GROWING BACK: POEMS 1972-1992
Growing Back
for Judith Hoberman The overgrown plant, billed as a cactus, but surely a sedum of sorts: parts of it properly upright, others, stems, half dead, with persistent tips, clusters of fleshy leaves trailing the withered pink blooms, effortless, sessile, removed to a table, since spring will not come though it’s April 14th, the window-ledge battered by corn-snow, the jambs dropping melted sleet. The plant I bought only one of this year, knowing it would be just one year I might keep it. It could do with a larger pot and doubtless will when I give it away. It will be time to give up every thing again; but now I cling to these surroundings, can scarcely raise myself from bed regardless of sleep or time. In a dream I lent out my lexicons, even the O.E.D. and Webster’s Third New International, abandoning these for a diction. Some other voice than Reason’s dictated this. Some other dictator indited, commanding me leave my stays and enter a world of forms, spaces, chambers enclosed but roofless, sands over my head, the sea distant but present. I never speak in my dreams though I talk in my sleep. I have never woken screaming. Stifling I’ve tried to scream and woken; no incubus perched on my sternum. Voices I have hard: a word or two spoken sagely, distinctly, irrevocably; or sounds, birds or bells. I myself have never answered. In a dream I removed a particolored blouse and with it all the color of my bruised arms. Another: I walked out among rocks, sands and seabrush; each one spun on its own axis. Wrapped in a caftan, I tried to reach firm ground, touched something and covered my face with my hands. When I took them off they were caked with blood and my face completely charred. This too came off, a black thickness with the mouthprint still clinging. In another room, girls screamed, women drew blood from a man’s chest, the police were coming . . . I could not leave that house. I have been walking in my sleep again. Where I’ve been no one knows, but my footsoles smart as if parched by hot sands. I woke to raining slush, chilled through, though my feet were burning. I woke and rose only because something rang, and the ringing disrupted my hand furiously writing away on the sheet. What I wrote no one knows. It was a letter with letters sloping uphill. Has it been long since I wrote? I can’t keep track, had counted on you as clock and calendar. You kept track for me. I have been down in the caked sand at the shore between tides. Not as the rootless sea palm with its crown of blades, but as the lug, Arenicola, casting a mound of my form behind, above me. Found nothing. Turned back. – Out of context, many things can be bridged, nothing changed. And the bridges we think we have burned behind are more secure than any destination. Write me again of your wedding, the glow that lit everyone that day; or of married life, tender distractions, backgrounds submerged. I want to invent a new dance, a new ritual, with my own tempo, somewhat out of time. There will be no music, just the sequence of words: I begin I begin I begin. And the dance is a ring, but no hands are joined, just extended, palms half up, fingers curled inward, one hand before the other . . . It grows all too clear, what I set out to do without ambition and beyond reward. I have taken too many into my keeping, careful to possess none. To keep my balance: this distance. I am exhausted not fatigued. When I pass a mirror I haven’t the strength to look. I am still tempted to believe the heart does nothing but pump blood, the hand touches nothing it does not disturb. I want to walk weary, naked in the night, under clear stars, on a path unfolding with each step. Nothing more than the mind of the sedum breathing through its limbs, of the tumbleweed, before autumn. © 1997 Rika Lesser |
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