And Now She Has Disappeared in Water

found on our driveway    

decades ago, in our childhood

but it dissolved onto a gray wall, undecorated  

Now you have returned to water  

  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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Young Marilyn, Old Marilyn.

there are places on this planet where

I find it hard to detect any beauty

therefore, silence

                        No nice shoes.

 

there is silence

 

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.