The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

by Bianca Stone

  and the hostile cats are locked in the bathroom—

  and then

  you can’t look away

  for anything.

  X

  Watch me loving you forever, Mom, on this strip of land

  we call grief—but it is only life!

  Do you know the game?

  The game is called Being Unhappy, Just in Case.

  or Gratitude as a Weakness.

  And we play sometimes when there is nothing else to do.

  XI

  Thunder & lightning outside turns to reverence.

  Realizing your parents are just human

  is a large part of mature development.

  Some people never get there,

  and being there is evanescent.

  XII

  Suddenly this need for honey in everything; seasickness bands

  on my wrists remind me of my old perversity,

  blackout incisions on the skin, an injury, open-eye-shaped, woman’s-shame-shaped—

  Get up out of the internet, Lawnmower Man!

  I’m concerned about the way we keep looking

  for something to ease the pain—

  I’m not yet like a Navy SEAL, the way they love it

  when things are miserable.

  Living is enduring painful situations.

  But Living, certainly, is not Reality,

  which, as we know, is such a lark, Mom, don’t we?

  *

  An exotic bird comes to solve herself in the backcloth of ash trees.

  I dream again I am so articulate

  with my vicious insults.

  XIII

  Grief for the living will ruin your appetite.

  How much do bird species watch other bird species?

  “Like blue terriers”

  Emily Dickinson said of the jays.

  Mimicking the cry of a hawk—

  the Old World jay who will intuit his female’s state of mind

  and find her the food she most desires—

  the jay will watch closely and keep track.

  Being loved depends upon it.

  I’ve been watching you from this damp branch,

  the wily sun

  across your sullen face, your bones among your features,

  your mouth curled, beautiful, angry—a child’s lips

  that whorl on a word.

  Your sisters—from the same Edenic womb,

  who crossed the red sea of the maddening mother—

  cannot reason together.

  Just jays scattered across the country surviving on

  the delicacy of larvae.

  The seed feeder swinging like a crystal pendulum saying

  Yes—

  “I miss you in the world,” I said to you yesterday, sitting on the couch while

  you threaded tiny Italian imported beads onto string

  in your manor of magnificent lamps

  illuminating;

  the veil Dickinson noticed

  hovering over the imperfectly beheld face

  fluttering

  with your out-breath of cigarette smoke,

  an old wound reddening around you,

  your genius trapped like a moth on the screened-in porch of your pain—

  waiting in your house for a miracle. Oh,

  Mother—it will never come without your consent.

  *

  Mothers are all I have ever known.

  And my loyalty, never amassed enough. My labyrinth. My confusion of jays, my

  “cacophonous aggregation.” University of humor

  and ingenious abilities

  I come back to again and again, to hang out and argue

  —dearest playmate, won’t you come out

  and play with me?

  “I’m dead and in hell. I’ve known that for years,” you say.

  And I step quietly back into the night.

  Ones Who Got Away with It

  I still fantasize I can do something about it.

  That girl in the outpatient-care facility for teenagers

  confided to me that she sneaked out to see a guy

  at his frat party, and he shared her with his three friends,

  to have a taste after he was done. “Is it supposed

  to hurt so much?” she whispered to me. ”I mean,

  for this long after?” She was bulimic, and we both

  hated our mothers. The next day I said, We should

  tell someone. And she said, “I’ve talked it over

  with my best friend. She says

  I should be proud of it.” She was thirteen

  and I, sixteen, recovering from those endless nights of shrieking

  across the house, out into the yard and

  into the cold moonlight to wish myself into some

  other species; the endless silent Stooges’ bangs and thwacks,

  some self-preservation up against inherited solitude;

  bent almost in half, the copper piping of my family grief

  that always raked itself across me

  until I was deformed by it,

  until I was defined by it—

  but dammit,

  I hope that girl’s doing well.

  I hope she can keep down food

  and it’s nourishing her. I hope her cells are cheering

  like parents in the stands at a game, even if those men still exist—

  important men, I imagine. Men who now run conglomerates

  and have well-to-do families. Or maybe men I see

  every day at work. Or whose books I read.

  And how am I here? With my life intact?

  I’m painful to the touch only when I don’t light

  a candle and praise oblivion, give myself over

  to nothingness—and is it every day

  or was it long ago,

  that I’d slid shut my teenage self’s veranda doors

  and stepped

  onto the world’s fancy balconies

  and was prepared to do something drastic

  like live and live and live.

  Letter to a Letter to the Editors

  She clearly knew her melodramatic fears were groundless, and avoided challenge by expressing her invective through poetry—a multifaceted, intentionally cryptic medium through which she could conveniently deny unprovoked attacks upon those who loved her.

  —Anne Sexton’s nieces, Lisa Taylor Tompson and Mary Gray Ford, in a letter to the editor, “Anne Sexton’s Vision of Reality,” New York Times, August 1991, after the publication of Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Biography

  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

  —Emily Dickinson

  Where Blanche saw reindeer on the roof, Santa, and expressions of love, Anne saw a particularly villainous season. Anne could “find a cloud in the sunniest sky.” These people from Scituate, Mass.—I know them in my head and heart. The way they say how it is interesting but not surprising, that everyone who is slaughtered (reputation-wise) is dead. The way one person took up so much static-electric space, and spread out. How could that sweet old man we loved have molested her? they ask. (Oh that’s how predators work, separating one from the rest.) The body cringing at the sight of the one who harmed it—the deep voice of it comes out, to balance the well-meaning upper-middle-class, the cherished, the sweet, loving facade. Nothing is accurate. Nothing is right. And who would see clots of blood for beautiful roses? (They ask.) Presuming the wet, real grass is just yours, the garden where everything is flourishing, the sidewalk where a chicken bone lies, the way the morning takes its time to unwrap, and the street begins to fill like a play—nothing you lay your eyes upon is just yours. And it is also all yours.

  *

  Does anguish only come from within your own head? Yes. But so does the meaning of words, the depiction of a cloudless sky, where there is nothing, no sky at all,

  only an unbroken stream of water hoarded in it. And Anne went and ruined everything with h
er fucking chemical imbalance! Her strange and unsettled anger! Her “insistence on what she saw as brutal honesty”!

  What is “brutal honesty” in poetry? How does that work?

  Of course she chose a mysterious medium to talk about a cloud that existed in a sunny sky. The “pleasant memories were slashed.” They assume that Anne assumed that poems were concerned with fact. But she knew the complicated presentation of existence. She didn’t write essays or memoir. She was all “imagination, without basis in fact.” Is imagination constrained by fact? The accepted social story must be consistent. The story must be sanctioned. The story must be liked. Must not upset great-aunts, carted off, screaming. Awe at death was what she had in the end. Sisters will hate one another, and nieces will always take their mother’s side. So normal, I know! My family is full of angry sisters who want to explain their childhoods in different ways.

  *

  I had a vision last night of a massive heron with a shimmering rainbow neck that stood, in my mother’s backyard, on top of a machine that dug graves. And the heron’s chicks were gathered under her wings as the machine swayed and clanged; the man at the levers, indifferent in his control center, continued to dig where the birds had lived—“But they are rare!” I cried up to him. “RARE! LIKE, ‘NOT SEEN NORMALLY!’” But he continued on, saying he didn’t think they were rare. And I watched, there being nothing I could do about it.

  What unwarranted conclusions can we draw? What can horror provide? There was also the “accident of birth” hypothesis offered by Anne’s nieces.

  Is it “a misfitted chromosome,” a “genetic misfortune,” that makes a poet?

  “Some families, confronted with a child like Anne,

  would have turned her over to state agencies for

  warehousing.

  Our family chose to accept responsibility for one

  of our own.”

  —this, this medium is not done with itself. And I’ll take her babble, her immature, completely unwarranted conclusions. And tell things honestly with a slant like a roof where apples roll down, and snow slides off, under which phoebes make weird hive nests and lay eggs—I think a poet will see truth through a distorted reverence for the underlying truth of shadows; “human decency” has nothing to do with poems—

  And where do these poems’ truths come from? We are mistaken when we try to make broken things new; rather, we must proceed through the outrageous, cryptic medium of vision, which is only curiosity at being alive. When one has seen horrors in the midst of everyone’s enjoyment, to pretend to see reindeer and elves is to ignore a more powerful perception, covering it with a sheet, as over a wound that will fester. The ordinary conceptual system that we live by is governed by metaphors neither obvious to nor desired by most citizens. The automation of living is comforting. To closely examine the realities of germs, for instance, disgusts people, drives them to enthusiastically kill the vital bacteria necessary for a healthy organism. Purell™ and a set of agreed-upon concepts. It wasn’t that Anne was bad, just that, for whatever reason, she wasn’t let in on the agreed-upon system of understanding reality—and her madness was stayed a little with poetry.

  So, dearest nieces of Anne Sexton, I get it. But I disagree.

  The Green Word

  In a dream my twin brother was telling me a word

  for the sudden appearance of green—when, in spring,

  it comes, exploding from branches the way college boys explode

  out the doors of their frat house onto the cool, wet grass at dawn. He was telling me how this was the key to understanding human suffering. This one word, which,

  he said from the floor, he had to tell people about, his turned-up face perspiring from his earnest emphasis on this point;

  and he looked just like he did when we were nineteen years old and backpacking in Italy. It was so hot and humid in Florence we couldn’t sleep.

  Terrible nights on hostel bunk beds visited by a little old woman

  who would come in with linen piled in her arms

  and point her finger angrily at my boots on the bed.

  I had no taste for wine then, no feel for maps. I was always stopping

  and staring for too long at sculptures,

  which were everywhere—I didn’t even have to know where I was going,

  they came to me, those statues—men with their swords up in the air

  and severed heads in their hands, women with small perfect gray breasts—

  and my brother would disappear into the crowded streets

  as if he’d lived there for decades and was late to work.

  It would take me all day to find my way back to him. I had no sense of direction,

  no grasp of etiquette. I loaded film in our camera, gave both of us haircuts.

  He was already becoming older than me,

  the towers had just fallen, and he’d watched from his dorm rooftop, his faculties

  slowly guillotining, slamming shut, and—where was that word then?

  That word for when the green comes like Swamp Thing

  when he hallucinates himself across the bayou in torn ligatures of moss

  and plant matter, transforming his intellectual pain

  into carbon-based superpowers?

  Now, on the weekends my brother and I get together on the internet.

  We talk about the importance of nonbeing, of reactions.

  When I think too much, I think the words “everything is as it should be,” very loudly.

  He works at a hospital answering phones and directing people;

  he meditates every morning;

  I visit him in Portland

  and he meets me at the airport, even though I can get to him on my own now, and he always comes with a sandwich and iced tea,

  and he shows me gateways on his smart phone and the best places

  to watch birds. His wife comes back from work and uncovers a book on souls

  and lights sage. There’s a poster of the body’s flailing chakras facing you

  when you sit down on the toilet; and my brother and I walk and walk and walk, endlessly through Portland’s parks, and long streets going nowhere in particular

  but the general direction of water—

  the smell of it hits you first, acrid and mossy.

  And I still walk too slow to keep up with him;

  I still walk with a clinical leisureliness. I feel

  like Mom’s Subaru that is always breaking down.

  I feel like we’re a couple of human sandbags at a levee,

  like we’re lying down together

  at the base of a shuddering dam.

  Migration

  This time of year the birds fly in elegant mobs,

  tragic and sinister against gathering clouds.

  It always made me sad to see the one trailing at the end, who I thought was

  falling behind, tripping like a head of a musical note;

  dark dots making swirls over and around the obscene billboards,

  gathering in the empty trees like relentless matching ornaments—

  no distinction between them from this distance,

  their eyes kept from me, their hearts blue-red compasses

  leading to Florida—

  I watch them like a child might watch a father love

  another child better—they smash into commuter planes or into a sky-blue tower

  (the greatest trick of humans, making the sky into matter—),

  those little feathery dinosaurs stopping at the mall ponds

  to drink, calling to one another, sensing the change

  in the wind, working as a team—it makes me want

  to get stoned on the front steps, lit from within—seeing

  these migrating jewels, elegant survivors, feathered delicacies,

  musical geniuses, flinging themselves like a ballerina

  made of smaller ballerinas;

  these small dwindling barrettes of Nature—

  there’s
simply nothing more important than them making it.

  I want to haul my mattress onto the roof.

  I want to compare them to the stars, to light, to pepper.

  I want to follow them. Want to do something

  other than take this exit off the freeway

  and leave them in my rearview mirror:

  fumbling clear black angels, backup dancers, flawless cheerleading squad

  from some more transcendent universe

  piling up on one another, perfectly—swallowing the sky like a silk scarf,

  above, silent, powerful, better than me, in every way,

  hustling over the shipwrecked world.

  Retreating Knights and Riderless Horses, or Poem with Another Poem Halfway Through It

  I keep a box of illegal paraphernalia on my table. I keep a knife

  in a pet rock. I hire men to come to try to remove it.

  The one who does will be king of my life. I keep my life

  right here by my other life. My other life keeps to itself.

  I have two guitars. One expensive dress. Too many lamps. I take myself

  very seriously. My name is permanent. I cut a hole in the wall

  and watch the neighbor watching TV. It’s not even

  sexy. Cracking open a bottle with my bottle of pills

  prescribed forever like sunlight.

  I’m going to a new restaurant in town

  to lay waste

  to its reputation.