Hortus Apertus

There is a woman. She varies.

*

First, of course, it starts with the family.

She waits in a red armchair, oracle kind.

She reclines like a queen, long hair spread behind.

She’s swinging or sweeping at a house that’s been destroyed.

She’s on the wind. She’s holding her baby daughter.

She’s ill at ease. She’s singing. She’s upset with her mother

or her lover or me.

She’s sitting on her bed playing solitaire,

switches to slapjack when I saunter in.

She was born in 1910 and died in 1946.

She was born in 1930 and died in ‘16.

She was born in ‘82 and died in ‘19.

She was born in ‘85 and died in 2020.

*

I find myself more,

stepping out of my skin.

I cannot go away and pretend none of it was real.

That none of these people ever lived,

none of them as they were if they did.

I cannot shut up about the past.

I cannot edit reality to elide identity.

I cannot save face by shaving off face.

I've been sitting on vital communications for too long.

Did you get me the first time? I'll show you again.

I'll tell you. I have sources. I have continuity.

You'll know when you see me, but will you understand?

*

I carve a hole and hold my hand under the water,

feeling where a filigree of roots clings to memory-warm mire.

The long reeds are mush, an eternity of layered leaves.

My skin is pale under ice and red in the air.

The silt of remembrance sucks at my handprint.

There is a foundational crack at the hem of my life,

the place I trip in circles.

A roar of pale noise. Blinding light.

A hammer to that hollow from time to time, then I experienced dynamite.

Again. Then again. Until I dully came to understand:

This is just how it is now. Grow up. Enjoy the sliding rug.

The shifting sand.

*

I was dreaming about my mother,

a frozen forest I can never walk again without fear.

An abandoned aquarium set out to shatter,

a submerged dollhouse of dreams deserted.

A pitcher of caramel milk without milk, unstirred, untasted,

a cantankerous kettle constantly at buzzing boil.

*

I asked Alex what is left when matter decomposes.

A copper sludge is what he found inside his time capsule.

Pennies putrefied. Letters perished to slime.

So it isn’t just nothing. There’s the sticky film,

The viscous goo, the residue.

*

The body that eats itself.

The one who whispered, her face turning blue, murmuring, “Love you.”

A string of explosions stacking.

I found coincidences then patterns.

The hollow cord in my throat as I lay on my side.

I plucked myself out of the sky.

Carbon copies with torn edges. Resonance, ricochet, rage.

Bum steers, bankruptcies, and battles.

I live to talk and never want to speak again.

The charming face and tongue blackened.

The ouroboros in her circle.

I couldn’t stop repulsing and consuming.

I’ll leave nothing and everything when I stand up from the table,

the shadows emerging from strange places I’ve laid my head.

The mass of it all. The masquerade.

Death comes for Mrs. Mayfield.

The worry. The woman waiting on the stairs.

I wouldn’t stop gnawing the hinge of my tortured jaw,

memories bursting from my lips as foam and orange bile.

My God! I changed the very shape of my face

the way I can’t convince my mind

to see these bones as cleaned and left behind.

*

I cannot unmake the mud.

I can only point to the insects sweeping clear, revealing

the industry of livings and leavings amid

the rot of it all. Largely, the life.

My heroes were solitary sots, liked to eat sweets.

Self-reforming starved sensualists dying to live well.

Struggling to do it better. Get it right. Relish it.

Creators, readers, caretakers, casual experts.

Capability, culpability, and calamity combine as corpses.

One of the last messages my sister sent before she died

urged me to get the motorcycle burn on my leg seen:

our mutual friend departed from such a little thing.

*

There is a gallery of bodies,

there, not there, ‘til finally, I’m alone,

the woman clutching what remains.

A black handful of earth and ashes.

I build chateaus in the clay.

Decomposition drives my composition.

Obsession, remorse, submission, attrition.

•

My mouth dries so much when I sleep, my lip comes away on my teeth.

My mouth's buried me far too deep.

Adepts at stacking the deck and reshuffling unfurl perpetually winning hands of words, but eventually run out of cards.

Sentences can be sources of sorrow, put a rent in reality.

Words are a burden both for the speaker and the listener.

Words have been used to hold me back.

I wrote a letter to the editor, age 11, and the editor said, "There's no way a kid wrote like that." Right words, wrong body.

Words are combed thin, too many, and yet insufficient. I can never cover enough terrain to tell you exactly how it felt to me, what I saw, exactly how it all came to be.

Words burst out of me wrong, and even when they're true they cause me no end of distress. I feel suffocated by secret sentences. Who can carry all this weight?

But when language cuts cleanly through, sliding like a new keycard, and a gleaming core blossoms, words open worlds.

Whether breaking the door down or unlocking it, words permeate the fabric of everything,

the deftest tool, the well-balanced blade.

Words were my hiding place, and still are, sometimes intruded upon via hedge knife slice.

In between childhood and adulthood I hid in a library basement every day, devouring without discrimination.

Years later I went without reading or writing for months, except for necessary work:

obituaries and memorial speeches.

Text blurred before my futile gaze, isolated in my inability to turn back time, to read a spell to breathe back life.

But here, let me say a few things:

There is an old woman who lives in the forest by a lake, and her home smells like velvet feels.

There is a swimming starlet with long brown hair in the golden light dappling through the trees.

There is a dainty, soft-bellied hedgehog sleeping in my palm as we listen to piccolos playing.

There is an expectant mother choosing carefully crafted baby names outside Chicago, sipping lemonade from a saved honey bear.

They're all still dreaming in my words. These whispers wing me back to my every lost love.

Words are masks and betrayers, but not only false. Building a life on words is constructing a fairy bower, a castle only I can see. Sometimes I don’t even believe it is real and find its doors locked to me. But oh, words—filter-fine, silken-sharp! They find a way through my defenses back to my heart.

I used to hate to say words out loud for the first time. They were more wonderful as mysteries, delicious secrets I could keep in my child mouth unpronounced and mine. A mispronounced word out in the air was humiliation, cut badly like a messy slice of cake.

But the enjoyment of the cake is in the eating together, and the joy of the story in the speaking together. If I wrap my words up and put them on a shelf, they're safe, but also solitary, spayed, and starting to turn stale.

Words are terrible power. They keep the score.