SPEAK MEMORY, iii

SPEAK MEMORY, iii               

It began like this:under

the desk, eyes and neck covered

to keep  the soft skin  from melting

and I remember the drills and the testing

and how we all assembled on the playground

facing east and we witnessed how the sky paled.

I heard “Jackass Flats.”Where did all the blue go?

And the jump ropes all quit chanting Hot Pepper

the tether ball was a full moon in a white sky,

a sonic boom in our heads, a litany

sung for The Bay of Pigs

& the missiles

& the silos

& Castro

Cuba

communism

& Khruschschev

& the blockade of ships like silver cigars,

Sputnik wobbled across the Milky Way. Her mother died in a fire because she translated an enemy tongue. This is how we learned McCarthyism. Black lists. Red diapers. Will they send Babushka back? I imagine a chain-mail Iron Curtain. Was it like the Berlin Wall, only bigger? Memory spoke in the shape of a cloud, it became a curtain of fire and scorpions inhabited our dreams.     

 The captain shipped out to sea in darkness,

& the prayer plant folded its leaves like me.

I thought late night sounds were bombs

falling in Vietnam across the Pacific,

those planes overhead at midnight

and then, the utter stillness

jet streams  writing  the  sky

with no birds singing, crickets

all seething in the dry oat grasses.                        & there was a mysterious relative at Ground Zero

no address,  just a note saying: Hello, I’m fine.

from Los Alamos, Alamagordo, Stallion Gate,

from Oak Ridge, but we would wait a half-life

for the code names of The Manhattan Project:

We would have to wait until after the funeral

we would wait long after the dawning of Light.

& so now it begins, the waiting; only this time we’re slouching against the Darkness & the Light.

2/16/2003

© 2003 Maureen Hurley, published in My America. Brandon Mise,  Blue Barnhouse Press, Asheville, North Carolina. More on Blue Barnhouse blog.

DEEP NOVEMBER

DEEP NOVEMBER

Dark morning, deep November,

low clouds threatening rain.

We sat by the firebox, slurping tea from a spoon,

she twiddled her hair into long white snakes,

while arguing with the dead:

blaming Cromwell, deValera, the Anglosaxonsandjutes.

An unnamed thing stirred at the pit of the stomach.

Who were they, the long dead?

I scooted around on my back the way kids do,

my robe, a red stain on the gray floor.

The cats hunched up, wanting in. No, she told us.

A bird banged at the kitchen sill.

Too much effort to fly, the air, palpable.

Calm before the storm, my grandmother said.

That knocking is the dead wanting in.

Shivers up my spine, a ghost story in the daytime.

The rain sobbing, not God, but the rain and me

crying—for no earthly reason.

Dead man walking on your grave.

Come closer to the fire, child, she said.

The small sorrows of my seven years welled up and found a thirst.

The birds and the cats, the rain and me, all wanting in.

All t’ings come in t’rees, she warned,

she never could say the T-Haiches  right.

I wanted to undwind her hair snakes,

and laughed at her  loss of “H”es,

Tír na-nÓg, she said in Irish, Land of the ever-young.

And here we are, west of the west. Samhain.

Be careful, the door to the otherworld are still open—

She cautioned me: “H” was the letter of the Lord.

A silent ladder to the sky. The sound of breath. Inspiration.

I climbed the first leafy rung. Plucked an apple. The sky breathing.

A knocking at the door. An scéal? No news is good news.

But the gates were already open.

My drunken uncle burst through the door,

giggling hysterically, Did you hear? Kennedy was shot!

My grandmother’s small sob, played over and over,

her hands fluttering like flocks of useless birds.

A sacred letter had fallen from the sky.

2/12/03; rev. 5/11/03
SILENT HAICHES
LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN

Articulating a Moment of Personal Witness

When I left class last Wednesday, I was enamored with Brian’s Oz-like description of walking into the New Year with red glitter on the soles of his shoes... I was humming Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of My Shoes” except that I wrote down “souls” instead of “soles.” And as I began to take stock and catalogue moments of my personal witness—that Joycean Aha! moment when you know that everything you’ve ever done in your life has led up to and prepared you for that particular moment in time where you cannot go back to who you were because suddenly everything is irrevocably changed. I realized that I have an abundance of such moments—most of them in second- or third-world countries.

It is the act of witness that compels me to write. So the issue at hand was which moment? Should I describe witnessing the body of a lawyer for the Sendero Luminoso in the Chorillos Tunnel, Lima, the daily news covering his face, the garua drizzling on the windshield, Carlos Orellano speeding us off, saying “Don’t look!” Or the Sendero’s reciprocal attack blowing up the power plant and the US Embassy so we ate soupa criolla by candlelight Independence Eve; or having to bribe our way out of the Peten Itza jungle when things between the guerrillas and the Guatemalan Army were heating up—a friend’s sister, a nurse, missing in action; or being stuck at the Guatemala airport with no way home because the US invaded Tegusigalpa—shamelessly resorting to bribing ticket agents for the next flight out anywhere in Mexico; or winding up in the USSR at the exact right moment, I was interviewed at a reading (on the Beat Poets, no less, not knowing the socio-political significance THAT had on my audience) right when Jesse Helms began his NEA purges? The shame I felt as a US citizen... And I haven’t even mentioned the home front: 9/11 or AIDS. As I tried to narrow down a particular a moment, I began to feel like one of Tom Stoppard’s reporters in “Night and Day,” always after the big story. In fact, at the time, I was a penny-ante freelance photojournalist, I knew the thrill of the hunt, front page bylines in yet another newspaper...

How did I get into this sordid business anyway? I was in workshops with Carolyn Forché after she and her photojopurnalist friend, Harry had returned from the atrocities of El Salavdor. She told us that poetry in America wasn’t enough, she told us to go out and to bear witness. El Salvador was a little too real for me, but as my then boyfriend John Oliver Simon and I traveled in other safer periphery countries meeting with, and translating Latin American poets, the trouble came naturally to us. Right place right/wrong time, depending on the viewpoint.

DREAM THE WIND

When the echoes of thunder 

repeat the dream of the wind, 

why does the storm speak of wishes 

trapped deep in the metal 

of a starship exploding 

into pure light?

Brian Thorstenson's MFA Seminar

Imaginary Ancestors

I come from a place where real and imaginary ancestors dance under the rainbow arch. I was the one who dreamed of flowers under the full moon, the land where I arose from was like the light in my veins. More and more often I dream of a fictional place deep in the mind, more real than what is real. Like Robert Duncan, often I am called to a meadow where a cabin grows wings and stories, leaving me lonely for the laughter filled place where the living and the dead sit around the dinner table, leaning back on their chairs after the feast.