Robin Morgan

You never asked to be a master and God knows (if She would only say so) that I never asked to be a slave. Position papers, grocery lists rain down like ticker-tape on my long-march procession past where you cheer me on, waving from the wistful side of—let's admit it— barricades. You're tired of living without any joy. You think you're going crazy. You need my friendship. You're afraid to demand the right to be afraid. You're trying very hard. I know that, and you can't imagine how I wish it were enough. I need to sleep. I never asked for this; you never asked. Our twenty-five inch son whimpers in the night and my breasts hurt until I wake myself and feed him. He never asked for anything at all. We all want just to be a little happy. Listen, I see an older me, alone in some room, busy on the telephone dialing all my terrible truths. This thing has never let me live as we both know I might have; yet I see this thing can cut me down on some street or podium tomorrow— or just let me live, alone. Our child looks back and forth from your face into mine, and laughs. You worry about us, wondering if something within us has broken. You hold my body as if it were glass that will cut you. I'd stop this if I could, believe me, my beloved. I'm dying of bitterness. I love your forehead. Did I ever tell you that?

Not having spoken for years now, I know you claim exile from my consciousness. Yet I wear mourning whole nights through for that embrace that warmed my ignorant lust even past intimacies you had dreamed. I played your daughter-husband, lover-son, to earn both Abraham and Ishmael's guilt for your indulgence, and in time, reproach. Who sent us to that wilderness we both now know, although I blamed you for that house of women too many years. But Time is a waiting woman, not some old man with a stupid beard, and when I finally met my father I found him arrogant and dull, a formican liar with an Austrian accent. Well, we meet the phantom that we long for in the end, and getting there is half the grief. Meanwhile, my theories rearrange themselves like sand before this woman whose flaccid breasts sway with her stumblings, whose diamonds still thaw pity from my eyes. You're older than I thought. But so am I, and grateful that we've come to this: a ragged truce, an affirmation in me tht your strength, your pushiness, your sharp love, your embroidery of lies—all, all were survival tools, as when, during our personal diaspora, you stood in some far country blocks away, burning poems I no longer sent you like Yahrzeit candles in my name, unsure of me at last who sought a birthright elsewhere, beyond the oasis of your curse, even beyond that last mirage, your blessing. Mother, in ways neither of us can ever understand, I have come home.

Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infrared light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can’t see it. We see by reflection. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting a drunkard’s part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvases spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — especially when one’s body is not al dente anymore. Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I’ve always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don’t do balance. Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I’ve lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within.

Survival is the final offer that arrives at the eleventh hour just when pain to the tenth power would kill you with another ninth degree. By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note; you wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal. But life whispers through your sixth sense of what might await you in some fifth dimension where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter. Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day. You know better, but with no second thought, risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight— as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.