#terry wolverton

Terry Wolverton

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 23 August 1954

Ethnicity: White

for C.

Like shoes she chose for comfort, not for style, that fit her contours without chafe or blistering

Here is sanity. It took her years to arrive, like an explorer settling at last into uneasy retirement, a small cottage at the edge of the sea. How the breakers crash against the underpinnings; still, the walls hold firm. Hearth blazing steadily, she tries to warm to it

tells herself she is mature now, this is good. The days of stalking, done, the rabid pulse, the blood-drenched kisses, all behind her now. Wearied, finally, of careless cruelties, she will stay here, grow old

Writer, poet, educator Terry Wolverton (Writers at Work, Insurgent Muse):

"One of the most important contributions Skylight makes to L.A.’s literary communities is its commitment to present, stock and support local authors. Skylight has always been a welcoming environment for L.A.-based poets and prose writers, whether published by major independent presses, providing a space for readings and making room on the shelves. I have personally benefitted from this as an author, and many of my writing students have benefitted as well. That sense of allegiance to being an L.A. bookstore, to presenting local authors right alongside the out-of-towners on their book tours, has helped local authors to build audiences and readerships. L.A. has a stronger, richer writing landscape because Skylight exists. Happy 20th, Skylight!"

The son I never had is walking the hallways of high school.  Sweat smell of locker room wafts down the corridor.  Meat smell of the cafeteria seems soaked into walls.  This weighs him down.  More than the books full of words whose meaning eludes him.  More than afternoon detentions in an empty classroom, breathing the dust of old ideas.

The child I never gave birth to has a Nintendo in his brain.  Life unfolds before him drenched in color.  Lights too bright flicker and explode. Scene shifts snap snap.  Movement jerky and speeded up.  Hurled words lack roundness, inflection.

When this motherless boy stares up at the sky at night, he sees no miracles.  He sees airplanes and satellites, space debris, inert gasses, and light long dead, too remote to warm him.

The son I never held feels like he’s on fire.  He’s burning up but I can’t reach to rest my hand on his forehead.  Still he feels so alone, like a star separated from its galaxy.  Blazing alone in space.

This boy whose nightmares I never soothed is wrapped in a trench coat.  His heartbeat so loud beneath black canvas he’s sure it will give him away.  His breath like a great machine.  Boots click on linoleum.

The son I never had is stalking the hallways of high school, weapon cocked.  He’s opening fire, spraying the walls with his revenge fantasy.  Perfume of gunpowder soothes him.  Metallic clang of the lockers.  And the rifle’s report as it drowns the screaming, but he can’t tell if the screams come from inside or out.

Then people are lying on the ground, red running from holes that gape from foreheads, from chests.  There is another odor now, old as earth, and it feels like it will drown him.  This young man who never called me mother calls to me now.

He calls to me from the front page of the newspaper.  From the blue light of the television.  And people will ask, “Who mothered him?” and search for someone to blame.  They will not ask, who did not give him life, catch his snot, dry his tears.

The son I never had sinks to his knees, stares up at me.  The video game is almost over.  Just one more shot before all enemies are vanquished.  He wonders if I am finally proud.

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Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

“…You will leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile  shoots first. You will know how salty  another's bread tastes and how hard it  is to ascend and descend  another's stairs…” — Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso XVII: 55-60

When did you first leave your home?

I tried to escape my mother’s womb; I wanted to break out early but the nurses made me wait, mother’s legs forced together, her body tied to the bed until the doctor was ready to do his work. Hours passed; she grew septic. I gave up trying to slip into the world through the red tunnel, thought instead to exit the same way I’d come in, as a stream of vapor, pure idea exiled to ether.

*

The word planet comes from the Greek planasthia—to wander. To wander derives from the Old English windan—to wind, to twist. In Middle Dutch, to twist also means to quarrel, and in Old English, twa means two.

*

I vacated my own body the first time my father’s fist came shuddering down on my cheek. I could not flee the crib, but could forsake inhabiting the cage of bone that held me breathless on the damp stretched sheet. I burrowed so deep inside the container of my skin that I escaped it. Once I’d tunneled deep enough, his blows could no longer reach me.

*

A state of division or separation may lead to strife, which can cause meaning to distort, to wrench and spin, until one’s body or mind begins to drift, to stray, to roam until one has ventured out so far that one cannot return. Thus does one become an exile.

*

I ran away from home when I was five, packing a straw basket with my hoarded treasures: a cheap porcelain figurine of Alice in Wonderland, a scarf the color of sky, a stone found by my grandfather on one of our walks, a fistful of saltines. I made my way to the schoolyard, sat at the concrete base of the flagpole, two blocks from my house, as far as I knew how to go alone.

*

One can become an exile from one’s country, forced to leave or choosing it. Or an exile from one’s family. From one’s cultural group. One can be exiled from oneself, so brutally split as to feel estranged in one’s own skin.

*

Then others left: Grandparents who moved to another city. Parents who’d nightly disappear into the dark environs of a bar. My stepfather moved in with his girlfriend. My mother went to California to ease her broken heart. Others came and went; I stayed, steadfast, unmoving, rooted to the spot.Still, pieces of the psyche began to drift.

*

Signs and symptoms of dissociative disorder include: feelings of detachment or estrangement from one’s self; inability to remember the past; confusion as to one’s own identity; feeling as though one is living in a dream; impulsive traveling or wandering away from home.

*

At twenty-one I tried to exit this world, swilling a bottle of stolen pills with cheap burgundy wine. I lay on my bed, waited for the nothing to take me. But God is a Trickster, closed the borders, would not let me go. I awoke in a place too small to contain my bloated hopes. Thus I moved to California to become an exile.

*

In one theory of the big bang, the universe is endlessly expanding. The floating galaxies with their masses of rock and fusions of gasses, those planets, whose very name means wanderer, drift forever, moving farther and farther from their source of heat and light.

*

On the streets of Los Angeles: unaccustomed heat. Blinding brightness. The swirl of indecipherable tongues. Desert winds that cleared the sky of industrial smog. Music rising up from car windows. I was different here: in my body, in my bones. In my brain. Exile in a city of exiles. I was born for a life of wandering. A planet fallen from its orbit. Spinning away from my origins, from the lexicon of my birth.

*

Not every exile is the same. Some have left their land of their own accord; others were forcibly removed. There are those who are motivated by a dream; there are those bent only on escape. One adopts the language of his new surroundings; another clings to her native tongue. Some never lose hope of returning from whence they came; others swear they will never go back.

*

To what are we connected now—those of us who have irretrievably left our homes? To whom or to what are we bound? Are we doomed to a lifelong nostalgia, to hunger for a taste we can no longer quite recall, a slant of light lost to us forever? There are so many of us now, untethered, drifting. Listening for a hint of music that has long since ceased to vibrate at its source.

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Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012

The core and the surface are essentially the same, Words making them seem different only to express appearance. If name be needed, wonder names them both: from wonder to wonder, existence opens. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It begins with the nouns, their reification, which in the Latin means “thing-making.”  We make a thing by naming, by nouning it, pulling it out of the soup of the undifferentiated, setting it apart.  With nouns, we confer distinction.  Nouns ensure that the apple is discrete from the bowl in which it rests.

But what if this separateness is illusory?  Where is the word that can render the essential sameness of apple and bowl?

We grant ourselves the power to name. In naming myself I declare that I am not-you.  We huddle alone inside our names, as in dark houses on a moonless night.  Or seek out others who dwell in containers that look like ours, as if this signified connection.

Language was invented as a tool of discernment, evolving in increasing sophistication as discrimination becomes ever more refined.  Adjectives further enhance the specificity of nouns—a red apple is nothing like a green one, a Fuji is completely different than a Macintosh.  Adjectives particularize: My bowl holds an apple but your bowl is empty.

As a writer, my stock in trade is such discernment, sifting the lexicon with ever-greater precision, seeking the one word that could describe this and nothing else.  Perhaps this is why Harijiwan, my Kundalini Yoga teacher, prefers music to literature.  Notes do not cleave the ear; each sound opens one to the possibility of all sounds, carries us back to the origin of all sound, the cosmic tone.  The formless sound.  Music can evoke the state of wonder.  Whereas language is exclusionary—this and not that.  One could say the writer is in the business of separation.

The verbs are the aggressors, always doing, doing, doing.  There are so many words for doing.  I can wake or walk or work.  I can swim or swarm or simmer.  I can count, or crouch, or couple.  I can flutter or float, flounder or fishtail.  I can do something all the time.

But there is no smorgasbord of words for being.  I can only be or not be; without variety or precision.  Thus, language defines reality.  Where there is no vocabulary, we do not apprehend the possibilities.  What are the possibilities for being?

Verbs, in Indo-European languages, attempt to define our relationship to time.  Their tenses slice present from past, past from future, try to convince us there is such a thing as a linear pattern of events.  Causal, trackable, as if there were a logic to it.  If I tell you: tomorrow I simmered you will think I am confused, but I am not.   It is only that language is caught in the construct of time, and can’t imagine its way out of that paradigm.

Objects are nouns that are verbed upon by subjects.  The power imbalance is clear.  All over the world, people and things are made into objects so they can be verbed upon by others, predicated on the belief that some of us are born to be subjects, others objects.  One can be done to or acted upon.  One cannot be be’d upon.  We are all the subjects of our own sentences, but not everyone is given a voice.  And what is our role in the larger text?

Adverbs are said to answer questions: how, where, when?  How much, how often?  Was the object acted upon slowly or quickly?  Everywhere, or somewhere in particular?  Frequently, or only once in a while?  What do we know when these questions are finally answered?

It’s not only the structure of language.  There is the problem of different languages.  For example, the word chair in English refers to furniture, but in French it means “flesh”; mist is “water vapor” in English, but “manure” in German; sobre means “sober” in French, “above” in Portuguese and Spanish, but in Spanish it also means “envelope.” And there are words that seem to encode an entire cultural understanding: the Hawaiian ho’oponopono (a social gathering and healing process that combines the functions of a religious ceremony, group therapy, family counseling session, town hall meeting, and small-claims court.) Or the Thai sabsung (to slake an emotional or spiritual thirst, to be revitalized.) Or the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz (“You are one of those whom we couldn’t turn into a town-dweller.”) How can their contexts ever be translated?  How can we hope to communicate?

But we don’t have to travel to encounter lapses of comprehension.   There are plenty of misunderstandings closer to home.  One person says, “I love you,” and means, “I am here for you no matter what, throughout time and space; your well being is as important as my own.”  But another utters these same words, it might mean, “I am experiencing chemical sensations that make me want to touch you for a while, but I cannot say for how long.”

Even before birth, babies are prepared to communicate, to send and receive messages through movement and sensory response without the benefit of words.  Observation of twins in utero has uncovered body language including holding hands, kissing, playing, kicking and hitting each other.

Animals have a range of communication tools open to them, including vocalization and scent, along with body movement and gesture. Honeybees, for example, have a dance language.  It is theorized that certain body parts evolved in animals to enhance their ability to convey messages.  Moreover, such gestures are now understood to convey not a singular meaning, but a complex and subtle range of meanings depending on context.  A dog wagging its tail can mean playfulness or anxiety, relaxation or submissive placation.

Humans take great pride in the sophistication of our linguistic communication, but, increasingly, words are used not to build a bridge to meaning but to brew a storm of confusion.  The U.S. military in Vietnam had to “destroy the village in order to save it.”  Interrogators may use “physical persuasion” with terror suspects.  “Family values” are meant to enforce the morality of some families onto others.  Such obfuscation becomes so noxious one longs for a vast stretch of silence, an unending blankness to detoxify the ears and eyes.  Or to covet the ability of the bees to perform a tremble dance and thus signal that we’ve had enough.

Yet, the writer cannot be silent, cannot turn her back on these corrupted runes, their guttural soundings.  She must tool these broken signs, hone the twisted marks, tongue the blighted syllables, discern and particularize and separate for a lifetime of pages in the faint hope that if she cuts deep enough, she may make an opening, and through that opening something like wholeness may be perceived.

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Text, © Terry Wolverton, 2012

Photograph, © Yvonne M. Estrada, 2012