is in the knowledge that whereas you may
lose a few, there are plenty more to win-
And, like I said, there is plenty of time.
THE SCRIPT
I am performing in a play as a child star. The play calls for me to run away on a horse that comes galloping in from upstage left, to throw my body onto it. The horse is a little off, but that’s OK, it makes for good dramatic tension. The script then calls for me to have a huge accident. After the crash, I wake up in my childhood bed, and find I have obliterated the back of my head. It feels terrible, I can’t touch it, all I can do is lie in the bathtub and let the blood unclot in the water, let the water sift through the matted hair and blood and brain. After I’m all cleaned up I get tucked into bed: fluffy pink sheets, a yellow bedroom. I accept flowers, people come to see me. They assure me that this is all part of a larger plan, the plan for my return to the starring role.
THE ORACLE
Go down to the dumb
oracle. Bring an offering
of sorts-a pear, a cuticle, a block
of quartz. Kneel down
on the cold slab of marble
wedged in the dirt.
Concentrate. Let the sun vault
over its dial.
After a while a question
will come. But as
I already mentioned, the oracle
is dumb. So trudge home
to your room where
candles make shadows
of fruit. Ask the shapes,
ask the dark city,
Am I to live this life
with a blameless ferocity?
Then wait
for morning to bring
the bright sediment of things
into focus. It
comes clear.
A SIMPLY STATED STORY
THE LIBRARIAN
When I tell my mother
I’m going to Michigan
to trace the end of
Jane’s life, she
surprises me, says
she wants to go
with me. Says
it’s about time.
As we’re planning the details
of our trip, she repeatedly insists:
I don’t want you to get obsessed with this.
I dream I am in the library
doing research on the Manson Family.
I try not to let anyone see me, but
the librarian is onto me. When
she confronts me, I desperately
try to explain that it’s part
of a larger project, it’s not
just about the Manson Family.
A TRIP BACK
Our plan: to meet in Chicago,
fly together to Grand Rapids,
then rent a car to Ann Arbor.
But huge thunderstorms strand me
all day at LaGuardia. Didyou think
it was going to be easy? I can hear Jane say.
There’s no way to get in touch
with my mother, so when
I don’t arrive at the gate
she goes on without me, stays
the night in Muskegon with
her father. When we finally talk
on the phone, I tell her,
This whole trip feels fatally
flawed, and some god’s
telling us not to inquire further.
But I go back to the airport
at dawn, get to Chicago OK,
then board a little propeller plane
to take me the rest of
the way. I watch the woman
I take to be our flight attendant
as she pulls in and secures
the door; I’m shocked
when she climbs into
the cockpit-I’ve never flown
with a female pilot before.
Once we’re airborne
everyone moves
to sit by the windows,
but I stay in seat 1A.
From here I can see
all the controls, how
simple they are, and
how she uses them.
IN THE MOVIE VERSION
I am chic, smart, and ambitious—
a young CIA agent who likes
to run alone in the woods.
A city slicker, I come to a small town
and unintentionally prod
old wounds. I order martinis
in the local bar; the regulars
don’t like me. I learn more and more
about her murder, though no one
really wants to talk to me.
What I don’t know is that
I’m increasingly in danger—
the killer’s hot on my trail.
One night I come home to find
a toothpick shoved in my lock;
as I fumble with my keys, he abducts me
into a truck, then traps me
in a dark cellar
where I am forced to play the cello
in a sexy black outfit
and confront my feelings
about the death of my father.
In the end I kill my captor,
even though my back-up
doesn’t arrive on time.
In the parting shot
I look safe, happy, and tan
but the audience knows
I’ll be forever haunted
by the crime.
RESTLAWN CEMETERY
My mother drives our rental car right to it, though
she wasn’t sure she’d remember the way.
She used to come here and sit for hours, tell her sister
about all that had happened, about her two children.
Jane’s buried next to her mother now;
both graves are extremely plain. Just
flat granite plaques in bright green grass.
And Jane’s marker says Janie, not Jane.
I remember when we buried Grandma,
sneaking looks at Jane’s grave. I never dreamed
I’d be sitting cross-legged on it today, my mother
facing into the sun. As we sit and talk
I get a sunburn I will have for weeks
on the back of my neck and my arms.
We leave three white peonies
we bought at the local supermarket-
two for Jane, one for her mother-
before continuing on our way, stopping
to pick up some wrappers from McDonald’s
the wind has scattered over their graves.
LEFORGE ROAD, REVISITED
There are still barns out here, solitary red barns
suspended in the fields. Each one
has a dirt road leading to it, cutting white
through the rib-high grass.
Every so often, a pickup drives up,
trailed by a ball of dust.
I tell my mother to turn off
onto one of those dirt roads.
Suddenly it’s marshy and quiet;
a corridor walled in by blades.
The sun weirdly dappling the road.
I directed my mother to drive here,
but I can’t manage to tell her why.
How dark it must get, I say instead,
out here at night.
A SIMPLY STATED STORY
“Small dots simply state the story of tragedy which has unfolded in the Ann Arbor area over the past two years.”
-Ann Arbor News, July 28, 1969
Imagine a map
studded with
numbers, each
corresponding
to the location
of a dead girl,
the words Figure 4.1:
Death Map Expands
at the top of the page.
Such a map
I am holding
in my lap,
thirty-odd years
after the fact,
navigating
our way. We
he
ad east on
Route 12, a road
lined with dismal
strip malls. None of this
was here before,
my mother swears.
It gets more rural
as we get farther
from the cluster
of other numbers
and closer
to Number 3.
Suddenly I see
an old metal sign
tacked onto a chain-link
fence: Denton Cemetery.
Turn here, I say quietly.
KOAN
Not yet, says
a scrap of garbage
floated by
the wind.
Not yet, says
a limb of
lightning,
shrouded by
clouds.
A girl in a boat,
the boat full of holes.
Closer.
A slit sky.
A slit sky and a bowl.
Almost.
(OCTOBER 28, 1961)
Masque gave a play tonight-Diary of Anne Frank.
I worked backstage on costumes. Got to know the cast very well.
The star was Gwen Giubord. She was wonderful. She was Anne.
I feel like I became a friend of hers. I don’t quite understand it-there was a bond there. Maybe it was just the play, the lights, the mood; but oh she was so sweet.
She was sad, happy, triumphant, subdued. And I think I, in a way, understood. Maybe that was it.
In any case, it was fabulous. I loved every minute of it and I love Masque with all my heart.
I hope someday I can star-but it’s too early to even consider that.
All I can say is that I was thrilled to be a part of it all and thrilled to just be there, amid the activity and fun. You can’t truly enjoy or understand this until you’ve been there...
Humor, gratitude, and joy overflow and brim and yet I know no words to describe it.
The spirit of this play has touched deep into my heart and I know I shall never forget it.
I can only imagine what the players must have felt-if I feel like this and was only a costume committee member...
I’m so happy-!
A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION (REPRISE)
Does it matter if I tell you now
that Jane was not beautiful?
She was not beautiful. Her skin was
white and chalky, her eyes
set close together, recessed
with disappeared lids. In my new favorite photo
she is fifteen, around the time
her childhood journal falls into scraps,
then silence. Her face and torso loom up
against a deep blue sky
a great, momentary albatross of cloud
hovering nearby. A bright block of light
bleaches out half her face, whitening
her forehead and her tough, freckled
nose. The whole picture
is beautiful.
DENTON CEMETERY
Parallel to the highway, there runs a narrow gravel road
that used to be a lovers’ lane.
The road empties out to a field of corn, home
to a huge red barn, once flanked by white silos.
Along one side of the gravel road, ten houses or so,
a big brick one at the end of the way.
On the other, just a few yards away, lies Denton Cemetery-
a square cluster of no more than thirty graves.
The cemetery opens out to grass, then the highway.
It’s so quiet here, this gorgeous June day
and the whole world feels shrunken to this:
sun, big clouds, green fields, red barn.
So much talk about the possible significance
of the name on the headstone where her body was found
but “William Downing, Sr.”
turns out to be just the grave
closest to the entrance, the first inside
the chain-link fence. So there’s
no plot. Here is just where
he dumped her, on a night of cold rain
and where my mother and I stand today,
listening to the birds.
This kid doesn’t know anything.
She’d like to sleep the childish slumber of a baby and yet live in a world of complexities.
Now she’s going to bed-to wake up to Monday-to go home Wednesday-to come back to school Sunday.
Think of summer days gone by and dream of you.
Thank you. Therapy is over.
Love, Janie.
EPILOGUE
Quiet now. Done with her letter she claps the notebook shut, stuffs it in her bag. As she wanders out of the bakery, the entrance seals up behind her, and is gone.
Along the road, she picks up the perfectly round pebbles, impressed by the luminosity of their everyday gray. Feeling the return of the slightest ache in her head, as if it were the end of a long day of fresh pollen, she tries pressing a stone to her forehead.
Feels good. Pushes it further.
The stone sticks, like a third eye, a moon with the pocked memory of its seas. That’s good, for here she can polish it. Not with gauze-with breath.
And she may need to, for the world in which she moves can threaten blindness.
Indeed, she no longer sees it, but the last of the light is dribbling out in thick, sticky drops of phosphorous.
I go on and I don’t know whether I’m going into darkness or into light and joy, she thinks as she walks further down the road.
Above her, the sun is still trying to burn through the mist. Strange, she thinks, how the sun so often appears as a pale circle, not the orgy of unthinkable fire that it is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment to the editors of LIT and jubilat, where excerpts from this book first appeared. Five Fingers Review and Salamander also published individual poems.
Sources: Edward Keyes, The Michigan Murders (NY: Pocket Books, 1976); Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); the Crime Library website (www.crimelibrary.com) ; the Michigan State Police in Ypsilanti; the Ann Arbor News, Detroit News, Michigan Daily, Detroit Free Press, and New York Times; The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath; The Oxford English Dictionary; Edgar Allan Poe, “A Philosophy of Composition”; Benedict & Nancy Freedman, Mrs. Mike; Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being; William James, The Principles of Psychology; André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real,” from “Once Upon a Time to Come” in Earthligbt, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (LA: Sun & Moon Press, 1993); Simone de Beauvoir, “Can anyone like blood the way one likes the mountains or the sea?,” from “Must We Bum Sade?,” translated by Annette Michelson (The Marquis De Sade, NY: Grove Press, 1954); Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “I go on and do not know if I am going into darkness or to light and joy,” spoken by Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Gamett (NY: Signet Classic, 1980).
Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Page 8