Susan Dane

SHELL FREE

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Susan Dane

Ten thousand pecks they say
to break the shell
and wiggle free,
wide-eyes blinking.
Nothing to be done to hurry things.
It needs 10,000 pecks to build the beak.
What must it think?
At 10,000, beats
one peck at a time, blind,
until the darkness cracks
and a different air wraps its flapping
cold around it.  Light dazes in
a rush of smells and greens.

Are we too breaking free bit by bit?
Certainly there is much
that closes us in
our own invisible porcelain:
the hourglass,
and sleepless nights,
and lives with sand walls sliding,
and everywhere the tight jacket
of desire keeps us wrapped
around ourselves.

Still I wonder if the metaphor itself
is not half-cracked.
The question never asked:
Are we the tiny embryo
pressing to be born?
Or is there something far unknown
fighting for its breath in us– against us–
cramped, curled and nerve pinched,
its oxygen receding?
Are we the chick or shell?
The cage or caged?

Or does some mystery make one of two?
That with 10,000 pecks
this dark sufferer
splinters all our little hardnesses;
And then this folded over doubled thing,
crammed and squeezed,
breaks free
and when it does,
God Himself wriggles out, ever so fragile,
hesitant, still wet, but bodied!
And the mystery!
It doesn’t leave us behind,
like some broken thing,
an empty shell,
but brings us on its frangible wings
to a new home,
that is precisely wild,
and we,
clumsy but unfettered,
climbing,
climbing!

 

 

The First Stigmata

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Susan Dane

“Lean on me,” she said,
He frail and struggling
from days on end with no sleep,
now thirsty, bleeding.
She, a robust woman,
strong footed and determined.
They pushed her back.
She fought them off.
“Lean on me, ” she said.

Then the hardest part.
They laid him flat,
and nailed him through,
bone chipped on wood,
the splinter of porcelain.
This man whom she had held
on many nights,
rocked to sleep
in his silent separateness,
now crunching.
Still not a sound from his lips,
so intent on something else.

The crowd had thinned by now,
bored with the routine.
And it was dinnertime.
A strange chill stirred the air.
And then they swung it up–
the cross–
in one fell swoop,
with pulleys and a rope.
Him hanging hard forward
as if his hands
would rip through
from his own weight.
Then finally straight.
His mother screaming “No.”
And the other Mary doubled silently.

Then she felt it,
as any woman would  feel it.
Flowing down between her legs,
unexpected, early,
bursting inside her,
Another season unfulfilled.
Then behind her ears,
warm and moist,
she touched it with her hand,
then pulled away.
Blood.  Blood everywhere,
from vein and pore.
Hands trembling,
frantically, she wiped them on her robes,
until she heard his voice.
“Take this my cup and drink.”

And desperate to taste his last drop,
she stretched up on tip-toe
to caress his blue-black feet,
and kiss his blood.
Entwined in death and life
as man and wife,
In life and blood.

 

 

TAFFETA TORN THROUGH

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Susan Dane

We look for strong arms
to carry us.  None forthcoming.
Or they come and go and
leave us more depleted in the going.
We look to find ourselves in the other,
always turning ’round the other
in pink taffeta, little girl pirouettes,
all grown up and still
twirling for him, as if some coyness
could suffice the long road.

We are built with space inside,
but confuse the space for emptiness,
then mad that no one, no thing, can fill it for us,
we stomp away.  If the other can’t be all,
we’ll be all ourselves, we say.
Come up empty once again.
Then banging around, high on hype,
insisting the world be round
the way we have been promised.
One day we finally stop.
Stem and petal bruised.

The grace of time is in its always
coming.   Each moment undefined,
but now becoming.  Pounding
pavements in the driving rain,
alone, a new mercy takes shape:
Life neither round nor square,  love sought
neither here nor there, but every blossom
of its own unfolding.  Here sun does not
eclipse the moon, nor being with one’s self
dismiss the other.   Intimacy of a new order
untangles the pronouns.
In the clear blue we are no longer different.
Which is not to say
we are the same.

 

 

PERU

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Susan Dane

If you want to hear the mountains,
do exactly as I say.
There are rules to things like this.
And I tell you that many
have come this way more than once
and have not heard them yet.

Listen:
You must leave Lima early.
The flight at five will get you there by six,
before the morning fog wraps Cuzco thick.
When that first crest of snowcaps rises
you’ll feel the thinness of your breath.
A quiet ache will settle in the chest.
Do not stop for Indian trinkets.
Drink the coca tea and then go straight to bed.

At four you rise to start again,
this time by train.
But do not think that you are almost there.
The ride will take six hours:
switchbacks laced with waterfalls
and clustered sheep.  Sit on the left
to see the Indians wrapped in layered rainbows,
black bowler hats and braids,
spinning llama yarn outside their homes,
the wisdom of their people lost
except when kings return in dreams
and speak about the stones.

At the base of Machu Pichu
there will be five hundred tourists
bursting from the train
like subway riders.
Step aside.   Let them push.
Look up to the right
and see the cavern homes where mothers nursed,
and children scattered ants for play.
Listen to the river rushing madly to you;
listen to the rising of your own breath.
There are no other sounds.
There are no birds.  No chatter here.

When you can feel the pulse beneath your feet,
then start the climb, the way you must, on foot.
You are the silent stranger coming to this time.
And all the mountains are waiting.
Through a thousand years of solitude,
they have all been pressing toward this moment
of your coming, of your coming.

 

 

LABOR NIGHT

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Susan Dane

Her world is upside down,
waiting for the baby.
She paces in the night
and sleeps the day.
She has cleaned every corner
of the house,
rearranged things twice,
then started on the garage.
Her belly so round,
so full of grace,
she cannot feel her legs
or in between them.
All this will have to wait.

For him there is nothing romantic
in the coming.
When there’s not one
more inch to spare,
one more ounce of air,
he’ll  push his way
into the new world.

For now,
there is still time
between the violent seconds.
She rises in the night,
to cook the peppers,
pops the stems and scatters seeds,
and marvels at their colors–
yellow, orange, red and green.
Christmas in the air!

But life starts with a fight,
a gritting of his will
and single-mindedness.
Necessity, the mother of invention.
For his first breath,
he parts her bone,
slow and hard
like the resurrection,
and  moving of the stone.

 

 

LA HAINE

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Susan Dane

It starts as a small little thing,
indignation at a trespass,
anger,  having been wronged.
It grows into a flag,
parading first down small streets,
sweeping up the meanderers,
then avenues and winning crowds,
cheers along the way.
It writes an anthem,
builds a campaign.
Marching through the mind
it settles thoroughly in memory and vein,
changing our posture,
the way we hold our chin.
By the time it reaches bone,
it has eaten through sinew and spine,
cost us all that was benign.
Then, rises up the starless night,
no song no light.
Suddenly afraid,
we want it out:
cut, poison, burn the blighted stem.
But rampant right breeds cell on cell
out of control,
And having eaten heart
it eats the soul.

 

 

NEW SEA

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Susan Dane

She has watched herself move beyond sad
into the realm of desperation,
where her need snarls against his.
She has moved beyond remembering
her former necessities:
mid-afternoons framed in poetry,
gardenia air and tousled
half-finished sentences
grabbing.
Now there is only the scramble
for new ground.  Time short,
her unspoken depths
slowly being filled up.
Like a sea lion who dives
into her familiar pool,
to find the clutter
of someone else’s world
fast descending, muting her waves,
the rubber tire, plastic pipe, diaper, old shoe.
At first something she can swim through,
then around, then day by day
around is all there is.
Gone the clear blue.
Gone the clear blue.