And Now She Has Disappeared in Water

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.