Resume
By Jenae Marks
“Maybe
I should just die now” she whispers, reckless, suddenly suspecting that tomorrow
will be a lot like yesterday, and the day before, and nothing like tonight.
“There’s
nothing in the world I want except this”. Sitting across his lap, she lifts
herself up, then lets herself fall, and then again, “Nothing,
(December,
1999, The Capri Motel)
(April
2000, Prince St. Court)
Arrayed
in these flowers
I
want nothing but to drown in
a
blue stream.
I
need running water,
to
fracture golden light,
and
carry my eyes along,
with
the wraith-like spiders
that
live on the water.
I
need noisy,
singing,
gurgling water.
Nature
is often too quiet and too still.
I cannot be quiet or still
though
I’m paralyzed,
on
this bench, the sun on my knees,
leaves
of this scrub between my fingers.
Once
I was quiet and still
and
we were wed again and again
on
the edge of
the
blue-green sea .
Knee
deep, blindly strolling backwards,
my
skirt above the ocean,
my
only vision a swirling sea,
waves
that never break,
like
a lake, like a stream.
At seventeen.
The
garden of those flowers
will
never grow again,
That
seemed to be
reflected
in his eyes.
A
poison poured in my ear,
long
ago,
that
made me drunk then,
but
left me now
with
this mind, like a field
strewn
with salt.
The
world is still green,
It’s
the eye that fails.
I’ll
never have such sight again.
So why not die now,
with bare skin,
for
why let tomorrow come,
to
oppose me with a
with
outrage
What
a mirror would be overthrown,
The
very glass, the eye…
Tinted
by a lonely mother,
clinging
to incestuous needs,
to
pour potions in my ear.
She
found me dead in the closet,
a
deer park melting in the dark.
Once,
I was seven, dreaming:
My
dead self curled up
coats.
song was playing.
I
would be happy tangled up in green flowering vines;
Only
too much would be enough for me,
Red
flowers that bloom like screams,
Grass
and leaves as vast and churning as a sea.
would
kiss, would lick, the
soles
of my feet, I would be home.
Tired—so
tired—of a stale exile.
An
avalanche of African daisies, saffron-red,
drag
me home.
“Nymph,
in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.”
A
friend once told me that death is the ultimate sin.
The first short-coming.
Orisons
are prayers.
The
nymph is Ophelia.
The
sinner, Hamlet.
I
see her brooding with a skull, talking too much.
I
see him wreathed in flowers.
The
flowers bloomed in your hair,
Each
time we kissed.
Heartbreak and funeral pains are not despair.
When my father died, it was not despair. (I was elated, exhausted, delirious. I had never been so close to him.)
Despair
is the septic blood of unattended heartbreaks, forgotten and festering.
The pestilence of the unburied dead.
(Most
of us, when we flee Troy, can't find our loved ones. Or can't bare to carry them
on our backs.)
Despair is a wounded animal hiding from further
injury.
A kennel made of
sun
never
rises
Despair
is trying to live and failing to live.
Is
arms without hands, a mouth with
no
tongue.
Walking
on broken legs.
“I
have crawled, through dead-end
streets, on my hands and knees.”
Limping
along for ten years
no
shaman to set the bones, induce the
necessary
epilepsies, and cushion the blows;
With
no women to drown you in the wails of mourning.
Those
who grieve cannot wail. We should
wail
for them.
No
white bed in a white room with white billowing curtains, where
time
can not stand still but can be made to move more slowly.
Sometimes
you find me lying by the side of the road, dirty and bleeding,
and
you clean me up and try
to prepare me for transfusion. By trial and error
you’ve
(You
are not the you I kissed, you are the other you, I kissed before.)
So
go ahead and kill that reprieve, with an
army
of tomorrows.
The doing’s all, they say: there
may
be other worlds
somewhere
with
sweeter sorrows.
June, 2004, Pennyroyal Ranch, Yokio CA