Diane Wakoski

Falling in love with a mustache is like saying you can fall in love with the way a man polishes his shoes which, of course, is one of the things that turns on my tuned-up engine those trim buckled boots (I feel like an advertisement for men’s fashions when I think of your ankles) Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face and I find myself a bad moralist, a failing aesthetician, a sad poet, wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles that make a man’s body have so much substance, that makes a woman lean and yearn in that direction that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day in your presence the pool of wax under a burning candle the foam from a waterfall You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson She is the rain, waits in it for you, finds blood spotting her legs from the long ride.

The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, as if you were walking on the beach and found a diamond as big as a shoe; as if you had just built a wooden table and the smell of sawdust was in the air, your hands dry and woody; as if you had eluded the man in the dark hat who had been following you all week; the relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, playing the chords of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to, when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters and clean shining Republican middle-class hair walked into carpeted houses and left me alone with bare floors and a few books I want to thank my mother for working every day in a drab office in garages and water companies cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40 to lose weight, her heavy body writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers alone, with no man to look at her face, her body, her prematurely white hair in love I want to thank my mother for working and always paying for my piano lessons before she paid the Bank of America loan or bought the groceries or had our old rattling Ford repaired. I was a quiet child, afraid of walking into a store alone, afraid of the water, the sun, the dirty weeds in back yards, afraid of my mother’s bad breath, and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home, knowing he would leave again; afraid of not having any money, afraid of my clumsy body, that I knew no one would ever love But I played my way on the old upright piano obtained for $10, played my way through fear, through ugliness, through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases, and a desire to love a loveless world. I played my way through an ugly face and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights, mornings even, empty as a rusty coffee can, played my way through the rustles of spring and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California, I played my way through an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet and a bed she slept on only one side of, never wrinkling an inch of the other side, waiting, waiting, I played my way through honors in school, the only place I could talk the classroom, or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always singing the most for my talents, as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering her house and was now searching every ivory case of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black ridges and around smooth rocks, wondering where I had lost my bloody organs, or my mouth which sometimes opened like a California poppy, wide and with contrasts beautiful in sweeping fields, entirely closed morning and night, I played my way from age to age, but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely, wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling leaves of orange trees, wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me, who would be there every night to put his large strong hand over my shoulder, whose hips I would wake up against in the morning, whose mustaches might brush a face asleep, dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart and Schubert without demanding that life suck everything out of you each day, without demanding the emptiness of a timid little life. I want to thank my mother for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning when I practiced my lessons and for making sure I had a piano to lay my school books down on, every afternoon. I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, will get lost, slide away, into the terribly empty cavern of me if I ever open it all the way up again. Love is a man with a mustache gently holding me every night, always being there when I need to touch him; he could not know the painfully loud music from the past that his loving stops from pounding, banging, battering through my brain, which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I am alone; he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me, liking the sound of my lesson this week, telling me, confirming what my teacher says, that I have a gift for the piano few of her other pupils had. When I touch the man I love, I want to thank my mother for giving me piano lessons all those years, keeping the memory of Beethoven, a deaf tortured man, in mind; of the beauty that can come from even an ugly past.

My sister in her well-tailored silk blouse hands me the photo of my father in naval uniform and white hat. I say, “Oh, this is the one which Mama used to have on her dresser.” My sister controls her face and furtively looks at my mother, a sad rag bag of a woman, lumpy and sagging everywhere, like a mattress at the Salvation Army, though with no holes or tears, and says, “No.” I look again, and see that my father is wearing a wedding ring, which he never did when he lived with my mother. And that there is a legend on it, “To my dearest wife, Love Chief” And I realize the photo must have belonged to his second wife, whom he left our mother to marry. My mother says, with her face as still as the whole unpopulated part of the state of North Dakota, “May I see it too?” She looks at it. I look at my tailored sister and my own blue-jeaned self. Have we wanted to hurt our mother, sharing these pictures on this, one of the few days I ever visit or spend with family? For her face is curiously haunted, not now with her usual viperish bitterness, but with something so deep it could not be spoken. I turn away and say I must go on, as I have a dinner engagement with friends. But I drive all the way to Pasadena from Whittier, thinking of my mother’s face; how I could never love her; how my father could not love her either. Yet knowing I have inherited the rag-bag body, stony face with bulldog jaws. I drive, thinking of that face. Jeffers’ California Medea who inspired me to poetry. I killed my children, but there as I am changing lanes on the freeway, necessarily glancing in the rearview mirror, I see the face, not even a ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved’s wallet. How I hate my destiny.

I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by, leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface. Come in, you said, inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the old songs that line your hands, inside eyes that change like a snowflake every second, inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel, inside the whiskers of a cat, inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you grind the pigments with your teeth, painting with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth. You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside the veins where my small feet touch bottom. You must reach inside and pull me like a silver bullet from your arm.

All fathers in Western civilization must have a military origin. The ruler, governor, yes, he is was the general at one time or other. And George Washington won the hearts of his country—the rough military man with awkward sincere drawing-room manners. My father; have you ever heard me speak of him? I seldom do. But I had a father, and he had military origins—or my origins from him are military, militant. That is, I remember him only in uniform. But of the navy, 30 years a chief petty officer, always away from home. It is rough/hard for me to speak now. I'm not used to talking about him. Not used to naming his objects/ objects that never surrounded me. A woodpecker with fresh bloody crest knocks at my mouth. Father, for the first time I say your name. Name rolled in thick Polish parchment scrolls, name of Roman candle drippings when I sit at my table alone, each night, name of naval uniforms and name of telegrams, name of coming home from your aircraft carrier, name of shiny shoes. name of Hawaiian dolls, name of mess spoons, name of greasy machinery, and name of stencilled names. Is it your blood I carry in a test tube, my arm, to let fall, crack, and spill on the sidewalk in front of the men I know, I love, I know, and want? So you left my house when I was under two. being replaced by other machinery (my sister), and I didn’t believe you left me. This scene: the trunk yielding treasures of a green fountain pen, heart shaped mirror, amber beads, old letters with brown ink, and the gopher snake stretched across the palm tree in the front yard with woody trunk like monkey skins, and a sunset through the skinny persimmon trees. You came walking, not even a telegram or post card from Tahiti. Love, love, through my heart like ink in the thickest nibbed pen, black and flowing into words You came, to me, and I at least six. Six doilies of lace, six battleship cannon, six old beerbottles, six thick steaks, six love letters, six clocks running backwards, six watermelons, and six baby teeth, a six cornered hat on six men's heads, six lovers at once or one lover at sixes and sevens; how I confuse all this with my dream walking the tightrope bridge with gold knots over the mouth of an anemone/tissue spiral lips and holding on so that the ropes burned as if my wrists had been tied If George Washington had not been the Father of my Country it is doubtful that I would ever have found a father. Father in my mouth, on my lips, in my tongue, out of all my womanly fire, Father I have left in my steel filing cabinet as a name on my birth certificate, Father I have left in the teeth pulled out at dentists’ offices and thrown into their garbage cans, Father living in my wide cheekbones and short feet, Father in my Polish tantrums and my American speech, Father, not a holy name, not a name I cherish but the name I bear, the name that makes me one of a kind in any phone book because you changed it, and nobody but us has it, Father who makes me dream in the dead of night of the falling cherry blossoms, Father who makes me know all men will leave me if I love them, Father who made me a maverick, a writer, a namer, name/father, sun/father, moon/father, bloody mars/father, other children said, “My father is a doctor,” or “My father gave me this camera,” or “My father took me to the movies,” or “My father and I went swimming,” but my father is coming in a letter once a month for a while, and my father sometimes came in a telegram but mostly my father came to me in sleep, my father because I dreamed in one night that I dug through the ash heap in back of the pepper tree and found a diamond shaped like a dog, and my father called the dog and it came leaping over to him and he walked away out of the yard down the road with the dog jumping and yipping at his heels, my father was not in the telephone book in my city; my father was not sleeping with my mother at home; my father did not care if I studied the piano; my father did not care what I did; and I thought my father was handsome and I loved him and I wondered why he left me alone so much, so many years in fact, but my father made me what I am, a lonely woman, without a purpose, just as I was a lonely child without any father. I walked with words, words, and names, names. Father was not one of my words. Father was not one of my names. But now I say, “George, you have become my father, in his 20th century naval uniform. George Washington, I need your love; George, I want to call you Father, Father, my Father,” Father of my country, that is, me. And I say the name to chant it. To sing it. To lace it around me like weaving cloth. Like a happy child on that shining afternoon in the palmtree sunset with her mother’s trunk yielding treasures, I cry and cry, Father, Father, Father, have you really come home?

Foreword to “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” This poem is more properly a “dance poem” than a song or chant because the element of repetition is created by movements of language rather than duplicating words and sounds. However, it is in the spirit of ritual recitation that I wrote it/ a performance to drive away bad spirits perhaps. The story behind the poem is this: a man and woman who have been living together for some time separate. Part of the pain of separation involves possessions which they had shared. They both angrily believe they should have what they want. She asks for some possession and he denies her the right to it. She replies that she gave him money for a possession which he has and therefore should have what she wants now. He replies that she has forgotten that for the number of years they lived together he never charged her rent and if he had she would now owe him $7,000. She is appalled that he equates their history with a sum of money. She is even more furious to realize that this sum of money represents the entire rent on the apartment and implies that he should not have paid anything at all. She is furious. She kills him mentally. Once and for all she decides she is well rid of this man and that she shouldn’t feel sad at their parting. She decides to prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life. With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together. for my motorcycle betrayer God damn it, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man; you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often, you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women, women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might ever be put in the same category with them; you’ve left me alone so often that I might as well have been a homesteader in Alaska these past years; and you’ve left me, thrown me out of your life often enough that I might as well be a newspaper, differently discarded each day. Now you’re gone for good and I don’t know why but your leaving actually made me as miserable as an earthworm with no earth, but now I’ve crawled out of the ground where you stomped me and I gradually stand taller and taller each day. I have learned to sing new songs, and as I sing, I’m going to dance on your grave because you are dead dead dead under the earth with the rest of the shit, I’m going to plant deadly nightshade on your grassy mound and make sure a hemlock tree starts growing there. Henbane is too good for you, but I’ll let a bit grow there for good measure because we want to dance, we want to sing, we want to throw this old man to the wolves, but they are too beautiful for him, singing in harmony with each other. So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. “Is this an angry statement?” “No, it is a statement of joy.” “Will the sun shine again?” "Yes, yes, yes,” because I’m going to dance dance dance Duncan’s measure, and Pindar’s tune, Lorca’s cadence, and Creeley’s hum, Stevens’ sirens and Williams’ little Morris dance, oh, the poets will call the tune, and I will dance, dance, dance on your grave, grave, grave, because you’re a sonofabitch, a sonofabitch, and you tried to do me in, but you cant cant cant. You were a liar in a way that only I know: You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen. You were mean to me, and I’ve survived, God damn you, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man, I’m going to learn every traditional dance, every measure, and dance dance dance on your grave one step for every time you done me wrong.

Can these movements which move themselves be the substance of my attraction? Where does this thin green silk come from that covers my body? Surely any woman wearing such fabrics would move her body just to feel them touching every part of her. Yet most of the women frown, or look away, or laugh stiffly. They are afraid of these materials and these movements in some way. The psychologists would say they are afraid of themselves, somehow. Perhaps awakening too much desire— that their men could never satisfy? So they keep themselves laced and buttoned and made up in hopes that the framework will keep them stiff enough not to feel the whole register. In hopes that they will not have to experience that unquenchable desire for rhythm and contact. If a snake glided across this floor most of them would faint or shrink away. Yet that movement could be their own. That smooth movement frightens them— awakening ancestors and relatives to the tips of the arms and toes. So my bare feet and my thin green silks my bells and finger cymbals offend them—frighten their old-young bodies. While the men simper and leer— glad for the vicarious experience and exercise. They do not realize how I scorn them; or how I dance for their frightened, unawakened, sweet women.

For Marilyn who died in January april 1 found on our driveway like a feather dropped by a crow 8 of spades, a playing card / we played Crazy Eights, slapping cards or holding them as if they were birds that might fly out of our hands decades ago, in our childhood like the translucent, whirling image I imagine, prismatic and phosphorescent — a murmuration of starlings swooping and iridescent but it dissolved onto a gray wall, undecorated / glimpses of us wearing our velvet Sunday best dresses, yours usually crimson, mine blue we never had nice shoes. Now you have returned to water thanks to the Neptune Society spreading your ashes over the Pacific april 2 Ceylon tea — that amber cup from Sri Lanka, popularly known here, before Americans became tea drinkers, as Orange Pekoe; our mother hated so many things — tea was rattlesnake venom to her I embraced it  /// What did you drink, Marilyn? I saw you only with a Coke or a glass of wine in your hand? Our mother whom you felt damaged you / your life       spirals, the twisting iridescent birds fly at me now                       scintillating, spinning I blink (Our mother drank many cups of coffee with cream a day.) Our sad mother I blink and tell it to go back to our childhood of muddy little shoes from walking in the spider-filled orange groves. There, the damaging must have Begun  / she loving me so much more than you. I wish there had been more stories like the one about the origin of her disliking tea at 17, she went to celebrate being made teacher of the one-room school she had attended and graduated from at her retiring teacher’s home, she was served for the first time — tea, she being from a German coffee-drinking family. Our mother hated it but politely choked it down. Would never again touch a drop of the poisonous beverage. From that story, we learned that our mother ritualized hating something — expected us to admire her for it. I took that negative pattern and spun it until I could have cloth enough for an eloquent garment. Perhaps the lesson simply made you feel yourself            helpless         ragged                      torn I never saw you that way, Marilyn, though perhaps incomplete. I pour a cup of Assam. Take a sip, let it wash through my mouth, down my age-damaged throat, think of you sitting with me in your Southern California backyard one May morning next to the camellia bush. I, as always with a cup of tea in my hand. You, smoking. I left all my family — you were part of it — left California and reinvented myself, even mythologized myself as a tan “California Girl.” You did not become an artist or a poet. I suppose that’s why you felt damaged. If only you knew how much imagination and sacrifice it took for me to get away. So many small things can save us from the damage you talked of. For me, drinking that first cup of Orange Pekoe and making tea my drink      risking rattlesnake poison with every steaming cup, a tiny emblem of a rebellion I still try to practice. You left us so quickly, Marilyn, and without any warning this January, your house full of cancelled aspirations — glass bowls, and cylinders, and huge globes filled with sea scallop shells you combed the California seashores to find, collecting these empty shells, washed free of their biological life.                                 Out of the ocean: we two different daughters of a sailor. april 3 The spinning                      the scissors               the measuring and thus our lives are given out from the heavens, with unfair allotments and varied, unaccountable fates, born when we are, and to whom you would have prevailed in an age where women had to spin, weave the material, cut it into britches and dresses, undergarments and sheets, sew and keep clean, warm, and comfortable a household full or a castle full / men children, hired hands, maidservants — you would have done it so well. But you would have died young in such a world — diabetes, asthma, chronic bronchial infections even in the 21st century where you lived to be 76       a world where all your skills were plied as substitute for being an artist. When I asked you a year ago, not knowing that you would die this January, what you would most like to have, if money were not the object — since clearly all your measuring, cutting, and sewing had been for economical reasons, not art — you thought for a bit, raising your chin. “A swimming pool in my backyard. One I could step into every morning, swim, float — maybe in the afternoon I’d go for a dip. Many evenings, I think,” she said to me.                     Longing for some ocean? In our portrait, if someone paints it, she will be sitting in a scallop shell, her many jars of seashells behind her head. I will be invisible, except for the spinning murmuration of birds that radiates past me. They read at her funeral, a poem from her journal about lying on the beach, the sand embracing her. How much she loved it / felt safe, felt released. Oh, Marilyn, all those seashells emptied of their living fleshy occupants. (the ugly parts that die and rot) now glorious empty rooms in which to live an imaginary life, to decorate, to create beauty, spaces to live a different life. What is left but your desires, locked in glass, and an image of you walking your beloved beaches, hands full of seashells, your footprints measured, then quickly filled with the tidal flow. april 4 my spinning, a whirlpool of faceted moving lights Everything is Numbers! down into a vortical glare that replaces my own mind’s desire Everything is Numbers! Everything is Numbers! floating down like the crow’s onyx feather the 8 of spades random card appearing last week over gravel 8 legs on a spider, the arachnid so many people seem to fear, yet I lose track of time, stare into the wall or any space to replace real images with my imaginary ones, some random spider, who spins my fate Crazy Eights, the child card game Marilyn and I played pieces of eight, the dollar of pirate Spain — our childhood in Orange County 8, a vertical infinity sign everything is numbers / your fire opal that Daddy brought to you from India, and our mother paid a jeweler to set it into a ring. You wore the ring more than sixty years. I suppose it was on your finger at death spinning,     spinning to scintillate and iridesce We never had nice shoes. april 5 Easter Sunday. You and I always dyed Easter eggs together, our mother busy at her forty-hour-a-week bookkeeper’s job. I was intrigued with the colors, but they never turned out so bright when coloring the eggs. You, the artist, were interested in the designs to transfer onto the eggs, cartoons, bunnies, chicks. We kept our eggs separated from each other, put them in separate bowls, neither caring for the other’s creation. Still we felt connected, even joyful, on those few holiday projects. Not enough to make us friends. My unwillingness to be like our classmates embarrassed you. You chose invisibility in school, rather than being known as “Diane’s Sister.” That unwillingness to be like others was what made me a poet. So many little things, but that early decision of yours, not to understand why I wanted to be weird, is what made you make so many other small choices, preventing you from becoming an artist. “Look away,” our mother said to us, when there were ugly things confronting us. I could not do that. You blame our mother, yet it was you who decided to look away, even though it meant not seeing the whole world, even if meant you didn’t become an artist. Poverty, of course, was the reason we never had nice shoes. april 6 All numbers have disappeared instead there are mushrooms fungi that has always seemed more artful than tasty Sipping a cup of tea / soothes me as the mushrooms in a veloute sauce never could. I feel stymied / a rider with no horse. I want only to watch the stories unfold / the secret stories about why you chose to marry and have children / why I did not / the stories I try to banish blot out, replace with the diamond dog. A murmuration of iridescent starlings, and the spider of eight, twirling on its silk line, projecting infinity art is made when you subject yourself to the unacceptable, then dredge yourself out, find a mineral replacement: infinity iridescer irised feather scintillater a crystalline body whirls releasing me from the history, the stories it’s so hard to tell. Until recent years, my sister and I either ignored or disliked each other. We fought continuously as children. I have in my wrist a black bump that protrudes near a vein. It’s the point of a pencil that broke off and penetrated my wrist as we struggled for the long yellow weapon. A pencil, the weapon of a writer. But there was no bleeding, no seeming-wound to be dressed. We never told our Mother, both too ashamed of our brutality. I’ve never asked a doctor about it, the pencil lead encapsulated in my wrist. Nor ever spoken of it to anyone. I always wonder that so much must remain a secret? Why we never had nice shoes. april 7 Young Marilyn, Old Marilyn. there are places on this planet where I find it hard to detect any beauty therefore, silence No nice shoes. april 8 there is silence april 9 Drinking a blend of traditional Darjeeling with a touch of Ceylon / this tea takes me back to a Viennese visit, drinking this very tea in the afternoon while my friend, Jonathan, ate their famous Sacher torte. The tea seemed particularly aromatic — “lightly scented with oil of bergamot and a hint of genuine Bourbon vanilla.” Wishing for the moment in the past to reappear. I didn’t know the tea from the Sacher Hotel was as famous as the cake until I found in my Upton Tea catalogue a listing for “Scented Darjeeling” under the heading “Earl Grey Blends” This tea, any cup of tea! Hard to believe. no! Sad to think my Mother almost spat out her first taste of tea. What worldly thing must I touch to bring Marilyn back into my sedate life, my sister Marilyn who died in January? Her hand — I’d like to imagine timidly touching her hand — Marilyn’s hand. Her right hand on which she wore the fire opal ring. In that hand she’d be holding a cigarette. Smoke and fire makes me think of her — not water, though it was that Pacific ocean filled with seashells that she was in touch with. My old hands, not really like hers at all. She had big hands for shaping things, while mine are small,      like birds.