Andrena Zawinski
1.
Walking home to a new flat this Western autumnal dusk,
everything crisp and at attention, the gardener packing up
his weekly gear, I can't help but smile at the strong stucco face
topping a leg of a climb uphill, at its odd widow-walk balcony,
and think as I peek through my own open blind slats--how pretty
the eucalyptus bunched in the vase, how tidy the run of temple gates
framed above the mantle, the season's persimmon and pomegranate
centered in a bowl, how sweet the chime of shorebirds singing
the light breeze, thin linen billowing at the lifted sash.
How I heard once a rapist say he picked his victims by the pretty
through their windows, picked blooms from their flower boxes
when they were not looking, picked them from the neat upkeep
of their lives, hinge plates undone before the latched door.
2.
My friend leaves for work complaining soldiers armed with M-16's
and full magazines search the bike's saddle packs near Pleasanton,
as morning radio distracts me with Ferlinghetti's poetry-of-peace
I missed read to a sold-out crowd at Club Fugazi. I carry my coffee
to the post office to buy stamps to advertise my own new work in print.
The woman at the window, wearing blue oversized latex gloves
and painter's mask, says since '78 she hasn't had so much as a cold
but thinks she has "the symptoms," that there is another unconfirmed
postal worker death in nearby Brentwood. I assure her it is the one
outside Washington, D.C., not here, not Oakland, not in California
"Don't worry," I say, "don't worry."
3.
This afternoon, two envelopes fat with rejection and no return
address arrive postmarked from publishers back East. These,
unlike the rest, I slit open with a knife blade, handle the contents
with the same caution I did once that Chesapeake camping tick
I dropped into a pill bottle after tweezing it from my scalp.
Not even the dust of cheap manila appears, but the manuscripts
hit the desk in a thud with my thoughts on Anthrax in New York
and two more bodies dropping dead.
4.
I spend a day between gallery walls for Dias de los Muertos
and thread together beads of memory with marigolds I buy
to attract spirits, incense to guide souls, salt to dry tears,
water to cleanse open wounds, bread of the dead topped with sweet
jimmies. My friend cannot understand why I do not join him
at Techno Cosmic Mass, go trance-dancing. Another won't let up
on trying to coax me onto a target range, practice shooting pistols.
At home, I open all the ground-floor windows, let in the sound
of first rain after long drought, listen to it wash the walk clean.
5.
The woman on the tv magazine says she explained her breast cancer
to her three-year-old on paper with pencil as an erasable fleck of dust
inside some word balloon. During the radiation, she visualized this
carbon smear of punctuation as an end stop on an invisible sentence
beam of light. After the mastectomy, she wished she had earlier
read the plastic placard hung in the shower stall with directions
for touching herself intimately and often.
I stop to touch myself, but don't. I light candles instead
for all my dead.
6.
My son is about to have another birthday. I no longer tell his age,
part vanity, part principle. I do not explain my own growth
into this life with him, child with child, his great head still pushing
through me, me strapped to that birthing table like a madwoman
who does not scream but breaks a small bone in the nurseís hand
as the epidural needle jerks into the spinal cord in an untimely
contraction, me afraid I would never do another arabesque,
and did not.
The woman who inhabited the next bed then still cradles her sack
of a belly absent of the stillborn child. We, strangers waking to check
each other in the shadows of medication, shared a room, a splinter
of time, never ever to forget each other.
7.
At the college where I have taken on teaching writing, a young man
the age of my son flaunts his penchant for synecdoche. My thoughts
grow hungry for the kitchen chopping board with beets and blood oranges,
a strong mince of garlic and zest. I tell him make a poem, not a word game,
as a sugar skull crystallizes at the end of my pen. Another tells me
she can no longer see straight, is huddling again in the jungle in Laos
at her mother's skirt as the house is searched for her father.
She tells me she is suffering. "Don't worry," I say, "don't worry."
The next day I track a hawk in my camera lens from Nimitz Trail,
and into the frame flies a military plane with helicopter escorts
circling the Bay Bridge in the distance. We all worry.
8.
I organize my new walk-in closet by blacks, grays, the dark blues,
various shoes ranging from frivolous to sensible, and in this array
of San Francisco uniforms resurrect a Sicilian woman, Lavinia
back in Pittsburgh, who wore black through my entire teenage years
mourning the loss of her young Roman husband.
All of us drag queens of the dark, I think, working this life
like slaves to the dead, an occasional bauble catching some light.
9.
I follow a New Neighbor Welcome Brochure around the city lake
wearing its incandescent halo of pearls--3,400 bulbs to be exact,
punctuated periodically by over 100 Florentine lamp standards--
loop around this bit of a Pacific flyway with its watery feasts,
its silenced wild settling in an evening mesh of heron, egret,
the ring-billed gulls full of their feed on mussels and tubeworms.
Nights, when I toss between various frets of the noisy music
of the brain, make shopping lists for melatonin and apologies
for not giving anyone what they really want, I sometimes toy
with shaving off my hair to show off a thick skin of eyes tattooed
at the back of my head watching out for something yet to come
when the clock's hands dip downward, when thieves creep in,
and for which no strand of worry beads nor line of poetry
can ever be enough.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Andrena Zawinski
credit: Heliotrope, No. 7, Spokane, WA, 2004 in a slightly different version.