Gold Spun from Straw

(“The Miller’s Tale,” can be read on pp. 55-56 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)

Truth has this strange association with bareness: we assume so often that simplicity and nakedness are the essence of truth and that adding details and decorations is deceptive. What if we were wrong? What if innocence really did mean not knowing? Or what if nudity and exposure were not as true as they seemed?

“The Miller’s Tale” is a fairy tale that turns on lies. And yet, it’s also a story about belief. There is a belief in the value of beauty and innocence yet also a belief in the value of the ugly, the practical, and the known. There is a belief in the value of wealth yet also a belief in the value of poverty. A belief in the value of life is juxtaposed with a belief in the value of death.

Do you remember this story? Not the tale from Chaucer’s travelogue but the one from the Grimms’ collections.  Not as bawdy on the surface, yet equally violent, equally absurd. A tale spun of self-importance and neglect in which no one lives happily ever after.

A miller, a man who takes the simple and makes it simpler by grinding and pounding grains into flour, tells a lie. He makes a cake of his floury trade rather than plain bread. He tells the king of his country that his daughter can spin straw into gold.

It’s an impossible claim. Straw is for weaving rather than spinning: gold is for beating and engraving. Straw has little value except as fuel or shield from heat and wind. Gold is not protective and doesn’t easily burn (remember Frodo and Bilbo’s attempts to melt the one ring).

Poor daughter! What is she to do? The king wants more gold; the miller wants more status. Neither man seems willing to admit the magic of this thinking. Instead, the miller spins his tale of fool’s gold. The king demands proof. Both sacrifice the truth (gold and straw will not become straw and gold). Both sacrifice the miller’s daughter.

Who becomes “lost to a look,” lost to a room full of dusty, sneeze-provoking straw.  Imprisoned in a room, bound to a truth she doesn’t possess, the miller’s daughter sits, cries, wonders, and waits to die.  The straw, lit by the sun filtering through the window, takes on the luminosity of gold. Silence becomes something other than golden, something other than truth.

What is she to do or say? More lies enter the room. “A story,  prismed, flared and forgotten.” A little person breaks into her space, without warning or welcome. He is fully grown for who he is just as she is fully the innocent, incompetent female she is supposed to be. Only blameless uselessness could take on the fully grown lie conceived and born between the king and the miller.

This little person promises to do the impossible: he will make magic happen. Magic has no truth and therefore no lies. Magic is the surprise of making everything true, false, and inexplicable all at once. Spinning straw into gold is like turning lies into truth. In a more serious context, spinning straw into gold is the task given to torturers: they force lack of knowledge to become knowledge and unimportant details to become conspiracies and accusations. The miller’s daughter is in this sense a victim forced to be a witness and accomplice to something she’s never seen, never done, “refining story into strands, into morning forgotten and fallen.”

This poem explores witness in this sense, not at the moment when the little person’s identity is revealed, not at the moment when the miller’s daughter is rescued because she lied about what she knew (and her accomplice). “The Miller’s Daughter” “sears into silence to demand a name, a story” until “husks unravel stories, and story leaves the room.” Like a spindle, the sestina repeats itself in words at the ends of each line; the broken and short lines spin the poem into straw and gold.

And the poem, which is not about a traveler telling a bawdy story or even about an observer narrating a child’s entertainment, becomes a relocating of reader and poet, of daughter and father/king, of tormentor and rescuer, of straw and gold. What if this were your story? What lies would you tell? The truth may be in silence, may be in waiting for memory to change and make room for something new.

 

Stealing Our Becoming

“stolen,” can be read on pp. 108-109 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)

Death. Loss. Crying and holding back tears. Finding the world colorless and impossible to move through. Everything heavy, thick, wrong. Hating the parts of ourselves that once knew how to dance, how to love, and feeling our bodies weigh twice what they did before he died or she left or we failed. So impossible to breathe or stand. “stolen” comes from these times, these places in my life.

“stolen” was inspired by a dance choreographed by Joyce S. Lim, one of my favorite choreographers and dancers. Her art lives community, lives the stories of women who work, travel, play, celebrate, mourn, and go slowly or rapidly insane. Lim uses dance as if the stage and its dancers were multiple screens, each with its own story, its own poetry. Lim’s works bring together women whose stories and poems unravel in spaces that occasionally overlap and reshape each other. “stolen” was one of these works.

I wrote ‘”stolen” after seeing Lim’s performance. She brought together her experiences and lessons from a year’s stay in Japan. And in this project, Lim used references to “the floating world” to express the futility and despair of women caught in roles of endless repetition and consumption. It was a raw, wrenching work.

In “stolen,” the poem echoes the movements of separate and overlapping performers. The words bring me back to the woman who is grieving, partly sea in her loss, partly stone. Images from the dance—“a rock mouthed, carried, released/ stacked until fallen, brushed aside,” and “the sorrow of eating oneself/ raw, flecking bone with scale, feeding”—work into the sorrow of the poem, and the poem enacts a transformation from ocean and rock to sun and sky.

The poem begins with “She became the sea.” And I want to ask, isn’t this part of grief, feeling dissolved into something so large and other than human, knocked off our feet and unable to walk, numb and yet compelled to replay tasks that are meaningless or destructive or both?

And yet, for me, “stolen” is a comforting poem to read when so much in the world feels gray and heavy. There is a pregnancy and birth that rises from grief—“She became life, dropping stones into a pool,/ walking as if she had legs, breathing/ as if she had lungs”—and language—“become tongues for speech.” And the poem becomes more transformative, more generative than the dance, because the woman impels herself to move from floating within a shell of who she was. “She became the sun and sky the surface broke” as if she were diving upward rather than down. And I am comforted when I repeat, “She became; she became” because it feels like a promise so much easier than “she became the sea.”

Grief and heaviness can be broken into “shreds” with patience, with time, with trust that something will change if we just stay in ourselves and let what we do teach us when to drop what is too heavy, too meaningless to continue doing. And remembering that loss will circle back like a tide and reclaim us, just as births will surprise and delight us, may be what we can “steal” from moments and months of failure that may seem to have no end. Remembering that time is “measured in scars, coral increments, scuttled lines” rather than sea, sun, or sky.

If stealing our lives back from sadness and pain means living “as if” rather than “feeding what comes to destruction,” then perhaps the “as if” is worth considering, perhaps believing that “two stones could kiss” might bring back the chance to breathe and to be someone else. Remembering the pain, letting it fall into our memories like broken shells dropped into the ocean.

Pashto: Rippling in a Sudden Silence

"Pashto” can be read on pp. 44-45 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).

Write it. Take it all apart on the page and in the ear. Put the words back together like badly folded clothes tossed in a drawer, and then take out a few you thought were necessary but can do without. Get used to a poem that might feel a little odd, a little awkward, ready to fall off its edges into a tongue-tied heap at the bottom of the page. And then. And then reshape the drawer and its contents into echoes of their freshly laundered selves.

“Pashto” is one of these poems. It started as a pantoum (see the blog on “Baghdad”) with repeating lines and carefully interwoven stanzas. It started with an argument and an image. Arguing against while arguing for made for a poem that wrestles within itself and emerges tattered but fierce in its final lines.

While working and studying with the International Trauma Study Program, I was asked to view and comment on a rough cut of the documentary Echoes of War, directed by Joop van Wijk. It was an incredible film about the experiences of children in and after war, with a children’s book (A Little Elephant Finds His Courage, by Nancy Baron) being read to these children as a means of helping them to express their fears and grief.

The film convinced me that films could be designed as intricately as poems and that the form could tell stories that were lost to content. And the maker of the film, van Wijk, gave me the image of a yellow flag with an eye painted in its center that he rooted in each minefield and war zone he filmed, letting the eye serve as a witness to the children’s conversations.

This flag, flown in the minefields of Afghanistan, fights within “Pashto” just as the color yellow fights against light and poppies, symbols of fallen and wounded soldiers, fight for their opiate dreams rather than the reality of loss. Just as the children learn to share their experiences and to find their courage, the poem learns to tell its story by saying less, repeating only what brings silence, reflection, the promise of a future, the physical fragility of the living body. The poem is its own witness of grief, is its own conversation about violence and what remains.

Raw Light

“Arizona” can be read on pp. 81-83 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).

A lake as out of place as I have often felt, a river contained within cliffs and dammed until its heights depended less on snowmelt than on heat and turbines—where better to explore while standing still, while disturbing surfaces too thin to resist intruders? “Tonight I trick a stone” follows the smearing of mosquitoes across the evening air; “Arizona” follows a Philip Larkin form far from the decay of anxious London and its suburbs.

“Arizona” takes a rhyme scheme borrowed from Larkin and moves his achingly sad musings on the dreariness of belief-less, depthless lives to a place that holds its own belief and depth, a place with an “unknown shimmer” and a “trout’s fierce blush.” The lakes made from the Colorado River were part of my childhood escapes and isolations, family trips from desert to desert, irrigation to reservoirs. England’s postwar landscape only became familiar years later, too late to replace the “canyons crumbling to dust” that came from wars too little publicized, too barely protested.

My family traveled to these lakes—Mohave, Havasu, and Powell—once, twice, or even three times per year for weekend breaks or summer vacations, piling six children, their friends, and food and clothes into a van and a car, divvying up the kids by size and anticipated tempers. Some nights we drove separately, one group arriving hours before the other. I remember leaning out of the window of the front seat along the Arizona highway, no lights except the deep, deep piles of stars I wanted to sink into, wanted to breathe.

I felt that way about these lakes. Artificial as they were, fish and weeds and stone had made them real. I wanted to breathe the textures and heat, the cool water against the burning skies, wanted to dissolve myself in both and in the cliffs reddening my sight more than my sunburned skin. “This rush to release what cannot be born” tangled itself in my intense desires to take in all my senses could translate and to release all I felt I was unable to share. The only connection I trusted was this beauty and strangeness.

“Nothing seamless in this place,” and yet there was nothing I could add, nothing that could connect to me here in these difficult places that shifted volume and contour daily, visibly, audibly. The sheet lightning struck nearly every evening; thunderstorms kicked up waves dangerous for swimmers and boats. And then utter, utter calm, with water so smooth the skis skated their soft, cottony surfaces like waterbugs, fish breaking the surface with bubbling gasps like children pursing their lips to pop out restless pressures.

Every year I wanted more, wanted to leave myself in these waters, wanted to imprint myself in these cliffs. I felt more awkward, less able to dissolve, and yet more at home in these false constructions of beauty than home itself. This is where I found belief, “in the vagaries of day, the lone bird, the lost stone.”  This is when I found there was something of home “murmuring slight in the dimpling of surfaces, the grasp for connection extended, borne alight.”

The Sense in Making Nonsense--Penelope

The Penelope series, “Counterpoint,” can be read on pp. 97-117 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).

Discouraged, exhausted, unable to breathe without the stale and greedy odor of unwanted guests clawing into her pores, her mouth and throat—Penelope was no heroine. She was just tough, stubborn, and disgusted with the paltry minds and men around her. After Ulysses, who could blame her? She’d had a husband match her cleverness, see through and undo her strategies, twine her in his own confusions of honor and faith. She’d let herself be second choice once, and now her cousin was again the cause of her being seen not for herself. Being seen as the next best thing, some thing to be won out of failure, a little more power because of who and where she was.

Unlucky guests, unlucky suitors. It’s a rare woman who does anything solely for another even if she sacrifices nearly everything she has. Poor, dumb guests. Aching for love even as they wrestled for bits of power like dogs tangling for food dropped to the floor. They wanted to believe someone could be that faithful, that a woman could be so devoted to one man as to refuse every single other one. And that such devotion could be turned, betrayed, and become as pure as before with a new husband. A new father. Fickleness craves fidelity.

These, and other bitter thoughts, went through Penelope’s days as she wove and unwove the same piece of shroud, her father’s funeral wrap, for twenty years. How she must have hurt from the winding and unwinding, carefully undoing what had already cut her palms.  Twenty years! Was her father still unburied, or did she come up with a new excuse? She must have been grateful for the interruptions of illness, menstruation, household tasks, emergencies. She must have worn through her skeins and had to start others, been carding and spinning as much as she wove.

And yet she must have been tempted to give up and give in, to let go and not have to continue to fight, to let her son find his own wars. Attention is intoxicating. There must have been some guests who raised the blood beneath her skin, who made her nights more sleepless than they already were. And yet she was stubborn, like Psyche, focused on her task, believing that if she waited long enough, she would either be alone or be married still with proof at home and in her belly. Yet she must have known she was close to menopause; her body must have given her signs of age and different wisdom.

Penelope. Clever, angry weaver queen. Helen was her cousin, Helen the unfaithful. Helen who ran away before her husband could. Helen whom Ulysses wanted and lost, making Penelope never the first. And yet they had been happy, she and Ulysses, enough that he feigned madness rather than leave her. Enough that after twenty years of Cyclops and sirens, lotos and Circe, he returned, determined to be with her. With HER.

Athena was her cousin, if Zeus fathered Helen and the Gemini. And Athena’s gift of weaving played in Penelope’s hands, frayed the edges of her dreams. Athena sent signs when Penelope wavered, reluctant for the cloth to fall from the loom. Just enough to lighten the dreariness. And then Ulysses came. Disguised, older, not with flowers or gifts. With violence and blood, clearing out her suitors and littering her floor. I can smell the sweet awful spatters on her dress, across the loom. So much time and effort put into protecting the bleached wool, the semblance of purity. And her husband slaughters his way to her and expects a welcome. Penelope is no romantic, no heroine with long enchanted hair or special skills. She is old, tired, filthy. And spitting, hornet mad.

There are at least three endings to this myth. Happily ever after is the dullest and least believable, that she and Ulysses reconciled and stayed Ithaca-bound for their remaining years. Another ending undermines them both, adultery with Circe matched by infidelity with a guest, named and yet early and easily killed, forgotten, when Ulysses swung his club. Ulysses is less forgiving of Penelope’s betrayal than she of his—he exiles her, and she wanders, cursed not by gods but by the man who could never find his way home without divine intervention.

The third ending is odd; a new player appears. Penelope leaves Ulysses and wanders, yet meets Hermes on her travels. They marry, and Penelope has a second son, the god Pan, who in his wildness and cleverness is music and desire, promiscuity with no urge for faith or faithfulness.

Which is true? The archetype that speaks the most in the story you create of and for yourself. They’re all archetypes, these myths, not really real yet speaking for each of us in some experience of desire, lost love, belief, despair, and weariness. The women are weary, or they are lost. The men are unable to realize their desire without ruining that which they desire. What is found eludes the finder, or destroys what touches its form. And yet we wait; we try; we make different endings to the same story that keep us wandering and coming back. Finding our way home to unravel at night what we’ve made through the day, choosing what works. Rejecting the ideal for real. “Believing in something like air” (Jill Leininger), believing in something like truth.

Human, once-removed--Psyche

The Psyche series, “Once Removed,” can be read on pp. 55-72 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).

Oh, Psyche. She hurts to look at, always doing the wrong thing, always given more to do than she has hands to do. Filled with love and confusion, listening to jealousy and fear, humiliated by a moment of doubtful action, a mother-in-law’s grief and anger. They try so hard, these women, to love the men in their care. They fall back on themselves and their undeveloped hearts when left alone.

The Psyche series, Once Removed, begins with someone else’s story, another woman given impossible tasks. The miller’s daughter was locked up and ordered to spin straw into gold. Like Psyche, this nameless woman had to rely on dangerous help and sacrifice who she might become and create in order to have a chance at any future at all.

Then Psyche enters, in the next poem, spilling candle wax on her husband Eros. He is a stranger to her in the day and a dark but loving presence in her nights. The wax burns his skin and wakes him—some strange law of Greek divinity decrees he must leave instantly and never see her again. Sight equals knowledge here, and knowledge and love cannot live together.

Psyche, still shaking from this loss, is now tormented by his mother. Venus appears, not as the goddess of beauty but of justice, and she becomes Nemesis in her pursuit of Psyche’s destruction for shaming her son. Psyche must clean and count; Psyche must pay the unpayable.

And Psyche counts, not seeds but memories and days. Lost in her mind and heart, she finds helpers when and where she least expects, ants and birds to carry and sort. It is not enough. Venus wants more, wants the death of this unwanted, unloved daughter-in-law. So she sends Psyche to meet death, a journey no one but Orpheus has survived. And Psyche is no musician, has no talents but beauty and healing.

Psyche knows she will die if she makes another mis-step. She knows that Eros will never come back if she does not return. The trip to meet Persephone and Pluto is nearly as frightening as the trip to the living world. She must face this dreaded couple who rule the world no waking person sees, and she must ask the Queen of death and spring to share her beauty with the Goddess who breathes beauty from her smile. Woman to woman to woman—Psyche doesn’t stand a chance.

Yet Psyche is surprised. Pluto and Persephone know mismatched and impossible love, mutually exclusive choices. They welcome her and offer the one moment of divine compassion Psyche knows in this entire myth. They give her what she needs. And this love, this mercy, nearly break her—she has prepared herself for pain.

More counting—Psyche keeps herself focused on the journey back by numbering her steps, refusing to look left or right or behind. She has this one last task—to focus—before she can see her husband again. And she has no guarantees. She is a different woman than before. Stronger, sharper, and more sure. Angry even in her hope. Even the bats and spirits cannot shift her feet.

It’s daylight when she emerges. Eros comes to meet her. The first time they have seen each other in the sun since he rescued her from a sea god’s rape. Now she has rescued him although she doesn’t know why he needs rescue, nor where he’s been. And she wants him to feel the pain she has felt. She pierces him with one of his own arrows, reversing the mistake that first brought them together. It is her desire and love that want to be met.

And he bleeds and becomes less than a god, only a man, this time a husband she can see and touch and hold. They weep and laugh together, seeing that in looking at each other after grief and separation, they know the other in themselves and love each other deeply.

Psyche to me is another voiceless myth who has much to say. Her connection with Persephone is key to finding the depth of her pain and the strength in her choices. Lost, abandoned Psyche became the hunter who caught her god and made him lovable. She took away his singular power to choose other’s matches (the original e-Harmony) by choosing him for her own. And in the choosing and the loneliness and the strength, Psyche found her own divinity. Human, once-removed.

Relocation

“London” can be read on pp. 126-127 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)

a flurry of breaths—“London” is scattered across the page like breaths snatched between words. It’s a sonnet in a series of sonnets (“Joy” and “Syncope” are also in heart speech this) I wrote as I grew into a place I thought would never fit.

Tell me why I stay here—My first year in New York, I broke yet another of my “I’m not going to do that” promises. I had vowed never to live on the East Coast and especially not in a city as thick and dense and over-stimulated as this. I wanted mountains, ocean, desert, and space. Spareness and horizon. And of course I found myself driving from Oregon to Pennsylvania in the space of a week, first south through the Siskiyous and then east across the deserts, the Divide, the sudden clusters of townships and hills, soybean fields and trees.

the frenzy for crumbs shouldering brothers to curbs—I was not prepared for the city despite visits in the ‘80s, despite traveling and living in US and European cities in earlier parts of my life. Six years in forested, rivered Oregon had dulled my agility. I had lost the sense of crowds, the athleticism required for hip checks, blocking, taking a charge.

fringed with vain shadows obscuring the light—There was a moment of horror when I stepped onto the subway car and saw a pool of blood on the seat I’d been ready to grab. Moments of utter confusion when directions and lines and numbers/letters had no pattern or system internally mapped—the constant shifting, running, and straining to hear/see were like bodysurfing in riptides, pulled off my feet and tangled in waves, kelp, sand, and rocks.

surround me with pigeons fluffing their breasts—the first place I’ve lived where strangers start conversations in the middle, speaking to anyone close enough to address, blurting out intimate and unrelated observations and complaints. So much reaching for connection, posturing for attention, and offered simply for the pleasure of being a little larger in the crowd, of making the city of knots on a string more like lace than measurement.

savoring haste over hunger—“You don’t like the city very much, do you?” observed one of my French students when I shared this poem in class. And I was surprised, because I did like the city, in the way one likes family one can’t live with but always feels affection for, the mutual agreement to love the differences one can’t understand but tolerates for deeper connections.

Offer me tastes I’ll refuse to forget—There are people who love the gulping nature of this place, the ravenous energy to get, make, and be more. And I have not escaped. Yet I love those days, those minutes, when there is something truly, truly slow, some ache that develops into emptiness and then desire that rumbles inside and makes embarrassing comments, like the stranger standing next to me as we wait for the train.

to long for this din—and yet “London”, which is about London as well as New York and all these cities of stink and staleness and compressed sights and sounds, tells me I can learn to live anywhere and love the place I’m in, just as Helen, in whose series “London” crowds, learned her cities and shock and elbow room.