Affidavit of Identity in Retrograde - Articles I-IV

Affidavit of Identity in Retrograde – Articles I-IV

ARTICLE I:

Ours are a people breathed.

Ours are a people stained.

We are a story together.

A story apart.

We bleat peril and growl heroism.

We view ourselves from many angles.

Sometimes from the beginning.

Sometimes from the everlasting.

The middle remains to be lived.

We make much of ourselves.

There is much to be made of everything.

We act as if we begin with ourselves and end with ourselves,

but we believe otherwise.

Question us.

We will tell you all about it.

We will share our thus and so’s.

The thus and so’s include what is precious.

What is deplorable.

The everything else shimmies into our stories named and unnamed.

We are shaped as much by what we know as by what we imagine.

We straddle glaciered time.

We gather.

We disperse.

Life is strangeness; a secret even unto ourselves.

We live and have our being in making much of.

On any given day we wake in much-ness.

We wake tangled.

Our legs tangle with the legs of our mothers.

Our hands tangle with the hands of our fathers.

We are children grown.

Children deceased.

Children yet to be.

What is a seed to a farmer was a church to our grandfather.

Grandfather planted a crop of churches in his wake.

He wrote instructional books about holiness.

We so wanted to fit inside those books.

To be holy.

To receive the promises.

To believe who we are and who we are to become. 

Surely this distant man, the daddy before our fathers could build a fire bigger than a thunderstorm,

certainly he knew about holiness and the dangers of unmarked crossings. 

His death ended in a collision between a car and a train,

leaving us with the wreckage. 

ARTICLE II:  

Wars irrevocably traumatized our fathers.

Abandonment slept with our mothers.

Back from the hunching trenches, my father

entered a matrimonial battle everyone said would fall to divorce.

My mother seeking to transcend his wounds,

escaped the trapped violence in surfs of used treasures watered by her own seminal loss.

Father stone.

Mother sea.

They didn’t call themselves Bohemian.

They were enigmatic, winsome, creative.

Later they were called artists.

To be their child was to maneuver in a world of fierce hands. 

More than one.

Sometimes a hand flings a belt.

Sometimes a hand is open and drumming.

Take an ordinary day.

A peculiar kitchen.

Pecky-cedar cupboard doors.

Speckled linoleum floors.

Formica counters.

The mother makes lunch.

Intent on endeavor, her hands flutter across the bread.

The word endeavor tumbles in the child’s mind.

End and ever put together.

End and ever kissing.

End and ever walking down the aisle.

Born tongue-tied with an indigenous yearning to be seen, 

The child carried her story through a day of many mountains.

A yellow, red, blue story.

A lonely story she wants included in the mother’s treasured swells.

The child tells her story in its entirety, with gusto.

Before the colors dry,

The mother’s face tightens.

Over and done.

The end.

The mother’s hand flies out and strikes.

The child holds her burning face.

The colors smear.

-        Who do you think you are? 

Something heavy, something sharp contorts the child’s face.

The child sees the mother does not have what the child has.

Such as a mother. The mother has no mother.

The child knows this, has always known it.

From before forever, the child seemed to know.

The child blames herself for putting her face in the space of her mother’s loss.

She takes it all back: Her story.

The colors in her story.

The yearning in her story.

The rhythm.

The joy.

The hope.

All of it, the child gathers back and folds neat and small.

As difficult as it seems, the reversal happens quickly.

The force of the slap loosened the child’s face.

In actuality, the child’s face came off with ease.

-        Who do you think you are?

The question keeps asking itself.

At night, the child braces her knees against the wall by her bed.

She fears rolling into a hellish dimension, forgotten and unretrieved. 

She grows prone to high fevers.

Clocks and newspapers fly untethered around the room.

She tries not to make a fuss.

Sleep walking and bed-wetting haunt her.

What dies in brisk conversations emerges in stuttering clumps.

Through the abyss of sleep the child walks half-clothed down a gravel road.

-        Where do you think you are going?

-        I’m looking for my legs.

In the shadow of grandfather’s disembodied purity,

She learns disassociation and silence.

She disappears in libraries, in the backseat of her boyfriend’s car, in household chores and fictions.

Her stories fuel the fires of her body’s pilgrimage.

She finds a deep river.

She hikes her skirts.

She wades in.

She braves the knifing tide.

To cut the noose of promiscuity, she marries young.

She excels at hospitality, diplomacy, flexibility, loyalty, faith.

She battles a fear and the subtle reign of self-righteousness tarted up to be godly womanhood.   

ARTICLE III

We are people anxious to avoid wolves.

We are kept women, women ignored, women trying to behave. 

We are well-heeled men, jobless, strapped to our careers.

We have student loans, special needs children, small houses, large houses,

houses threatened by fires and tinderbox trees.

We maintain cottage gardens, clip grass, wash cars.

We are well-advised and misinformed.

Photographers.

Curators.

Teachers.

Legal aides.

Lawyers.

Farmers.

Students.

Dispossessed.

Winsome.

Comics.

Singers.

Soldiers.

Preachers and mild-mannered thugs.

Constellations mark our stint on earth.

How much time has gone by since we’ve shared a meal?

We seek to justify our abundance.

Abundance sustains us.

The life breathed into us goes on expelling and inhaling long after we’ve forgotten the first gust.

Then there is food.

Then clothing.

The reference to what we have and how it arrived inadvertently tips a scale.

By proxy, abundance erroneously suggests who we are.

The woven us, the tangled and mingled together struggles with unearned abundance.

We hide our broken and unrepaired parts.

We want to be on our own; to take the credit, to get the praise.

At once with neediness comes the shame of it.

We grimace at our arrogance.

We search for hints of humility.

Wolves can play the role of both sheep and goats.

And we can play all three.

Borrowing does not become us.

Still, there are times we borrow without qualm.

A cup of sugar.

An egg.

But never a car.

An egg can be borrowed back.

But a car is something we could not bear to ask for. 

Cars are bad habits and upstanding citizens do not ask to borrow them.

Batteries fail without warning.

Heaters throw noxious gas.

Tires tend to cheat, exploding at the most inconvenient times.

So eggs yes.

Cars no.

Bad habits unthinkable.

Though bad habits go on lending themselves at whim.

And we end up borrowing without cards or due dates.

Fines accrue and keep accruing.

We want to dine with others.

We want to dine alone.

How long has it been since we’ve gotten together to eat?

Traveling tests our suitability.

The further we go, the more we discover what we want to avoid.

As nice as it is to eat with others, eating alone allows easier chewing.

It takes more than hunger to pry from hibernation.

We don’t want to be uncomfortable.

We detest exposure.

-        If we ride together, we can use the carpool lane.

-        Bring cash and plenty of it.

We are not sure where we will end up.

Cash habitually evades us.

We travel from the suburbs to The City.

We push against rain.

The road is a dark ribbon unscrolling before us.

We commandeer its drenched back.

We are later than we wanted.

Surprised to be this early.

People like us remember as much as they forget.

Even our memories argue.

We don't call lies lies.

We call them what we know.

We assume the occupation of skilled interpreters.

We study the city's sophistication, amazed.

How did the city achieve its esteem?

Homelessness, lack of parking, flying trash.

Even still, the city thumbs its nose at the suburbs.

We want the city's flash.

We want the soft finish of the suburbs.

Discontent, we feign acceptance.

Forgiveness isn’t in the city or the suburbs.

Choose a place to go for forgiveness but it is not found in innocence.

Forgiveness arrives by way of the desert.

Believing we are innocent traps us in the jungle.

Other than a target for rage, time is an inconvenience.

Over the years, we’ve haggled about what happened when and how.

Now, we admit the futility of argument.

Our complaints pay us no mind.

Complaints continue their tirade while we try to outlive them.

We meet half-way at the Farmer’s Market.

We park down the road. 

We walk toward the water, teaming with longing.

The used book store winks us in.

We are never strong enough to ignore the advances of books, used or otherwise.

Fruits, flowers, soaps and vegetables can wait.

We delay the fragrance of basil for the scent of a used book.

We fumble through musty pages.

Our eyes hurt.

We want Oz and Narnia.

We want James Bond and The Civil War.

We want ruby slippers and bayonets.

We want lampposts in the snow and the breath of a Lion to blow us beyond the cliffs.

We turn our backs on the silent pages.  

We join produce regiments flanked by curiosity and speculation.

The oceans spits its fog, the sky its rain.

We stand under a dripping umbrella gawking.

Ruddy-cheeked dahlias,

black-eyed Susans,

Roses bundled like babies,

Snapdragons and Queen Anne’s lace. 

Even wearing treacherous heels, a glimpse of beauty shrinks our suffering.

We return to our car, climb in and head for skyscrapers.

Once we cross the bridge into discombobulation.

We take it in.

We push it away.

We call for directions.

Announce our proximity.

-        We’ll be there in a minute.

The car moves through the traffic.

One of us watches for red lights, another for one-way arrows.

The conversation is velvet and sap.

Criticism collapses.

It is no longer easy come, easy go.

It is perhaps and hopefully and watch out for pedestrians.

A man stands on the corner wearing a ski jacket, poly fill bursts at the elbows.

Women wear gloves and scarves.

The air inside the car radiates like a bonfire.

We open windows.

The ocean air pours in to roust us. 

The universe doesn’t share our fickle hearts.

The universe answers its obligation to thermodynamics.

The universe arrives on time to keep its appointments with God.

Infrequency and disbelief doesn’t sway the universe from following the rules.

The universe bows to The Timekeeper.

It doesn’t ask for favors.

It doesn’t need to stop.

Age is no excuse and is not held against it. 

God changes the sheets of the universe and cleans up after it.

The universe doesn’t have a penny to its name.

It is too poor to rent a toothbrush and already enjoys everything.

We arrive at the hotel to pick up the others.

We’ve been called scallywags, hustle-bottoms and airheads;

to be suspected interlopers is not a stretch.

What alms can we bring?

We arm ourselves with honey custard under a dollop of ice cream.

Without spoons, without dishes, without white linens and black coffee.

We swallow the landslide of hearsay and escape our righteous indignation.

We enter an elevator carpeted with tropical leaves.

Push buttons.

Doors shut.

There are many floors.

Each one a destiny for someone.

Not necessarily us.

Inertia comes alive within us.

Doors open.

We hug and become our own audience.

We meet the second wife and compare her to the first.

We study the power of her arms.

Her high-collared silk cigarette tunic rides muscular calves.

She clutches a purse embroidered with peacock feathers.

The peacock pushed too far.

It would not shut up.

It screamed at all the wrong times.

The bear snapped its neck.

When the peacock died, gratitude watered its grave.

Its feathers commemorate unearned rescue.

The second wife stanched his infidelities.

He stopped prowling.

Divorce restored his integrity, terrifying everyone.

Especially me.

What could I do to restore mine?

I never expected to be a second wife.

I study the form of a headless statue and consider the artist.

She must be humble.

She isn’t one to go on about herself.

She explains how the White House restoration is coming along.

Repairs are underway.

They've found a breach of ivory dating back to Napoleon.

Three hundred elephant tusks were sacrificed for its construction.

Transformation is delicate work.

Everything is carefully considered, including voice frequency.

Compassionate tonality assists in removing centuries of soot;

even antiquated deadness resists renewal.

Brokenness lends itself to misconception.

Brokenness has no idea what it was in its pristine entirety.

Not even the universe knows.

We pay attention to our noses.

Exhaust and Ovaltine.

A hint of coffee.

Tea tree shampoo.

We remember how to be small and curious,

to try on lipstick,

to climb through poison oak,

to conceive prayers,

to be oblivious,

to write letters,

to cling to outcome,

to legitimate our needs.

The child prays for a marriage that already ended in divorce.

On tiptoe, she reaching through the wind to pin wet sheets on a line.

She ducks her head to keep from being slapped.

At times we believed hunger would bring disintegration.

Now we crave boomerangs and fat chances.

The menu mentions prices we gawk at. 

The cheapest appetizers mock frugality.

Entrées start where dollars leave off.

The child sneaks back into the empty third grade classroom during recess.

She steals Twinkies from the brown paper bags lined up on the shelf above the coat rack.

I reconsider my anorexic budget and the hypothesis of spending invisible cash.

In terms of choice, we decide and disavow.

An earlier warning roars in my ears.

-        Bring plenty of cash.

My cash makes a contribution just this side of indigence.

I spin in the galaxy of choice: prawns, embellished tofu,

snow peas drenched in sesame oil,

wine flung from the stars,

sake suitable for the cast of Thornbirds.

I don’t yet know I am a two-fisted addict.

Trauma holds me in its clutch.

Along with happy bewilderment, I appreciate the hydrating evening.

Tea totaling is legitimate for designated drivers, not under employed poets.

The Solomon's baby syndrome descends upon me.

Am I about to be severed in two?

Poets can become laureates.

But most thrive in hypotheticals.

Poems begin with gazing and every candle poses for a cheeky angle.

But shivering flames bore pragmatics indifferent to abstraction.

Appetizers arrive.

Calamari.

Crescent-shaped dough stuffed with the treasure of national forests.

The discussion begins.

We don’t want to duplicate our mothers’ marriages.

We want to undermine our fathers’ dismissals.

We want to invent our own disasters.

Levity pulls us this way and that.

Advice flies – market yourself;

be your own encourager;

find out what you don’t know.

Stop balancing broccoli on your head and dressing paper dolls.

Prepare for famine with a history of well-watered humilities.

When worse comes to worst, keep a distance. 

Beware the calving glaciers.

While the release of its offspring makes for good footage, its name is Rupture.

Its repair is crucifixion.

To be indifferent is to be instigators.

To be instigators is to be guilty.

We discuss almost everything.

Politics; legislative procedures, congressional hierarchy.

We argue about what is in our power to change.

Who is responsible?

We discuss electronic addictions and

young men missing fathers;

fathers missing fathers.

Mothers missing daughters.

Daughters missing mothers.

We take sides against ourselves.

Women are worse than men unless you are a woman and then men are the culprits.

Our incandescent genders need exoneration.

We use abstractions.

Abstractions come naturally when we design our alibies.

I admit I’m an artist.

But I could say I am making a paper-mache hot air balloon.

Artists are often misunderstood and are much like wedding cakes.

They appear one way and taste another.

The world wants to know: What's it for?

Can it be eaten?

Who is going to carry it?

The world talks smack about cake but it is baffled by marriage.

Before we know it, we’re discussing sex.

Every subject leads to sex.

Even if nobody admits it, sex undergirds the conversation.

Whether we want it to or not, sex takes the heat for fake marriages.

Sex is the scapegoat in the form of a wolf wagging its tail like a dog. 

When it comes to marriage without love, the despotism of sex growls.

We live wedded lives as free-range drifters in populated wildernesses.

Was the grandfather faithful to the grandmother?

And subsequently unfaithful to the second grandmother?

Did his absences earn the consequence of an early death?

Did the second wife, withered by the care of orphaned children,

collude with insanity or lucidity in accusing her husband of adultery?

By her own admission, she envied the perpetuity plan of the seahorse.

One of us bore witness.

Driving down the road, the grandfather pulled to the shoulder,

Cranked off the ignition, laid his head on the steering wheel and wept.

Later, the word got out.

-        Stay away from that woman, she’s crazy.

This story assails the gut.

It takes something away.

It gives something back.

It reminds me of things we’ve lost;

our mothers, for instance and on the other hand, our fathers,

our marriages.

As go our marriages, goes our faith.

ARTICLE IV

The first door to the left at the top of the stairs is not,

as the signs indicate, the lady’s room.

Instead, it is a broom closet shelved with votive candles.

At the center of each, bent wicks disabled by snuffed flames.

I shut the door and find the door I am looking for.

Grace favors my reflection. 

Shrouded in dusk-like lighting, the mirror shows me a face I can’t remember.

I see a suggestion of how I might look without the spangled creases between my brows.

Before the rupture.

Before the deep waters.

Before the undertow pulled me into where I’d never been. 

Disassociation fries the wire between danger and safety.

It works well in a pinch.

When disassociation is born, no one immediately names it.

Disassociation answers to daydreaming, air-headedness.

To ignorance.

Disassociation means well.

It sets us apart when we don’t know how to be gathered in.

Disassociation says forget your glasses, maintain decorum.

Before returning to the table, you study the fledgling koi in a fake pond.

The pond convinces despite its contrived banks.

This could be Paradise.

The evidence of its myth is in the water’s lack of clarity.

In the sag of the miniature palm at its edge like a priest cupping his ear to absolve the guilt of a faceless oblate.

But Paradise ends the need for confession.

Guilt has no pillow in Paradise.

At the table, we make good impressions.

We calculate our worth in clock years.

We flounce our vigorous endeavors look for prisms in our dust.

Younger is what we want to be unless we already are.

When we are no longer young, we remind ourselves we’ve done the best we could.

We hint at God.

We try to be nonchalant.

We pretend we know.

We want to convince each other.

We don’t want to go to Paradise alone.

We want to save our doubts for another day.

The puzzle of God comes anyway.

We consider God’s audacious claim to be our lover.

I want to question my father about seeking my own salvation.

I want to ask what he is seeking to be saved from.

Being still and knowing has taken a sabbatical.

We are looking for gainful employment.

Questions drive us to stillness.

To the outskirts of disillusion.

We pass through doubt’s debilitating entrance.

We find cousins.

Second cousins.

Striving uncles.

Unstable aunts.

Locked closets.

Wrinkled mantles, has beens and unclaimed victories.

-        Don't act shocked.

-        You did the same thing to me.

-        I did not.

-        It's true.

-        We didn't know what we were doing.

-        We were sabotaged by indiscretions.

-        As were our parents.

-        All children get messed with.

-        We get attention so we put up with it.

-        That was another time.

-        They were both miserable.

-        And exhausted.

What can be done with semi-orphaned children and spent adults?

What happens to a stone thrown to the sea.

Follow the ripples.

The concentric circles include sex but skirts equivalent desires.

No one wants sex to be smutty.

We want sex to be like it was in the garden, exultant, unifying, bereft of if only and incapacitation Above all, restorative, restful.

We want the rest of Paradise.

We hope God’s healing sweeping gesture encompasses the lot of us.

Paradise cannot be Paradise if isolation makes the cut.

The bill arrives.

We pitch in, but not in equal amounts.

We still do not know how wealthy we are.

We could give more but think we owe more than we have.

We are thankful and humbled.

Expressing gratitude increases our need for humility.

We move to the deck of a semi-outdoor bar.

We are not ready to return to the literal.

Desire remains unabated.

Caught in the resplendent undertow, we gasp when it tosses us up on shore.

We didn’t expect to find the dog, a former wolf.

He stands panting, docile.

There is petting and comparisons.

Some step back and some inch forward.

No one mentions the danger of the now-dog reverting to a wolf.

The slightest mishap could trigger reversion.

A small cut in an open hand, the tiniest taste of blood.

Domestication can wake a wolf one morning and name civility a bore.

A dog sleeps while a wolf explores.

Its braided blood shadows rambles and pulls its blood to subterranean violence.

What was once tame reverts to its hinterlands.

The taste of adrenaline in the blood returns a wolf to its pride.

It no longer obeys any voice but its own.

A wolf doesn’t mind owning what belongs to others.

Ownership infuriates a wolf.

It doesn’t think about its and theirs or ours.

A hunger-crazed wolf does what starvation demands.

It feigns a ghost and hunts you down.

Think blood.

Think sacrifice.

Take a knife and dip it in blood.

Put the blood married to the knife in the freezer.

Once frozen, take it out and dip it in blood again.

Repeat until an innocent bundle of pink ice hides the knife edge.

Bury the knife in snow, just below the surface.

The wolf follows its nose.

It sniffs out the blood, licks the snow, numbs his tongue but arrives at the knife.

Delirium wags a promising finger.

Licking the blood, the wolf severs its own tongue and dies.

A wolf can bleed to death, but it doesn’t mistakenly stand in the tracks and let a train run it down. Not unless hunger drives away the desire to be a friendly dog and no one knows the difference between a wagging tail and flattened ears; between a broken heart and a broken dream.

Grandfather’s car barreled across an unguarded train crossing.

The train careened through a rain-drenched walnut grove.

Horns honked.

People yelled from the cars lined up behind him.

We wrestle within ourselves.

We struggle to name our opponents.

We struggle to be named.

This is a time for listening.

When surrounded with strangeness.

When we can’t find what we know.

When the map shrinks.

When our eyes make fools of us.

When rain smears the windshield and broken wipers punish us with caterwauls.

When we misread signals and lose our hearing, we arrive at who we are.

Our lives go on into everlasting.

We will one day cease to strive but therein do not end.