make us so happy and there would be velocity in the days and velocity in the nights and it just figures that on the day of gratitude he would be in Norway and I would be inching back toward spinsterhood and

Hello.

I have no ambition.  No motivation.  No--well--drive.

(No commas in paragraph three in honor of the Radish King).

TRUTHS THAT I DON'T WANT TO ADMIT:
1. I am terrible at being single. I am worse at being a girlfriend.  I was good at being Harvey's wife.  And that leads me to #2, which is that
2. I am pissed at Harvey for dying.  I am so angry that I cannot forgive him for dying.  I know it's stupid.  How do I forgive losing my best friend and partner and husband, and I am sure that this has led to the realization that
3. Being really sick doesn't make me saintly.  It makes me mean and whiny and I can't stop looking at my biopsy site which is now the size of a saccharine tablet or those new awful pink candy hearts on Facebook posts, which leads me to muse on the following
4.  What do I put on Facebook (oh I wish this was a joke).  I am not in a relationship but I still feel kind of married.  It is complicated. I am no longer a wife and no longer a fiancee and no longer a girlfriend and no longer a lover, and I am not really a widow, which leads me to the following monostich
5.  In the middle of WIDOW is I DO--which is just meat in the beartrap jaws of those W's.

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For Dez: VARYKINO

In my deepest fantasies, I am a Russian heroine kissing her love farewell at a train station.  There are furs and tears and troikas, and maybe a little Tchaikovsky in the background, and (to steal a line from Spencer Reece), "snow falls like rice."

I think Dr. Zhivago has had a pathological effect on my idea of romance.  I dream of this dacha, often.

Tomorrow my last love leaves for Norway.  For work.  For three years.  There were no sables or sleighs, no symphonies, but tears last night, this morning?  Falling:  Articles from a Russian sentence, satin strap slithering from a shoulder, spill of sheets to the floor the first night we made love.

Whiteness for me is elegiac, the edges of an old photograph,

That out of the frame.  

Here is a snowglobe all shaken.

Here is a love slipcovered in frost.

Here is a woman who has had her Russian, her romance and her stereotypical end.

Here is her life with ice at its heart.

Warm me up; I'm so cold.

Mosaic, Part Two

I still think that broken is beauty potentiated.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/44824832@N00/7415484404/

RESOLUTION:  I am going to take care of myself, my children, my art: 

"The artist has to love, he has to love what he is making...so that beauty may become connatural to him and inviscerate itself in him through affection, and so that his work may come forth from his heart and his bowels as well as from his lucid spirit. This undeviating love is the supreme rule." Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism

In words of one syllable:

 1. LOVE YOUR OWN WORK BEST.
2. WRITE FROM THE HEART, WRITE FROM THE GUT, WRITE FROM THE SOUL.
3. WORK TILL IT FEELS PART OF YOU.
4. YOUR WORK IS PART OF YOU. 

5. AS DALE RAY SAYS, TAKE CARE OF YOUR WORK, AND YOUR WORK WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU.

 

Detritus, Krissy Wilson

I've been thinking, as I often do when ill, about what remains, about remainders, about clay columns of pipes, china doll heads, singleton chess pieces, sea glass, transferware fragments, all sorts of shards that line the water's edge....all the pieces I looked for once, what remains after the descent into the river of grief.  What remains of me?  I miss Harvey, and yet I fell in love again.  And came up gasping.  I was immersed.  And I need the sky.  And I need souvenirs, something that shows I came, I saw, I loved.

I think I fought so fiercely against the Pretty Boy and longed to lean into his embrace simultaneously, because he's probably my last love.  

I told him goodbye.  Months ago.  I stopped taking his calls.  

And I waited for my life to go on.  And it did.  In  a mosaic sort of way:  Start.  Smash.  Rebuild out of the pieces. 

For the past week, out of nowhere, I fell apart.  I fell into fever, into shaking chills, into the topography of crimson rashes and a purple-as-the-center-of-Queen-Anne's lace breast lesion, into the arms of the ER doctor and into my sickbed.  Friends had to teach for me; co-workers had to cover my shifts; my father had to drive me to a doctor's appointment.  I had scarlet fever.  I had a MRSA infection without any visible signs of a cut.  I had a breast lesion that required multiple biopsies (and my sister died of breast carcinoma, with symptoms like this).  My hair changed texture.  The soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers peeled away, like onionskin.  The skin over my whole body sloughed.  I had shingles--a raspberry patch over my left scapula.  

Today, after 10 days of antibiotics, I'm weak but otherwise fine.  My biopsies were negative, although I have another one scheduled after the rash, just to be sure.  There's nothing but bruising on my breast to indicate I was ever ill.  (And eight pounds disappeared from somewhere--but I cannot see where).  My skin looks better than ever. And yet, I'm falling apart.  

During that time of extreme illness, somehow he knew I was ill.  Somehow he knew I was afraid of dying, as my sister did, from a breast cancer that was diagnosed out of nowhere.  And he knew just when to call, and he knew just what to say:  You lose your breast?  I still love you.  And  You lose your hair?  I still love you.  You love me and all my hair fall out, right?  And he researched reconstruction and trompe-l'oueil nipple tattooing, and he said all the right things, in the broken English and that Badenov accent, and oh my god he is so pretty.   

And the guy whom I've been seeing?  He found out I was sick and had to have a breast biopsy and broke it off with me.  Not a word, not a text, not a phone call in days.  I guess he's gone to BOOBS R US to look for a new sweetheart.  

Today, after thinking about love and loss and the likelihood of ever being someone else's baby, I've decided.   I'm making something new out of something old.   

I'm 55, and I'm tired of running.  I'm staying put in my house with my daughter for at least the next two years.  No more fantasies of moving to Nashville, to Norfolk, to a teaching job of my dreams.  It's here for two years.  

He's 43 and moving to Norway for five years (long-term job, leaving right before Thanksgiving).  He has no furlough for months.  

You are the love of my whole damned life, he tells me.  

The love of my life died, I tell him. 

I lost my wife and my son, he tells me.  I won't lose you.  

You don't have me, I tell him.  

I have you repeatedly, he tells me. 

Can you dial 1-800-IMPASSE?  

He's a conundrum:  innovative, intuitive lover; maddening, jealous fiend.  The only letter he ever wrote to me was 3-1/2 pages on how Barack Obama saved the American economy, and one sentence about my eyes blue as fjords. 

 

He's economically dishonest but emotionally honest, and that's another conundrum.  

Next week we say goodbye to something, if not farewell, with food and flowers and physicality that I thought had ended with Harv.  (As the French say, formidable.  As he says, хуй его знает).

 

After that?  I have no idea.  All I know is that I don't know how to feel this way.  I have forgotten how to feel.  

I think of the artificial songbird from "The Emperor and the Nightingale." I sing her song.  What's left of love is a locket that won't stay shut.  What's left of my heart is a sprung gear. 

What do I make of this? 

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Caravaggio in Kentucky

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.

For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish

School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,

Already bent to drink.

(originally published in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry)

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