“Fragility of Potential”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
Beneath the smoky tulle of my gown
that drifting vapor of madness
I wear the chafing undergarments
of despair
a crinoline of sorrow
of desire and regret
a corset laced tight
against pain
To have and to hold you, daughter
in sickness and in health
till death do us part
I hear shrieks from my past
The crinoline I wore then
my panicked mother ironing its noise
then spraying me into starched white splendor
Remind me why I had you
the holes I thought you’d mend
the one seamless life we’d make from two pieces
We speak our vows in whispers
Yet still I bear the rings, a kind of disgrace
You and I, daughter
hauling our heavy yardages up the aisle
Our red hair is on fire this night
two manic blazes
I brought him home from his pole
in the field
unhooked him
A few bits of straw fell
out of his pants
I carried him across the threshold as one carries
a bride
I swear he smiled, but beneath the brim
of his straw hat
who could really tell
He doesn’t scare crows anymore
Crows crowd the field and gorge on
his absence
They round his abandoned spine
in delight, a maypole
of abundance
I forgot to pull it up
his backbone
He lies in bed mostly these days
a few mice in his pants
tickling him
The farmer never replaced him
In his way, he is
irreplaceable
Inside his gloves
the dust of years
pooling to his fingertips
He has no hands, so what is
this music I hear
All the ways he touches me
holds me
the fresh smell of hay
how it enters me
lives in me
how I too, made of the stuff
often seek the old field
to watch the crows gobble
what is left of the grain
Is it only right how
now that he is gone
I go there
to hang myself on the pole
to feel in the hoisting up
the weight of something
I can never understand
music plucked to the strings of
baling twine
From the margins of the field they eye me
the crows in their brilliantine
I tell them to come and they do
gobbling my doubt and
disappointment
feasting on
all the tiny things that give
The wind takes my hat
Then my gloves let loose
their dust
From my legs sheared of shoes
pours out my scratchy heart
The mice are here
filling cheeks
preparing to make beds
of me
To know that I’ll no more go to waste
than him
makes me smile with the
face I no longer have
R for rigor, what it took to get through that day
R for radio, the Queen’s Christmas address
R for rage
For your raising of the tree
The rallying cry rumbling our female ranks
R for the riffraff you called our sweet boyfriends
R for ruthless
For rose, our mother’s colored glasses
R for the rub of rosemary on roast
The rub-a-dub of trying to get clean
The rubbish of religion in your hands
The robing and disrobing for you in private rooms
The roly-poly afterward of Christmas pudding
B for beg pardon
D for death wish
Death duties we refuse to pay
D for the dossier I kept on you
S for silence
For sisters: seven, sixteen, seventeen
M for mother
M for make waves, as in don’t
M for mourir, the verb we dared not yet decline
M for Maybe, she said, some day, but
N for not now
N for not
U for until
H for he
I for is
D for dust
R for rigor, as in mortis
For the redeemer, born this day
R for righteousness
For the risen, the end of a different story
Raised in London, Julie Esther Fisher now lives on remote conserved land in western Massachusetts. She thinks of herself as a gatherer of sorts: of presences, movements beneath surfaces, murmurings at once familiar and strange; of lost domiciles, both flesh and brick and mortar; of voices left to echo landscapes, gleanings to be captured in the fleeting moments of poems.