The Siren
Today has been even better. I've almost finished two revisions of poems whose endings have stumped me for well over a year. And all because I have finally stopped depending on other people to solve the problems for me. For six weeks, I've basically felt crippled. My advisor hasn't been responding to my emails looking for feedback on revisions and of new poems I wrote a couple of months ago. In the last week, he has sporadically begun sending comments, now that I have days left to finish and turn in my manuscript and I've been amazed by how unhelpful they are, especially compared to the quality of feedback I was getting from him a couple of months ago.
So a few days ago, a friend of mine had what she calls "real talk" time with me, and basically said that the work I'd been doing in these last several weeks without him was really great and that I should trust that, and this bubble only goes on so much longer anyway. Yesterday and today, I feel like I got there. Trusting my voice. That maybe I know what's right for my poems too. I tried something that's worked before, but this time, I didn't wait for someone else to make the suggestion. I went back to the beginning of my poems, and I looked for the threads that got lost, that dissolved before I made it to the end. And then I picked up some Ruth Stone, some Greg Orr, some Elizabeth Bishop, some Lorna Dee Cervantes, and my Illustrated Dictionary of The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, and I tried to remember the original stories I meant to tell. I opened myself up to other voices who dealt with similar things, and then I tried to remember my voice and my story. And I found it. I found my thread. By the end of it, I'd managed to add not just a few lines to each poem but almost doubled the length of the second poem, and added an extra third to the first. The great thing, too, is that now the second poem, Rope, is in conversation with my title poem, which I'm including below.
I'd always meant to merge Rope (a poem about a girl who witnesses an act of violence at her brother's hands) with the Mayan custom I've read about of scapegoating an old woman. In certain Mayan cultures in Guatemala, it was common practice for a village to choose an old woman once a year to hear the confessions of the town. It was ritualistic: she would receive offerings and hear confessions, and then at the end of it, she would be stoned to death by the town. For the last year, I haven't been able to figure out why Rope wasn't working, but yesterday I realized that I never brought in this other thread. Originally I'd planned to have two locations working in parallel in the poem—the girl witnessing the act of violence and the old woman hearing the confessions, and that's how the poem started originally. But yesterday, in my revision, the mere presence of the siren as my title poem seemed enough license to age the girl as she hears the confessions, thereby making her the scapegoat. And that's the thing—there is literally no one else in the world who could have told me that that's where the poem needed to go. I forgot. And for a year I have been looking to other people for answers.
The Siren
What luxury it is, this being loved,
to know your most egregious trespasses
no longer harm, not really, not enough
to make a faithful lover cast you out,
When first we two were courting, he loved my garden
with its exquisite blossoms that madly surged.
Golden waves of daffodils and poppies:
winking coyly atop their bright green stools.
Others had come when, undulant, the garden
was still a meadow; always the soft men
wound up pillowing the dear poppies’ heads.
But since I gave up singing, I’ve learned to let
the garden go, the past stifled so long as
the flowers keep their silence. And so I wake
each morning to feed this strong, forgiving man,
to feed his ignorance, ensure my glory forever.
Some days I forget myself, standing naked
in the shower as water streams around me,
and I feel the salt air and summer storms
building in my throat, clouds gathering beneath
my skin, droplets forming on my unflown wings,
and I begin to hum. The rain courses
through my lungs, my blood—I forget. I step out
not onto sand but a bathmat and find him there
standing at the sink, razor in hand, shape of ocean
swells etched in blood across his thigh.
He is just a man in love. And you, unknowable
one, you are the bitch, your beloved form
a shimmering feathered thing; a cushion
to this man, or so he thinks. Awake at night beside him,
I pluck out the loose plumes as he lies still, snoring.
The few times that I’ve dozed, vigilance flagging,
I woke to choking, strangled sound and sputter,
his mouth filled with feathers carelessly disposed.
Even now he praises the hushed power of my voice,
praises the wings that could carry me away,
praises the life I’ve built upon the bones
of other men. But my desire for him?
It rots in so much praise. I’m ready for
new gardens, new men more able to resist
my slyer charms, at least for a little while.
I want to use my voice—to sing out.