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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609405090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wings Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2016 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
She Becomes Time
By Margaret Randall
Wings Press
Copyright © 2016 Margaret RandallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60940-512-0
CHAPTER 1
First Family
"To question everything. To remember what it has been forbidden even to mention. [...] To look afresh at and then describe for ourselves, the frescoes of the Ice Age, the nudes of 'high art,' the Minoan seals and figurines, the moon landscape embossed with the booted print of a male foot, the microscopic virus, the scarred and tortured body of the planet Earth."
— Adrienne Rich
One Memory Less Among the Weeds
If older sister had lived more than hours,
a lifetime or other circumstance,
I wouldn't have a second-hand name
I cherish as my own.
If Grandpa hadn't taken what wasn't his
with Grandma looking on,
if salty and sweet hadn't come
to the party with intent to confuse.
If the young Italian lover had closed
the bathroom door, an image
more relevant than Ivory soap,
one memory less among the weeds.
What if blue and green had always
danced with one another,
red and orange burst into flame
on the walls of a child's room.
I cannot say if reading that passage at eight
about the concentration camp, then slamming
shut the book and furtively opening it again
was childhood curiosity or awe.
War was always huge, unknown and battering,
Bundles for Britain followed by marching
endlessly from there to here.
I carried placards, then thirty extra pounds.
If I hauled words in my firstborn's diaper bag
or reinvented them
everywhere I stayed
more than a few exploratory months,
it was a complication born of poetry and war,
following a broken arrow
to weather, language,
and humor disguised as rice and beans.
In Vietnam I found broken clamshells
on a pontoon moving across a river
where bridges and bombs took turns
and I wore USA: trembling question mark.
I kept on moving, collecting teachers
and battlegrounds,
more children with open eyes,
their fathers hovering.
And then I stopped, embraced by the one
I was meant to find who was meant
to find me. I tell her these stories
night by night in a single breath.
Being their Daughter
It was the question without an answer.
Sometimes her silence
was gunmetal gray,
sometimes rimmed in orchid pink.
He didn't know and didn't want to know.
Like most couples, they had their problems.
Being their daughter
didn't provide a clue.
DNA isn't part of this story.
Each year I ask
in the voice of a younger me
and reap an answer of rainbows.
People always told me I had big bones
like him. My resemblance to her
stared back in every mirror.
They're both gone now,
leaving me a story winding down,
repeating echoes
and resignation
transparent as morning sky.
Where I Live and Die
I am in the picture frame but look
as if I want out.
The relative behind the shutter
must have urged
come on now smile,
may have displayed impatience
at my lack of interest, refusal
to take my place in his tableaux.
Almost eight decades have passed.
The image is faded, edges frayed
beyond their pinked irregularity
defining that home album era.
I cannot remember what lay beyond
the picture plane,
what truth or action
social formality stole.
What I do know is what I longed for then
without knowing its name
I have grabbed with both hands
and pulled onto this map
where I live and die
along with all those
who invited me
inside looking in.
Like a Bull in a China Shop
I rise, astonished by air beneath my floating limbs,
buoyant dance of a body my father once said
was like a bull in a china shop: grade school
ballet recital yearning for grace.
Grace would never be my strong suite but
here I am skimming the top bookshelf
where poetry flashes before my eyes, pulling
my feet way up and in to avoid stubbed toes.
The platform chair rocks back and forth,
no one settled on its curved seat,
not even a ghost hiding its presence
to watch this carefree dance.
Faster and faster I race beneath a ceiling
threatening sudden stop, untouched,
propelled by some magical force:
three parts helium, one part abhorrence of war.
Pied Piper of love and logic, I sound the first
totally on-key melody of my life
and beckon the world to follow,
peace so much easier than this sad default.
Mother and the Mac Truck
Mother sat erect, her hands firmly
grasping ten and two
and always drove
a good twenty miles slower
than the speed limit,
which is why in my dream
I was surprised
she was speeding
and swerving all over the road,
even onto its broken shoulder.
I tried to grab the wheel but she was
determined to make it
to the yellow stucco hospital —
a building like the old French ones
I saw in Hanoi, 1974.
She needed medication. I held
a lab envelope that may have
contained her shit
in the hand not concerned
with steadying the wheel.
She really confused me, though,
when she briefly became
a teenage delinquent male
I was trying to hide
from the police.
I smoothed his hair, tucked him
into bed and promised
I wouldn't let them get him.
He smiled gratefully, begging
over and over please keep me safe.
All I knew about the boy was
he'd stolen a Mac truck.
Then it was Mother
who'd stolen the truck
and the kid had a plan
to give it back. I woke thinking
my mother's shit shouldn't
have been too heavy for me to carry,
and Law and Order wreaks terror
everywhere in this New World Order.
CHAPTER 2
Broken Cities and Perfect Cubes
A Day Like This
On a night like this my nine-year-old son
discovered the stars through the telescope
at Cuba's tiny observatory
where a young Russian astronomer
put her eye to the instrument
and heart to the universe
every sultry Caribbean night.
His first apprenticeship.
Forty years ago on a day like this
my ten year old daughter
stood on a chair,
a wooden pointer in her hand, authority in her voice.
Her classmates listened
as she explained New Math,
traveled a path that wouldn't split
for decades, questioning
her destination on the run.
On a day like this we gathered peacefully
at Mexico City's Plaza of Three Cultures,
circle of concrete apartment blocks
and righteous colonial church
built over ruins of Aztec glory.
Loudspeakers carried the rousing static
of speeches until gunfire tossed bodies
in piles of before and after,
turned history on itself.
On a day like this but not at all like this
we began to understand
the shameful color of betrayal,
where kindness hides itself
and for how long,
why a Vietnamese monk lit himself on fire
and died without a twitch of muscle,
no sound but the hiss of flame.
On a day like and unlike today
we remember the child who speaks
surrounded by silence,
farmers coaxing potatoes from vertical plots
on Andean mountainsides,
a girlchild leaning into her loom
in the dim light of an Egyptian factory,
and the tiny desert flower that blooms
from its bed of rock-hard earth.
A day like this has nowhere to go
but home.
Uneasy, it inhabits its calendar
— Long Count, Hebrew, Anno Domini,
Consular or Gregorian —
tries to hide in a robust month,
escape tumultuous weather,
cherish younger siblings
and avoid the rage of those who
do no honor to a day like this.
Their Braided Fingers
— for Mary Oishi
I didn't get to be a scientist, not this time around.
My creative impulse never would have borne
the slow angst of double-blind studies
or impartial observation.
Still, my poet's intuition
brings me to the same place.
Your grandma's terror during the firebombing of Tokyo
adheres to my DNA,
the epigenetic change it hosts
reflects a grandfather kidnapped from his African village
while I no longer remember
an uncle I should have been able to trust
fingering my childhood.
The point is, none of these genetic memories
nor childhoods are lost.
They reside in our cellular memory,
the genetic material of which we're made.
Their braided fingers will not let our double helix go.
Time's Language
Light does not get old: a photon that emerged from the Big Bang
is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at
light speed.
— Brian Greene
Time appears in its loose-fitting shift,
knocks on the child's windowpane,
hopscotches gleefully
then drags itself across the floor
for the unbearable wait.
Midlife it sizzles, careens against walls,
stumbles over roadblocks
trying out new dance steps
but catching its voluminous cloak
on all that excess furniture.
In age I hardly notice its devious passage,
steady breath lifting me through night.
Caressing my shoulders it launches
the occasional taunt
or hides in a double take of mirrors.
Sometimes it catches me off guard, sometimes
I want to tell it: slow down, dammit!
Sometimes I nestle in its arms
and understand its tempo
perfectly.
Bead of an Elephant's Eye
The silences are heaviest
when great events
like the birth of a child
or stubborn resistance
against whatever torture
turn weightless along the way.
My children broke loose where
the road split
and I stopped for a moment
uncertain which fork
pronounced my name.
The next generation always cheers us on.
We share that single destination
and I can offer you a ride
but will not carry your baggage.
Inheritance locked in secrets
always weighs too much.
Shoulder yours and travel with me.
I've learned what I cannot do
weighs more than all I did.
What slips through my fingers
leaves imprints of desert dust.
Peeling the secrets as we go
will laugh us safely home.
This found life — our great love —
rides effortlessly
between breastbone and diaphragm.
Details make the journey:
an almost forgotten conversation
or bead of an elephant's eye.
Joining of No Return
Where rock meets rock along the jagged cleft
above Pueblo Bonito's back wall,
where brick floats upon mythic emptiness
in Hagia Sofia's great dome,
where calligraphy is coaxed to art
when image is forbidden above the entranceway
to an abandoned way station — caravansarai —
and the Silk Road sorts its memories,
there is a joining of no return.
There is nothing messy about these seams,
nothing left over.
A waning sun turns the Nile's expanding ripples
to brief ridges of copper light
as the same sun turns wave fields on the Mekong,
Irrawaddy, or Colorado an equivalent hue.
Yet all waves belong only to themselves
and along the lines where each river laps its shore
a thin line separates seeing from unknowing.
Such borders drip salt on slightly parted lips,
images embed themselves
in soft age-mottled flesh.
Great stones placed by the Inca
in perfect harmony
issue words I feared I might forget.
Each migration held by invisible mortar
imprints itself on this landscape
unfolding upon my tongue.
Where your skin and mine knit tight
between your right breast
and my left,
our bodies fit together perfectly,
and despite our sudden hot-flash blooms
touch speaks its language of years.
Here every cell brings memory home,
every nerve ending rests:
the boundary along which we grow.
Not Your Neighborhood
For Anne Waldman on her 70th birthday. Poet of poets.
It's not your neighborhood at first but a street
across town where balconies of flowers
become grotesque fragments
trampled in choking dust. Another family's children
maimed or dead. Another searching
for shelter. Where are they? Right there, and then
everywhere as the last slivers of silence disappear.
Your side of the city falls, landscape of rubble, work
and school are lost, then water and food.
And now you are walking, walking
with what you can carry
and every day you carry less.
Direction your only friend, its destination
enveloped in something you once called hope.
The rest of the world — those families who still have
clean rooms with televisions parsing
the nightly news — sees the face of a small girl
with large eyes, her curls reach mid-thigh
of the adult beside her, who is beyond the frame.
They are moving north and west. You are
moving but not as fast
and the small girl with large eyes is not enough
to wake a complacent world. So another
picture tries: a man gently lifting
the body of a dead child from the sea.
In minutes the image gets a million likes,
instagram attention from those
who watch in warmth from rainproof homes.
Tens of thousands crowd rubber dinghies or creaking
boats, follow rail tracks, storm borders,
escaping countries dissolving in blood and dust,
carrying those who cannot walk, pushing
wheelchairs, pulling carts. Few are photogenic
or speak sufficient English
to muster sympathy on the six o'clock news.
As all sides fight on, countries lose the definition
of country and the thugs remain convinced
they must fight harder, kill more,
destroy memory along with those who live
in its fragile wake. Fight to the finish is a dictate
designed to make sure
everything dies, even the beloved stories.
Twenty-first century paints itself in colors
rent by razor wire, money demanded
by those always ready to profit from misery,
obscure words to be learned,
new tastes to swallow as arms reach out
with woolen gloves and teddy bears.
Exhaustion devours what used to fit perfectly.
Most of the faces aren't engaging enough,
most of the eyes not large and round.
Most of the bodies are bent, never the best
camera angle, most cannot speak English.
The small girl who is still alive
and the dead child's body washed ashore
share a heavy load. They labor beyond their years.
In Broken Cities
In ancient Syria, Arzu and Azizos
the gods of evening
and morning stars,
cast equal light upon a land
headed for death.
Quetzalcoatl and Tezcalipoca
cannot question
their gender roles
when conquest leaves them
battering want.
Apollo and Artemis still stumble
through time.
Castor is mortal
to the divinity of Pollux.
Egypt tells us Geb is of earth
while Nut surveys unruly heavens.
Data's positronic brain
makes computational magic
while his malignant twin Lore,
possessing the emotion chip,
fatally wounds his maker.
The Star Trek character teaches us
reality and humanity are not the same.
Identical twins of war and gluttony
stretch love to the breaking point,
rip hope to insignificant particles:
breadcrumbs looking for a path.
A word flies in like the dove of peace,
settles briefly in my hair
relieves its nervous bowel
then disappears
in a temper of wings.
Those few who remain
after terror wipes the map
of all but a landscape of rebar,
are lost supplicants
in broken cities.
They try to decipher the word,
to bring it home,
but cannot decide
if it is syllable or logogram,
noun or verb.
Still they hoist it
on reverent shoulders
eager to begin again,
to rise from the ashes of shame
as civilization's grandly decorated bullies.
Gleaming and Dark
Long lines of captives climbed those pyramid steps,
some drugged, honored, others resigned,
unable to accept the brutal rite.
Up above, priests fixed their bodies to an altar
while others used sharp flint knives,
opened them gut to breastbone
and lifted their still beating hearts to the gods:
a sacrificial offering, plea for renewal
regeneration of a culture
whose pageantry and art excite us still.
Patriotic fervor convinces today's more willing captives
their job is to keep us free, protect our security
while earning a paycheck in hard times.
Those they are sent to kill, after all, are not like us,
mock our exceptionalism,
flew stolen planes into our mightiest buildings.
A child who confuses that scrap of metal with a toy
and the wedding party making its way
across a desert where love goes up in smoke:
collateral damage all, war's painful cost.
Ritual death was the fate of those enslaved by Aztec lords,
food for gods who renewed each morning's sun.
For our Empire's soldiers
body armor may save torsos
while legs explode and heads close over eternal hell.
Thousands come home in flag-wrapped coffins,
others finish themselves with alcohol, drugs,
or the peace a self-inflicted bullet brings.
They've earned a country's gratitude
but vulnerability is risky for the fighting man.
Flags fill airport terminals, handmade signs and
pale children welcome the warriors home.
In city streets and shopping malls
the rest of us thank them for their service,
remember an earlier war
when we confused those boys with policy,
rank and file with criminal masterminds.
Memory lives in a broad black granite V:
gleaming and dark
as the obsidian of those ancient knives.
Someone We Do Not Recognize Stares Back
Damp haze presses down on ordinary moments,
how your extended palm feels against mine
as we meet and greet,
where the mudslide erases a village,
bigotry in the news anchor's voice
when he calls one opponent State
and the other "a militant group"
although both are democratically elected
and equally concerned
with fending off the shelling of babies.
Too much salt in your potato salad,
too much benzene in our water.
We construct a scale of values,
carefully order our lives
to reflect concentric circles: war
several rings within gardens,
profit sustaining a center point
and art hanging on for dear life at edges
rising in waves crashing almost beyond our reach.
What she made. What he made.
What we make
of what all of us have made
as we gaze in the mirror and someone
we do not recognize stares back.
Now We See Them, Now We Don't
A family walks down a canyon wash
bordered by paintbrush and sage.
They carry children and grinding stones,
one water jug, one corrugated dish
fashioned last year by grandmother's hands.
Grandmother because she remembers
the last great flood: water
swelling the creek just below First Balcony,
knows the way because she holds
the stories, follows the rains.
Family because lineage, community
woven into days and then nights,
alignment of landscape,
people carrying their lives
like seed banks of future.
Travel because a road, a time, a pulse
of tidal migration, their route
Travel because a road, a time, a pulse
of tidal migration, their route
in meridian memory,
their lungs expand and contract
through geologic time.
Return etched into pathways
of sand and wind,
images pecked into rock,
land that rises and falls
beneath their hungers.
Twelve sixty-two by our poor reckoning.
Now we see them,
now we don't:
human figures moving along roads
we can only follow from the sky
and only then in those fragments
of vision we still possess
when able to put aside the fear
our arrogance requires
in order to keep us from knowing
where ancestors traveled, where
their children will go
after they come back,
tethered to canyons
and stars.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from She Becomes Time by Margaret Randall. Copyright © 2016 Margaret Randall. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
All Destination,First Family,
Broken Cities and Perfect Cubes,
Mexico,
Cuba,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,