Plum Cove and an excerpt from "Aun the Healer"

This is where I live in Plum Cove, Gloucester, MA. We are on a small hill overlooking the cove. A small softball field and the two lane road that runs around Cape Ann lie between us and the beach. It's quiet here: the beach is usually full of moms and small children in the summer. Bill and I often snorkel round the rocks watching the flatties, urchins and tiny lobsters that live there.

This post is an excerpt from a fantasy novel I have been working on sporadically. It is the story of a late Bronze age healer from the south west coast of England, whose devastating childhood experiences change her in ways that make her very different from the average woman, for better and for worse. Enjoy!

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The Last Winter

There were no more candles left in the sixth week after midwinter so we dipped rushes in pork tallow and tried to sleep through the long hours of darkness. The daytime was spent searching for firewood, which was becoming scarce within an hour’s walk of the village. We had killed all the animals except the breeding stock and had gorged ourselves at the midwinter feast on pigs roasted in front of the great bonfires and emptied the barrels of beer made from the saved malt barley. We had taken the honey of late summer and poured it into oat porridge for those with no teeth. After the eating, all that could made love in the dark corners of the hall while dogs sniffed around the remains of the meal and children slept, round-bellied, in heaps by the embers of the fire.
That time is always good, but by now the cold and damp begin to eat into your bones and the clouds and mist never lift to show blue sky. It is as if the bargain we made with the great one at the midwinter feast would never be honored and we would live in a dim hell for ever, stumbling through the muck, unable to get dry and warm even close to the hearth. It is worse for me because I am old and my chilblains pain me, and the smoke indoors makes me cough even though the fire keeps me alive. I drink mullein, valerian and horehound boiled with bloodroot and honey to ease the pain in my chest, and lie back in the sheepskins that my son has brought me. I find I can doze and dream for days at a time now I am old, and while I’m dreaming I see many of the days from my past, and sometimes from other times that have not been yet, or of this day in lands far away where my son is, and other places where I am a stranger.
Young women bring me broth and bread softened in milk in the morning and evening. Sometimes it is my daughter-in-law or one of my son’s servants, sometimes my sister, the one that died. Sometimes, which warms my heart, it is my mother, gone now for twenty years, looking as brisk and bonny as she did when I was a girl. Sometimes I see my father sitting opposite me on the hearth, his hair bristling like bronze wire, his chin on his hands, looking into the embers with the look of planning, as he often did in the winter before he led the young men on the spring voyages. He said he saw the journey among the flames in the fire, the loading of the boats with grain and dried meat and small casks of water and fish lines and hooks, the sharpening and repair of the weapons, the selection of the men who would go (none with bad blood between them, all with firm hands and strong hearts), the time of going, when the winds changed to the southwest, and the way was free of ice to the lands over the sea. He could see all this in the fire, so when the time came, he could tell the folk what would happen and when, and they knew to follow him, because his understanding was sound.
He could not foresee the day when his brother walked behind him on the hunt and killed him with a spear thrust in the back, nor how the killer was brought back and judged, and hanged in the clearing in the oaks, nor how they cut his limbs away and buried each in a different corner of the county, or how they left his trunk for the crows and wolves and threw his head into the sea. I saw all this, for months before it happened, in dreams from which I woke crying out. I began by hating my uncle more than ever, but after a while, I realized that it was he who would suffer the most, and who had suffered all his life, and I had pity on him and prayed for his soul’s peace, even as they were dismembering his body. I hated him because of what he had done to me and to my mother. Go back with me forty years to the time when I was born and I will tell you the story I have told no other, for you and I will never meet in the market place or pray together by the old stones on the moor. You will keep my secrets safe, and I have kept them too long already.

Spring

In her last months
she shook us all off.

First, her friends,
then her children,
finally she shook off her husband.

She relaxed then. Her face
no longer shone with ambition
to be loved, attended.
Her whole body slumped,
unreadable.

She was at rest. For us
there remained an evening
sky, empty even of clouds.

Perfume

In the distance, from behind,
a short beige raincoat, headscarf, slim pants,
gesturing with a cigarette:
it is her style.

When she turns, the blonde hair, silvered,
cut chin-length, the ivory forehead,
the very same. And I keep on looking
though I know it isn’t she,
who might notice me at any moment and wave,
and I could hug her to me, feeling the legacy
of our two protruberant bellies kissing
and the lavender honey perfume of her face–

I still have the last box, Yardley’s Medium Beige,
the cardboard sides rubbed down
at the edge by her indefatigable
nose-powdering–

and how her husky voice would say
Put some lipstick on, darling. You’ll feel better.

My Mother's Dress

I

Grandma admired Rita Hayworth,
a woman who could drive men mad, a red-head like herself.

She made the dress at the kitchen table,
of clover pink silk crepe shot with gray mutable
as the fading of sunset. Halter-necked, backless,
bodice luxuriously ruched, a trail of tiny buttons ran down,
and the skirt fish-tailed deliriously from the knees.

It was my grandmother's masterpiece.

In the mean little parlor, I saw my mother model it for my father.
He said: If you go out in that you'll be raped.

II

I know where she keeps it.

In their bedroom, in the bottom of the chest-of-drawers
I feel under the cold linen. It is like
the skin of a long pale pink fish,
slithering from under the folded bedding.

Naked, I step into her gown,
twelve years old, not needing to undo
any of the twenty four buttons,
pulling the halter over my head,
smoothing the oyster satin over my narrow hips.
In front of the mirror I turn
and look over my shoulder at the plunge
of the back that shows half my bottom.
One day I will fill out the cups of the bodice.
Even now my hair is long and wavy, chestnut-red.

III

I was fifteen when she did it.

I pleaded: I could wear it myself
when I was older, but she was determined.

Out came Grandma's black tailor's shears,
the dress spread on the floor
showing all the complexity and strength
of its reverse, seams still firm and even,
the base of each hand-made button loop
set into the smooth lining like baby teeth.

My mother cut
without a pattern, big rough looking squares
hacked out. As the fabric gave way
it crunched under the steel
like fine stems of dried grass, or tiny bones.

Domestic

My father, the policeman, drove past the prison,
delivering me to my Saturday job on his way to the station.
In there, he said, they’re all murderers. Very quiet,
not what you’d expect. The prison officers
all want to work there, it’s such an easy job.
All the blokes in there murdered their wives.
Wouldn’t say boo to a goose most of them.
Just a one time thing, apparently. They just got pushed
too far and snapped, picked up a knife or a hammer –
it was all over in a moment, too late to take it back.
They confess right away. Some of them
call the police themselves. They’re all in there
together, doing their time, mild little men.

He seemed proud of them: men who had just once
stood up for themselves. How often had my mother
pushed him? How far did she have to go?

Thunder, 1954

Thunderstorms seemed bigger to me
in those days. I lay awake, tucked up in white sheets,
looking toward the bedroom window where my mother
showed me the dance of blue-white fire over clouds.
She had long ago gone back to bed, when my father
came in, quietly, in the spasmodic dark, closing the door
behind him. He sat down and took my small hand
in his big hot palm. You're not frightened, are you? he asked.
I told him truly, No. The storm rebounded from the hills
above our town, with the sound of giants moving furniture.
My father's shoulders hunched. I could smell his sweat.
Your mother's asleep. He wanted talk, but I couldn't
have known what to say. A huge glare, the sky cracking.
Can you smell the cordite?
What's cordite? I asked.
You smell it when they fire the big guns.
He went to the window and looked out into blackness.
As the lightning came and went his arms hugged
his own black silhouette. Go back to sleep, he told me.

Acrophobia at Mile Marker 89

The seven mile bridge rises,
unnecesarily high, water out to Havana
on one side, Biloxi on the other.

The road is four cars wide.
Jersey barriers at the edge
(the slighest touch would tip them).

A heart is a ferris wheel that’s seizing
at the very top.
No way down. No way out.

Above, the paranoid sky
below, bipolar sea,
waiting in its sleek green
hide to catch you

and falling is inevitable.

Dust of spinning wheels
makes coral the clouds,
the bridge is

a white crumbling arc
hanging. Broken

columns sink in submarine clay.
Mind crashes and tumbles.

Someone says
Don’t close your eyes.

Hands clamped to the wheel,
wait to come down in Marathon.

(Poem, later)

It was as if the bank teller could not see me
neither could the two girls speaking
Spanish at the information desk.
I was invisible to the hairdresser
except for my hair. In the mirror
I saw the manicurist, but she didn’t look
up from her client’s cuticles
and the bald man in the gallery
talking on a cellphone to a creditor
only saw my money.

In the over-heated parking lot
Camrys and Cadillacs ignored me
sinking their tires into the tarmac
so did the scarlet striped with yellow
leaves of the croton bushes
and the curbside shopping carts.
If the ospreys on their nest
on the light pole had stopped mating
for a minute they might have seen me.
It was as if I had vanished into
the earth when it was not watching:
in reality, too,
the earth was not watching me.

Both hearts broke

She stood at the top of the stairs
clutching the newel-post, knees sagging.
Her moan brought me running: just then
Dad came in the front door past
the foot of the stairs carrying
groceries. She stretched out her arms
past me, to him, weeping. He looked up
for a moment then carried on to the kitchen
eyes down muttering “Got to put things away”.

When I reached up to her, she pushed me away
with the vehement weakness of an invalid,
saying “It was him I wanted”.

Figure of St. Francis in Bronze

He stands on a plinth of broken marble
his hands held outwards,
cupping an intangible gift.
Thin streams trickle from the moss
under his feet into a fountain basin,
his generosity overflows into a gutter
from which animals can drink –
like the brindled dog that drank from your hands
filled with water from a city fountain
that sultry night of chattering starlings
when I first knew your touch
and grateful, shivering,
took what is more important than water
gained strength to return love
like a spring unstopped,
a flow, soaking,
swelling seed and bud
into mortal grass and flowers.