“I will not be a memory but a memoir for I bury my broken pieces in me ----they are not left behind like an ancient monument---I am both shattered and completed at the very same time.” -Noor Unahar
I have had a few rough weeks where four family members gave us enough stress to hold us for a long time. As I grieved, hard, for a sister-in-law, I was led, then to grieve for my sweetheart. In fact, we had to put my sweetheart’s comfort dog and that was the last bit of living thing I had left of Richard, My Man Hands. (The nickname reason is for another blog). My adoptive brother has been in the hospital for three months and still they cannot stabilize his blood pressure when he sits up or stands up. (It goes down to 65/33 at best). I am terrified to lose him. And then, a beauty of a granddaughter got herself into a mess and we could not find her, although we had been told nothing more than she was in the hospital in a bad way. It was more than my brain could handle.
I blocked my feelings of grief for my sister-in-law because it led to that other greatest grief of my life. Then my beloved Esqueese, had to be put down. (Her name is Woodland Cree for “Little Girl”) . We, eventually, found my older granddaughter, in a psyche ward, because of a drug with fentanyl was the alternate numbing in her life. She was living in the land of coke dreams. I was riding the waves of despair and grief but my brain was working hard to keep me from ‘feeling it’. I was a sunk ship waiting to happen.
I am a Canadian Poet. I was a prolific Canadian Poet. Then my sweetheart died and the poetry went away. I have not been able to write more than a few poems in nearly 6 years. I was in daily crises as I helped my birth brother get through dark nights of his soul. We were talking through the nights as he desperately tried to chase away his own feelings and then crashed and could not stand alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c03sWpt62vw
Adrienne Rich is the poet that changed my life. My poetic mantra is all about Diving Into the Wreck. It seems to be a poem about diving into a shipwreck. Not! She hid the real meaning of the poem, well. Good poet’s do that. The poem is really, simply without going too deeply into the poem, is about looking at our own wrecks, to see the damage that was done, to examine how it damaged us, to find the real story of what happened that sunk us, and how, even in our drowning, we face hope…we are still here to examine what we thought we could not survive. Wrecked perhaps but still here.
This is where I am today. Diving into my own wreck. And, so, I begin the page with two different colors of blue, on the lighter note. I have die cut some frilly paper that I am going to use as ocean waters. I let the background paint dry and measure out how much of the grasses I need in order to have room for a mermaid and a shipwreck graphic I have copied, and pasted, and used part of.
Adding gears and propeller and bits of a shipwreck, added to the grunge look.
A finally smearing of ink from a black ink pad helped to grunge it up.
How many ways are we wrecked and patched up and still afloat? Most of us are, in subtle ways. We know where we nearly swamped, and how many times. We have the story, the myths, but do we have the deep diving experience of finding and healing those broken places?
This has been a cathartic exercise, maybe not the best double spread, but it has meaning to me and found by my own deep diving. And, a poem happened.
Foreign Land
still wandering in foreign land
tattered map in hand someone else’s journey
or was it mine and I am here again
tracing routes seeking safe places to bide time
compass whirling where there is no magnetic field
wind spiraling rather than blowing West to East
the way it is supposed to
white-knuckled standing at precipice
of knowing I should step out of my cave
yet I plant my feet and peer into the darkness behind me
as I always do when I revisit this place
dead flowers gripped because I can not lay them down
wisps of yesterdays dressings raggedy with wear
barefooted stepping on stones
knowing I could once trip lightly
to some safe shore ribbons waving bravely
shores are being swallowed by whip and lash of sea
that burgeons like bloated great whale and I am a woman
swallowed if I go too far into salty places
I am frozen like woman turned to pillar of salt
because I have no direction as to where you are
this refuge where language is babble
orchestrated by a great angry god
shooting at ducks at circus sideshow
that have no way to break free of tracks
that always destine one in his dark sight
no safe place to be when there is a quarter to be had
in pockets of little girls who want biggest prize
oh cursed be any fascination with fairy tales
about heaven and hell and devils and gods
and chosen life down here as if by chance
when it was always part of a script sad and sorry
where wheat falls short and weeds grow abundant
and green fellows decry loss of breath and bone
of waterways and cross ways and byways
that lead us none else but to circle’s beginning
this is foreign land drug from death’s bosom
set upon rock steep cliffs of someone else’s mountain
where I have burrowed in to wait
for crack of earth to lay open some sense of reason
for standing here hand to brow
looking for wings or a thesaurus
so I can understand and make sense
of the senselessness of putting one foot
in front of the other
©Carol Desjarlais 4.13.21
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