Susan Griffin

I would not have gotten in this boat with you. I would not except where else was there at the dock’s end to go? The water was cold. I would not have let you row the boat. I could see what kind of man you were. I would not but who was there to choose between you and me? I would not have let you throw away the oars. I knew what would happen next, except what else was there to do, struggle in a boat with a leak over cold water?

1 The perfect mother lets the cat sleep on her head. The children laugh. Where is she? She is not carefully ironing the starched ruffles of a Sunday dress. What does she say? She does not speak. Her head is under the cat and like the cat, she sleeps. 2 But her children are in a marsh! Bogged, they have gone wild. Yet, no one should worry. See, they are there, in a sunny kitchen. They drink cups of soup and wipe their faces with yellow napkins. What does it matter if they are hatching plots, if in their waking dreams the poor cat is trapped its hair standing on end? 3 Where shall we go? We ask the perfect mother. What do you want of us? She is no where to be found. Not in the cookie jar we have broken to bits not under the shiny kitchen floor not on our lips. Here we are transfixed, mourning the perfect mother, and she is caught in the trapped cat of her children’s dreams.

For Barbara Green Happiness. I am not used to this. (There is always something wrong.) Look at it the bright early tree. (I am trying to find out how you fell.) The leaves have already turned. (I want you to see this, how they glow outside the glass.) Morning light strikes differently. For so many years I hardly had time to know such moments. They struck me with such intensity I would have said battered me open. I never understood they were mine. I was panicked. Unhappiness caught up with me all the time. Did you know the speed of light never alters even when you go faster it will be still that much faster than you? (I am thinking that in your fall something momentous occurred.) What I see as beautiful I want you to see too. Next door, the workmen are hammering. Very soon we’ll go to lunch. For some reason this moves me to tears. How life is. (One does not have to explain what occurs. One only need say it has meaning.) Years ago, when I was young I traveled to Italy, took in the great sights. I was in awe, yet I did not understand seeing Masaccio’s frescoes fading like shadows into the walls, this would be the only time nor that I would never forget. Those muted shades are still with me, as possession and longing, and the view too of the square before that church the air, newly spring, that day, all of it. Life, I have finally begun to realize, is real. (All this time you recover from falling will sink indelibly into mind.) The leaves may fall before you are able to see them. Science has recently learned the line of existence is soft and stretches out like a field wind and light shaping the grass energy of sight giving consciousness force. In the meantime we live out our lives. (This morning we talked for so long everything became lucid. How can I say what I see?) At each turning perfection eludes me. One moment is not like another. Last spring the house next door caught fire. There was the smell of gas. We thought both houses would go. I vanished up the hill, went to the house of a friend where we listened for flames and to that aria from Italian opera, was it the one of love, or jealousy, or grief? My house was untouched. Now the one next door is painted, fixed. In place of perfection, the empty hands I turned out to the world are filled. With what? A letter half written, the notes I make on this page, this new feeling about my shoulders of age, that sad child’s story you told me this morning, the workmen’s tools sounding and stopping. What? As time moves through me, does it also move through you? I keep remembering what you said, ways you have of seeing (and that light must have curved with you fall.) This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world. 1986

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself. Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath. Every hair has life and standing, as you do, swaying from one foot to the other all the forest stands with you. Each minute sound, one after another, is distinct in your ear. Here in the blur of mixed sensations, you can feel the crisp outline of being, particulate. Great as you are, huge as you are and growling like the deepest drum, the continual vibration that makes music what it is, not some light stone skipped on the surface of things, you travel below sounding the depths where only the dauntless go. Be like the bear and do not forget how you rounded your massive shape over the just ripened berry which burst in your mouth that moment how you rolled in the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling with your sensate skin, how you shut your eyes and swam far and farther still, starlight shaping itself to your body, starship rocking the grand, slow waves under the white trees, in the snowy night.

1 I keep placing my hands over my face, the fingertips just resting on the place where I feel my eyebrows and the fine end of a bone. My eyes are covered with the blood of my hands, my palms hold my jaws. I do this at dinner. My daughter asks Are you all right? and by a common miracle when I smile she knows I am. 2 I ask her what she will do after we eat. Sleep she tells me. But I will clean the deer skull, wash it. 3 You gave me this skull in the woods told me to bring it clean and tell the story I had told you before, about how the deer had come to me, and I said I would. 4 And I put this skull on an old newspaper, pulled the lower part of the jaws free, touched it first carefully, as if it would fall apart in my hands, the bone paper- thin, and then I saw I could scrub, so brushed the surface with steel and my fingers and more and more this surface became familiar to me. 5 I wanted to see the lines of it what it would be if it had been polished by the wind, the water, and my hands, these agents making the skull more itself. Slowly I was not afraid at all and my fingers went into the deepest holes of this thing, not afraid for myself or it, feeling suddenly as if cleaning this small fragment of earth away from the crevices inside was like loving. 6 But it was when I touched the place where the eyes were that I knew this was the shell of the deer that had lived here, this was this deer and not this deer, her home and now empty of her, but not empty of her, I knew also, not empty of her, as my hands trembled. 7 And in that instant remembered you had been in that body of that deer dying, what does it feel like to be a deer dying, the death consumes you like birth, you are nowhere else but in the center. 8 Remembering those gentle deer that watched me as I wept, or the deer that leapt as if out of my mind, when I saw speaking there in that green place the authority of the heart and the deer of the woods where my feet stood, stared at me until I whispered to her and cried at her presence. 9 And when I cleaned the skull I washed myself and sat my body half out of the water and put my hands again over my face, my fingers edging the bone over my eyes, and I thought how good this feels and this is a gesture you make. 10 Tell this story of the deer’s skull you asked quietly and so I came in my own time to put these words carefully here slowly listing each motion on this thin paper as fragile and as tough as knowledge. 1978

The bad mother wakes from dreams of imperfection trying to be perfection. All night she’s engineered a train too heavy with supplies to the interior. She fails. The child she loves has taken on bad habits, cigarettes maybe even drugs. She recognizes lies.You don’t fool me