Author: Sharon Mesmer

(Posting rewrit bits from my ‘script, Metaxu, a book-length prose poem about my adopted sister)

Chapter 2 / Starting with Storms

Our first summer together started with storms — do you remember?

Big storms, boiling up in the mornings from the prairies south and east. National Weather Service warnings interrupted the noon news: tornadoes reported in northern Cook County, funnels sighted in Kankakee, large hail and damaging winds in Hammond.  Remember Ma running around, a Marlboro in her mouth, closing all the windows halfway, pounding the air with her fists and saying, “Ooh, hey, we’re gonna have boomers today!”? And soon after the first roll of thunder, and the cascading sheets of water, came the rain-drenched stench of the stockyards, four blocks away? The smell got worse depending which way the wind blew.

Remember when the rain stopped and the sun came out and Ma released us from watching TV, confined to the couch? We raced down the long porch stairs and, instead of running out to the yard, tiptoed into Grandma’s, into her bedroom while she watched TV and Uncle Stas was at work driving a truck, and stared at the mysterious image in the dark frame next to her big dresser — the Blessed Mother in a tree, holding Baby Jesus. Remember the altar on the big dresser, with small statues of saints and a red candle always burning? How about prying open the metal box next to her pillow and finding brittle black and white postcards, rosaries, a baggage claim ticket from a ship — White Star Line, Liverpool — old photos of old-looking people in old-looking clothes, cards with smudged with blue ink thumbprints, signatures?

We opened a small, soft black box and found a sharp, red-brown thing, cushioned on dark cotton. When Grandma came in and caught us she didn’t yell, or snitch to Ma. Instead, she said, “That’s thorn from Crown of Thorns. Polish priest give when I was sick, in old country. Come mit.”

We followed her outside, over the soggy, bumpy grass to the three evergreens. She knelt and pulled a wooden bowl filled with muddy sticks and twigs out from beneath the tallest of the evergreens. She made the sign of the Cross. Took a small bottle out of her housecoat pocket, poured its brown liquid into the bowl, turned it around in the grass until the sun made the mud shine and a rainbow appeared over the bowl.

We asked what it was — she laughed: a healing salve for skinned knees.

“What did you see?” I asked you that night, my faced wedged between the wall and the top bunk.

“I don’t know,” you answered.

“What do you think you saw?”

“I don’t know. A rainbow?”

(Posting rewrit bits from my ‘script, Metaxu, a book-length prose poem about my adopted sister)

I know the plastic flower aisle is not the zero-point field in the space-time continuum, where the someone who has died and is on my mind might survive. But I wish a magical incantation, uttered here where we once joined hands and twirled, heads flung back, will take me back, back through a portal to watch her unpacking the box she brought with her from the other home containing two books — The Stories of the Saints and The Big Circus Book — striped pedal pushers, a red plaid jumper, and two pair of white ankle socks. Back to the bottom bunk of our new bunk bed, where I sat with my knees next to hers, as she pointed to and named all the children in her Kindergarten class photo. To our first dinner as sisters: Spaghetti-Os and apple sauce at the same kitchen table where, hours earlier, Ma sealed the deal with the social worker. To the back seat of Dad’s lime-green Rambler after dinner, where we sat next to each other for a trip to the store before Target, to buy her new clothes and shoes and two bottles of Tabu perfume, one for me, one for her.

With the airport in front and a prairie behind, the store seemed a remote outpost, harboring secrets no one could know.

Back at home we sat next to each other on the edge of the bathtub watching Dad take his dentures out.

“I got teet’ like the stars,” he said to his reflection, in the mirror hanging from the dusty wire on the rusty nail above the sink. “They come out at night!”

Ma tucked us in while it was still light out, and I stretched my legs out between the clean sheets of the top bunk, and looked out the half-open blinds at the roof of the house across the alley, glowing mottled red-violet in the fading sunset, and smiled: I was finally a big sister.

I rolled over and wedged my face between the wall and the mattress and said to her: “Let’s knock on the wall until we fall asleep — I’ll knock first, then you, until you fall asleep.” We knocked until one of us fell asleep.

Pausing before Housewares I wonder: Is every separation a link? Who said all obstacles point the way through?

I love someone who has died. By now you probably know that the someone I love is you.

You were dead three days before I knew.

(I’ll be posting newly rewrit bits from my ‘script, Metaxu, that some of you have seen before; it’s a book-length prose poem about my adopted sister)

I was sitting in a plastic lawn chair between Ma and Grandma, staring out past the oak tree and the three evergreens, waiting for my first glimpse of her. When her blunt black bangs came into view, bobbing above the front yard hedge, the fence, I raced up the path, opened the gate, and embraced her, as if finally reunited with her from wherever little sisters are delivered to eagerly anticipating big sisters.

“Play nice now,” Ma said, as she and the social worker went upstairs to seal the deal at the kitchen table.

We ran between wet bed sheets hanging on the line. We took turns pulling each other in the red wagon across the grass. We plucked ladybugs off the wide, shiny leaves of the small tree next to the fence, and bade them fly away. We played “Lady of Fatima” with towels on our heads. Then Grandma called us in for ice cream — Neapolitan — in two Blue Willow bowls, in a crescent of sunlight on the bottom step of the long porch stairs. I taught her to write her name with the American Airlines pen I’d won in a classroom bingo game that day, the last day of second grade.

“She’s Mexican-Indian,” I overheard the social worker say upstairs in the kitchen. “Mother was Menominee tribe. Wisconsin. Died from drinking. Not sure about the father.”

“I swear I saw her face in the paper about a year ago,” I heard Ma say. “Five children on the West Side left alone, no food or water. What kind of a mother lets a child die?”

I wonder, pausing in the scent-trail of Tabu perfume: What kind of a big sister lets a little sister die? Are there mistakes too monstrous for remorse? We may have been sisters of different mothers, but the link remains those mothers, strangers to each other. Even the mothers who give us life are strangers.

After the ice cream we jumped rope up the path to the gate and back, and she taught me a song she’d learned from her big sister in the other home:

                                                           
On a mountain stands a lady
Who she is I do not know
All she wants is gold and silver
And the finest gentlemen

Someone who has died is on my mind. Can you guess who?

(Hi all … I’m late as usual. I’ll be posting newly rewrit bits from my ‘script, Metaxu, that some of you have seen before; it’s a book-length prose poem about my adopted sister)

Chapter 1) Someone who has died is on my mind

I’m at the Target across from the airport, heading to Housewares to buy a hamper. I’m in Chicago for a bridal shower, and someone who has died is on my mind.

There’s a smell of plastic and the sweet, cloying perfume of the salesclerk walking ahead of me down the plastic flower aisle to Housewares. I recognize the perfume: it’s Tabu — jasmine, oakmoss, patchouli — because Ma bought two bottles of Tabu on the first Friday of June 1968, the last day of second grade, the first day of summer vacation, in the store that was here before Target.

I’m wondering if following the scent-trail down the plastic flower aisle will lead me to the zero-point field in the space-time continuum where the someone who has died and is on my mind might now reside.

She was the someone for whom Ma bought the other bottle of Tabu on the first Friday of June, 1968, in the store that was here before Target.

I decide to abandon the search for the hamper and instead search for her, even though I know I will never find her here, here in the plastic flower aisle where we once joined hands and twirled, heads flung back, so that the colors of the flowers spun, here where the store before this store once existed. I know I will not find her anywhere. Her spirit is not lingering in Housewares, waiting for me to find her. And I know that twirling until we were dizzy did not create a zero-point field in the space-time continuum that bridges this store with the one before.

I know I will never bring a world of being back. Never know in which book, and upon what page, the magical incantation that brings a world of being back might be written.

But I’m wondering if my life with her is truly over, and whether I still have something of her, in some drawer somewhere: some small object, some doll or teddy bear, gumball machine ring, birthday card or letter, or maybe even the little bottle of Tabu, shaped like a violin, that Ma bought for her, the twin of the one she bought for me?

How likely is it that I might find some true living proof of the day she arrived? She didn’t arrive the way I’d fantasized — via the dream-vessel that sails the sky bearing little girls to fated destinations, to waiting sisters, loving mothers and fathers — but rather a grey station wagon with a dented fender driven by a blonde, broad-faced social worker.

(like every year, mainly because I’m unprepared . . . )

April is a mood
A mope
A moo

It’s the fucking moo

The cruelest of the most cruel months month

Stirring mixing clutching breeding bleeding branches also breeding and more breeding always more branches clutching and breeding

Breeding tubers

Fucking lilacs
Fucking breeding tubers lilacs and snow and dead rain
And mopeds

Cruel mopeds

Fucking cruel mopeds neither living nor dead

How about drowning?
How about some Earth feeding on the drowning?
Some sweaty faces in the stony places shouting and crying and we who were living are now dying?

And forgetful fucking and dead breeding and fucking us dry in ugly gray snow  and Death undoing
with cruel its unstoppered unguents your strange synthetic perfumes   troubled confused and drowning
in odours fattening and flung into the  dancery burning foaming forming more Earth and more roots and                                

more fucking and lilacs

                                    and dead rain

Don’t forget the fucking dead rain

Even though it’s better than the fucking snow and wind the cold brutal wind that always made my eye makeup
run before I discovered fucking waterproof mascara

All of us fucking our roots breeding more fucking roots keeping us up with dead feelings and life stirring the withered stumps and canals and gashouses the whores morons and idiots a welcome indifference to whining mandolins           fucking my humble people the beneficent spiders fucking the lean solicitors and everything fucking the life out of everything so just fuckest me the fuck out hurry up please its time

There is nothing I want from you,
lighthouse of bottlefly eye.
I never sought a port.
Temporal and lost, made thin by wandering,
I scored no corporeal songs.
So do not confound me, lighthouse.
Lead someone else to return.

Absent a body, what makes a grave?
Not bright birdsong, not lithe air,
not sustenance by chalice,
or modest beds at bright perimeters.
Path me, lighthouse, but not by stricken lantern.
Instead, by concrete petrichor — no shore allowed —

I will follow your noisy drops and hollows,
the signposts in your coils, the vibrance of your wires,
the singing soundlessness that trawls
the place that raised me to a dirge.
So do not confound me, lighthouse.
I never sought a port,
no guesting back, no catwalk.
Lead someone else to return.

Who doesn’t love a dinner-and-a-couch friend?

Like, you have dinner and just sit on the couch

discussing orange-peel theory.

Or not.

Maybe you just sit on the couch.

That might be hard for me.

I can talk for hours.

Like, about how the Sámi people

of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia

have hundreds of words for snow, and the British people,

of Britain,

have hundreds of words for “drunk.”

They just add “ed” to any noun,

the weirdest ones being:

gazeboed, carparked, oreganoed.

I think I could invent some weirder ones.

I might have to use a hypen, tho.

Like “criminally-infanted” — as in

“Wow, I got criminally-infanted with my

dinner-and-a-couch friend last night.”

Or, “I am way erinaciously-spiled right now!”

Doesn’t have to be limited to drinking, either.

Like, ” I went to the salon and got mob-wife-aesthesized.”

Or, “She Scouse-preposition-W’ed me in the chat.”

Or, “I went to Ikea and bookshelf-wealthed before I 75-cozy-journeyed.”

Abbreviations might work better, tho.

Like, “I got MWAed at the salon.”

Or, “She SPWed me in the chat.”

Or, “I went to Ikea and BWed before I 75-CJed.”

Pretty soon, all communications would just be abbreviations.

Like, “PS, all CMNs WJB ABs.”

But that feels like TMW (“too much work”).

So who am I?
If I am only slightly sad — really more like “emoticon-sad” —
and brandishing an alchemical retort as I enter my serious period,
and if I am

            layered,         

            ineffable,

            vexing,       

merely the shadow of moving leaves on a brick chimney five floors up,
with a falcon on my left wrist and a missal in my right hand,
but don’t know who I am,
am I the integrity of victims daylighting near the equipment?
the eggshell colors of the ‘90’s multiplying exponentially toward tonal dissonance?

And if I inherit space but borrow time,
and it’s Christmas day on the radio and I stain your blouse with my fake
cherry cheesecake,
and there goes my adrenal distraction again,
and I am dwelling in my motherboard mementoes and dead-zone fold-ins like a good homo sapien,
applying grout between three big sensory bluffs with my “War Is Hell” in safe mode,
then who I am is a socialist uncle
adorned with chunky academic advisor jewelry,
who just found out that the word for “small penis” is “cookie”
in Hungarian,
and the word “Hungarian” is Hungarian for
“violent grapefruit eater.”

— for Benjamin Bourlier

Failed at form
Failed at normal

Failed at cultivating an extremely chewy porpoise aroma

Failed to create an online owl persona

Failed at becoming a whore of something
Failed at ironing while rappelling

Failed at rage
Failed at silence
Failed at sacrificing the orifice to a novice

Failed at spillage blinking
Failed at interactive retail think-tanking

Failed at maggot inventory
Failed at weekly overseas tree surgery
Failed to defend the Host against Christianity

Failed at stopping drinking
Failed at starting drinking
Failed at being all by desiring to be nothing
Failed, and failing, at being nothing (and, also: something)

Failed at texting STOP to opt out
Failed at sleeping outside in the buff

Failed at being born to preposterous ignorance
Failed at being heard hollering for solace
Failed at affairs I should’ve kept Masonic
Failed to recall the ROY G. BIV mnemonic

Failed at becoming the sublimated vapors of what had been solid a moment prior
Failed at becoming Richard Pryor

Failed at manufacturing nationalism
Failed at fighting immigration legislation

Failed at feeding the local “water sausages” (a.k.a. otters)
Failed at Mexican-ish fine dining with otters
Failed to determine whether this dining is just more irredeemable torment for otters

Failed the rhizome, the arborescent
Failed the criminal and the innocent

Failed to make the tacit speak in the place of saying
Failed to be the peace that surpasseth understanding

Failed to cancel my appointment for acupuncture
Failed to make full-time tenured professor

Failed to finish The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

Failed rain, and all the weathers

Failed law
Failed awe

Failed despair
Failed air

            — for Elisabeth Workman, after her “Occult Clouds Rhyme In My Galactic Mom”

(This is an older poem — full disclosure — but wanted to post *something* bc no time to write past few days)

1

A raptor in descent
sugars the sea change to poison

to stay alive in ardent gardens
pomped with bones and teeth.

2

Mood pages in a breeze moult
always in roam-time.

The bowl before the sensorium,
the glyphs before the lore

of mutant maws declared American:
the lost is cause; I in my bog.

3

But here with hands and no utensils,
the caveat is rats disguised as dogs.

In the beginning there was fennel, and laments,
a song about psychopomps.

In the hedge of what to wear tonight
is quelled Solange and Baubo.

4

I caul
I tangle

And when I angle
and you don’t answer

I slide my sequins down
ahead of sun.

5

In this egg skin of portals,
any idea will do:

benefits of blue glass,
fungi in the chant,

a science finale in which the living lie
dying of sun-bleached stones.

6

Nothing personal, but
my Orc is confused by your torpors

across the shifting dunes.
Let this incomprehensible flux eviscerate

earthly magnetism and chance,
the green bed of mid-morning.

7

You have no body yet are ready to secrete
the edge of banished feeling.

There is no elephant spraying
your lady silently with soap.

There is no freedom,
courtesy of mastodons in the grotto.

8

Again, don’t worry, everything’s under control.
In the short film I showed,

the metaxu of John the Baptist
was too profile, too cameo.

But the swan queen was my mother,
whom I thought I knew.

9

In the city of the sun,
glittering void vestments

wrote poems releasing the zoo
from resistance.

The limits of this freak way
formed figurines, strange nourishments.

10

A new sense in the form of glass
truffles distillations of my paralysis.

Forever young,
my already hemorrhaging heart

flings eyeballs
toward your cliff face.

11

For sport, I doubted your tannenbaum,
but gathered your spalled appellations

and released them to the sea.
Ugly feelings sometimes

go all the way back
to the first extension cord.

12

I am in a sense bionic
when I tap a minor succulence

to spray its ovum skyward;
its fishy viscera

is the sovereign flower
of a quivering metallic disk.

13

The delivery girl for Tony’s Pizza
put her finger in my thong.

So come musk, come ox,
come eon of sylvan aerie,

abject sentience by a vexed river,
more favorable lustrations.