my woman is the sea.

They were holding hands like teenagers now, like two kids on a date before either of them had ever kissed anyone. She thought of a brief suburban afternoon back in her parents big house. She thought of that very first collision with adrenaline at age fourteen. Things were never quite the same after you touched someone and meant it. Things were never quite the same after you realized you meant it, after you had to make that explanation to yourself. It didn’t seem very long ago that she had been that innocent too. Sometimes everything in between seemed fictional, immaterial. If she didn’t think too much, she was still fourteen, wearing too-big jeans inherited from her brothers, defiantly talking to a boy outside the big brick school building in the next town over from her house. If she didn’t think too much, nothing else had really happened. It was easy enough to blink and be ignorant of all the time, event, adulthood. Her life since seemed an overwrought little story she’d made up, at once too dramatic and not substantive enough. It didn’t have much of a hold on her unless she thought extremely hard about it. Most of her life was something that only existed if she believed very, very hard in it. Today, on this wet heart attack of an afternoon, that belief seemed too much effort. 

She tried, at the ripped hours of the morning, when the day fell apart straight along its seams, to get back to a self that had never known him. She tried to rebuild her steel frame, as though she were a car melted by heat. It was impossible. There was only a future self, and the only future selves possible were ones partially created by him. So she stopped speaking to him seven times in two weeks, love like punching a wall, pointlessly thrashing at the small space of their life together. As if that could do something. As if anything at all could do something. To try and change the fact of her interaction with this other person, their effect on each other, felt so futile that she thought maybe she’d just stand still for the rest of her life, for all the good doing anything else did her, or anyone.

apropos of nothing

and also this one

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. 

(adrienne rich)

there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin

diving into the wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

(adrienne rich, 1929 - 2012)

“…subversively domestic, the quick stunning judgments of the kitchen.” (didion on hardwick)

“She was born in Kentucky and grew up in Lexington. She no longer lived that life but she remembered it all. “In the summer the great bands arrived,” she remembered in Sleepless Nights.

Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb…. They were part of the summer nights and the hot dog stands, the fetid swimming pool heavy with chlorine, the screaming roller coaster, the old rain-splintered picnic tables, the broken iron swings. And the bands were also part of Southern drunkenness, couples drinking Coke and whiskey, vomiting, being unfaithful, lovelorn, frantic.

Although she had lived in the North since she came up to Columbia for graduate school, you could still hear Kentucky in her voice, not only in her eccentric rhythms but in the extreme gravity of her remembered world, in its destructive romanticism, in its dramatic promises of redemption. “Yes I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior on the west side of town in June, accept Christ once more in the scorched field in the North End in July, and then again on the campgrounds to the south in August,” she wrote in Sleepless Nights. “Perhaps here began a sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes.”

Joan Didion on Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Review of Books