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Diane Wakoski USA  Orpheus and Roses: A Woman’s Myth
Why couldn’t he bring her back?
No, the question should be:
“why didn’t he bring her back?”
THE BOUQUET
of blood/
on the street
I know what it is,
saw the man fall
(from his bicycle when his child struck his show in the
spokes),
saw his neigihbor,
the lady who wanted to help,
bring out the roll of paper towels, thinking
to wipe up the blood from the asphalt
after the ambulance left/ but
giving up her purpose
knowing she meant to wipe away memory, perhaps.
I saw the ambulance leave, carrying him
with the flesh and bone gone from his nose,
the blood covering one eye as if]in some whild’s coloring
book, a 3-year old had scribbled red
over a raccoon’s face,
and I saw in a foreign household and watched a nearly clad
housewife bring out her roll of paper towels,
thinking to wipe up the blood off the street.
What restrained her?
I wonder.
knowing there was so much there
perhaps?
A pool so big,
the parodying of all those ads – “It’s absorbent,” and “Mrs
Suburban Housewife, tell all of our listeners now
just how absorbent is!”
“You wiped up a whole pool of blood spilled on the street!”
But what impressed me,
the voyeur,
the foreign visitor to this American suburb,
was that this housewife walked out, with her roll ofpaper
towels, and then she silently,
almost stealthily, put them behind her back,
-- ashamed, I wonder –
and walked back into her house
without using them.
The pool of blood too big?
No, not for the absorbent towels.
Perhaps some sense of history
that you cannot wipe a man’s blood from the pavement
when his child has thrown him there.
The bouquet
of blood
blackens,
wears itself into the street,
the stain a reminder
of a simple almost-deadly
accident.
from VIRTUOSO LITERATURE FOR TWO AND FOUR HANDS, 1975
THE NEW MOON, A SCAR
How can you see
something which isn’t there?
(The new moon is like a scar long
healed.)
And how can you complain that you
have to die, when everyone has to? What’s
the secret
of accepting this?
She serves me a cup of coffee
and a white plate holding a thin wafer
of toast which I see as a sheet of paper on which
my father’s written
his will: “Give my daughter
this officer’s hat which used to
sit in her mother’s closet.”
Judith in Humboldt,
lightning bolt house of blaze
of Aztec fury,
complaints
about the sec missing from her life,
but surely she must understandable invisible by now,
the thing which is there but which
no one sees, or which is only a form
not yet illuminated.
I remember not eating my candy
when other children did, holding mine back till
I still had a piece of chocolate
when no one else had
anything but smeared fingers
or smudged faces.
“What a mean child you were,” says the physician,
but I patiently explain to her
that I felt so out of control, my emotions were
so wild, my life so empty, my needs so great
when I was a little girl, that I learned early to find
what few moments of control I could exercise
in contrast to the actions of
other children.
Now I say nothing
as my hair turns white
finally like moonlight and no one sees
the moon. I’m at a full moon, with this shining head
finally a mythic beauty glowing in reflected light,
but men and women alike see me as empty,
a new moon, nearly invisible, not a woman
any longer.
I walk across the bridge to meet
my lover. But I am almost invisible;
he doesn’t even see me.
“Who is that woman with white hair?” asks someone
who should recognize me. I have turned into my mother,
my father’s naval hat
with the gold anchor shining against the patent visor
is in my closet now, untouched.
Judith’s gold blouse hangs in her closet. Old
women are witches better left untouched,
just like a scar,
Just like the new moon.
from THE EMERALD CITY OF LAS VEGAS, 1995
LADY’S SLIPPER
paph-eye-o-pad-ill-um
small yellow shoe
open mouth/ sweet lips/ it is everything / hand and
foot.
As we lay in bed
two blocks from the rustling night ocean
under the disputed quilt
listening to two men screaming
in a lover’s quarrel
that overheard life seemed so thin with pain
and I felt safe in our normal love.
But you are gone now,
and I confess in my new life I love flowers
more than jewels or gold or men.
Just the color of this Concolor opening next to my bed.
this small soft flower
which will last
only a few weeks
but will bloom again every year, with care,
in my own house.
from CAP OF DARKNESS, 1980
The Ice Queen’s Calla Lily Fingers
Little girl, whose socks were always lost
in the scuffed heels of her shoes,
your face like a round moon showing curd-y,
like a blemish in the daylight sky,
the world says
you got things wrong.
Did the hibiscus of Southern California,
the humming birds like plums,
the hot air,
distort your life?
You saw the Snow Queen
riding in her crystal sleigh, NOT
as evil but as refreshing goodness.
Her sky, a mirror of ice
and its cracking splinters
NOT giving a false view of the world
but transforming
squalid or mundane reality into
an acceptable world.
Where did
the slivers of ice
stuck in my child eye
come from
in this land of orange trees
and sweet dates?
Now winter is the major season
in my life. And I still contradict the world
when it says ice is evil or a signal of doom.
I know I was not wrong,
seeing, through the glassy fragment in my eye,
winter’s truth: The Ice Queen
robed in ermine drawing up to my door,
her crystal sleigh
invisible, her calla lily fingers
touching my door.
I go to greet her,
past tears,
wearing a Cap of Darkness,
the world frozen
against pain.
from THE MAGICIAN’S FEAST LETTERS, 198
© Copyright, 2016,
Diane Wakoski. |