friday refrains · lost daughters, part II
Friday 15 August 2008 | someone left a cookie
In the white-white room he said, Is she a woman?
asked why and the spiked tools laid in neat lines
rows of recommendations, reasons, the aforementioned
not-thought-of, it’s-too-late, what-were-you-thinkings
she felt in their green gaze under the strobe and light
altering, or something else fading in the waiting room: plastic
toys, a small brown boy watching her. The actual details?
Unimportant. She said Does it? or Matters to me or Please but
unheard the rows laid out waiting in the next office
a slip of permission, unfolded lines and signature after
oval tables in lines with other girls who, but we
are all the same. Girls who. Women who. The room is carrying
something. A child crying and she explains why and
the wherefores, but not back down against the ladder he’d pressed,
pressed back to. The child is—can you stop him?—crying.
The extremism. Peripheral. Simulating life in an
artificial environment. Mahogany skin against dream, she.
But there were documents. Formalities. The question of social/
security. Secure sociality. She was thinking but nothing
social, nothing sociable came to mind: the Métro knifing,
hand pressed to window-glass, silence of waiting.
In the tunneled darkness under the fluorescent
light. She was, they were, all the same. Women?
The lady scratched something onto or around: Formulaires. Scandal
security. Months later she’d wonder at the absence, blush at the forgotten,
taken aback or apologies she’d, well—”Did it go alright?” And “I hope so
for your sake.” Nothing she said was acceptable. Civil.
To stop at. Go forth, not straight, but directly. It was the choice
they’d fought for, a right, and no one round the oval
would question her. A first. She was questioning her
self, anything after all. It was, yes, questionable—to or
not to. Assuming dissatisfaction in either case. It is never
bien vécu. They’d say. The fact that she is allowed to,
the fact is she was able to, the fact was she knew only
—in the service of—to. Perhaps the inconscient, the conscious
nod of, yes, ready, and there were in the white-white
room, only men. Stretched. Stretchered. She was about to
question, but not this, another decision
as germane as what she’d learned from, or something
else she pretends is pounded against. To bear alone.
The barren. Knowing he could take. or did. or perhaps vanished.
Elsewhere. The white parallels, the rooms of, and in rows
pinchers, forceps, needles, aspirin, sutures, padding, cotton, vials, gloves,
scissors, band-aids, mists, scalpel, lollipops, aspirator, trinkets,
glasses. They don’t understand her reticence. She watches the color
of their gaze shifting. Only to find the bars of the ladder
have to be checked again, again she should be checked
in case of infection or. She tries to stand in the wheeled room after.
She knows she mustn’t give. She explains to dream is of utmost
importance. Touch of palm, the refusal of being sent back,
a table. Explains to the girl in green who has been sent to,
wasn’t her, had to, Shhhh, don’t think about it. Then two women
in the windowed other room where she’s been wheeled,
by the window outside, the grey elsewhere, white
merged separately. She responds thankfully. It was
hard for her to lift, though she expected to act then. The IN
space of herself was. A line of. All the same. Is she
a woman? he said. In the white-white room skin
was blue. She didn’t have to: Sign. Respond.
While at the door, later, she would realize the stars were.
And sewn. To form fountains. To form an alcove. Cut to
form the small angular door through which he’d passed, elsewhere.
Her own incapacity to be distinguished in the waiting where the child
there, urging. The women are. The girls. In rows, carried away like slips
of paper with names and initials, abbreviations for what is in their hands.
•
THE CASTLE
I refused to believe I was
Pregnant.
Pregnant or just before a storm,
Purely local.
And the limp bodies of the young women
Are wheeled out, drooping, and lifted
Up by the men to be dropped on the beds
Where they lie for a while, inert
And faintly crying. As in a science-
Fiction film.
I just felt sick all the time.
•
It’s the body you can’t get to,
Even though it is yours.
Nominally yours.
For a little while.
•
The nurse saying, Hush, hush.
•
Eyes shut, lying flat
As though sleeping, a woman
Traces with the tips of her fingers the shape
Of her bare breast.
There was a room that opened up
Into another room.
She shuts her eyes tighter.
A room that opened up into another room
Opening up to a big
Picture window.
Lines
In the skin around her eyes from the force
Of her closing them, tick, tick.
The rooms empty, the picture window blank.
•
And wasn’t it beautifully furnished?
Magnificently:
There was nothing you could touch.
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I like this first poem, very very much.