Our Andromeda

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Our Andromeda Page 4

by Brenda Shaughnessy


  unnerved and fallen from the reach of your amazed

  groping dream that everything lives twice.

  That dream hurts me the best. I depend on it.

  Get a new envelope and make one new pinhole.

  Just one hole. Don’t try to save the others.

  Don’t bother. I’m the lucky one. It’s me. Me!

  Card 8: Strength

  What did god say

  to the friendless woman whose child

  was ill and whose home was lost?

  “And it’s only Wednesday!”

  4. FAMILY TRIP

  Family Trip

  We never knew closer

  sisters, stronger trees,

  tighter clans, wilder

  fires. Where can we

  go if not to each other,

  resenting every step?

  I Wish I Had More Sisters

  I wish I had more sisters,

  enough to fight with and still

  have plenty more to confess to,

  embellishing the fight so that I

  look like I’m right and then turn

  all my sisters, one by one, against

  my sister. One sister will be so bad

  the rest of us will have a purpose

  in bringing her back to where

  it’s good (with us) and we’ll feel

  useful, and she will feel loved.

  Then another sister

  will have a tragedy, and again,

  we will unite in our grief, judging

  her much less than we did the bad

  sister. This time it was not

  our sister’s fault. This time

  it could have happened to any

  of us and in a way it did. We’ll

  know she wasn’t the only

  sister to suffer. We all suffer

  with our choices, and we

  all have our choice of sisters.

  My sisters will seem like a bunch

  of alternate me, all the ways

  I could have gone. I could see

  how things pan out without

  having to do the things myself.

  The abortions, the divorces,

  the arson, swindles, poison jelly.

  But who could say they weren’t

  myself, we are so close. I mean,

  who can tell the difference?

  I could choose to be a fisherman’s

  wife since I’d be able to visit

  my sister in her mansion, sipping

  bubbly for once, braying

  to the others who weren’t invited.

  I could be a traveler, a seer,

  a poet, a potter, a flyswatter.

  None of those choices would be

  as desperate as they seem now.

  My life would be like one finger

  on a hand, a beautiful, usable, ringed,

  wrung, piano-and-dishpan hand.

  There would be both more and less

  of me to have to bear. None of us

  would be forced to be stronger

  than we could be. Each of us could

  be all of us. The pretty one.

  The smart one. The bitter one.

  The unaccountably-happy-

  for-no-reason one. I could be,

  for example, the hopeless

  one, and the next day my sister

  would take my place, and I would

  hold her up until my arms gave way

  and another sister would relieve me.

  Magi

  If only you’d been a better mother.

  How could I have been a better mother?

  I would have needed a better self,

  and that is a gift I never received.

  So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault?

  The gift of having had a better mother myself,

  my own mother having had a better mother herself.

  The gift that keeps on not being given.

  Who was supposed to give it?

  How am I supposed to know?

  Well, how am I supposed to live?

  I suppose you must live as if you had been

  given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance.

  I cut off my hair, to sell for the money

  to buy you what you wanted.

  I wanted nothing but your happiness.

  I can’t give you that!

  What would Jesus do?

  He had a weird mother too…

  Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if

  it were given unconditionally, your birthright.

  It’s a riddle.

  All gifts are a riddle, all lives are

  in the middle of mother-lives.

  But it’s always winter in this world.

  There is no end to ending.

  The season of giving, the season

  when the bears are never cold,

  because they are sleeping.

  The bears are never cold, Mama,

  but I am one cold, cold bear.

  My Water Children

  They could have been anyone,

  no one special. I didn’t need

  them to be angels or stars.

  But to me, they were a boy

  and twin girls. Like ink soaking

  through from the other side

  of the page I write on now,

  they form no images, no story.

  A crack in the wall admitted

  no spider, no draft, but only

  because there was no wall.

  Often, as a child, when I did

  something wrong and got away

  with it, I thought a ghost

  or spirit or a kind of assistant

  god (not the Real God, who was

  too busy for the souls of children

  and it turns out that is true)

  would bleed through to me

  from the skin of the other world,

  cut by my misdeed or sin,

  and catch me. I wanted to be seen,

  known for what I truly was:

  a bad child, unlike the perfect

  water children I would never have

  the chance to know.

  Vacation

  for Mark and Paul

  1

  When the mind walks without language,

  there is no boardwalk; there is no Board;

  there is no boredom; and there are no feet,

  legs or yards, coin or meter. No measure,

  no miles. What is freedom if not freedom

  from distance? From speaking lines?

  2

  The leaves, little green lamps for the sunblind.

  3

  Blue fingertips. Could mean a beach-party

  manicure or a corpse. Or: and a corpse.

  To be touched intimately by blue fingertips.

  To put it more bluntly: to be fingered

  by the pool in which you drown.

  4

  Why not sparkle if given a choice and you’ve

  had enough sleep? Why not give back

  a tiny grain of what you’ve been given from

  night’s endlessness and guaranteed breathing?

  I have fractured only so minute a corner

  of the deadest, most useless bone in the sky’s

  body, how can I not make a kite of it?

  How can I keep even the broken glass

  to myself, drinking nothing out of nothing?

  5

  To swim is to let god know you won’t take it

  lying down nor will you just lie down and take it.

  6

  Solemn toes respond directly even to the most

  frivolous mind. What other rules but bent

  rules? Can I love you from the other

  side of the conversation? From the other side

  of the brown-feathered space of the table?

  Of the living, eaten egg and sunrise and sleep-

  eyes wet from night?

 
7

  The tiny grain of sand in the eye. The single

  flap that lands the bird into the lonely next,

  the only nest in the sea. The glimmer that

  proves contact has been made. Dear child,

  wild sea, closed eye. Far, loving air.

  8

  Walking in the sand—am I under the sun

  or dangling over it, first by one foot

  and then the other?

  9

  This cerulean weather and its yellow talons.

  The afternoon on the brink of drink. My ears

  are plugged with wax and seawater, utterly

  corked. The light has to widen to include

  the music I can’t hear. I am hoping the god

  of catastrophe—barbecue, lightning, riptide—

  has smarter fish to fry. Suddenly the scruffy

  deer appears, as it often does in poems, a dark-

  eyed child dreaming in a dream.

  10

  Where oh where is that one leaf?

  Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light

  Though I am well,

  and deep, and fall asleep well,

  I am not the wisher that I am.

  I think that just thinking about

  lighting the way and lighting

  a match are the same thing,

  is the same thing as doing either.

  With both hands the same thing

  and that thing is me. But it’s

  all the time, every day. But no.

  It’s not for me to say.

  It’s not heatlight’s way to have

  me in heatlight’s way saying

  no light today or heat will pay.

  When golden oak leaves, real

  gold, real leaf, flaked thickly

  all over my wonderful dull self

  with a gleam like fresh paper

  what did the old boulder say,

  in a waste of words?

  “Some kind of freak lives next door,

  a fish-striped alien

  on an earplug binge who simply

  will not acknowledge she’s being

  called home.” Home! Home!

  But nobody’s called me, nobody’s

  home. There isn’t even a phone.

  Perhaps I’ll start working alone,

  on two separate films,

  enrobed in a copycat

  body, a leaping projection,

  for isn’t that what we do?

  Leap. A larger footprint

  than creature. An aluminum

  filling doubling as a bulletproof

  vest that’s been tested

  as a way out through the window.

  The window of curved mirror,

  of salt, the window of it all,

  the latched feeling,

  to quit patching the baby,

  for example (did you know

  there was a baby? You’d think

  he’d be mentioned by now,

  but the things I choose not to say

  might keep you wondering to the end

  of the page, the fat page, the fat

  unmentionable this and that),

  onto the habit of the baby.

  Where is the quilt? The boulder-

  edged quilt. The one used for Earth

  Day. The stained, strange,

  fleshlike quilt, fortress, green-feared,

  many-colored dress.

  It was my costume,

  it was my stained-red pink thing

  all last year. It was my rag doll

  concubine shrink honey

  girlfriend hag that I had to have

  at home or I wouldn’t go home.

  If my wish is anything more

  than a graft, a draft,

  a cover, ten thousand lovers

  in the space of one, then I will take

  all three: these wishes: baby,

  body, poem. Or body, hobby,

  bone. And make them as true

  as a genie can make them come.

  True as a field in lamplight,

  as a stone believing it’s all alone.

  With my wishes I can kill them

  twice, and still get them back:

  maybe, body, prone.

  Unbelievable that it is still today.

  How much more of it is left?

  How much more of tomorrow?

  I am not greedy. I ask because

  I hope for less than I have coming.

  I am not more than I hoped

  to be in my prayers

  in my girlhood, in my bonfire.

  Not in my ungodly unuttered

  then-ness. If that old boulder

  ever lived a day with any burden

  but itself then I will lift its hard-

  meat to a place of honor.

  Super-polished on the very top

  of the world’s biggest root.

  I am not ungrateful. I will face

  the stranger’s face in any light

  from any lamp or lucky gold

  three-wish thing. I will not

  wish for two things and then use

  the third wish for three more.

  I won’t take more than I have,

  and I don’t have to want

  what I already have from before.

  It’s too quiet and sorry to want,

  and the place of wanting is too sore

  to stuff it with hard rock,

  hard luck, or it’s too far back

  to even see the stuff anymore.

  I’m open. I’m old. I just want

  the wishing to go back home

  or to send me back, in its place,

  to where the giving is given out.

  Mermaid’s Purse

  There is no such thing as sacrifice,

  though the bleeding doesn’t end.

  The self is the self yet bigger than itself.

  Indebted. And subordinate

  to the unity of its fragments,

  loopholes in the loop of wholeness.

  Cat sharks lay their eggsacs,

  which eat themselves in gestation,

  for if fewer mature sharks,

  bigger portions at the feast

  of the loggerhead turtle, which

  will never again be a single entity.

  Out of one, many. If blameless,

  then meaningless, dissolved

  by a cloud of sardines, flashing

  silver as if paying for breakfast

  in a silent movie starring no stars.

  Vanity

  To think that, in my sorrow,

  I thought it was permissible to flick

  myself away like a fly from the full-length

  mirror on opening night. Curled the hot

  hair around my crowded face,

  warming up the audience for a flop.

  I thought I’d be bought something,

  by one who admired me. Some lost meal,

  hours of fat drink check, a copselike rope

  of rubies for my waist. But no. I’m selfsame:

  a wordsmith wearing too much paint,

  my inking irons heavy in the rain.

  The night is an imperfect story

  for us all. It leaves things out.

  The witch’s song can’t prove itself

  beautiful enough to sing at dawn

  for the enchanted child

  in an ordinary story about the night.

  No small favor, no laughing matter.

  Pass the meat through a slot

  in the chamber. This whole self

  can be as silent as a chain saw rusted

  on the broken fever of my song’s rain,

  my night’s story, my ink iron’s brains.

  In spite of the spot-checking,

  the self-seeking, the meticulous soul-smithing,

  I am still me, lacking.

  Like murders in books, but with reverse

  precision, how anyone becomes h
erself

  is a mystery. A miracle. A myth.

  5. OUR ANDROMEDA

  At the Book Shrink

  one learns to say “My body uses me

  as a grape uses wine”—

  to talk about inevitability,

  the essence of plot.

  But what happens when a person

  understands she is being sent

  back, glass by glass,

  to the invisible pouring stations

  of the larger narrative?

  That she is merely like or likely

  a person in a book?

  Like a saltwater balloon

  sinking in the ocean.

  Like a person in a book, like

 

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