Silk Becoming I.
I had been a friend of language
in the mulberry days
when I devoured the leaves of books
like stolen oranges,
sleek on the bright secrets
of their pulp.
Daily I tore them up
and recombined them,
inventing words to talk about
my hope of wings.
I would repeat them in my sleep
amid the peelings
and wake with other speakers
lurking--waiting to trap me
with dry arguments
on hard embittered questions:
what besides words would
I give for wings?
Would I go hungry or
sleepless or without books?
But I escaped without
an answer--there was
mulberry as far as
the eye could see.
II.
I only wished to go
uncontradicted--unbound,
my words could speak
wings into life, their graceful
veining like the surfaces
within my stolen fruit.
But arguments persisted--
I could hear them
when the dry edges of the leaves
turned bitter
in the porcelain vase on the mantel
where I kept them
after I turned inside to keep
from answering the questions.
I would not subject my hopes
to argument--rather,
I would confine myself in a shelf
of books already read,
dried mulberry in a vase on the mantelpiece,
the bed--
I would turn from the blood of oranges
torn into in my head.
I would describe them round and gold,
unreadable.
III.
Here is a rope of tangled sheets,
wound hard
across my body as my hopes
are wound in words
unsaid, wrapped secretly around
a small red stone
of hunger--the pages
I have peeled
and eaten in my mind
return in bitter threads
of thought, the stubborn part
of a rind.
I recall the words I made
to speak of wings
(jewel-paned membranes,
dry leaves reborn
in gold)--they are the answers
I will not give.
Then how will I escape
this world of white,
this bitter bed of ropes,
this season
of unreasonable hopes
I hope to keep
from argument?
These mulberry words
cannot sustain my flight:
I am trapped, I will
be boiled like a believer
in the next hard fact--
an orange thief caught,
unable to recant.
I turn from my own argument,
inward and away.
IV.
How can I tell the color
of new silk, beyond
all whiteness? It was years ago,
there was a girl
in a dusty green Communist suit
under the dust-
choked sun of a high old
factory floor.
We had seen the tight pods
of industry
as beautiful as bandages,
easy to explain.
Then there was the skein
between her hands: twisted
by her, twisting itself,
complicating sunlight
and dust and everything--unraveling
my language
as it spun. There were all
the small deaths in the skein,
all the tight-wound bitterness
of hope undone
in boiling, the flights that became
impossible.
And after tea and oranges
in the reception room
and the souvenirs,
the bus back to the hotel
(by way of a famous garden),
another twenty years,
I am left with the frayed
white pith of language,
all the arguments
I have refused.
V.
I have not escaped--
I remain at the mending frame
by the mantelpiece.
I am hungry; I work, I wait,
my thread like lacework
re-knitting over the flesh
of an opened orange,
or like new words that make
old arguments impossible.
A tired girl, all day twisting
that glory light
from mulberry dust
and bandages: as trapped
as I, as ignorant
of the names for colors that do not
appear in books.
Come then, I will stop
turning. We will wind it
back and forth; we will mend
what can be mended--
we will eat the stolen words
that fetter hope.
Cyd Harrell, 2003. All rights reserved.
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