These Acts of Water Poems By
Nina Bannett
Copyright © 2015 Nina Bannett Copyright © 2015 Cover Design by Mary Ann Biehl ELJ Publications, LLC ~ New York ELJ Editions Esperanza Editions Series All rights reserved. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930310 ISBN 13: 978-1-942004-11-0
for RB and MG
CONTENTS
I. What Child Is This Curator
3
Rachel St. Michael War Story
4
War Story #2 Artist in Residence
6
All-Day Kindergarten Artist in Residence #2 Dr. D. I Am Violet
8
Let’s Talk About Jesus Ceremonies Circles What Child Is This
5 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
II. A Tall City of Sepia Pain Be Good The Long Winter Settlers
19
Where I Am Going Planetarium Blackbirds Pilloried Plath’s Recipe Revival Meeting Espalier Notes
22
20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28
Confidences Tempests
29
Emergency Topography Ambush
31
Nurse Beverly Re-enactments
33
Election Day Like a Saint, Rising
35
Hospice Woman’s Work
37
Requiem My Falcon to Your Swallow Pantheon Dream of the Forsythia Tree
39
A Prayer, A Lamentation
43
30 32 34 36 38 40 41 42
III. These Acts of Water The Pinnacle
47
Getting Far Waiting to Speak Wilderness On the Spot
48
Twisted Dream What I Carry
52
49 50 51 53
Lost or Changing To Jericho
54
Consent The Giving Moment
56
Nosebleed Nesting Dolls
58
Anchors Away Who Is Annie Sullivan?
60
Mythology’s Undertow Pretender
62
Snapshots of Still Water Impromptu Art Show Fire at Pratt Institute Photo Synthesis
64
Governors Island Underwater Flameproof Breathe This Ring
69
Harvest Time
73
55 57 59 61 63 66 67 68 70 71 72
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Plath’s Recipe” appeared in Bellevue Literary Review , Fall 2012. “Revival Meeting” appeared in CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer 2014. “Rachel St. Michael,” “War Story,” “Artist in Residence,” “Tempests,” “Re-enactments,” “Woman’s Work,” “Requiem,” and “Dream of the Forsythia Tree” appeared in Lithium Witness (Finishing Line Press, 2011).
Part 1: What Child is This
Curator Your leaf motifs grow, tower everywhere you are not gone they tell me, but in these arts you remain yourself unfettered by death. Putting together a coherent show by myself will not be easy. It is so hard, you told me once, it is so hard to move a library. Implicit within these arts, your sweet voice, my heartbreak.
3
Rachel St. Michael We were passing out your business cards, a woman artist and her daughter, a madwoman and a four-year old. We flicked monochromatic cards inside mail slots, houses that ringed your mother’s, but you were Christ’s daughter, a lamb shorn of outer trappings, nude, shouting after a city bus. I have lived a nineteenth-century life, early exposure to madness, sentimental love and premature death, holy crosses and guardian angels.
4
War Story Surrounded— my mother and I are flanked on all sides. This waiting is a serious business, these trenches, this series of stiff chairs and couches, have been placed here by our enemies, our dentist and his secretary. Suspended in space, I am waiting for time to begin and end. Outside, as we prepare to surrender, the red brick houses stand at attention. What are they thinking? Right and left: my police car, her ambulance. Undefeated, my mother screams my name many times. She will not be vanquished in her psychosisconvinced that the hospital would be the best place for me, too. Shattered, I sit in the front seat, squashed into the squad car radio, huddled against what I have witnessed.
5
War Story #2 I am in a refugee camp, against a backdrop of police metal, Styrofoam and Oreo cookies. I am a four-year old celebrity. Sitting and staring is what I do best, still, these many years later, it is what I do best. Turn my head? Never. Refusal is an art form. I cannot be broken into betrayal. Soda can be poisoned, Hershey bars manipulated, reality swayed into unbecoming, a mother distorted into disappearing. My young will is like iron, as I prepare to sit here, forever. Officers staring sympathetically, their offerings sitting limply in my tiny hands.
6
Artist in Residence I reach the right ward by following the pipes, those primary colors on the wall. Everyone here is Lewis Carroll, making animal gifts instead of watercolors: For me, a blue-grey cat with wispy ears and a yellow tongue, a dark green turtle, stuffed head bobbing. Outside the common lounge, away from the other patients, she offers me a skein of yarn, casts on, waits for me to come to this hook. If I learn crochet here I will be chained too, tied to dulled smokers, their thoughts vested in thorazine.
7
All-Day Kindergarten I shift from mourning to afternoon. From the outdoor misery of steady rain, I watch my little classmates, Their wait for revolving wheels, other mothers, their diurnal returns. My new red boots glisten, grassy. I am led inside, shorn, handed off from one shepherdess to another. My head nestles up to its blanket, napping to the Nutcracker Suite. I am with the celesta, interlude of solitude. Within my landscape of sweets, dancers twirl in punishing circles, their toes explode, far away from their homes.
8
Artist in Residence #2 Seven feet, high separation. A thin divider of unfinished wood, threaded with a metal eyelet and inner hook. You are in communion with your materials, your garden cadmium red, like dahlias. The Moonlight Sonata floods your phonograph, your fingers tending soft strands, delicate Natsumi paper. Forests of young colors cloister you from me. I find myself wandering your perimeter between pilgrimages.
9
Doctor D. He was your call waiting, your manic fiancÊ, beckoning you to God’s Unity Center. He favored monotones, his brown china dog standing in the corner, waiting with us for your time. He built on to his own house, receiving you, flush by car, driven, sullen, cross-roaded into the Roslyn hills. He was your mercy, righteousness, a shepherd with unstable hourly company, swaying from tricyclic hymns, staying with the breach.
10
I am Violet The announcement is made, the jubilation of a weekend morning. Your childhood parakeet, Violet, is now your child, much beloved, reincarnated, cited by God. In the face of such surety I am bound, rapt with havoc, lost in the violet wilderness that soothes only you. My wings are set in amber. I sit, hovering on your left shoulder, overlooking a vale of confusion.
11
Let’s Talk About Jesus I can’t. My childhood could not grasp His hand, your conversion reaching through the locked ward, voices debuting on Queens streets. His pastures turn to plenty. Little Women appears under our new, artificial tree. I read only the pages where Amy drafts her will. Demanding my family’s religion, classmates press me for clarity. I lose myself with hesitations. This is the opposite of faith.
12
Ceremonies We are the symbol of our slow ripening future, dressed in red, flowing scarves, graduates, in unison singing “Memory” from Cats. To the audience, families, we are still one primary school, joyful in our onstage harmony. My mother stares, downcast and hollow. I am troubled by moonlight even though it is bright, sunny. My father angles for good light for photos. We are each Doric and Ionic columns. To the audience, we appear as one family, classically posed within the show’s dithyrambic trappings. We reunite with our new car that afternoon, a Reliant of such poise that we should all rejoice after six long months of winter crisis. My father drives the car away from its large stage, not a sound from the roadway.
13
Circles There has been slim preparation. The tear in space-time created by so little, snatched so much. At the wheel, maternal panic fevers you. As we spot the span, I see the cosmos. This, then, is the world’s edge, wondrous, precipice-torn, astronautic. The U turn you execute is valiant, the widest stretch of desperation moves you, as pedals harmonize with your feet and arms. A carousel of captive time cascades through our afternoon. We are fireflies inside our jar.
14
What Child is This Smearing me with your green sleeves, you cast me off as part of a deeply manic struggle. “Am I your mother?” My delayed reaction, my own disembodiment. At least we are home, you cloaked in a wide meadow of childlike desire. Such a discourteous question, “Am I your mother?” For I have loved you so long, so well. My full cup of fear hovers, brims over your bright brown eyes, runs into your housecoat, its field tiny green and blue blooms. Churning, your bright eyes, more than clouds. Christ’s child, not Mommy, beckons me for my response. Am I your mother? This is my brink, the new womb I can create with a “no” or “yes”.
15
Part 2: A Tall City of Sepia Pain
Be Good Your worries still course through me. The flow of your fear reaches my knees, locks them in place, sticks to my toes, leaving me with bad feet, the ones I thought no slippers should hold. We might, one day, be homeless. I would go with my father. You would rot, in some armory, in a psychiatric ward, electrified. My eyes cannot close through these moments, their bulbs of bright doom dazzling as I keep reading between the lines, these links of chain.
19
my eyes,