The Glyphs In The Canyons

I’ve forgotten those times between wakefulness and dozing and sleep. I know something happened, but I can’t recall what it was. It’s like trying to recall where I was just before I was born.

My friend tells me that this is the reason I should never fear death. She says, “You don’t know where you were before you were born, so why fret about where you’ll be after you die?” This is wisdom I can acknowledge, but from which I glean no comfort and it is comfort

I want more than nearly any thing. I want the great eyes of god to turn my tears to opals and the great tongue of god to tell me that life and death are the same--that I will keep loving and making love, and walking and humming, and wanting and holding, and will never lose my appetite for joy or for potato chips and onion dip and ice cream.

Between wakefulness and dozing and sleeping, what is there to know?

Who do I serve awake/asleep?

Who do I honor when I doze?

And why is wakefulness the stain on all this embalmed paradise?

A well-known someone once wrote a poem for me. To my delight, it showed up in a literary journal of some repute and then in an actual book.

My initials were there, right under the title and following the word for. I was delighted that this fine poet had discovered words meant especially for me and I hadn’t even slept with him or chatted him up flirtatiously. My friends, I ask you to imagine it: a poem for me who ground away at her own poems—hustling the hell out of every line, always afraid that my lack of credentials would become oh-so-apparent in my ignorance of literary intricacies. I must tell you: that poem didn’t care one bit about my lack of formal education. It mentioned beauty and had an understanding inside it that claimed the right to know what beauty is and what it is worth. “It doesn’t matter that you aren’t beautiful,” my father said. “It matters whether or not you are smart.” He, too, had discovered words just for me.

This all happened years ago. The poem with my initials happened 35 years ago. When I remember or dream, I forget which, it is those initials I see: for _______. Those initials are what I believe.

Home Town

There is a town too far from here, (too far from there), that I can’t even pass through it. Sadness and trepidation hangs over it like a century-old quilt. It is always late afternoon there and the atmosphere is the color of vanilla custard, carries the taste of tin. That town was my bewildering beginning, the village of my young wifehood— steel mills and strikes, dreamed-up romances, dateless weekend evenings, eulogies over the telephone wires talking of this one or that one who ran away or died. I swear to you, there were days in that town when I didn’t want to open my eyes—when waking up was an act of supreme optimism and warrior courage. The sagging porches of our best-kept secrets were at the front of too many houses, disenchantment reigned. I look straight ahead at the highway when we speed past that town. I will not look at that town until we get to its Hallowfield Cemetery where I turn my head to see the gisants* nodding their granite heads.

*Gisants: sculpted figures on a tomb, usually with arms crossed over their chests.

Into The Skid for Alexis Rhone Fancher

The year I lost my virginity, Marilyn Monroe took her own life.

She’d had it. She didn’t want it anymore.

She didn’t care about John Glenn orbiting the earth. She’d orbited the earth lots of times with champagne and Nembutal waltzing elegantly in her magical body. I cared about orbiting the earth and figured losing my virginity would be about the same thing.

We’d been to see “West Side Story” and our shared grief at Tony’s demise and Maria’s devastation took us to the Los Cochinos Motel (Hourly, Daily, Monthly Rates–Free T.V!).

There, in the aluminum light of Gunsmoke’s dusty tribulations, I unbuttoned my blouse, he unbuttoned his jeans, I unzipped my skirt, he took off his socks, I dug in my purse for a mint, he dug in his pocket for a condom.

Stripping, I thought, surely doesn’t take long.

The Beatles were on the radio, sang “Love Me Do,” and that’s what I was thinking as he tried to figure out where to touch me to unleash my passion. My passion seemed to want to stay leashed.

The progression from there is everyone’s story: the French Kiss, the hard, close embrace, the tweaking and the tracing– that unskilled first dance that everyone knows.

It took 12 minutes; I counted them, peering somewhat unsteadily at my Timex watch–a graduation gift from my parents. It kept good time.

I must confess, I was unimpressed. He said, You’ll get to like it the more we do it.

When I told my roommate about it, she said the whole sex thing was an orchestrated hoax, laid on women to keep them encumbered and enslaved.

She said that, during our lifetimes, there might be a few encounters that would produce momentary ecstasy, but, to stay sane, I shouldn’t depend on that

The night we went to see “Dr. No,” he started to drive in to Los Cochinos again.

I protested. I said, not this time. He said, The more we do it, the better you’ll like it.

“We?” I thought, “Meaning you and me? “We?” I thought, and dropped him like a hot rock.

Life is contorted and busy, busier than eddies or winged insects, busier than congested sidewalks at noon.

The Word, they say, is father to the body.

Then, who fathered the Word(s) which lay like hand-sewn quilts of snow

(and other fragments of the sky) over earth and ruins of earth?

Suspicious of everything, my fears stay between me, Jesus, and the jelly jar which makes them no less alive and breathing than if I screamed them into the atmosphere.

I park those fears in deserted parking lots, old newspapers blowing up against them, ticket stubs scattered evenly over the entire expanse, dry grass poking through cracks in the asphalt.

I learned fear at Mother’s bedside— no, not her bedside—the last block coming home from school, the silence of the house, then her bedside.

Afraid that she would never get up; afraid that I would have to be more than daughter, a caretaker for a woman whose sadness would never let her out of bed; afraid that she would stay in bed through a fire or a flood or even through the nuclear blast that was coming; afraid that my father was too weak to take care of me or maybe just didn’t want to.

Now, I am suspicious of everything but keep that to myself, although I have just told you and the attendant at the little shack in the parking lot.

Aria (Basso Profundo)

The groundsman meditates and works on mathematical formulas in his shed when he isn’t raking leaves or cutting the academic grasses of the university from which he graduated with honors and with a Masters Degree in Physics. His radio is on a station that plays classical music, operas. His face is stoic, almost angry, and, on breaks from his damp, green duties, he takes off his shirt and exercises or lounges in the sun (wearing only his camouflage dungarees and work boots), where students and secretaries and department heads can see and wonder at him.

I think he appreciates—invites— wonder, but not women; he doesn’t return their smiles and appreciative glances.

I imagine that, in his own home, the groundsman does his calculations by candle or lantern light, has soup every night for dinner, and sleeps on a cot with a scratchy blanket from the Army/Navy surplus store. I have wondered if he could lift heavy objects with his mind.

Once, in a thunderstorm, lightning struck his pruning shears and he was knocked flat. When the ambulance got there, he was already on his feet, retrieving the shears, walking with great determination to his shed. From then on, his lip had a curl to it that was almost a smile. We like to say that gratitude for being alive gave him that smile, but everyone knows it was just the lightning, nothing else.